What Is Higher Education For?

After the incendiary testimony in front of Congress by the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT, a question arises: Why, exactly, are these institutions of supposed higher learning sticking with their embattled leaders? Why couldn’t those leaders have simply condemned chants like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “There is only one solution, intifada revolution”?

To answer that question, we have to answer another: What is higher education for?

Obviously, universities serve a purpose. They wouldn’t have survived this long if they didn’t. But that purpose has shifted over time. Originally, universities were an extension of church education: Those who completed the trivium — grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics — and the quadrivium — math, geometry, music, and astronomy — moved on to universities. Over time, universities evolved into centers of learning, in which scholars would pass along age-old wisdom and search for new answers. Citizens who went to university were expected to become leaders in their fields and to be inculcated in the values of their societies.

Over time, however, the centralization of an intellectual class led universities down two paths: the first path, toward specialization in industry and preparation of a professional class; the second path, toward social experimentation. The path toward professional specialization has sometimes been positive. Obviously, the science emanating from our universities has changed the world and continues to do so. But it has also meant an increasing credentialization of society, in which a university degree is considered entrée to the workforce altogether.

The second path, social experimentation, has been the way of universities since at least the mid-19th century. With the impact of religion falling away and universities increasingly the battlegrounds for various replacement theories, social experimentation became the key purpose of the university. New theories of living, from bureaucratic centralization to broadening of social rights, sprang from universities. Universities became seedbeds of social change.

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The new purpose of the university — and the education system in general — was well summed up by theorist John Dewey, an early 20th century progressive, who argued that universities were designed to create a progressive citizen: a citizen ready to take part in the rebuilding of a great state, unbound by history and religion. As Dewey said in his 1910 book “How We Think,” “Education has … to undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages. When social life in general has become more reasonable, more imbued with rational conviction, and less moved by stiff authority and blind passion, educational agencies may be more positive and constructive than at present, for they will work in harmony with the educative influence exercised willy-nilly by other social surroundings upon an individual’s habits of thought and belief.”

Experts, you see, guiding the life of the nation.

This philosophy was not relegated to the United States — far from it. Dewey’s own thought was an outgrowth of German progressivism, where similar ideas took hold. It is no wonder, then, that German universities represented a center of power for Hitlerian thought, as historian Niall Ferguson wrote in the Free Press over the weekend: “A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. … German academics acted as Hitler’s think tank, putting policy flesh on the bones of his racist ideology.”

The intelligentsia, as Ferguson points out, also have an ugly habit of creating coalitions of the supposedly dispossessed to act as shock troops for their new ideas. Certainly that was the case in the 1960s, when universities in the West were reacting not against the supposed handcuffs of theology but against the supposed evils of nationalism. Now, the universities would be redirected toward a sort of global citizenship, in which the atomized individual would be the prime mover — so long as that individual declared fealty to the intellectual leaders of the movement.

Thus, Herbert Marcuse, one of the progenitors of the so-called New Left, posited a free sex lifestyle in order to create a “non-repressive civilization”; the end of capitalism, which of course, had led to Western power and what he called fascism; and banning of alternative viewpoints, which stood against “tolerance” for his cause. No wonder students during the 1968 Paris revolt carried banners reading, “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.” The chaos in the streets of the West during the 1960s and 1970s was born in the universities of the West.

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Today’s universities promote a new social experiment: diversity, equity, and inclusion. Unlike its brash predecessors, DEI makes far more humble claims, at least to donors: not for free love or pacifism, but simply for a more “diversity” and “inclusive” body politics, modeled by the universities.

But the same theoreticians stand behind the old revolutions and the new.

DEI is the result of critical theory, a belief that all systems of power are reflections not of merit but of exploitation — and the only corrective to that exploitation is to completely restructure those systems of power by appeal to group identity and coalitional politics. Anyone successful must be denigrated as evil; anyone unsuccessful must be upheld as good. This oppressor/oppressed binary is the motivating feature of life on campus today, and it results in oppression and discrimination just as surely as the German universities’ revolutionary ideology resulted in oppression and discrimination against the supposed powerful — in both cases, the Jews.

That’s why the presidents of major universities struggled to answer basic questions about anti-Semitism. Their world-breaking new philosophy is focused entirely on the oppressor/oppressed binary. That binary cannot be allowed to fall — for with it falls an entire ideological edifice that acts as the seedbed for a revolution against the American meritocracy. Better a few Jews are threatened with swastikas than that DEI be allowed to fail.

DEI is the purpose of the universities. It is not a means. It is the goal. Because the goal is always perpetual revolution by the intelligentsia. And this is the current revolution. It is the entire pedagogy. In the words of Paolo Friere, the chief force behind so-called “critical pedagogy,” “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

And that cannot be allowed.

And so DEI must be protected.

And the media are doing their best to protect it.