There's an idea afoot—I've seen it on Twitter but I assume it is common elsewhere as well—that blames the state of America on college professors. The specific claim is that our society is laboring under a number of dysfunctional principles—principles that are summarized as "woke" and that relate to such topics as sex, gender, race, and the correct uses of police authority. The suggestion is, further, that these principles have been smuggled into modern consciousness by college professors teaching "Critical Theory." While only a small percentage of students come anywhere near a class that might be flavored by even a hint of Critical Theory itself, the idea seems to be that it serves as some kind of leavening agent, so that a tiny bit can transform the whole of higher education.
However things may stand with Critical Theory narrowly-construed, it is undeniable that overall the attitudes on campus have changed in the last 75 years with respect to patriotism, government, and the American Founding, to say nothing of sex, gender, race, and the police. And so it is natural to wonder Why? What has caused this change?
The accusation from the modern Right appears to be that it all started with a cabal of radical professors (perhaps European émigrés fleeing World War Two) who hated and resented America's foundational principles and who therefore taught their students to do likewise. The students, in turn, were too simple and naïf to suspect their professors of perfidy, and therefore passively accepted the hatred of America that they were taught in class. And so, over the course of about a generation, everything that Americans used to believe about themselves was brought into disrepute. And here we are.
It's a clear picture, and it has the virtue of simplicity. But I don't think it's true. Of course something like it might have happened here or there once or twice in an incidental way, but I think it can't be the whole or main explanation.
In the first place, the explanation is too clear and simple: whenever you hear someone blame a broad social change on a handful of deliberate bad actors you should be suspicious, because bad actors rarely have that kind of power by themselves.
In the second place, it's nothing like what I remember. I went to college in the late 1970's and early 1980's, exactly the time period in which this project (if it ever existed) should have been getting well under way. The overall ethos of the college I attended was aggressively left-wing. And yet I would not say that any of my professors hated America.
It is true that there was a strain of the left-wing sentiment which bordered on disloyalty. And if you had asked me to explain it back then, I could only have pointed to isolated bits of the larger picture. Not many years before, Richard Nixon had left the White House in disgrace and everyone knew he been caught lying to the American public. His record destroyed the trust in our government that many Americans had felt beforehand. Inside the academic world, scholars like Charles A. Beard had argued years before that the Constitution was written to protect the property of rich men, an explanation which was rather different from what most of us had learned in high school. These bits and bobs contributed to an air that felt edgy and exciting; and, as I say, in extreme cases it may have bordered on disloyalty. But it wasn't that any of my professors ever hated America.
Young students want to make names for themselves. They desperately want and need to be brave. In the 1860's young men proved themselves by enlisting to fight in the Civil War; in the 1940's young men dropped out of school and enlisted to fight in World War Two. As long as our country faced foreign enemies that could credibly threaten us, young men (at any rate) proved their courage by joining the armed forces to fight in defense of our country.
But by the 1960's and 1970's, we had run out of such enemies. Notionally there was still a threat that we could be annihilated by nuclear war with the Soviet Union; but nobody lived their lives in that fear. We all figured that if it happened, it happened; but there was no room for courage when one was threatened by an atomic bomb. And other than the Soviet Union, our enemies were … who exactly? Vietnam? Grenada? It's true that we lost the Vietnam War in any meaningful sense, but nobody ever pretended that Vietnam could seriously threaten the United States. And Grenada? Oh please.
For all practical purposes, that left the ambitious young of this country only one meaningful enemy that they could feel brave by opposing: the United States itself. To the extent that we were seduced into disloyalty or something like it, it was because we wanted to be brave and daring; and our own government was the only available enemy strong enough that it required courage to oppose them. So my classmates opposed the government in order to show that they were brave and independent. My classmates opposed the government because only in such opposition could they display the martial courage that they needed so desperately to maintain their self-esteem.
Maybe in another country this would have worked out differently. But we are Americans. We are a country made by war, a country marked by violent self-assertion. We are happiest fighting the good fight against terrible odds. So when we won—when we ran out of credible enemies to fight—how could it have been any surprise when our best and most talented youth began fighting against our own institutions?
Who needs professors to teach us to hate America, when the students will pick up the fight on their own initiative?
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