The Roots of Campus Leftism

“Socialism,” a term favored by Senator Bernie Sanders and some of his student followers, also fails to capture much of what this ideology is about. Sanders’s followers scarcely ever advocate state ownership of industry, and most of them have little interest in factory workers or farmers. Small banks may or may not be better than large banks, but breaking up large private banks into smaller private banks, as Sanders advocates, is not exactly a socialist measure. Even “Medicare for all” would leave the provision of health care to private physicians and hospitals, not government. Nor is the trade protectionism advocated by Sanders and his partisans particularly socialist—or even progressive. Proposals to make college tuition or contraceptives free would increase government spending but not government ownership and tell us more about the financial pressures on college students than about their enthusiasm for statism. Most of today’s “socialists” want not more state ownership but more state regulation, except of course for abortion, sexual behavior, and drugs, issues on which they are not socialists but libertarians.

“Inclusivity” and “diversity” are favorite terms on campus, but they call for a striking amount of exclusion. “Inclusivity” excludes significant groups like political conservatives, traditional Catholics, evangelical Christians, and Orthodox Jews, since views held by these groups are considered bigoted and ignorant. Whites, men, and heterosexuals are often attacked as groups and reminded of their “privileged” status and resulting inability to understand others. “Inclusivity” applies only to supposedly oppressed groups like blacks, women, Hispanics, homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals. Their defenders encourage them to engage in identity politics, but only to emphasize their oppression, not their achievements. “Tolerance” means avoiding not only criticism of these groups, but any speech or behavior that might offend them or their defenders, though the words and actions that they find offensive often change and are sometimes disputed by the groups themselves. While any criticism of the favored groups is forbidden, even farfetched criticisms of whites, men, and heterosexuals are encouraged, especially when accompanied by accusations—”racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia”—that are plainly meant to be offensive to dis-favored groups.

The most neutral and accurate term for this ideology is probably “leftism,” since it implies a general attitude rather than a doctrine supported by arguments. The absence of reasoned argument is in fact one of campus leftism’s sources of strength. Refusing to supply ideological definitions leaves the impression of a viewpoint that depends not on arguments that in theory could be refuted but is instead so obvious to every decent person that it needs no support from logic or reason. The implication is that campus leftists favor a set of principles that transcend ideology, for which the appropriate name is simply “social justice” or “the truth.” Campus leftism is more a matter of feeling than of thought and is based more on passion and outrage than on reasoning. Counterarguments are shouted down on the ground that they offend or discriminate against favored members of the campus community, while disfavored members of the community receive no sympathy if they claim to be offended or discriminated against.

Although it may seem pointless to look for intellectual content in campus leftism, it really is an ideology, and it has intellectual roots. Its guiding principle is the Marxist concept that people are divided into classes of oppressors and oppressed. According to classical Marxism, the oppressors are the exploiting capitalists or landowners, who represent the “class enemy”; their victims are the working classes, otherwise known as “the people,” with the implication that their class enemies are less than human. The oppressors must be resisted, and the oppressed defended, by any means necessary. While Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot killed large numbers of supposed oppressors, less extreme Marxists believed the job could be done by limiting the oppressors’ legal rights, including their right to free speech. In the case of universities, in most Communist countries people from the wrong class background were either denied admission to higher education or allowed only restricted access to it, while those from the correct class backgrounds received preference in admissions and hiring.

As it happened, the American student radicals of the late sixties, who began the movement that was to become today’s campus leftism, soon discovered that American factory workers and farmers were not the sort of oppressed class that classical Marxism had in mind. The American working class was anti-Communist, socially conservative, mostly religious, not very dissatisfied, and uninterested in political or social revolution. Blacks could be more plausibly identified as an oppressed class because most of them were poorer and had been subjected to various kinds of legal and social discrimination. But they seemed to have received legal equality under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which also seemed to have granted legal equality to women. While most college students were so obviously privileged as to be hard to depict as economically oppressed, they were affected by the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution in ways that let them claim to be socially oppressed.

Because I was in college in the late sixties, I can attest that most college men at the time were afraid of being drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed. Even if they had an exaggerated idea of their actual danger, their educational draft deferments were after all only deferments, and some of them really were drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed. Before the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1971, most undergraduates were ineligible to vote and could therefore claim that they had no say in the process that had started the Vietnam war and administered the draft. Many of them also argued that the war was unjust because it pitted American oppressors and their Vietnamese collaborators against oppressed Vietnamese patriots. Consequently, student protests against the war were not merely self-serving but a struggle for justice. The protesters insisted that the universities support their protests, by banning ROTC programs and military research from campuses and by sponsoring antiwar speakers and “teach-ins.”

For most students in the late sixties, going to college also meant experiencing the sexual revolution in full force. Though parental disapproval had often kept them from having sex in high school, college students who lived away from home were free from parental supervision. The parietal rules set by their colleges to discourage them from having sex were more or less ineffective. Reliable contraceptives were easily available. Most students soon decided that sex before marriage was entirely moral—at least under certain conditions, which they were sure that they satisfied. Whenever their sexual relationships went badly, as sexual relationships often do, the students usually blamed their parents and religions for what they assumed would otherwise have been wholly satisfactory experiences. The students also demanded that colleges drop the rules designed to discourage sex among students, which most colleges were actually happy to do.

At about the same time, largely through affirmative action programs, majority-white universities were admitting significant numbers of black students for the first time. Some of these students were unhappy and had trouble with their grades. They insisted the problem was that universities were teaching a “white” or “Eurocentric” culture and demanded that the universities introduce Afro-American or Afrocentric programs. Most colleges (sometimes under the threat of violence) soon adopted such courses and majors, with overwhelmingly black enrollments and a preponderance of excellent grades. White student radicals agreed that the existing “Eurocentric” curriculum oppressed not only American blacks but all supposed victims of imperialism or colonialism, including Africans, Latin Americans, and Vietnamese. Student radicals also objected that the curriculum was “irrelevant” to their concerns with war, race, and sex, and accordingly demanded changes to make the “elitist” curriculum “relevant” and “multicultural.” Courses in “Western civilization” were particular targets.

With help from a few Marxist students and professors, such ideas gradually coalesced into a radical movement that identified the oppressors and the oppressed in novel ways. College students, still then mostly white, male, and affluent, were nonetheless oppressed by being refused the vote, sent off to Vietnam to be killed, denied a fulfilling sex life, and indoctrinated in a culture that was the instrument of their oppression. Exactly who the oppressors were was somewhat less clear. Plainly the class enemies were older than the students and included most of their parents. While some students adopted the slogan “Never trust anyone over 30,” this included some sympathetic professors and in a few years would probably include the students themselves. The oppressors definitely included the “military-industrial complex,” which supposedly dominated America and had started the Vietnam war for profit. The oppressors also included organized religion, which supported the dominant culture and tried to make the oppressed feel guilty about their sexual behavior.

Most university administrators and professors, even if sometimes alarmed by seizures of buildings and student strikes, felt at least partly sympathetic to student radicalism. They had themselves become disillusioned with the Vietnam war, which was going badly, and they had never liked policing sexual activity in university dormitories. Seeing most of what they taught attacked for its alleged lack of “relevance” was harder to accept. But most of them assumed that the students’ demands could be accommodated by hiring a few new professors to teach a few new courses in a few new majors. Only a small minority of professors and administrators believed that student radicals should be firmly opposed. After all, most faculty and administrators thought that the young were the future, the future would be leftist and probably Marxist, that there was something seriously wrong with America (as the Vietnam war showed), and that keeping up with the latest intellectual fashions was important.

The latest intellectual fashion was postmodernism, which denied the existence of any objective truth. But by no means did postmodernism imply that anyone’s opinion was as good as anyone else’s. Instead of facts, postmodernists spoke of “discourse,” which was imposed by means of power, whether just or unjust. Oppressors tried to impose an unjust discourse to serve their own evil interests; but the oppressed and their defenders could combat it with their own discourse, which since it was just could not be refuted. In theory postmodernism could be applied to almost any topic, as long as someone could identify the classes of oppressors and oppressed, and could trace present injustices to past injustices. The oppressed were defined by the categories of race, class, and gender, and the forms of their oppression were racism, imperialism, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. While some postmodernists were not really radicals and some radicals were not really postmodernists, the two groups had much in common and were usually allied with each other.

What was theoretically interesting to followers of this developing ideology was the race, class, or gender group, not the individual. Groups were either oppressed or oppressive. Even rich and highly educated blacks and women were still oppressed by the racism and sexism in society; even poor and uneducated whites and men were still oppressors, especially if they thought that they were not racist or sexist at all. The only way to escape the status of oppressor was to champion the rights of the oppressed, preferably more enthusiastically than the oppressed did themselves, and to identify new oppressed classes and ever more subtle forms of oppression. The original oppressed groups were college students and blacks, but women, Hispanics, and members of non-Western cultures were soon added. Homosexuals, transsexuals, the disabled, and others were added later.

Meanwhile, the expansion of the American academic job market that had begun with the GI Bill ended in the 1970s when college enrollments stopped growing with the end of the baby boom. Universities now needed no more faculty after years of hiring young professors who would remain employed for decades; the professors who were retiring were the few who had been hired in the thirties, when enrollments had been far smaller and money had been short. The drastic fall in available jobs coincided with the widespread adoption of affirmative action in academic hiring. Because most professors agreed that the university should be opened to blacks, women, and new ideas, most of the few available positions went either to black or female applicants or, if there were not enough applicants from the oppressed classes, to postmodernists and radicals. New positions not justified by growing enrollments could be justified by a need to hire more blacks and women or to teach ethnic or postmodern courses. Similar hiring practices continue today. They have resulted in steadily more left-wing faculties and—since most administrators are professors bored by teaching and research—left-wing administrations.

The paradigm of the oppressors and the oppressed spread through almost every field in the humanities and to some in the sciences. The oppressors were identified as Europeans and white Americans, capitalists, “elitists,” men, and heterosexuals. The works of Homer, the Greek dramatists, and Shakespeare were considered “elitist” literature, even though their original audiences came from every level of society and were largely illiterate. The quality of literature or art was considered uninteresting unless it illustrated oppression or resistance to it. Aristotle was said to have stolen his philosophy from the library of Alexandria supposedly founded by black Africans—even though the library had actually been founded by Greeks after Aristotle’s death. Other creations of leftist scholarship included a feminist Africa, a pacifist Islam, Hinduism without the caste system, pagans who never persecuted Christians, a benevolent Soviet Union, and a thoroughly malevolent United States and Western Europe. Research that failed to fit the paradigm was dismissed as outdated and irrelevant. At a lecture I once attended about Bermuda, a questioner criticized the lecturer for ignoring the oppression of native Bermudans and remained indignant even after hearing that Bermuda had been uninhabited before its colonists came.

Campus leftism has been much less concerned with helping the supposedly oppressed than with demonizing the supposed oppressors. The allegedly oppressed who fail to recognize their oppression, like women who want traditional roles as wives and mothers, were lectured on their need for “raised consciousness.” Radical white professors had to teach minority students to recognize seemingly inoffensive remarks and actions as “microaggressions” to be resented. Yet anyone with a real concern for the interests of women and minorities should realize that telling them to be outraged by, say, a Halloween costume or the name of a football team discourages them from positive efforts to help themselves and encourages them to antagonize people who would otherwise be sympathetic to them. Anyone with a real concern for blacks should want police protection for the many blacks in danger of being terrorized and murdered by black criminals. Anyone with a real concern for people confused about their sexuality should be reluctant to encourage them to undergo drastic and largely irreversible surgery. Nonetheless, the question of whether leftist social engineering causes more misery than it relieves is irrelevant if the only permissible motive is to combat oppressors and to defend the identities of the oppressed.

The paradigm of oppressors and oppressed explains combinations of dogmas that can otherwise seem inconsist-ent. It may seem incongruous to insist that sexual orientation cannot be chosen but gender can; but both positions serve to stigmatize as unjust and oppressive conservative and religious views that homosexuality and transgenderism are unnatural. Animal rights are important if the animals are oppressed by capitalists; but a right to life for an unborn child can be ignored if oppressive religious traditionalists defend it. That American blacks are almost six times more likely to be imprisoned than whites is a scandal because blacks are oppressed and whites are oppressors; but that men are almost 14 times more likely to be imprisoned than women is no problem, because men are oppressors and women are oppressed. That a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, killed a black thief who was trying to take his gun away (presumably to kill him) is an injustice, because whites are oppressors and blacks oppressed. The only acceptable remedies for global warming are those that penalize oppressors, especially capitalists, and certainly not more nuclear power, which enriches capitalists.

Campus ideology is however not much interested in defining exactly who belongs to the classes of oppressors and oppressed. Questioning someone’s claim to be oppressed is condemned as “blaming the victim,” while claiming not to be an oppressor is condemned as insensitivity to oppression. The status of oppressor or oppressed can be inherited, but only by groups as groups. Many black Americans are richer than many white Americans; but all whites are still considered more privileged than all blacks. Homosexuality and transgenderism are supposed to be a source of pride, but heterosexuality is not, because homosexuals and transsexuals are oppressed and heterosexuals are oppressors.

While such beliefs have become increasingly influential off campus, on most campuses they have come to be not merely influential but incontestable, to the point where any questioning of them is taken as proof of racism, sexism, or homophobia. Subjects for courses or research unrelated to oppression are dismissed out of hand; the paradigm of oppressors and oppressed cannot be challenged; and even the paradigm’s applicability to specific cases is dangerous to discuss. Accordingly, universities’ only legitimate function is to teach and produce leftist propaganda and to prohibit criticizing it. The idea of seeking intellectual diversity by hiring moderate or conservative professors provokes heated opposition, because it would treat oppressors as if they were oppressed. As a matter of fact, though this sort of affirmative action might help a few moderate or conservative professors get jobs, it would still leave them isolated on campus, vilified by many of their colleagues and students. Similarly, the efforts of some foundations and other organ-izations to support moderate and conservative professors and students may bolster their morale a little but will do nothing to restore free speech on campus. If others have created their identities among the oppressed by demonizing you as an oppressor, nothing you can tell them will help. It will only keep you from being hired, tenured, or promoted.

For this reason, I believe America needs new universities. They should be intellectually distinguished, not enforcing a conservative orthodoxy that is the mirror image of other universities’ leftism, not obsessed with intercollegiate athletics, and not demanding that professors spend all their time on undergraduate teaching instead of developing knowledge and ideas to transmit to undergraduates and graduates alike. The colleges and universities we have are too far gone in leftism, or too mediocre in their scholarship, to provide the intellectual leadership that the country desperately needs. Though foundations and periodicals can help, they cannot do the job of a university. A large part of the reason our national economic policies remain saner than our foreign and social policies is that economics departments still have some moderate and conservative professors. The same can be said for our scientific and technical education, which is still the envy of the world. Otherwise universities have been steadily training their students to be leftists, and the measure of their success was apparent in the overwhelming student support for the Sanders campaign.

Outside the universities, the problem is still not as bad as it is within them. People in less monolithically leftist professions than college teaching, particularly politicians, usually need to be more careful about demonizing large groups of people, who after all are potential or actual voters, customers, coworkers, or friends. Yet many ideas that would have been considered absurd a short time ago have gone straight from universities to become public policies enforced by the Obama administration, and we should expect to see more such ideas in the near future. They should be firmly combated, especially with the argument that demonizing men, whites, conservatives, and religious believers as oppressive groups is not truth or social justice but simply bigotry.

Warren Treadgold is National Endowment for the Humanities professor of Byzantine studies at Saint Louis University. He has taught at UCLA, Stanford, Hillsdale College, UC Berkeley, and Florida International University.