Friday’s edition of the indispensable Inside Higher Ed brings news of the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, just in case you were wondering. According to Colleen Flaherty’s report, an air of apprehension hangs over the event, which is being held, where else, in San Francisco.
In her opening comments to the teachers and administrators gathered there, the group’s president, Lynn Pasquerella, announced that “American higher education is under siege.” The general public has become alienated from the academy. Liberal arts, she pointed out, has been a particular target of a prevailing anti-intellectualism that equates education with job training. It is their job, she went on, “to contest the widespread perception that colleges and universities are out of touch with mainstream America.”
We could point out that by aiming several thinly veiled insults at President Trump, Pasquerella herself demonstrated one way in which she and her colleagues appear out of touch—at least with the half of America that voted for him. She even shoehorns in a quote from Hillary Clinton about “fake news.” But to really get an idea of what a fringe enterprise higher education has become—out of touch not only with Trump’s America but with most of the rest of America, too—you don’t need to look farther than the meeting’s program.
Naturally lots of sessions are purely professional, devoted to insider tips: “Building a Productive Culture of Teaching and Learning,” for instance, or “Communicating Value through Sustainable Business Models.” Individual sessions like these are worthless and therefore harmless, objectionable only on the grounds that they serve to keep hundreds of “educational consultants” in clover. But travel beyond them and the politicization of the academy is in full flower. Thumbing through the program you’d get the idea that the entire $40 billion higher education business is simply a racket for advancing identity politics and left-wing cant.
The meeting’s pre-symposium is “Student Activism and Liberal Education,” telling faculty how to “engage students in support of racial and social justice on college campuses.” Then comes the first plenary session: “Reclaiming the Racial Narrative.” After this, we get a session of college folk whose campuses have enjoyed “student protest of racial and social justice.” Then a “case study” of Fairfield University, where administrators have “pushed forward a social justice agenda.” (What the hell took them so long?)
At lunch, conference goers get to hear a talk about “Finding Common Ground in Embracing Student Activism.” Then, their tummies full, they have to choose between concurrent sessions: “Balancing Intergroup Dialogue & Multicultural Curriculum Models,” “Revising ‘Diversity’ Requirements in a Context of Urgency,” and “Gender-Based Violence and LGBTQ Rights.” An embarrassment of riches! They must feel like kids in a candy store.
On it goes, and we’re not even close to dinner yet: “Institutional Responses to Campus Inequities,” and “Campus Climate: An Inclusive Language Campaign,” and a final summing up from the head of the group’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success. The next day has much of the same, and the next day, too. If you told these educators they weren’t allowed to use the words engage, inclusive, diversity, equity, and sustainable anymore, they’d run out of things to say. They probably couldn’t even put on an annual meeting.
To prove they’re in the mainstream, said Lynn Pasquerella, “those of us championing liberal education must reaffirm the role that it plays in discerning the truth.” At the risk of mixing metaphors, they may have to go back to the drawing board.
