By George Will
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Many undergraduates, their fawn-like eyes wide with
astonishment, are wondering: Why didn’t the dean of students prevent the
election from disrupting the serenity to which my school has taught me that I
am entitled? Campuses create “safe spaces” where students can shelter from
discombobulating thoughts and receive spiritual balm for the trauma of
microaggressions. Yet the presidential election came without trigger warnings?
The morning after the election, normal people rose — some
elated, some despondent — and went off to actual work. But at Yale, that
incubator of late-adolescent infants, a professor responded to “heartfelt
notes” from students “in shock” by making that day’s exam optional.
Academia should consider how it contributed to, and
reflects Americans’ judgments pertinent to, Donald Trump’s election. The compound
of childishness and condescension radiating from campuses is a constant
reminder to normal Americans of the decay of protected classes — in this case,
tenured faculty and cosseted students.
As “bias-response teams” fanned out across campuses, an
incident report was filed about a University of Northern Colorado student who
wrote “free speech matters” on one of 680 “#languagematters” posters that
cautioned against politically incorrect speech. Catholic DePaul University
denounced as “bigotry” a poster proclaiming “Unborn Lives Matter.” Bowdoin
College provided counseling to students traumatized by the cultural
appropriation committed by a sombrero-and-tequila party. Oberlin College
students said they were suffering breakdowns because schoolwork was interfering
with their political activism. Cal State University–Los Angeles established
“healing” spaces for students to cope with the pain caused by a political
speech delivered three months earlier.
Indiana University experienced social-media panic (“Please PLEASE PLEASE be
careful out there tonight”) because a priest in a white robe, with a rope-like
belt and rosary beads was identified as someone “in a KKK outfit holding a
whip.”
A doctoral dissertation at the University of California,
Santa Barbara uses “feminist methodologies” to understand how Girl Scout cookie
sales “reproduce hegemonic gender roles.” The journal GeoHumanities explores how pumpkins reveal “racial and class coding
of rural versus urban places.” Another journal’s article analyzes “the relationships
among gender, science and glaciers.” A Vassar lecture “theorizes oscillating
relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive and increasingly prehensive forms
of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine.”
Even professors’ books from serious publishers are
clotted with pretentious jargon. To pick just one from innumerable examples, a
recent history of the Spanish Civil War, published by the Oxford University
Press, says that Franco’s Spain was as “hierarchizing” as Hitler’s Germany,
that Catholicism “problematized” relations between Spain and the Third Reich,
and that liberalism and democracy are concepts that must be “interrogated.”
Only the highly educated write so badly. Indeed, the point of such ludicrous
prose is to signal membership in a closed clerisy that possesses a private
language.
An American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) study —
“No U.S. History? How College History Departments Leave the United States out
of the Major,” based on requirements and course offerings at 75 leading
colleges and universities — found that “the overwhelming majority of America’s
most prestigious institutions do not require even the students who major in
history to take a single course on United States history or government.” Often
“microhistories” are offered to history majors at schools that require these
majors to take no U.S. history course: “Modern Addiction: Cigarette Smoking in
the 20th Century” (Swarthmore College), “Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl” (Bowdoin
College), “Witchcraft and Possession” (University of Pennsylvania).
At some schools that require history majors to take at
least one U.S. history course, the requirement can be fulfilled with courses
like “Mad Men and Mad Women” (Middlebury College), “Hip-Hop, Politics and Youth
Culture in America” (University of Connecticut), and “Jews in American
Entertainment” (University of Texas). Constitutional history is an
afterthought.
Small wonder, then, that a recent ACTA-commissioned
survey found that less than half of college graduates knew that George
Washington was the commanding general at Yorktown; that nearly half did not
know that Theodore Roosevelt was important to the construction of the Panama
Canal; that more than one-third could not place the Civil War in a correct
20-year span or identify Franklin Roosevelt as the architect of the New Deal;
that 58 percent did not know that the Battle of the Bulge occurred in World War
II; and that nearly half did not know the lengths of the terms of U.S. senators
and representatives.
Institutions of supposedly higher education are awash
with hysteria, authoritarianism, obscurantism, philistinism, and charlatanry.
Which must have something to do with the tone and substance of the presidential
election, which took the nation’s temperature.
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