Far from being bastions of open-inquiry, universities usually have been bastions of orthodoxy and intolerance.
This essay was first published in the January 4 Colorado Springs Gazette and Denver Gazette.
The Writing Center at Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU-Denver) no longer teaches proper English to its students. The Center’s webpages — removed from public view shortly after being publicized by the Complete Colorado news service — claim that Standard American English “privileges white communities and maintains social and racial hierarchies” and “privileges white populations and creates a destructive binary between [standard American English] and Black or Hispanic Englishes [sic]. . . .”
So the MSU-Denver decision is understandable mostly as a political gesture — an expression of the far-left ideology now infecting American university campuses.
For the minority enrollment MSU-Denver serves, this decision is academically perverse. Learning standard English is particularly important for minorities who hope to rise in American society.
University orthodoxy
Universities, we are told, traditionally are havens for open and free debate. All viewpoints are entertained, and the truth filtered out.
Academic administrators find this narrative useful for public relations and for raising money from gullible state legislators. Academic critics use it to contrast the dysfunction of the university present with a supposedly purer past.
But the narrative is not true, at least outside engineering and hard sciences. Nor, for the most part, has it ever been true. Since their first establishment in Medieval Europe, universities have been centers of orthodoxy and ideological suppression.
Moreover, because faculty and students often have little knowledge of the world, their orthodoxies often are ridiculous and bizarre. Yet they are easily maintained because university self-governance helps assure that there are few negative consequences for clinging to absurdities. Exhibit A is the screed from the MSU-Denver Writing Center.
History of intolerance
Medieval universities typically were founded by clergymen with permission and privileges granted by a king or queen. Students and faculty had to subscribe to the approved religion. No one could be too critical of the gracious monarch who granted (and could easily revoke) the university’s royal charter.
Universities clung to religious and other forms of orthodoxy for centuries. When visiting St. Andrews, Scotland, I was granted access to James Wilson’s academic records. Wilson later immigrated to America and became a leading American Founder. The records included the Latin oath by which the young man swore that he was a Presbyterian and would remain so always. Signing the oath was a condition of attending the College of St. Andrews.
At St. Andrews you had to be Presbyterian to attend, but in England you had to be Anglican. Oxford and Cambridge, the two English universities, hired only Anglican faculty and admitted only Anglican students. Politically, both universities tended to be royalist; in fact, King Charles I chose Oxford as his capital during the English Civil War. Only with the founding of the University of London in 1836, could religious dissenters obtain a university education in England.
The situation was replicated in early America: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and most other colleges and universities subscribed to religious and political orthodoxies. And they brooked no dissent.
Then, as now, universities clung to their orthodoxies at the cost of driving out some of their most talented scholars. Galileo Galilei’s history with the University of Pisa is perhaps the most famous example. But there are many others—among them, the experiences of several of the great thinkers who created modern international law.
University orthodoxy not only required driving out original thinkers, but excluding them from the faculty in the first place. Throughout much of its history, Oxford University taught Roman civil law but stubbornly refused to hire any professors to teach English common law. Fortunately, universities often respond to money. Charles Viner, a wealthy legal author whose personal library I was privileged to access, therefore endowed a faculty slot for Judge William Blackstone. Blackstone went on to become the greatest of all Anglo-American legal commentators, and one of the most famous professors Oxford ever had.
New orthodoxy
Beginning in the 19th century, universities began exchanging traditional orthodoxies for a new one. The new one was the left-leaning, soft-socialism for which advocates appropriated the words “progressive” and “liberal.” The new orthodoxy often was tolerant of views further left, because the far left shared many of the same premises. The “open university” myth became popular in part because liberals promulgated it during the Cold War to provide their hard-left colleagues with political “cover.”
On the other hand, the dominant faction generally was less tolerant of conservatives, who rejected liberal premises.
This was the situation when I attended college (1966-1970) and law school (1970-1973). My college professors were uniformly men of the moderate left, except for a few on the far left. Conservative applicants for faculty jobs apparently were being excluded. Students quickly learned that failing to follow the dominant liberal line resulted in negative grading consequences from some (not all) professors.
Almost all speakers invited to campus were left of center. Readings and panel discussions were tilted to the left. One of my more memorable experiences was serving, at age 19, on a faculty-student panel to debate American involvement in the Vietnam War. The panel’s “balance” was 8-1 — eight for abandoning Indochina to Communism, and one for winning (rather than merely fighting) the war. I was the one.
Law school was more of the same. Liberal legal doctrine (misnamed “legal realism”) reigned unchecked. Most of us graduated without realizing that there were other ways of looking at the law.
An echo chamber
If you live in an ideological bubble — that is, within a circle of people with identical premises and similar views — opinions within the bubble tend to become more intolerant and extreme. With few dissenting voices to check the process, this happened to the universities after the 1970s: Traditional liberalism morphed into more virulent forms of leftism.
In 1984, while practicing law in Colorado, I started applying for academic jobs. By then, university orthodoxy was becoming more extreme. I had practiced law for a decade, but hiring committees were looking for law professors “unpolluted by practice.” (Yes, this was the actual phrase.) They also were looking away from white males. Because of my family history, I might have qualified as Hispanic or American Indian. Unlike U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, however, I refused to take that route. But I did learn not to express my conservative views.
In 1985, I barely edged into a bottom-tier law school faculty, and by virtue of a herculean amount of publication, moved one tier up in 1987. After that, hiring committees made it known that, as one chairman phrased it, they “were not in white male hiring mode.”
It’s worse now. In a recent Compact Magazine article, author Jacob Savage documents — both by statistics and by anecdotes — that it is almost impossible for millennial white males to obtain academic jobs unless they check one or more of the leftist ideological boxes (gay, trans, devoted to race theory, etc.).
The hardening of university orthodoxy has affected what is taught. Our law school, for example, had no full-time commercial law professor. Because most of our graduates would be handling some commercial matters, we had a desperate need for one. But the left perceives commercial law as conservative, so instead of our first commercial law teacher, we hired our fifth environmental law/public lands teacher.
Far-left university orthodoxy, coupled with the seductive effect of federal government money, also negatively impacts academic research. More and more time is spent on chic leftist causes like climate change, racial politics, and neo-Marxist studies. In the law schools (with which I’m most familiar) much of the resulting “research” is based on supposition and manipulated statistics rather than real evidence.
When venturing into my current field of constitutional law, I found that there was much work still to be done in understanding the U.S. Constitution. But little of it was being done, because professors were focusing instead on ways to manipulate constitutional law to serve leftist goals. I suppose I shouldn’t complain, because this provided me with an exciting field to explore. But others should have explored it much earlier.
The educational malpractice deriving from leftist orthodoxy is troubling at private universities, but is particularly inappropriate at taxpayer-supported institutions. Yet, as exemplified by the manifesto of the MSU-Denver Writing Center, leftist faculty tend to treat the taxpayers’ resources as their own.
Maybe it’s time to toss Colorado’s public universities off the taxpayer-funded gravy train.
