Time has shown the predictions which political scientist Charles Murray made in his 2012 study Coming Apart to be prescient. The drive-by Ivy League and other elite universities not only to attract but also to make possible matriculation for the best and the brightest regardless of race, religion, or where in the United States one lived was honorable but also created a new elite.
No longer were the Harvards and Yales essentially schools for the Northeastern elite; they recruited actively from high schools in Wyoming, Arkansas, and Texas. That elite financial organizations, consulting firms, law firms and, for that matter, the Central Intelligence Agency, recruited disproportionately out of Ivy League schools simply compounded the new elite and the divisions between it and “fly-over country,” especially as many of those from outside centers of commerce and politics chose not to return to the towns from which they came. Throw into the mix not only the end of conscription in the wake of the Vietnam War but also the active hostility toward the military on university campuses culminating in the expulsion of ROTC programs from top universities and the ossification of the bubble was complete.
Fast forward a few decades: Elite universities are worlds of their own, and increasingly not-so-elite universities are as well. After all, the explosion of Ph.D. programs not in hard sciences but in humanities and social sciences has resulted in more Ph.Ds than other teaching programs can support. In addition, the humanities and social scientists have become ever more Balkanized.
Once upon a time, to study gay culture, women during the Great Depression or African-American cultural contributions to broader American life would require studying American history. No longer. Each of those programs is its own separate field, divorced from the other. No longer is the whole greater than the sum of the parts. The divisions into ever more narrow fields create homogeneity at their base.
Absent the dissension at the root of intellectual diversity, assumptions become fact and theories take root that otherwise might not be accepted as plausible. How some women’s studies courses treat evidence is far different than how a traditional history or anthropology program might, let alone a biology or physics department. Intellectual intolerance has gotten so bad that the National Association of Social Workers mandates an ideological litmus test as part of the field; those unwilling to see merits to the causes of social justice warriors need no longer apply.
It’s easy to ridicule the culture of universities today. Anyone with a sense of history and the evolution of culture would dismiss complaints about cultural appropriation out of hand and recognize the merits of the melting pot. Sushi, after all, did not originate in Japan nor did Italy invent pasta. The idea that words are violence or that human beings must thoroughly be shielded from discomfort is at the heart of the trigger warning phenomenon. The idea that micro-aggressions merit any response diminishes recognition of what true macro-aggressions are.
As superfluous Ph.Ds enter the market only to discover the real world neither speaks their language nor shares their values, many seek to re-enter the bubble they know in the only way possible to them—as administrators. There is now one administrator for every 2.5 teaching staff at universities, and that ratio is declining rapidly. Those administrators—alongside professors whose path to promotion and tenure ironically requires ideological conformity with their peers — now impose their core assumptions on a captive student body. Universities have become less centers of learning and more high-priced re-education camps.
Enter identity politics and race-based theories. Freshmen (oops, “first-years”) entering universities today will be indoctrinated in theories that focus on race above all other variables that construct identity. They will be taught that white privilege is a fact rather than theory and will be forbidden from dissent should they see the world different from the administrators mandating indoctrination seminars. Individual identity is subsumed to ethnicity and race. Professors will preach that racism is as great a problem today as it was in the 1950s.
The core of today’s racial theories is that racism is based on power rather than discrimination based on race. Whites are inherently racist, the theory goes, whereas blacks cannot be racist by virtue of being historically disempowered.
If blacks cannot be racist, and if ethnicity is the core of identity, then strange things happen on university campuses, for example, the promotion of segregation instead of efforts to eradicate or shame it. Realistically speaking, with African-Americans holding or having held the presidency, having been national security advisor and secretary of state, having been Supreme Court justices, and having led Fortune 500-companies, it’s specious to suggest racism remains the problem that it once was. But, for the anti-racism industry, if hatred or intolerance based on race declines, then it’s simply necessary to change the definition of racism to be far less about ethnicity and more about politics.
The situation is only going to get worse. Mainstream Americans for years laughed off much of the nonsense emanating from elite university campuses. And some students reject the indoctrination. They may keep their head down for social or more practical reasons while on campus, but their time forced down the ideological rabbit hole forces them to sharpen their arguments in ways that progressive students seldom have to do.
But, indoctrination impacts others.
What once seemed youthful excess and experimentation gets mainstreamed as millennials enter the media and treat what they learned in the bubble as reality. Many media outlets operate under the assumption that increasingly-radical racial theories reflect reality and is the template upon which policy must be crafted.
Take, for example, their willingness to cite the Southern Poverty Law Center as an apolitical, non-partisan resource rather than an organ openly wielding a partisan hatchet. And while white supremacists certainly deserve no kid-gloves treatment in the media or by law enforcement, neither should the hate espoused by self-styled feminist Linda Sarsour or the core of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Enter Charlottesville: What happened was tragic, and the neo-Nazis are attention-seeking scum. But to amplify them beyond what they are—a fringe element seeking advantage from constitutional rights which they would deny others—is wrong. So too is trying to magnify a tragedy caused by a single individual who apparently conducted an act of domestic terrorism into political advantage by trying to stigmatize political disagreement and silence discourse rather than honor it with honest debate.
For civil rights to matter, standards and justice should be blind regardless of politics, ethnicity, or any other variable to identity. Alas, that notion has been lost in universities, and it is becoming foreign to many in the media as prominent outlets and broadcasters are populated by a generation indoctrinated in elite universities by spurious but politically-correct racial theories.
Journalists no longer simply report the who, what, where, and when of generations past who grew up covering specific beats, but they replace impartial reporting of “the why” with their own core beliefs and theories. Against such a backdrop, ordinary Americans lose faith in the media but further divisions are sowed.
What universities and so many in the media miss is that there was a reason why the Founding Fathers prioritized individual liberty. Yes, there were flaws. While it’s trendy to blame America for original sin, hundreds of thousands of Americans sacrificed their lives in the Civil War to end slavery and begin to rectify racial disparity. And, both Democrats and Republicans repaired other deficits through a process laid out in the Constitution.
Indeed, what so many in the Ivory Tower and Fifth Estate miss is that America has done far more to overcome its race problem than Europe, Iran, Africa, China, or Japan. It’s time to celebrate that fact by returning to the notion that we are a nation of individuals, rather than ethnic or religious tribes.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
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