Jack Niewold's Blog

“For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth.” (John 18:37) 

I am more convinced than ever that nothing is as important as making Jesus Christ the center of our personal conversation and presence. Life is short, and opportunities to witness to the truth rapidly pass us by. Jesus is the truth that everyone everywhere at all times must know to inherit eternal life. There are a host of methods and approaches to this end, but unless it is uppermost in our hearts and minds our lives will be unfocused and ineffective. 

This takes intention, prayer, frequent missteps and failure, and complete abandonment to God. 

Christian witness is the great dividing line between those who merely “believe” and those who truly “follow.” A non-witnessing faith is a self-centered, merely spiritual, merely cause-oriented religion. Churches are full of this light half-belief. Christians must be involved in many things: politics, the pursuit of justice, worldview formation, art, and social transformation, to name just a few. But none of these is a substitute for evangelism. 

Until you open your mouth with the intention of witnessing to the claim of Jesus on the lives and destinies of your friends and coworkers, you are merely playing at Christianity. When you attempt to present the gospel of Jesus briefly, coherently, and compellingly, it will forever change your social habits and your sense of who you are. It will awaken intellectual, spiritual and volitional powers you never knew you had. It will remake you and the world you  live in. 

I’m talking here about life lived with the big kids, best pursued with friends who share this passion. Try it alone and you’ll be eaten alive. The secular world is much smarter than you, and way cooler. It’s always easier, much easier, to go with the flow, to identify with the cultural standards of the time, to lose your identity in the music, entertainment, pastimes and fashions of the day. That’s why most Christians go that route, and why the world is going to hell, both literally and figuratively. 

Mark yourself off in one critical dimension from those around you and you’ll see your former friends drop away, or, worse, turn against you. Some, however, will join you. And that’s what it’s all about.  Most of the millions who self-identify as Christian will never in their lifetime influence another contemporary to receive Jesus as Savior and Lord because most have never made witness to the Truth central to who they are. 

Keeping your head down, staying out of controversy, being nice, not swearing much, avoiding the raunchiest cultural behavior, being cool, praying occasionally, and going to church once in a while (even leading a study group) are all good, but they are not what you have really been called to do. They are the minimum, and often unbelievers do these things better than you. 

Face it, you already do these things and you’re still miserable, haunted by the sense that something isn’t right, and fogged in with your own problems. Right? 

Step out from the ordinary, speak up for Jesus to someone on your chicken list, fall flat on your face, and cry out to Him to help you. Get out of yourself, get into Him, and matter for once in your life. 

There’s scarcely a problem or issue in your life that will not begin to make sense once you tell someone about Jesus. That’s because you are guaranteed to fail, and that failure will bring you down to the level where He can begin to form you into His image. 

There are a multitude of worthy activities for each of us to seek out. But here’s the question: do those activities and passions flow from a faith that is already sharing Jesus with your neighbor, or are they substitutes for direct witness? 

I see a great deal of loving and caring today in the name of this or that, but I don’t see much witnessing to the truth. For that reason I doubt that our loving and caring will lead to all that much. Harsh, I suppose, but then look at what’s happening around us. That’s what I’d call really harsh. Harsh is people never knowing the Light of the World when you’re standing right next to them. 

Today’s secular world is not a pit of despair and destruction because too many Christians are verbally telling too many unbelievers about the Lord and Savior of the universe. It is just the opposite: the world inevitably slides into moral and spiritual ruin as more Christians remain silent about their faith.    

How many of you have ever been called “judgmental”? I know, to Christians that question is like dangling catnip in front of Tabby. We all have, of course, at least those of us who have ventured to express an opinion that ranges beyond the weather or our tastes in organized sports.

Unfortunately, that may not be very many of us. The truth is, if you’re not considered judgmental, you’re not standing for much of anything.

The charge of judgmentalism is the Saturday Night Special of the uncommitted, the way to achieve the most complete destruction for the least cost. It is the standard default of one unwilling or unable to defend his or her own assumptions. 

Judgmentalism and liberalism go hand in hand. Liberals are far more judgmental than Christians. Liberalism is a category error that mistakes agreement with the spirit of the times with self-knowledge. When this conceit is stripped away, liberalism turns authoritarian and intolerant of that which dissents from its own disguised dogmas and cherished self-delusions.  

True judgmentalism is to put down those you don’t like with no investment in the hard work of understanding others or attempting to persuade them. To label one’s opponents judgmental is to pronounce them morally unfit and undeserving of further consideration, while sanctifying your own self-righteousness and lack of true conviction. 

Anyone who has even half-hearted philosophical beliefs, and expresses them, will offend someone, who will in turn probably consider that person “judgmental.” 

You will seldom hear the charge of judgmentalism from those who have themselves been subjected to this blunt instrument.

I recently flew to the East and back. Following are some observations I made en route, mostly while sitting in various airports waiting for the next flight. 

That Chinese males are always in suits or nice slacks and crisp Tattersall shirts. How do they manage to look like they’ve just stepped out of the shower? 

That there appears to be far less racial tension in the southern states than in the northern states. 

That the further east you go, the less body art you see. Granted, I was in the southeast, but even taking that into consideration, there were few males who had earrings and tattoos. People in general seemed better dressed the further east you go. 

That in Denver I saw more denim than I’ve seen in years. And I’m not talking about Levi’s. I saw denim skirts, shirts and jackets. I can’t be sure, but I thought I saw a young Dale Evans walk by on one occasion, right down to the hat, the skirt and the boots.  

That if you live in a small city that is served by regional airlines, as I do, you will be boarding a small plane at the very end of the longest concourse of large airports. The nice thing is that when I return home, I can literally kiss the ground if I’m so inclined. 

That nature has few really straight lines. Once, at 36,000 feet, I saw a perfectly straight shadow crossing several miles of terrain. What could that be, I wondered? A moment later it was obvious: A con-trail above or below the plane I was on. Was my plane leaving one that crossed it? 

That inconceivably vast expanses, say between Houston and Denver, are covered by a nearly unbroken series of crop circles and sectioned fields. Occasionally an arroyo intrudes into this terrestrial tedium, but then it’s back to geometric forms. 

That the Washington, DC greater metro area is indeed the richest part of the US, if flying over it is any indication. 

That there are at least a thousand small Midwestern towns that I wish I could visit, but probably never will. 

That many young mothers are traveling with their children without their husbands. I wish I could make their jobs a little easier. The infants aren’t so hard, but most three-to-seven-year-olds seem to be a handful. Still, I’m amazed at how competent many young mothers are these days. 

That a Canadair regional jet with 60 passengers produces much less air noise than a 757 with 180 passengers. 

That one of the universal human types is the 20-something to 40-something professional female in a skirt, business blazer, and pumps, and that you don’t want to be walking in front of one of these. Fortunately you can usually hear her coming and get out of the way. 

That the most superior being in the world is the person who can arrive at the holding pen five minutes before his or her flight begins boarding and somehow make two large bags disappear once on the plane. 

That I will never attain to that sublime estate.   

A year ago a white man was beaten to death in the Berkeley, CA hills by a black man, and the world yawned. Peter Cukor, a 67-year-old business consultant, died when Daniel DeWitt hit him with a flower pot. Cukor had called the Berkeley police for help, but the police did not respond because they were preparing for a march of “occupiers” making their way up Telegraph Avenue from Oakland. My condolences to the Cukor family. 

Daniel DeWitt was a 23-year-old mentally disturbed individual. His mother, Candy DeWitt, says she had been trying for years to get help for him, but she doesn’t know where to turn. The mental health system is broken, she said. “Our system has to change or else this will keep happening.” 

Once we go beyond the personal tragedies, there is enough irony in this story to keep us busy for quite a while. But here’s where I want to go with it. 

The Berkeley hills, a neighborhood I know well, is the quintessential land of the so-called “1%.” It is home to—among others such as Mr. Cukor—the tenured professoriate and managerial echelons of UC Berkeley, a privileged aristocracy accustomed to $300-400K incomes earned mainly from consulting for American corporations, with a little teaching and writing thrown in. This entitled class is also the recipient of much of the federal grant money aimed at the contemporary university, money California taxpayers provide. 

Not all of this money goes to the hard sciences like physics, computer science and solar engineering. The “softer” disciplines—sociology, gender studies, psychology,  linguistics—are on the take as well. This professorial nobility of the humanities, well off but not quite as rich as the real scientists, also live here in the hills. It’s not a stretch to say that much of contemporary progressive social, political and legal theory originates in the art-deco, stucco homes of upland Berkeley, Rockridge, Montclair and Kensington. 

And then this theory flows, so to speak, downhill from there. It flows to West Oakland and Alameda, to Mills College, across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, and up into Marin and Napa. It seeps into the East Oakland, Richmond and Berkeley flatlands, where it is no longer just theory. This stream of progressive effluence has much to do with the birth of the Occupy movement itself, and with the presence in our society of individuals such as Daniel DeWitt, people who would once have been institutionalized except for the intervention of compassionate progressives, expert elites of the Berkeley hills variety. 

And so, in a way, the Frankenstein created by the best and brightest returned to the laboratory where he was spawned. Nobody knows how Daniel DeWitt got up to Grizzly Drive, where he strikes out in rage, but without knowing what he is doing, and kills a businessman.

All the while, down the hill on Telegraph Avenue, another slouching monster of progressive fantasies, the Occupy movement, staggers north and just happens to show up at the same time as the murder in the hills. 

Here’s a thought experiment: If Mitt Romney killed a millworker’s wife, did the Occupy movement kill Peter Cukor?   

A few years ago, when four Oakland police officers were gunned down in a series of shootouts with yet another crazed black man, Victor Davis Hanson commented that the line between the social sophistries of Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and the motivations of the killer were remarkably short. Hanson, an academic in the California system, knows whereof he speaks. 

Yet the progressive academics who bring these kinds of misery into the lives of less affluent Bay Area residents, and now even their own neighbors, sleep soundly in their beds, unaware of the consequences of their ideas just a few doors away. 

Years ago, anthropologist Ruth Benedict divided societies into two types: societies of guilt, and societies of shame. Guilt societies are inner-directed and morality-oriented, while shame societies are outer-directed and compliant with external norms. We tend to mush guilt and shame together, but for Benedict they were polar opposites. Historically, most Christian societies have been primarily guilt-oriented and most Asian societies shame-oriented. 

Furthermore, worldviews within societies may also stand at opposite ends of this spectrum. 

It seems to me that America is increasingly a shame-oriented society and decreasingly one of guilt. That is, the traditional ethos of personal responsibility, relationship to the transcendent, and religiously-sanctioned competition is giving way to lives governed by social norms and expectations. We are becoming accustomed to sanctions imposed by law and regulation rather than “obedience to the unenforceable” that marks the old morality of the heart. 

A society permeated by liberal political correctness, as ours is becoming, could be the ultimate shame society. We should not be surprised at the rise of some of the other characteristics of shame societies: arbitrary rule by charismatic individuals, public shunnings and ostracisms of those who run afoul of the official orthodoxy, and peer pressure to conform.  Prolongation of adolescence (the period of life most marked by conformity) should be expected too, along with token assertions of rebellion such as the tattoo culture and transgressive behavior.   

Liberals like to ridicule the guilt  mechanisms of the old Christian ways. But perhaps their worldview of shame is the final guilt trip our society takes.

In 1970 I spent the summer with a lot of heavy books. I was in my late twenties. That summer was a kind of sabbatical for me, a reassessment, as I bowed out of my first fling at doctoral studies. Among my heavy books were those of Herbert Marcuse, especially One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization.

Marcuse, for those of you unfamiliar with him (and I suspect that would be nearly everybody under 50) was a political philosopher who was becoming the go-to theorist of the New Left movement that was taking over many American campuses. 

Marcuse was a popularizer in the classic sense: He took ideas that had been floating around, in this case the ideas of the so-called Frankfurt School of Social Research, and made them accessible to multitudes of youth drunk on a new-found, unexpected power. 

Norman Mailer provided swagger for the New Left. Franz Fanon created the myth of white racism and oppression that was the raison d’être for the New Left. R. D. Laing and Ken Kesey enlisted psychological deviance in service to the cause. The street theatrics of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman took care of the aesthetics. Gore Vidal fashioned leftism as an aristocracy. But it was Marcuse, who died in 1979, who attempted to formalize the movement into a doctrinal system. 

In 1970, Marcuse’s formulas sounded like the musings of an academic déclamateur, an old prophet manqué attempting to suck up to the new boys on the block. Who is this old German Jew trying to kid, I asked myself? Apparently, he made quite an impression on them. His books sold by the hundreds of thousands and are still in print today.   

I can remember to this day Marcuse’s prescriptions for authoritarianism. (Leftist ideologies, which begin as liberation from authority, invariably turn authoritarian.) One of his most famous dogmas was “repressive tolerance.” Tolerance, he wrote, would be exercised only to the Left. “No enemies on the Left,” had insisted the community organizer icon Saul Alinsky. To the Right, in Marcuse’s catechism, repressive tolerance would permit no legitimacy. He called for the “systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions,” by which of course he meant those opposed to the New Left. 

“Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed,” wrote Marcuse. These were his philosophical prescriptions then; they are today descriptions of familiar political and cultural realities. In the realm of public opinion, Marcuse seems to have prevailed. What conservative today, what Christian, is not aware that he or she is under some kind of presumptive judgment? As columnist Daniel Henninger writes, “Marcuse created political correctness.” 

Barack Obama was only nine years old in 1970 when I was hiding out for a few months in my parents’ spare California bedroom to read Marcuse. I don’t know if the young Barry Dunham ever read Marcuse in his Occidental, Columbia or Harvard days, but there is little doubt that he imbibed the philosopher’s ideas. Barack Obama is Marcusean through and through.   

One of the fundamental questions of our time is whether Republicans and conservatives will discover, or discover in time, who they are dealing with in Barack Obama and his transformed Democrat Party. Indications so far are that they have a long ways to go. It is not Barack Obama’s intention to tolerate any opposition to his policies and worldview. The handsome face and calm demeanor mask a ruthless Marcusean repressive tolerance.   

My copies of Marcuse’s works have long since disappeared, as had his ideas for many years. We all thought— though we shouldn’t have—that they had been consigned to the dustbin of history in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They are back now, deeply ingrained in the public psyche, and we have once again to take them on, not only on the campuses of universities this time, but in the highest reaches of government and society itself.  

Now, where is my old edition of The Strawberry Statement?  

I’ve been one of the few people I know who has spoken out against Christians wearing tattoos. Call me stupid or call me bold. I’ve been called both. So here are my reflections, in no particular order.

Some of my kids have tattoos. I’m not crazy about tattoos, as they all know. Sometimes I poke fun at tattoos and use sarcasm regarding them. This almost always backfires because my kids rightfully think that if I can’t be on board, I will at least be accepting. I’m never quite sure what they mean by “accepting,” but I do attempt to assure my kids that in spite of my dislike of tattoos, I love them (my kids) very much. 

It’s hard to make this distinction between their persons and their tattoos because for so many young people, tattoos are closely bound up with personal identity. I wonder sometimes that if kids get tattoos so young, they—the tattoos—will distort the normal processes of maturation. Here’s what I mean by this. Most of us don’t really get to know who we are until our twenties, and even then we see through a glass darkly. Self-knowledge seems to be coming later with each generation. Sociologists are now telling us that adolescent-like behavior and attitudes are persisting into the forties for many young adults.  

Some time when I’ve come to terms with it myself, I’ll say more about what adolescence and maturity are, or at least how I view these life stages. 

My point is that tattoos are permanent. The tattoo a young person decides is appropriate at, say, seventeen will be with him or her forever. I can’t imagine what I might have put on my arm or chest at seventeen, or even twenty-five, but I do know that it would not have fit me at thirty, or fifty. But what if I’d been stuck with it (so to speak)? Would it have determined how I developed? Would it have impeded, in any way, the normal growth I would have experienced had I not put it on my body? What role would it have played in my personality? And was that a good thing? Granted, one can’t know any of this until much later, if ever. 

Yes, I know: Clothes, styles, habits, music, culture, hobbies, education all do much the same. That is, they all have an effect on what psychologists call “individuation,” our growth into our unique character. But none of these things is permanent. Most young people will progress through the cultural artifacts of their times as their tastes and perceptions change. Tattoos aren’t like that. They don’t progress. I wonder if, in a sense, they arrest normal development.   

I recognize that most tattoos are probably harmless: Names, crosses, flowers, family crests, Bible verses, etc., things you can live with for the duration without a lot of remorse (even if the girl is long gone). I also know that many young people have the good sense to be discreet with their tattoos, not displaying them front and center. They instinctively know that final calls don’t make sense at twenty-one. I can live with that, even though I don’t especially care for it, if they can live with me living with it. 

Am I being judgmental?

Much of what I have previously written concerning tattoos actually addresses another level of personal expression, of which body art is only a part. This level goes beyond personal identity to personal badging.  It goes beyond what I may think of my tattoo. It even goes beyond what you think of my tattoo. It goes to what you should think of my tattoo. 

There is a level of personal expression that is thinly-veiled assault. It has no intention of being accepted or understood. Its entire purpose lies in taking and giving of offense. We all know this when we see it. Its approach is irredentist, an implacable hostility that is sharpened and heightened with each concession of its putative enemy. Watch a gay parade in San Francisco or a Hamas demonstration in Gaza City. It’s pretty much the same thing: Don’t even try to satisfy, agree with, or reason with me. 

Do I think that most people with tattoos think that way? Of course not. I would only say that some people move along a spectrum from the level of casual tattoos to intentionally transgressive behavior, including outré tattooing, without being aware of it. 

I would imagine there are lots of gradations in this whole matter of tattoos. Psychologists, for instance, study an entire subclass for whom obsessive tattooing is linked to other compulsive behaviors earlier in life. For instance, young females with a history of bulimia, self-laceration, and experimentation with hair are especially prone to disfiguring body art. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a male variant to this kind of self-mutilation.  

So far, I haven’t mentioned the religious and theological dimensions of tattooing. If you’re not a believer, and don’t intend to be, this won’t make sense to you. But it’s pretty clear that tattooing was considered a Canaanite practice and was condemned among the Hebrews as paganism along with incest, homosexuality, withholding wages, keeping two sets of books, shaving the edges of one’s beard, and cutting oneself. 

This mixed catalog of abominations stretches from Leviticus 19 through 21. (Leviticus 19:28 refers explicitly to tattoos.) Most Jews have traditionally avoided tattoos as a profaning of the Law of God, which is one of the reasons the Nazis tattooed numbers on the arms of concentration camp inmates. Otherwise the Bible doesn’t say much about tattooing, though the matter of separation from the world is a huge biblical theme. It’s good to keep in mind that the Bible also has much to say about justice, marriage and moral uprightness. 

I know there are those out there who were waiting to remind me of this.

Are there far worse things in the Bible than tattoos? What do you think? Have I done things in my life that are worse than sporting a tattoo? You bet I have. But does that excuse me from abiding by what might be considered lesser commandments? Comparison n’est pas raison.   

If you are a young Christian considering getting a tattoo, you should ask yourself: Does having a tattoo make me more like the Canaanites or more like Jesus Christ? 

Just putting it out there. It’s likely nobody else will ask.   

Incidentally, I have no problem with normal piercing of the ears for earrings. This was an entirely biblical practice. I sell wire earrings and other jewelry, after all.

There’s much more to say about this subject, and sooner or later I’ll get to it. For now I hope this will answer some of the questions people have asked me. When you’re one of those who speaks out against something as popular as tattoos, you do get asked to back up your assertions. And you sometimes get called either stupid and bold, or something else.   

I have observed that sometimes, perhaps often, the social pathologies so lamented by liberals are the fruits of—you guessed it—liberal polity itself. Liberal sentiment turned into law and institutions are, for instance, at the center of the despoliation of the American inner-city black family and neighborhood.

Liberals create a problem with their social engineering and then come to the rest of us to foot the bill. When we complain, they tell us how insensitive, how cold-hearted, how greedy, we are.

They have run up a bill of trillions of dollars with top-heavy, socialistic, Thirties-style social programs like Obamacare, and then tell us that our resultant impoverishment is the new norm. Nice people, eh?

The recent incidence of human trafficking is another case in point. There is no doubt that human trafficking is a terrible scandal and a human tragedy beyond words. Nor is there any doubt that Christians should be involved in ending this practice. Girls and young women are kidnapped or bought on a kind of black market and then transported illegally to those who wish to pay for them as sex slaves or domestic bondservants. Furthermore, there is little doubt that a primary impulse behind human trafficking is a complex ganglion of greed, sadism and lust. But let’s look closer, and ask: Why is sex trafficking so widespread?

One of the key reasons is abortion. This is especially true in India, Asia and China, where a generation of selective abortions has produced societies short of marriageable women. Liberal feminist Mara Hvistendahl, in her recent book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,  tells us that the world is short about 163 million women, who apart from this “gendercide” would be with us today. As a keen social observer, Hvistendahl understands the line between lopsided demographics and violent, dangerous societies.

Demi Moore is on board this same issue, crusading against the sex trafficking of Nepalese women into India, which has had its own version of selective abortion. Abortion, once it was made common and actually promoted by governments, led inadvertently to varieties of population control that have resulted in societies that must resort to human trafficking to balance the gender scales.

Yet abortion, in the guise of “choice,” is a holy object among liberals, and the very progressives who deplore human trafficking are staunchest in their defense of casual and volitional termination of pregnancy.

Is it too much to hope that liberals will ever own up to the baleful consequences of so many of their cherished ideals?  It probably is, though from time to time a liberal here or there comes around. This usually takes the form of a conversion, as in the recent case of playwright David Mamet. But for the most part, the psychological defenses are too strong, and the liberal never leaves the precincts of his or her sentiments and intentions to actually examine, empirically, the end product of it all.

We do indeed bear the Left Man’s Burden.  

Summary: American higher education, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is sick, but is not yet aware of it. This is not only a matter of faculty bias, as is commonly supposed, but results from bloated and increasingly politicized administrations. The University of Minnesota provides a case study of the extent to which public university administrations, in conjunction with tenured faculty, have become therapeutic agencies in the transmission of a particular worldview. Students and aspiring faculty, especially conservative aspirants, have been the losers. 

Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal had a front page article by Douglas Belkin and Scott Thurm on the growth of bureaucracy at the University of Minnesota. Heads should roll in Minneapolis, but probably won’t. The article illustrates what many of us have long been thinking: That one of the defining battles of these times is an administrative state pitted against a republic of ordered liberties. Behind all the rhetoric and political posturing, this is the struggle being acted out in Washington between Republicans and Democrats over issues of taxes, spending, fiscal cliffs, debt ceilings, regulations, and curtailment of basic rights. 

In the world of higher education this same struggle, though writ a bit smaller, has already been waged and is a thing of the past. There, the bureaucratic state has won. The story of the University of Minnesota and many other public and private institutions tells what happens when unelected and unaccountable elites take over society’s institutions and organs of power. This story has much to say of trends in our times far beyond the ivy-covered walls of academia.

1. 

Let’s look at higher education. What is happening there is instructive, but only if we get a few things clearly defined. 

Belkin & Thrum paint a picture of a bureaucracy rapidly increasing out of proportion to the general growth of other university populations. “ Between 2001 and last spring, the University of Minnesota “added more than 1,000 administrators… Their ranks grew 37%, more than twice as fast as the teaching corps and nearly twice as fast as the student body.” This, the authors write, is typical of American higher education. And not all of these are secretaries and campus police officers. “Administrative employees make up an increasing share of the university’s higher paid people. The school employs 353 people earning more than $200,000 a year.” Among these, “81 today have administrative titles, versus 39 in 2001.”  

It gets worse. “In its Office of Equity and Diversity, the number of people with ‘director’ in their title grew to 10 in the 2011-2012 school year from just four directors five years earlier.” This 100-plus percent increase is not just an expansion; it’s an order of magnitude. 

Across higher education, Belkin & Thrum report, “employees hired by colleges and universities to manage or administer people, programs and regulations increased 50% faster than the number of instructors between 2001 and 2011.” And during that same period, tuition has doubled. At U of M, annual tuition is now $13,524, more than 50% higher than the average state university. Someone has to pay for all these bureaucrats.

2. 

Well, who are all these new people working in “higher education?” Benjamin Ginsberg, in his recent book The Fall of the Faculty, states that they comprise a vast layer of mid-level apparatchiks who scarcely know what a university does, or is supposed to do. He calls these swarms of bureaucrats “deanlets.”  Whereas in former generations deans were few in number and were usually former teachers and academics, they are now more likely to be technocrats with MBAs and degrees in cultural, gender and diversity studies. They head up programs and events, rather than departments. They initiate programs on “life skills”—eating properly, campus speech code expectations, freshman orientation activities and ceremonies, and the like. Many of them are in public relations and fund-raising. The University of Minnesota, according to Belkin & Thrum, employs 139 people just to market and promote various aspects of the university’s life.  

The modern university is a complex of professionals fine-tuning the private and public lives of thousands of students. But in no regard are students more regulated than in what are considered acceptable norms regarding sexuality, race and culture. Higher education, which once prided itself on its academic freedom, its protected environment of intellectual dissent and inquiry, now promulgates and enforces a permissive orthodoxy of thought and behavior. Speech codes in academia are far more repressive than they ever were in 1950s “Ozzie and Harriet” America. And in order for such repression to obtain, lots of overseers are necessary. 

Naturally, these ranks of bureaucrats wear innocuous, politically-correct titles. Once in a while, however, someone tallies it all up, and it’s ugly. As Heather MacDonald recently wrote in City Journal: “The University of California at San Diego… is creating a new full-time ‘vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.’ This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the assistant vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.”

3. 

Of course, anybody who has attended a public university, or even most private universities, knows that it is not only at the administrative level that a particular political and cultural orthodoxy is both made normative and closely supervised. The faculty of most schools is complicit in this as well. Indeed, the faculty is where young minds full of mush are often informed, or should we say conformed—to the reigning ethos of the progressive canon. Most higher education faculties are overwhelmingly liberal and Democrat. Oh sure, there are the exceptions (e.g., Mark Noll at Notre Dame, Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, and John Yoo at Berkeley), and this dictum applies more to humanities and social science faculties than to those who teach the so-called STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math). But even in the harder sciences, bias is not uncommon. Climate change, biology and even physics are prone to their own versions of  metaphysics. 

Tenure, which once protected teachers from punishment for holding views unpopular with the administration and surrounding community, has become a mechanism for the protection of groupthink. Tenure was always meant to be the achievement of a six-year probation period during which a prospective full or assistant professor proved his academic mettle. If he or she taught well, published significantly, and demonstrated collegiality through sitting on committees, then he or she might join the inner circle in spite of belief or opinion. 

Tenure operates quite differently now. Not only are far fewer teachers allowed anywhere near the inner circle, universities and colleges are doing much of their teaching through associate professors and adjunct teachers. These educators earn far less than their tenured counterparts, sometimes 75% less, and they can be hired and fired at will. The proliferation of doctoral level degrees in this country has ensured an unending supply of part-time, dispensable experts with advanced degrees who make far less money than a journeyman plumber or a scrub tech at the local hospital.

4. 

But tenure does more than insulate the overlords of the faculty from economic competition from similarly-credentialed upstarts. Tenure ensures ideological and moral homogeneity across the privileged caste of inner-circle professors. If faculty senates do not hesitate to make symbolic votes on political issues that have little to do with academia, they likewise show little reluctance in  protecting their turf from intellectual dissent. Although most academics take pride in their “independence,” it is amazing how most of them end up voting Democratic. 

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of the best-selling The Righteous Mind, conducted an experiment a few years ago. At an academic conference he asked for a show of hands from those who considered themselves conservative. Of the hundreds of participants, only three people raised their hands. Though there were likely a few more present, the fact that they did not self-identify as conservative says much in itself. Haidt pointed out the obvious but unacceptable when he told the audience: “Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation. But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”  

For those who aver that conservatives lack the intelligence of liberals and thus avoid careers in academic teaching, the truth might be quite different, and not nearly so self-serving. In a study for the Association for Psychological Sciences, two Dutch researchers came to the following conclusion: “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.”

5. 

What are we to make of these observations?

The administration and the faculty at modern universities thrive in a symbiotic relationship of self-reinforcing liberalism. The administration, through its diversity and multicultural programs and its technological guardianship, reduces students to a compliant population where strict social norms and lax personal habits coexist side by side. The faculty in turn provides a conceptual framework for this arrangement that rewards and punishes students according to adherence to the tenets of postmodern relativism. 

Public universities are full of pre-adults who often appear more like junior-high children than human agents in-the-making. Visit the Facebook page of almost any student you know who attends public university. Then read the study of American college-age youth conducted by sociologist Christian Smith, et al. titled Lost in Transition. Although college has always provided a kind of pretend environment that is neither adolescent nor adult, the infantilizing of America’s college cohort is more complete, and more general, these days. 

Students often emerge from these Orwellian Ministries of Truth less intellectually equipped than when they entered. Outfitted with their tattoos, their naïve radicalism, their abandoned faiths, their loosened morals and their lockstep liberalism, they try to enter a workplace where many of them can’t possibly fit in. Their trophy-kid mentality and  general sense of grievance put off prospective employers. The students decide at that point that it is the fault of the free-market economy. Many of them drop out of life, and go home for a few years, eventually taking entry-level jobs if they can find work at all. Still others join the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest their own unfungible academic degrees and large student loans. A majority of them vote for Barack Obama and Democrats, who promise to make some of their misery go away, or at least blame it on someone else. 

It occurs to very few of these young products of public universities that they were cheated by the very institutions to which they had entrusted the formative years of their intellectual lives. While universities gorged themselves on federal money for noble but ineffective programs in communal coexistence, their faculties were allowed to become closed systems of conventional dogma. All of this was done in the name of critical thinking and heightened consciousness. That con job is just one of the many paradoxes of the modern university. 

Underlying the crisis of the contemporary university is the peculiarly modern belief that students are not real people until they are instilled with the right information and attitudes. Gone is the classic view of education that considered the young to be in need of self-discipline leading to virtue. Virtue is now a social construct that consists of adhering to certain approved political and cultural doctrines. Tolerance is the summum bonum of this new ethos, having replaced the discrimination that was the key moral algorithm of previous generations. 

Is it any wonder that graduating from university these days, especially in the humanities and social sciences, means a student has acquired little more than (1) a catechism of progressive notions and a corresponding lexicon of selected moral outrage, or (2) a general sense of hopeless, amoral ennui?