How universities are subverting their mission of free enquiry

Universities have changed. Not in the way we expect of all institutions over time but in a way that upturns their foundational purpose as custodians of knowledge and of the traditions and beliefs that underpin our civilisation. Historically, they are also facilitators of free enquiry that push the boundaries of knowledge and understanding.

What we now see in leading universities like Cambridge is a subversion of that mission. It is replaced with the ambitious project of relativising everything in pursuit of the chimera of equality. The great irony is that the ‘oppressor versus oppressed’ hermeneutic of history -identified as the root of all inequality- is now playing out between the pioneers of cultural change and the dissidents they mercilessly suppress.

In the words of philosopher Roger Scruton, himself a victim of academic cancel culture, “The university, instead of transmitting culture, exists to deconstruct it, to remove its ‘aura’, and to leave the student, after four years of intellectual dissipation, with the view that anything goes and nothing matters. The impression therefore arises that, outside the hard sciences, there is no received body of knowledge, and nothing to learn except doctrinal attitudes.” (First Things magazine, 2016)

Ivy League campuses have become the frontline in the ideological advance. Houndings, firings, digital pile ons, cancelling, denunciations and even re-training sessions have induced a self-censorship reminiscent of Mao’s cultural revolution.

Whistleblowers

Simultaneously however stories from whistleblowers, about inane research papers and PhD theses, appointments, including of university presidents, on the basis of ideology not merit, have been steadily surfacing though often under-reported in mainstream media. The Jason Arday case was singular only in its more sensational details and reporting and of course its tragic unfolding.

Many academics, sacked or pressured to resign from British universities such as philosopher Kathleen Stock and historian David Starkey, have found online platforms, arguably with much wider reach and influence than they had in the more sequestered groves of Academe. Interestingly, their contributions point to where and how the cultural upheaval started in the first place.

The buzz words and terms everyone bandies about in conversations and debates today were part of specialist jargon for decades before they entered common speech”

We tend to think that real life and its conflicts have little to do with the ivory towers of scholars. In fact the very opposite is true. Culture is in large measure down stream of the universities. The buzz words and terms everyone bandies about in conversations and debates today were part of specialist jargon for decades before they entered common speech.

‘Micro aggression’ sounds like a very new term to most of us but it was first coined in Harvard University in 1974. ‘Social construct’ was first used in 1966 by sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. As for ‘critical theory’, it goes all the way back to 1927 and the Frankfurt School which famously crossed the Atlantic to Columbia University when its left leaning exponents fled the Nazis.

Societies

It shouldn’t surprise us that the core ideas that shape societies trickle down in this way from leading universities. The world’s leaders, politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats judges, statesmen and writers are to a large extent the products of these institutions and what Cardinal Newman called their “the ethical atmosphere”. This isn’t new. What’s new is the radical change in that atmosphere.

Nothing suggested that a university’s aim was anything other than ‘to form and cultivate the intellect in the free interchange of ideas between people of different backgrounds’”

Cambridge University is familiar enough to me to offer ‘then’ and ‘now’ examples of how things have changed inside out as it were in a very short span of time. Back in the early 2000s, one of my sons spent some four years in Darwin College and I spent many wistful hours wandering storied streets contemplating the renowned names associated with different locations.

From my viewpoint, Newman’s idea of a university was alive and well. Nothing suggested that a university’s aim was anything other than “to form and cultivate the intellect in the free interchange of ideas between people of different backgrounds…to bring about a characteristic tone of thought, a recognised standard of judgment…a self-perpetuating tradition”. From Newman’s viewpoint, as from Scruton’s, the university was about the conservation and transmission of what civilisation had already built, in terms of scholarship and foundational values as well as development of that legacy.

Shifting

Of course, behind the scenes in the early years of the 21st century, in the humanities particularly, the ideological ground was already shifting but there was as yet no obvious sign. Everything about Cambridge spoke of beautifully curated legacy, of achievement building on achievement, of continuity with well considered change. There was also in that environment the moderating air of youthful irreverence and licence traditionally associated with student life but little of the brittle seriousness and sensitivity of their GenZ successors.

The beautiful red brick Queen’s College summons a memory of another spirited poet from a later time, Sylvia Plath”

I remember thinking of the ebullient young student poet, William Wordsworth, returning to his room the worse for wear in the small hours to find his college, “…St John’s, locked fast inside a dream with iron gates” (‘The Prelude’). The more puritanical Milton from earlier times attended Christ College and Wordsworth recounted his giddy excitement at the thought of walking in his steps and how he made a fool of himself by drinking one libation too many in his hero’s homour. The beautiful red brick Queen’s College summons a memory of another spirited poet from a later time, Sylvia Plath, who managed to scale its railings at least once on returning home after lockup.

It wasn’t just the colleges that evoked associations. The old pubs of the town thrill with them too. The oldest pub in Cambridge, the Pickerel, low-ceilinged and dark, a small rabbit’s warren of snugs, was the haunt of a group of writers who called themselves ‘The Inklings’ in the 1950s, chief of whom were C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Another pub, The Eagle, I often walked past, was also very old but its chief claim to fame was that it was where Francis Crick and James Watson walked in one evening in 1952, declaring they had “discovered the secret of life” or what would become known as the Double Helix structure of DNA.

Successors

The discoveries of Crick and Watson have led some of their successors to advance theories offensive to egalitarian ideologues who hold that inequality is the result of either injustice or an adverse environment, not genes. Watson himself was ostracised, as an older man for controversial remarks about heredity and race. Decades later, Oxford’s Richard Dawkins has suffered similarly for saying the same thing about gender. How bizarre that bioscientists can be sidelined or worse for saying that genes matter?

Before Crick and Watson, Cambridge had Charles Darwin. Though something of a secular saint, if any of his successors were to say, as he did, that “males were evolutionarily more advanced than females” they would certainly be hounded far from the university.

Being dead as we well know is no defence against cancel culture but it is harder of course to cancel scientists when we’re not prepared to forfeit the benefits of their life changing breakthroughs.

The culture levelling, egalitarian project of leftist secularism is conceptually a world away from what it is replacing”

“Dead, white poets” on the other hand, to quote young American black poet, Amanda Gorman, are easier to jettison. Wordsworth’s pure delight in natural beauty for its own sake probably jars in ears accustomed to dreary, postmodern introspection and ‘right think’. Milton, who made the English language sound like a cascade of chords from an organ, could well find himself cancelled if someone decides that Oliver Cromwell, whom he enthusiastically served, qualifies as a coloniser even though Ireland was the only country he colonised, though with exceptional ruthlessness and brutality.

The culture levelling, egalitarian project of leftist secularism is conceptually a world away from what it is replacing. It is necessarily a culture of rupture and replacement, of erasure and suppression.

Christian understanding of the equal dignity of every human being before God allows for the kind of distinctions that promote the best outcomes for society as a whole. One can point to the parable of the talents which acknowledges such distinctions in an explicit way. St Paul too explains something of the difference in thinking between God and the world on the subject. In 1 Corinthians, he tells us there is no order of moral value in God’s gifts which is the only thing that should concern us.

Judged

We will be judged according to the devotion we bring to the cultivation of whatever talent or talents we have been given. Paul too, the most influential of the apostles, makes it clear that his standing before God as the one who spread the seeds of the Gospel does not necessarily weigh more than the work of the unknown Apollos who came after him and watered those seeds. Elites mean something different for the church. We celebrate the spiritual elite we call the Saints every day in prayer and worship.

The invocation of the Trinity is still the default standard for all conferrings though it is possible to opt out”

Cambridge, in abandoning its original raison d’ětre is on the front line of a movement to sweep away the norms by which Newman’s characteristic “ethical atmosphere” is maintained and transmitted in centres of learning and throughout society.

In 2006, when my son was solemnly conferred with his degree in the name of the Trinity in a ceremony conducted entirely in Latin in Cambridge’s Senate House, the weight of tradition was palpable. Amazingly, the invocation of the Trinity is still the default standard for all conferrings though it is possible to opt out.

The ethos of an old university like Cambridge can be rapidly supplanted by a thousand cuts at the level of policy. It will be harder to banish it from its ecclesially inflected architecture. Most of all its founding ethos will linger in names too rich in association to be easily erased. Also, names like ‘Trinity’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Corpus Christi’, ‘Christ’, ‘Jesus’ and ‘St John’ are quite literally set in stone.

Over time, however, it may not be enough to keep them even if they withstand claims of cultural insensitivity. The fact is the ideology of relativism is hollow at the core. It is reasonable to ask if it is merely clearing out the ground, without realising it, for a more substantive ideology? Could an ideology with a more coherent sense of identity lay claim to what secularism has pillaged in the name of a muddled form of an exhausted Marxist, Utopian delusion?

All the great and learned in academic exile certainly believe so.