30 United States The Economist February 26th 2022
number of young people have about the in
tellectual orthodoxy of American colleges.
Few students are yet openly pushing back
as she did, but some educators are.
In recent years administrators at left
leaning colleges such as Haverford, Smith
and Yale have yielded tamely to student ac
tivism on everything from Halloween cos
tumes to “institutional racism”. Bryn Mawr
itself was hit by a student strike in Novem
ber 2020, when activists said the progres
sive campus was a hotbed of racism.
One mother’s anonymous account of
the college caving in, published in Quil-
lette, an online magazine, concluded that
this taught students that “might makes
right, that discussion and debate are for
racists”, and that administrators “will sell
them out...all the while publicly thanking
the socialjustice shakedown artists who
engineered their own humiliation, thus
incentivising more tantrums in the fu
ture”. The parent’s child also transferred
out. Watching the final townhall meeting
in which the college capitulated to all the
activists’ demands, the mother says, “I felt
like I was watching the end of liberal edu
cation.” The college declined to comment. The marketplace of ideas
The right has plenty of illiberalism, too, as
shown by Republican state legislatures
banning topics such as “critical race theo
ry” in schools. But Niall Ferguson, a histo
rian at Stanford University, says it is not
just conservative students and faculty who
are sick of what he calls “totalitarianism
lite” on campus. “Any student of the totali
tarian regimes of the mid20th century re
cognises all this with astonishment,” he
writes. “It turns out that it can happen in a
free society, too, if institutions and indi
viduals who claim to be liberal choose to
behave in an entirely illiberal fashion.”
A report in January by the Legatum In
stitute, a thinktank in London, found that
half of academics in elite American univer
sities feel the need to selfcensor (com
pared with 35% in Britain, 39% in Australia
and 44% in Canada). A study by the Amer
ican Council of Trustees and Alumni found
that, from 2010 to 2018, spending on stu
dent services and administration rose fast
er than spending on actual instruction.
A report in 2021 by James Paul of the
University of Arkansas and Jay Greene of
the Heritage Foundation found that based
on American universities they sampled,
the average one has more than 45 people
working in offices devoted to diversity,
equity and inclusion (dei). There were of
ten more people working in deithan there
were history professors.
The pushback is modest but, broadly,
there are three models offering an alterna
tive. One is religious colleges such as Hills
dale. Plenty of these—such as staunchly
evangelical ones—are unlikely to appeal todisgruntled centrists. But others, includ
ing some Catholic colleges, may be attrac
tive, partly because they prize the Western
philosophical and literary canon, which is
compulsory for two years at places like
Hillsdale. “The people who still believe in
truth are often people who come out of
faith traditions, who believe that there is a
truth,” says Bruce Gilley of Portland State
University. The Association of Catholic
Colleges and Universities has not seen an
increase in enrolment overall, but some
small colleges say they are having a boom.
Thomas Aquinas College near Los Angeles
recently opened a second campus in liberal
Massachusetts. Applications to Hillsdale
have nearly doubled since 2015.
A second strand is trying to reform the
academy from within. Leading the way is
the Heterodox Academy (hxa) in New
York. Founded in 2015, it uses workshops
and conferences to connect and equip aca
demics to promote “open inquiry, view
point diversity and constructive disagree
ment” on their campuses. Some 5,500 have
joined so far globally, with publication of
your name a requirement of membership.
hxa’s new leader, John Tomasi, gave up a
chair at Brown University to take the job.
“No organisation in the history of
American academic life...is doing more to
promote the basic freedoms and viewpoint
diversity we urgently need in our colleges
and universities today,” writes Robert
George, a conservative law professor at
Princeton University. He serves on the ad
visory council, alongside progressive aca
demics such as Cornel West. “Great minds
don’t always think alike,” says the website.
The pursuers of the third approach be
lieve the academy cannot be saved, so they
must build anew. In November, Mr Fergu
son and other academics announced the
foundation of a new college, the University
of Austin, to be set up in the Texan capital.They say uatx, as it will be known, will re
sist the identity politics that they believe
has captured mainstream academia. It will
be committed to the pursuit of truth, free
dom of inquiry and conscience, they say,
and be “fiercely independent”.
Advisers include Glenn Loury, Harvard
University’s first tenured black economics
professor, who is now at Brown University,
and Jonathan Haidt of New York Universi
ty. Kathleen Stock, recently hounded out of
the University of Sussex in Britain, is to be
a visiting fellow. It has raised $90m to
wards a goal of $250m, says its president,
Pano Kanelos. uatxis still little more than
an idea and a website, but in its first week it
received 7,000 emails from wouldbe stu
dents, and 3,000 from academics asking
about jobs, says Mr Ferguson.
It has had 11,000 enquiries for the 80
places on its Forbidden Courses pro
gramme this summer. A graduate pro
gramme in entrepreneurship will follow in
the autumn. Undergraduates are to be ac
cepted in 2024. But it has already run into
problems. Several academic advisers, such
as Steven Pinker of Harvard and Robert
Zimmer of the University of Chicago, have
resigned. Other academics are sceptical,
too. In the New Republic, Aaron Hanlon of
Colby College called its backers “a who’s
who of the Intellectual DarkcumSubstack
Web”. “It’s a solution to a problem that
doesn’t exist,” says Mr Colby, who suspects
it will be filled with conservative students.
“It will just be another version of what they
say we are not supposed to have.”Left, right and centre
Others are trying, too. Ralston College, a
startup in Savannah, Georgia, is preparing
to accept its first graduate students in the
autumn. Its website calls the reform of
higher education from within “a losing
battle”. It has raised more than $30m. Jor
dan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist, has
been mooted as chancellor. Arif Ahmed, a
Cambridge philosopher who has cam
paigned for academic freedom, will teach a
class. Ralston already has the authority to
award degrees (which uatxdoes not yet).
All of this remains small beer. And most
students are still likely to aspire to estab
lished colleges, even if these do lean fur
ther left than some would like. But the
leaders of the scrappy startups, and the
handful of dissident students, are issuing
important warnings. “We can’t take for
granted that our fundamental freedoms, of
speech, conscience and association, will
still be there 20 years from now,” says Ral
ston’s president, Stephen Blackwood.
Western liberalism is being deconstructed
before our eyes, he says. “The ideological
presumptions and weaponised activism
that universities now teach area closing of
our horizons. The work of ourtime is to
Hillsdale keeps faith with the canon open those horizons up again.”n