The Two Campus Cultures

When he put the proposal before the Curriculum Advisory Committee, however, it was quickly rejected. Although the course explored interesting material, it violated Item 14 of Monterey’s Course Proposal Outline, which is that all new courses “include a description of how course topics are treated to develop a knowledge and understanding of race, class, and gender issues.” In particular, Professor Clemens was told by Pat Lilley, chairwoman of the committee, that he wasn’t using his course materials in a way that would expose the habits of “sexist males.”

After appeals to several national watchdog agencies and a sympathetic editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, the college rescinded Item 14, and Professor Clemens will teach his course this spring. But anyone who has experienced today’s academia knows that on most campuses no formal Item 14 is needed. Where the humanities are concerned, the New Trivium of race, class, and gender has long since infected the main body of the curriculum.

On the other side of campus, though, life is very different. Even before leaving Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where he won the Top Student award, Parry Singh had big ideas. His sister was always complaining she couldn’t find the ingredients to make the family’s favorite ethnic dishes. Singh, who had earned a computer engineering degree in India, started thinking Internet. “It seemed like the perfect small, fractured market that could be organized online,” says Singh. In 1999, he and Subhash Bedi presented their idea at Kellogg’s new Digital Frontier Conference. Keith Bank and Don Jones, two Chicago angel investors, liked what they saw. By the time Singh graduated, EthnicGrocer.com had set up shop in the Northwestern/Evanston Technology Innovation Center, a business incubator that has become a model for other campuses.

“A university is an ideal place to start a business,” says Juliana Yee, EthnicGrocer’s vice president of marketing. “You’ve got a lot of smart, motivated people all in one place. They bounce ideas off each other. It’s a lot easier to get things started in that kind of environment.” At the incubator, EthnicGrocer expanded its menu to 15 countries and added phone cards, books, movies, money transfers, and online prayer services for immigrant communities. The company has since moved to the Loop, where it employs 130 people. In August, EthnicGrocer closed on $ 34 million of venture capital with a consortium of heavy hitters including Kleiner Perkins, Merrill Lynch, and Benchmark Capital.

“The support of the faculty and administration at Northwestern provided the perfect breeding ground for us to start this business,” says Singh. “America is a land of opportunity. It would have been hard to achieve in any other environment.”

At the threshold of the twenty-first century, America’s colleges and universities present a remarkable paradox. A growing thirst for technical and practical knowledge and its real-world applications exists side by side with a dour and gloomy introspection. Like the nation itself, the campus seems split down the middle.

Peddling a self-conscious multiculturalism — which usually means forcing students to read a lot of bad books — the old disciplines of English, history, philosophy, political science, and sociology have become a dreary monoculture where a generation of tenured radicals invites the young into the murky depths of nihilism and moral relativism.

“The humanities have always been dogged by the question, What practical use are they?” says Roger Kimball, who recently followed up his classic Tenured Radicals (1990) with Experiments Against Reality. “Traditionally they enriched people’s lives by introducing them to what Matthew Arnold called ‘the best that has been thought and said.’ But the curriculum taught at many colleges and universities today does little more than reinforce a handful of anti-traditional cliches and give students an unearned sense of righteous indignation.”

“In my history classes, Marxism was taught as if it were still a valid alternative to a free economy,” says Michael Capel, who graduated from Cornell in 1998 and now works for KPMG. “Even in Spanish class, there were always instances where the reading material was clearly selected to reflect the liberal viewpoint,” says Vincent Leung, a 1999 Dartmouth graduate working on Wall Street. Cornell offers more courses in women’s studies than in economics.

Paramount in today’s radical curriculum is the still-not-passe French philosophy of deconstructionism, whose central premise is that no idea has greater validity than any other, but that all “truths” are a matter of opinion. “I took an urban politics course that ended up as a big group therapy session,” says Erin McGlinchey, who graduated from Smith this year. “Not only did they not teach you anything, there wasn’t even any sense that there was some objective knowledge out there worth learning. Everything was just ‘validating your own feelings.'”

Through the action of some strange lodestar, this supposed free market of ethical ideas somehow always leads back to the same conclusion — that western civilization is destructive and white males are a breed of oppressors against whom everyone can have a legitimate grievance. “I remember when the black students took over a building at Hampshire in response to the Rodney King trial verdict,” says Shana Davidson, a recent graduate. “Naturally they took over the science building, because science equals Western Culture which equals oppression. At one point I remember a prominent male radical student — Jewish like me — pounding on the door of the science building yelling, ‘Let me join you in there! I’m a Person of Color, too!'”

Almost every young student entering an American college now encounters “oppression studies” at some point. “If you can’t find someone who done you wrong after four years at college,” says McGlinchey, “then you haven’t been paying much attention.”

Yet the arrival of the Information Age has coincidentally turned universities into fountainheads of technological progress. In the business, science, and engineering schools, opportunity abounds — and students around the world are acutely aware of it. More than half a million foreign students and countless new Americans are trekking through these schools, learning demanding, sophisticated skills that quickly place them in the mainstream of world commerce.

Engineering schools and entrepreneurial programs are spinning off inventions and ideas that are turning every college town into a center of innovation. Silicon Valley grew directly out of dean Frederick Terman’s efforts to turn Stanford Engineering School into a center of “technology transfer” in the 1950s. Hewlett-Packard, which Terman helped start by lending William Hewlett and David Packard $ 538, still has its international headquarters on the Stanford campus. A 1995 BankBoston study found that nearly 10 percent of the Massachusetts economy could be traced to MIT graduates.

Other parts of the country are copying the strategy. Texas has built Austin into the nation’s third-largest high-tech center by pouring money into the University of Texas. University towns like Boulder and Ann Arbor have emerged as “technology hot spots,” while cities such as San Diego and Atlanta are creating an economic renaissance around their academic institutions. Even tiny Williamstown, Mass., home of Williams College, has given birth to Tripod and a cluster of other Internet startups.

The business schools, formerly training grounds for the Fortune 500, are on an entrepreneurial binge. “This program is to take technology out of Georgia Tech and bring it to market,” says Terry Blum, dean of the Dupree Center for Entrepreneurship, launched in 1994 at Georgia Tech’s Dupree College of Management. “We’ve got students entering from every discipline — computer sciences, bioengineering, mechanical engineering. This is an entrepreneurial campus. We actually have to keep quiet about our courses — otherwise we’d be overwhelmed by the demand.”

One popular innovation is business-plan contests. “In only its second year, our competition attracted 420 student entries and 250 venture capitalists,” says Emily Gohn Cieri, director of entrepreneurial management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, which has just founded its own incubator, PenNetWorks.

Joshua Newman, a junior at Yale, has founded Silicon Ivy Ventures, a New York-based investment firm designed to fund student businesses. “We’ve already received 2,500 proposals from all over the country,” says the fledgling entrepreneur. “Everyone’s getting aboard — law school students, engineering majors, scientists. Our first funding success, HireOne, was submitted by an English major.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of campus, the New Trivium has insinuated itself everywhere, from world history to freshman orientation.

Kevin Nowak, a junior at the University of Michigan, volunteered to be a “residential adviser” in a dorm this year. The training involved mainly indoctrination. “From the first day, everything we were told had to do with The Oppressors and The Oppressed,” he says. “We were told bluntly that white males were the oppressors and the main responsibility of RAs would be to feel guilty and understand the resentments of the oppressed. We didn’t learn how to handle noise complaints. We didn’t learn to settle arguments. We didn’t even learn what to do in a fire. All we learned was how to feel guilty.”

Nowak precipitated a minor crisis at an August retreat when he asked to go to church on Sunday. He was told it would “violate the spirit of the weekend.” Eventually he and a group of fellow dorm counselors were allowed to hold a private prayer service.

With race relations poor on many campuses and male-female relations strained by hypersensitivity to “harassment” and “date rape,” homosexuality has become the new battleground. “At Wellesley you can take Queer Theory to fulfill the multicultural requirement,” says Larisa Vanov, a Wellesley graduate who has founded Women for Freedom. “At Cornell you can minor in Homosexual Studies. One history course at Smith ended with a graphic description of lesbian sex. At some orientations you have to make mock confessions to being gay. College administrators sweep all this under the rug on Parents’ Weekend, but if you drop by any given day, you’ll see it’s predominant.”

“At Smith, lesbians are allowed to be rude and vulgar,” says Erin McGlinchey. “At one point they did a chalk drawing of a huge vagina on the sidewalk right at the center of campus. It’s truly disgusting.”

“I don’t mind homosexuals having their say, but what galls me is the double standard,” says Michael Capel, of KPMG. “At Cornell, one seat on the student council is specifically reserved for gays. In 1995 we ran a gay conservative for the spot. The administration wouldn’t even list his name in the campaign announcements. They said we were ‘violating the spirit of the election.'”

To be sure, many college students these days are inured to proselytizing and have learned to live with it. “All my teachers are intellectually honest,” says Mark Davis, publisher of the Princeton Tory. “They may present a leftist perspective, but they also encourage you to debate.” Although she cringed when a professor changed “men” to “people” on an economics paper, Mary Podles, a Wellesley freshman, says she has not encountered pervasive political correctness. “There are annoying incidents but it’s not an overwhelming presence,” she says. “We had a Multicultural Night during orientation, but it involved watching three plays by people who had come to America from different ethnic backgrounds. It was good art.”

If enforcement of political correctness has eased somewhat, however, it may be because opposition groups are vigilant. Alan Charles Kors of the University of Pennsylvania co-authored The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (1998) after defending an Israeli student who had called a loud group of black students “water buffalo” on campus seven years ago. His organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (thefire.org), has become a clearinghouse for the defense of free speech on campus.

“Most of the action now takes place behind the scenes,” says Kors. “About 90 percent of the time the universities will back down when threatened with exposure. As soon as they get out of the clubby little confines where double standards seem right and just, they’re doomed.” This year Kors has battled a new Columbia University policy that drags people accused of sexual harassment through a star-chamber-type proceeding. He is also standing up for a Republican faculty member who is the latest target in a longstanding effort to purge conservatives at Virginia State University.

“A lot of people will tell you this stuff rolls right off students like water off a duck’s back,” he says. “There may be a certain amount of truth to this, but we’re still breeding fatalism and cynicism and compartmentalization. We’re raising a generation of moral cowards.”

Shana Davidson isn’t so easily daunted. She says she was “to the left of Lenin” at Hampshire; now she works for the conservative Media Research Center. “I was a good Marxist in college,” she says, “but then . . . oh, I donnow . . . I got a job. That makes a big difference. I subscribe to what Ronald Reagan said: ‘Liberals are people who read Karl Marx in college. Conservatives are people who understood him.'”

William Tucker is a writer in New York.