How the University Replaced the Church as the Home of Liberal Morality
During the past several weeks, I have been making the argument that progressive movements in America need to strengthen their connection to communities of faith and center their work in the church, as earlier progressive movements have done. In the past decade, millions of Americans have taken to the streets on behalf of social justice, but this has not led to much in the way of real change. The accomplishments of the civil-rights movement in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and of the Sanctuary Movement in the eighties depended, in part, on the infrastructure, moral clarity, and greater purpose of the church.
But this argument raises a question that I haven’t addressed. If it’s true that those earlier movements drew inspiration and leadership from the church, and if it’s also true that young liberals are increasingly secular, then where does that progressive energy come from? Why do young people participate in politics today, either through voting or through protest, in high numbers? What institution taught them a sense of morality, gave them words to express their outrage, and offered them the space and infrastructure to imagine a different world?
The answer is obvious: the university. In the past thirty or so years, the academy has replaced the church as the center of the liberal moral imagination, providing the sense of a community bound by ethics, a firmament of texts and knowledge that should inform action, and a meeting space for like-minded people. This isn’t an entirely new development, of course—American history is full of student-protest movements—but, rather, a consolidation of the university’s influence. Young people not only stopped going to church in large numbers, they also got fewer and fewer union jobs—and unions were the other institution in America that has historically produced a great deal of progressive change. College, particularly for middle-class and upper-middle-class kids, is now often the first and perhaps only place where young people are told that they are part of a community of their choosing, one that will prepare them to be “leaders of tomorrow” and instill in them a moral and ethical code of conduct.
So, if we accept that the university has become the incubator for social-justice movements in America, is it actually good at this job?
I began thinking about this question while reading about the effects of education on political polarization. It’s a familiar story by now: the more years of education you’ve received, the more likely you are to be a Democrat. In the past few election cycles, this correlation has become more robust. A number of conservative commentators, including Roger Kimball, Peter Wood, and Chris Rufo, maintain that political conformity overtook élite institutions of higher learning and turned every seminar room into some radical struggle session where students dutifully read Karl Marx and bell hooks. Even if you disagree, as I do, with their prescriptions to root out so-called radicalism wherever they find it, you can recognize that what they’re describing is not imaginary. In 1969, around the height of anti-Vietnam War protests and the Third World Liberation Front movement on campuses, the faculty at American universities were closer in political alignment to the general public. This held true until the end of the century, when a combination of factors—including the expansion of the social sciences, which tend to attract more liberals—led to the left-leaning academy that you see today. The extreme effects of this shift have been especially visible at élite universities; according to one conservative group’s report, seventy-seven per cent of faculty at Yale, for example, are or have largely supported Democrats, compared with just three per cent who are Republicans. But most forms of higher education have seen at least a doubling of its liberal-to-conservative gap since the nineties.
Wood argues that colleges are not only staffed with a disproportionate number of radicals who indoctrinate the students but also have turned everything from dormitory management to the dining halls over to the left. In this view, even students who might disagree with their radical professors will eventually succumb to progressive politics because it is embedded in every part of campus life. Wood and others—such as John McWhorter, who, in his book “Woke Racism,” contends that “wokeness” has become a religion on college campuses—understand that the contemporary university functions in some respects as a church, and they believe that it has taken up a dangerous and wrongheaded set of doctrines. (Wood co-authored a three-hundred-and-seventy-page study on my alma mater, Bowdoin College, because he believed that the school had become hostile to the teachings of Western civilization.) These critics do not want to change the basically religious function of the university so much as they want to swap out the sermons.
I would argue something more fundamental. Rather than fighting about so-called viewpoint diversity in higher education, and swapping different ideologies back and forth to match our political beliefs, we need to ask whether the university should have this role at all. To answer the question posed at the start of this column: the university is not good at incubating social-justice movements, or acting as a moral and ethical center of our culture. This is not only because its priests are mostly cloistered faculty but because not everyone goes to college, and many of those who do attend community colleges and commuter schools that do not play this role. The élite public and private universities are intentionally exclusionary, which is why seemingly every one of their commencement speakers talks about the assembled, in their caps and gowns, as the future leaders of America and the best of the best. The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.
This underlying contradiction doesn’t mean that students don’t care about all the suffering in the world, nor does it disqualify their dissent. But it does sometimes limit their moral scope. While studying campus movements such as the Third World Liberation Front of the late sixties and early seventies, I was struck by how many of their demands were about college life. This was, on one level, pragmatic—college students at San Francisco State and Berkeley might not be able to stop American imperialism, but they could at least force their universities to create ethnic-studies departments and change some of their admissions practices, at least at the margins. The anti-apartheid movements of the eighties decried the racism of the South African system, but mainly demanded changes in how specific universities managed their investments.
From one perspective, these localized approaches are laudable: young people have concentrated on what they can actually change while remaining committed to larger, worthy political causes. But what we end up seeing, often, is a version of what the writer Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls “elite capture,” in which a well-intentioned, liberatory idea gets rerouted into litigating disputes among the culturally and economically wealthy. This capture doesn’t necessarily take place at the site of protest, when angry people gather in a public square, but in the processing of the event through the media, the academy, and the political system—institutions that are overwhelmingly made up of élite college graduates. Five and a half years ago, millions of people flooded the streets of American cities. But, once everyone went home, the abiding changes took place mostly in corporate H.R. departments and in the academy. Those who left their homes to protest the murder of George Floyd weren’t secretly focussed on the diversity statistics at Bank of America or on the faculty lounge at Wesleyan University, but that moment of mass dissent got processed through the media, the government, and corporate America. If so many modern protest movements produce such results, is it because the church of the university teaches you to resolve disputes internally without truly disrupting its hierarchy?
I won’t pretend to know the answer, but I am convinced that we should deëmphasize the university’s role in our moral life. This doesn’t mean that professors need to become bots who hand out information stripped clean of any political valence, nor does it mean that colleges must hire more faculty who will tout the virtues of Western civilization. Rather, we must unlearn the idea that the moral fate of the country depends on what a handful of kids at élite colleges learn in their classrooms. As long as the university is mostly a vehicle for class reproduction, the morality that it produces will be tailored for an audience of fellow college graduates. Is it any wonder that years of liberal theorizing on how to reach non-college-educated voters have failed? Education polarization can be best understood as a quasi-religious conflict: people on both sides of the divide do not really believe that they share the same values, morals, or sense of community. And why would they? When “church” costs upward of a hundred thousand dollars a year to attend, how do you sell its sermon to the masses? ♦