This September, students and faculty returned to college campuses. They did so against the backdrop of last Spring’s anti-Israel protests at universities nationwide that have continued this fall. The shadow of these protests continues to fall on America’s campuses. Only days ago, the interim President of Columbia university “apologized” to students who had protested illegally last semester for any “hurt” they incurred at the hands of the New York Police Department. Getting less attention was the return to campus of a particularly noxious professor at Cornell University. Russell Rickford, tenured professor of African-American history came back from a voluntary “leave of absence.” The catalyst for that absence was Professor Rickford’s praise for the October 7th attack by Hamas that saw more than a thousand Israelis murdered, raped, or taken hostage. He characterized the slaughter as “exhilarating,” and went on to say that Hamas had “challenged the monopoly of violence,” had “shifted the balance of power,” had “punctured the illusion of invincibility,” and had “changed the terms of the debate.”
As one writer points out, what is remarkable about Rickford’s views is that they are unremarkable. To the contrary, they represent the mainstream of thought at elite American universities or, more accurately, the only stream. For example, as reported by a college watchdog website, in certain humanities departments at Cornell, registered Democrats outnumbered Republican 98 to 1, and over the entire university, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a ratio of 20 to 1. 96 percent of faculty donations went to Democrats university-wide, as well as 99 percent of donations by the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Debate among conservative circles is whether conservatives should work within the system and seek to promote diversity of thought and academic freedom at existing universities, or whether they should recognize that there is no hope for change and create their own universities. History provides the answer, because uniformity of opinion has long been a problem on university campuses. The problem in the past, however, was not that universities were monolithically progressive, but that they were monolithically conservative. This was the subject of a book, Goose-step, by the novelist and journalist Upton Sinclair.
Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair is another in the pantheon of History, Rinse, & Repeat authors who were celebrated in their time, whose works were required reading little more than one generation ago, and who are now mostly forgotten. Having received a Bachelor’s degree at City College of New York, he took graduate courses at Columbia, leaving before he obtained a degree. He humorously described how he would take, and later drop before completion, courses while at Columbia, allowing him to get their benefit without their counting against the number he was allowed to take.
He published four novels before he turned to political activism, embracing the Socialist party. Spurred by party members he had met, Sinclair traveled to Chicago to work undercover in the meat packing plants of Chicago. Based upon his experiences, Sinclair wrote and published The Jungle, a novel about immigrant workers in the meat packing industry. The Jungle which, together with How the Other Half Lives, should be mandatory texts on the subject of “White Privilege,” was a huge success. For decades, it was required reading for American schoolboys, including this author, but it appears to have been dropped from most curricula. Another Sinclair novel, Oil!, likely has more recognition today, as it served, in part, as a basis for the movie There Will Be Blood. The Jungle did not ignite an interest in Socialism, as Sinclair had hoped, but it proved to be the catalyst for legislation protecting the integrity and safety of food. Indeed, Sinclair peppered President Theodore Roosevelt, who was given an advance copy of the book, with correspondence with respect to that issue, causing Roosevelt later to term Sinclair a “crackpot” and to remark: “Tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while,”
The Jungle gave Sinclair the fame and money to embark upon a career as a political writer, pioneering the form of journalism known as “muckraking,” and to engage in other political activities as well. He founded a utopian “colony” in New Jersey to promote Socialist ideals and thereafter wrote an exposé of the coal industry, King Coal. Eventually, he moved to California, where he ran as the Democratic candidate for governor. At the end of his career, he returned to writing, penning eleven novels centered around a character named Lanny Budd, the son of a munitions manufacturer who traveled around the world meeting world leaders, including Mussolini and Hitler, and who played a part in world events. Sinclair won the Pulitzer Prize for the third book in the series. Once immensely popular, the books went out of print in a matter of decades. Nonetheless, a complete copy of the entire series holds a special place on the bookshelf of History, Rinse, & Repeat, as my father never lost his enthusiasm for the books even into his nineties, and it was one of his great disappointments in life that neither his son, nor his granddaughter, A.H., had the same passion for the series that he did.
While in California, Sinclair wrote a series of books, the “Dead Hand” series (a play on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”), about various political topics. Included in the series was a book about college education, entitled The Goose-step.
Sinclair’s Critique of University Education
Sinclair begins his work with an appraisal of college education that could have been written yesterday. Noting that hundreds of thousands of America’s young people are attending universities, “the pick of our coming generation” and the “future of our country,” and that millions of dollars are being paid to maintain the system, Sinclair writes that the American public “takes it for granted that this money is being honestly and wisely used.”
What is the so-called “higher education” of these United States? You have taken it, for the most part, on faith. It is something which has come to be; it is big and impressive, and you are impressed.
Sinclair disabuses the reader of any suggestion that he is impressed with “higher education.”
Suppose I were to tell you that this educational machine has been stolen? That a bandit crew have got hold of it and have set it to work, not for your benefit, nor the benefit of your sons and daughters, but for ends very far from these?
Sinclair identifies numerous problems with “higher education” that permeate America’s universities to this day. Among them are the degree to which petty college politics permeate university life, the intellectual conformity that is forced upon faculty and students, the manner in which those who rebel against conformity are sanctioned, the suppression of free speech, and the dishonesty of university administrators.
As to the first, Sinclair’s jaundiced view was formed, in large part, by his experiences as a graduate student at Columbia. Indeed, while his book is a scathing appraisal of universities in general, he reserves his particular scorn for Columbia and its President, Nicholas Murray Butler, or “Nicholas Miraculous,” the subject of our piece Roar, [Z]ion, Roar. Dubbing Butler a “climber” and a “toady” who kowtowed to the influential (“Ordinarily I hate puns on people’s names, but the name of Butler seems to have been a special act of Providence.”), Sinclair wrote that Butler most undeniably exemplified the petty politics and calculation that permeated the careers of university professors. Having studied Immanuel Kant with Butler, Sinclair wrote humorously of his experience:
I took seriously what I read, and assumed that my professor was taking seriously what he taught; so imagine my bewilderment when shortly afterwards I learned that Professor Butler had left the Presbyterian church, and had joined the Episcopal church, as one of the steps necessary to becoming president of Columbia University. It gave me a shock, because I knew he had no belief whatever in any of the dogmas of the Christian religion, and had completely demonstrated to me the impossibility of any valid knowledge concerning immortality, free will or a First Cause.
But Butler was not the exception at Columbia. As Sinclair wrote, “What you have at Columbia is a host of inferior men, dwelling, as one phrased it to me, in “a twilight zone of mediocrity”; dull pedants, raking over the dust heaps of learning and occupying their minds with petty problems of administration.” Nor was the problem limited to Columbia. Sinclair examined universities around the country, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Stanford, Chicago, Wisconsin, Stanford, Clark, and even North Dakota. He came to the conclusion that “among all the hundreds of millions of dollars of endowment at the disposal of the great American universities, there was not one dollar which could be won by a piece of creative literature, nor one university president who was interested in the possibility that there might be a man of genius actually alive in America at the beginning of the twentieth century.”
Sinclair argued that universities were stifled by uniformity of thought. This uniformity was enforced in two ways. First, dissenting academics would be forced from their positions. “I sat in one group of faculty members discussing this subject, and the conversation took a humorous turn; they started making a list of the various offenses for which a man may be fired from an American university.” Sinclair wrote of his own experience at Columbia where, like many administrative proceedings today, he was advised that a “charge” had been asserted against him, without being informed what the charge was or who had asserted it.
In the same vein, dissenting opinions, or free speech, were banished from the campus. In a passage that could have been written today with respect to “hate speech” or “misinformation,” Sinclair recounts a conversation with an editor of the Harvard Crimson:
The “Crimson” was for Free Speech—But! What the “Crimson” wished to forbid was “propaganda”; and it made clear that by this term it meant any and all protest against things established. Said the cautious young editor: “Not prohibited by law, propaganda creeps in and is accepted by many as an almost essential part of freedom of speech!”
Sinclair observed that “[t]here is a standing rule at Harvard barring ‘outside’ speakers who discuss ‘contentious contemporaneous questions of politics or economics,’” a rule that is, for all intents and purposes, still enforced today under the pretext of “public safety.”
More significantly, however, conformity was, as it is today, self-enforced by members of a faculty, who, with few exceptions, are too cowardly to betray a dissenting opinion. “The dismissal of professors by no means gives the clue to the frequency of the gag in academic life. We forget the many who take their medicine and make no fuss.” Sinclair quoted several academics with whom he had spoken on the subject: “Our young instructors are weaklings, selected as such. They seek a comfortable berth, sheltered from the storms of the world.” “They find that promotion depends upon conformity, and they conform.” “The plow-horse does not feel the rein until he tries to step out of the furrow.” “Yes, our men are free; they are horses that stand without hitching.” Sinclair wrote that such sentiments were expressed by “scores of men” with whom he spoke. Sinclair termed the phenomenon of academics sheepishly confined to the governing ideology as “academic asphyxiation.”
Of course, the corruption of academics could not be accomplished, as it cannot now, without the connivance of a dishonest administration. Sinclair firmly believed that the rot in college education started at the top. As noted, Sinclair was particularly contemptuous of Columbia’s Nicholas Butler. However, to Sinclair, Butler was not the exception, but the rule:
It is embarrassing to find so many people asserting that the president of Columbia University does not always tell the truth. It will be still more embarrassing to have to state that most of the presidents of colleges and universities in the United States do not always tell the truth. A curious fact which I observed in my travels over the country—there was hardly a single college head about whom I was not told: “He is a liar.”
The result of all the above factors was what Sinclair termed “a twilight zone of mediocrity”; dull pedants, raking over the dust heaps of learning and occupying their minds with petty problems of administration.”
Sinclair’s Relevance Today
It is hard not to view today’s universities as a “twilight zone of mediocrity.” Indeed, one of the lasting impressions from the public implosion of several university presidents, including Minouche Shafik of Columbia, Elizabeth Magill of Penn, and Harvard’s own Claudine Gay, whose rise to the pinnacle of the academic universe was based upon the scantiest of achievements, the majority of which apparently were not hers, is to what degree they exemplified the very mediocrity that Sinclair decried. That is because academic freedom is at equal, if not greater risk, than it was in Sinclair’s day. So-called progressives have seized control of our educational institutions.
However, there is one major difference between the conformity of Sinclair’s time, and that of today, and it explains why the universities now skew left rather than right as they did then. In Sinclair’s book, university administrations were the corrupt captives of moneyed interests, embodied by the schools’ alumni and board of trustees. Sinclair referred to Columbia as the University of the House of Morgan, he referred to Penn as the University of United Gas Improvement Company, or U.G.I. (after rejecting the University of Morgan-Drexel and the University of the Pennsylvania Railroad), and he referred to Harvard as the University of Lee-Higginson, after a Boston investment bank. According to Sinclair, President Butler “toad[ied] to the rich and powerful.” Sinclair saw a similar obeisance to moneyed interests in the President of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, comparing him to a deft circus rider with his feet on two horses, one the academic tradition of his predecessor, Charles Eliot, and the other the House of Lee-Higginson. Sinclair explained the only difference between the two:
A. Lawrence Lowell is not, like Nicholas Murray Butler, a climber and a toady; he could not be a climber, because he was born on a mountaintop, and there was no place to climb to—he could only stay where he was or descend.
Today, while alumni retain some influence, the driving force behind academic cowardice is unquestionably the students. As noted in the opening paragraph, it is the students who are the catalyst for speech codes, for barring what they perceive as heterodox views (As Sinclair put it, “Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is your doxy!”), and for disrupting the educational process of their schools.
Ironically, Sinclair perceived students as the antidote to the conformity on campus and the lack of academic freedom. He extolled a manifesto issued by a student group in Weimar Germany, the World league of Youth that would not appear out of place on any college campus today:
The unifying characteristic, indeed the only sense of the youth movement is this: we no longer want to obey laws, coercions, customs that come to us from the outside and that have aims without a living, inner meaning to ourselves. We want to form our lives in accordance with laws that are within us, laws toward which alone we feel a responsibility.
One wonders what Sinclair would think of the academic landscape today. While he remained a Socialist to his grave, he ultimately tempered his views to a certain degree, adopting a more pragmatic and gradualist approach to politics. Nevertheless, unless he was as intellectually and morally bankrupt as those he skewered, he cannot have considered this progress.
sure took a lotta words to say that
Frank Zappa
“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”
― Frank Zappa