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CHAPTER 3
POLITICAL COOTIES: ALAN KORS WAS RIGHT
FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors could be intimidating. He is, as he was then, one of the leading scholars of the Enlightenment and Voltaire, and a public speaker with the unnerving ability to make the person following him reconsider every life choice that had led them to the podium. I frequently had the terrifying privilege of being that next guy. You can still find his old Teaching Company lectures on Pascal and the Enlightenment and hear what I mean.
He and Harvey Silverglate (FIRE’s other co-founder) met each other as freshmen in Princeton’s class of 1964. As two Jewish North Jersey public-school kids on scholarships, they became roommates and fast friends. A photo of the pair hangs in FIRE’s DC office from those years, with Alan holding a pipe as if auditioning for his future role as a Penn professor. While there, he would serve as the adviser to Eden Jacobowitz, a student who had been accused of racism for calling black sorority students “water buffalo” for making noise outside his dorm window. (The Israel-born Jacobowitz was trying to translate behema, a Hebrew word that could mean “water buffalo” or “a rude person.”)
The school rationalized that “water buffalo” was an anti-black insult because, it said, water buffalos are large African animals. That would’ve been a surprise to the water buffalo, which are native to South and Southeast Asia. (There’s no zoology major at Penn.)
Jacobowitz’s tribunal became a circus and Alan called his old roommate Harvey, who had become a lawyer, to consult. The story is best told in the book that the pair wrote about the case which came out in 1998, The Shadow University, which explains how the poor due process provided to Jacobowitz compounded the sanction of his speech. A year after the book, the pair would establish the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, with a mission to defend free speech and due process on campus.
I met Alan and Harvey when I came to FIRE in 2001. Harvey was the more left-leaning half of the pair: a criminal-defense lawyer, ACLU stalwart, friend of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, and much more naturally my political type. Alan was tougher for me. He was somewhat more conservative, which mattered to me more than I would like to admit.
I had picked up a bad intellectual habit in college and law school that deserves the very serious name Political Cooties. It works like this: First determine whether the person making an argument belongs to the wrong political tribe. If so, you can safely discount the argument. It is epistemology modeled on a childhood game so stupid that my kids were already rolling their eyes about it at four. (It also resembles the outer rings of the Perfect and Efficient Rhetorical Fortresses described in The Canceling of the American Mind, by Rikki Schlott and me.)
I discounted Alan to a degree because he seemed too cynical about higher education, and because Political Cooties had already made the judgment easier than answering him.
Unfortunately for me (and for the state of higher education), he kept being right.
The funny thing is that none of us who went through college and law school in the 1990s thought campus politicization was imaginary. We saw it with our own eyes. The difference is that we mostly thought it was silly rather than pernicious: ridiculous jargon, ideological posturing, and a great deal of upper-class nonsense from people who did not realize they were “the elite” because they didn’t have a lake house yet. The contemporary descriptor for this was “political correctness,” and the term became pejorative almost as soon as it arrived. Even in print, seeing the phrase evokes a vision of eye-rolling in the way phrases like “chef’s kiss” or “air quotes” compel you to picture the gesture itself. How could this be a problem when it’s already a punchline?
Alan’s deepest fear went well beyond speech codes. He thought we’d made an enormous mistake by allowing universities to give up on the search for truth and turn whole departments into political projects complete with approved questions, approved answers, and an incentive to hire more people who would keep approving them. In a wonderful 2008 essay, Alan remembered the Princeton education that had made him fall in love with universities. Most of his professors were probably on the left, he said, but you couldn’t have guessed it from their classes. One professor assigned Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom for a final exam precisely because he disagreed with it. The assignment wasn’t to destroy Hayek. It was to reconstruct his argument with “intellectual empathy” and show that you actually understood it. That encounter helped change Alan’s life. “I don’t want disciples of my worldview,” he wrote. What a terrific goal for a university.
In their book, The Shadow University, Alan and Harvey wrote that “whole departments of the liberal arts” had been turned over to people who regarded universities as “the revolutionary agency of our culture.” Of course scholars should study race, gender, class, colonialism, injustice, and any other subject that matters. They should be free to conclude that existing institutions are profoundly unjust and ought to change. But if a department is built around advancing a political cause, what happens when the evidence points the other way? What happens to the junior scholar who suspects that the movement’s founding assumptions are wrong? Can an academic department tell the political movement that helped create it that the movement is mistaken? If the answer is no, I don’t see how the department can do its central job of discovering what is true. Alan feared that this was what significant parts of the university were becoming.
The point is, I knew it was happening. What I failed to understand was how thoroughly it could reshape the institutions themselves, drawing them away from the search for truth and toward what I think of as “all politics, all the time” — the larger transformation Neil Gross traces in his new book, What Happened to College?
Alan traced much of this phenomenon back to the campus upheavals of the 1960s, which look considerably less romantic if you focus on what actually happened at universities rather than the Hollywood version. He thought the largely liberal professoriate had welcomed a new generation of political radicals into the academy because they believed in intellectual openness and wanted more points of view represented. The problem was that many of the newcomers had no intention of returning the favor. They weren’t there to join the search for truth. They wanted to win, transform the university, and hire more people who shared their political commitments. The older professors thought they were making room for new ideas. The radicals wanted to make the university an instrument of their revolution. And once they had power, the enthusiasm for free speech that had helped get them there began to disappear.
A 1970 presidential commission studying campus violence explains the connection plainly: “Increasingly, the stated purpose of radical demands was the transformation of the university into a political weapon — their own weapon — for putting an end to the war, racism, and the political system they considered responsible for both.”
What Alan saw much earlier than I did were the institutional consequences. He told me that despite the repeated defeats of campus speech codes in court — Michigan in 1989, Wisconsin in 1991, Stanford in 1995 — there were more speech codes than ever. That sounded impossible. The courts had been batting them down for years. But Alan was right. When the courts struck down the codes, the rules migrated, taking on new names and hiding under new numbers.
He also warned that universities would use the growing student-life bureaucracy for ideological “thought reform.” In a 2000 article in Reason, Alan told story after story of student orientations that demanded students accept a dictated set of beliefs, rather than teaching them to think for themselves and reach their own conclusions. Much like Maoism’s thought reform or Leninism’s false consciousness, disagreement with the dictated ideology — for example, that white students bear collective guilt for their unearned privilege — is evidence that the student needs more education. “Political correctness is not the end of human liberty, because political correctness does not have power commensurate with its aspirations,” Alan wrote. “It is essential, however, to understand those totalizing ambitions for what they are.”
That sounded overheated to me until the events at the University of Delaware in 2007. Roughly 7,000 students in the residence halls were subjected to a program with required “competencies” on race, sexuality, politics, sustainability, and moral philosophy. Internal documents called its lesson plans “treatments” and defined learning partly as attitudinal or behavioral change. FIRE posted roughly 500 pages of Delaware’s own materials on its website. The university president killed the program within days.
Alan’s darkest prediction was that every few years a campus crisis — sometimes about a real injustice, sometimes about something wildly exaggerated — would somehow end with more money and power flowing to the most politicized parts of the university: more “studies” departments, more offices, more administrators, more programs, more training, more permanent machinery, and more PhDs in “media studies” (something I’ll come back to). The pattern had roots in the campus activism of the 1960s, which had led to the creation of departments that were openly conceived as part of a political movement, not simply as new subjects to be studied.
For example, in April 1969, the Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education produced El Plan de Santa Bárbara, which proposed Chicano studies departments as steps toward Chicano liberation. It declares that colleges “must be a major instrument in the liberation of the Chicano community.” In 1969, weeks after the Third World Liberation Front’s strike at San Francisco State, a reference to liberation didn’t sound nearly as abstract as it does today. A month earlier at the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, it had been defined as Chicano nationalism and self-determination, and ultimately, the reclamation of Aztlán, the mythological Aztec homeland the movement identified as being somewhere in the American Southwest.
The liberation was not merely rhetorical. A 1969 report prepared for a presidential commission studying the violence at San Francisco State documented confrontations with police, arson, and even bombings during the Third World Liberation Front strike. In one incident, Black Student Union member Timothy Peebles was injured when the bomb he was planting detonated early. Bombings at Pomona and Berkeley were never attributed to a specific movement, though both campuses had active groups demanding curricular changes. At Cornell, students demanding changes to the Black Studies program engaged in the armed occupation of a building. At Harvard, students occupying an administration building demanded, simultaneously, the abolition of ROTC and the creation of a Black Studies program.
Manifestos make awfully strange foundations for the uncompromising search for truth. And the machinery born of these political victories almost never went away.
Still, that was a long time ago. That’s why I thought Alan was almost comically cynical, even though every few years I caught little inklings of what he was talking about.
Then came the fall of 2015.
