Liberty on Campus, and in America

0:00Now, the good news is that the just plain silliness of all this stuff is becoming increasingly apparent to decision makers outside the university. And as a result of which, students, parents, state legislatures, charitable foundations and other traditional supporters of American universities are beginning to withdraw their support. Partly, as a result of that, the traditional university may become increasingly irrelevant in society. I'll come back to that in a minute. First, let me give you a little bit more detail on the bad news side of my story. As I'm sure you all know, every major university, large or small, in the United States, has departments of women's studies and African-American studies and gender studies and who knows what else.

0:50The kind of wackiness that one associates with a place like Berkeley, or Madison, Wisconsin, exists on every single campus. This is true even in my own adopted hometown of Athens, Georgia. Athens is presumably a sleepy little college town in the deep south, but it's becoming more and more odd. Just this past Tuesday of this week, the mayor of Athens, the deliciously named Gwen O'Looney, Mayor Aluni officially designated Athens a nuclear-free zone. Having lived for several years in Berkeley, also a nuclear-free zone, I can assure you that knowing that there will not be any radioactive materials in town does not make for a more peaceful night's sleep.

1:38The University of Georgia itself is quite liberal as well. The current president of UGA, Charles Knapp, is leaving at the end of this year, he announced, to become president of the left-wing Aspen Institute in Washington D.C. The Aspen Institute, if you don't know much about it, according to their mission statement, the mission is, quote, to enhance the quality of leadership through informed dialogue, close quote. Now that sounds innocuous enough until you notice that the dialogue consists of such programs as the Justice and Society Seminars. Those are designed to examine and explore, quote, the parameters of civil disobedience, white collar crime and criminal punishment, and the breakdown of long established hierarchies of race and gender. The Aspen Institute's board includes such prominent members of the elite as David Gergen, William Gray, Ann Richards, Al Shanker and Paul Volcker.

2:35Now, Knapp, himself an economist by the way, has very solid liberal credentials. He was was an official in the Labor Department in the Carter administration. He has brought a series of distinguished lecturers to campus as part of a series that we have called the Charter Lectures. The most recent charter lecturer was that prominent intellectual Tony Kushner, a great scholar who is the playwright, author of Angels in America, a series of Pulitzer or prize-winning plays about living with AIDS. Knapp has increased the hiring of women and minorities on campus and so on, the standard things. Now he says that he's leaving the university simply because he's been there for 10 years and it's time to move on and do something else.

3:21But I suspect that the university administration won't be all that sorry to see him go. And that's because Knapp has one major disability, I should say. He's a middle-aged white male. Now how do I know this? Well, in all likelihood his successor as president will not be a middle-aged white male. The chancellor of the University of Georgia System, a man named Stephen Porch, was recently interviewed about the formation of a search committee to locate a new president. And Porch encouraged the search committee to seek, quote, interesting-looking and, quote, not traditional presidential candidates. The search committee should not court look-alike finalists, the court said.

4:08Not only will you be bored to tears, you won't be able to tell one from the other. Give yourself some options. Now, that's a sensible criterion for choosing presidential candidates, right? You want to make sure they don't all look the same, because you might get bored. Like every other university, we have the usual kind of PC silliness. For example, at random, I was looking through some university materials. I came across the winter quarter program for our on-campus counseling and testing center. Let me tell you the workshops that they're offering this quarter. And I'm reading you the complete list. This is not an edited, this is not excerpts. Quote, beyond tolerance, being lesbian, gay or bisexual, person to person, how your unconscious influences your choice of partners, relationships 101, Women in Transition, a Wellness Group, Can't We Just Get Along, and Gaining Self-Confidence Now I can assure you that we'll have the most self-actualized students at any university, if not the most educated.

5:09Now in my own discipline, economics, things aren't quite so bad. I've not been asked, for example, to learn and teach Ebonomics as an alternative to standard economics. As Lew mentioned last night, economists tend to be more sympathetic to the market than they were a generation or two ago. Most economists will not go on the record of supporting price controls and fine-tuning of the economy and so on. However, note that the dominant position among economists is that markets are pretty good in moderation. You don't want to have too much of a market. Capitalism is indeed preferred to socialism, but only if there's This is a strong central government performing certain essential functions, maintaining activist fiscal and monetary policies, vigorously enforcing anti-trust laws, making large investments, i.e. government spending, in R&D and education and these sorts of things.

6:07Just to give you a quick example, Lew mentioned Alan Blinder last night, I came across a quote from Janet Yellen who was a former Berkeley professor and a member of the Board of Governors I recognize the difficulty of conducting monetary policy over time in a way that will damp business cycles, but I do not concede that uncertainties of economic forecasts and long and variable policy lags inevitably doom our best efforts.

6:49The record to me indicates that within limits, tuning works, even if it's not fine. So even if we can't fine tune the economy, we can still tune it just a bit. And of course, as Lew also mentioned, there are many positive signs in economics, most importantly, the growth of Austrian economics in the profession. There's increasing interest in the Austrian school, Austrian economics is becoming more and more respectable within the mainstream. and the mainstream. Now there are a few exceptions to that, even within the Austrian School, and I can't help mentioning this one. At the most recent American Economic Association meetings, I was a discussant on a panel where one of the speakers proceeded to present a postmodern theory of the firm.

7:36Now I won't name the speaker, as Murray used to say, to protect the guilty, but I will We'll say that he's associated with a certain group of ex-Austrians at a certain university in Virginia. He argued that the stream of research on the size of the firm is all completely illegitimate. And the reason is because the boundaries of the firm don't exist at all. They're merely social constructs. Boundaries of the firm, that's a social construction, so there's no sense in trying to study it. that exists subjectively in the minds of various interpreters with their own hermeneutical understandings of what's going on. Now, as he said this, I wondered what he would say if the payroll department at his own university had a hermeneutical understanding of the boundaries of that institution such that he wasn't in it. I wondered how he would react to that.

8:36Of course, in general, on college campuses, particularly in the humanities, as I mentioned, Things are very bad. Things are very bad. A couple of examples. There's an academic journal called The Review of Higher Education, which is about trends on universities. It's a very well-respected academic journal. The lead article on the current issue by one Roger P. Morad is titled Postmodern Interdisciplinarity. I had to practice that word a few times last Postmodern Interdisciplinarity Let me just read you the abstract of the article. I won't subject you to any more. Quote, In many fields, postmodern forms of thought have recently emerged, posing fundamental challenges to modern assumptions concerning knowledge.

9:23This article explores the implications of four postmodern philosophical positions on knowledge to show how they reject absolute foundations and seek to expand the possibilities for scholarly practice. It further argues that an absolute foundation pervades higher education, and that it unjustifiably constrains the capacity of the intellect. This absolute foundation is the notion that legitimate intellectual activity is the disciplinary pursuit of knowledge of entities that exist before and independent of inquiry. A postmodern conception of higher education that would Expand the Playing Field for Inquiry is advanced in the article based on the flexible concept of intellectually compelling ideas.

10:11When you read between the lines here, it's clear that what most thinkers who call themselves postmodern means is that there are no absolute foundations to any intellectual activity. In other words, anything goes. If you think that was odd, let me assure you that that was only mildly odd. I was recently looking at a brochure. The Young Americas Foundation puts out a humorous pamphlet every year with lists of college course titles and descriptions pulled right out of university catalogs word for word. Let me read you from a sample of this collection and tell you some of the courses that are being offered nowadays. At Harvard this year, you can take such courses as Comparative Literature 108, Fetishism, Fine Arts 277, Queer Theory and Visuality, and Literature 124, Ecopolitics, the Environment in Post-Structuralist Thought. Stanford offers one of my favorites, History 212, Homosexuals, Heretics, Witches and Werewolves, Deviance in Medieval Society. Interestingly, Amherst The course offers a course, Political Science 61, called, Taking Mark Seriously.

11:27That sounds a little bit on the defensive, doesn't it? Now if you're fortunate enough to be a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, you can sign up for Religion 343, Feminist Critique and Reconstruction of the Christian Tradition. Let me read you the course description, quote, an exploration into some significant contributions of feminist thinkers challenging traditional paradigms in Christian thought. This seminar will examine a range of feminist positions from those who see Christianity and feminism as mutually antagonistic worldviews to those who see feminism as vital therapy for Christianity. Issues to be discussed will include patriarchy in the Bible, gender and language about God, women's experience as a source for doing theology, and the impact of racial and ethnic pluralism on constructive feminist Christian thought.

12:19Not being widely read in constructive feminist Christian thought, I can't tell you exactly what that would be. I'm sure it will be good. Now for you men in the audience, just so you don't think you're being left out, Brown has a course called Modern Culture and Media 163C, Iron Johns. That's the course title, Iron Johns. Quote, an exploration of recent and contemporary theories and debates about the nature of masculinity, Its relationship to power, pain, and violence, as well as to reformist conceptualizations of the dilemmas of maleness, patriarchal, and male-dominated cultures. The course attempts to conceptualize the relationship of masculinity to notions of health and deviance which have been normalized in the medical model of Western culture, especially with regard to the practices of medical psychiatry and alternative psychodramatic practices.

13:13Texts from both print and visual media. Moms, dads, grandmas, grandpas, this is what your kids are taking in college. One of my favorites is a course at the University of Colorado called Mathematics 2380-3, Mathematics for the Environment. Quote, an interdisciplinary course where analysis of real phenomena such as acid rain, population growth and roadkill rabbits in Nevada leads to consideration of certain concepts in mathematics. As Professor Hoppe can elaborate on the roadkill rabbits in Nevada, of course, I could go on for hours reading these, and there are plenty more, and you'd get a kick out of it, of course, it's so funny that it's really quite sad, and it has major consequences, serious consequences.

14:05The basic consequence of this type of study is that it ultimately leads to the loss of the foundations for Western society, the loss of the foundations for liberty. Mises has a wonderful article published in 1950 called The Idea of Liberty is Western, and it appears in the collection Money Method and the Market Process, which I think I saw back at the book table. and Mises argues there that the unique source of the concept of liberty and the concept of the limited state is in what we generally call the Western or the Judeo-Christian tradition, tradition based on Hebrew, Greek and Roman civilization. Mises notes that even tyrants are aware of the importance of this foundation and they work to stamp it out. Mises discusses how even in In Bismarck's day in Germany, their efforts were already underway to eliminate the study of the classics from German secondary schools. Mises says, quote, the passionate endeavors to eliminate the classical studies from the curriculum of the liberal education, and thus

15:06virtually to destroy its very character, were one of the major manifestations of the revival of the survival ideology in Germany. And of course, things are much worse than that today. As Keynes so famously put it, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Now today, it's not the ideas of economists and political philosophers we need to be as worried about. It's the ideas of literary theorists, critical legal scholars, New Age philosophers, and their ilk. Now what happens is the ideas of these new age philosophers make their way into the general curriculum, giving us courses like the ones I alluded to.

15:54These courses make their way down to the education schools where future teachers are trained, and thus these ideas make it down all the way to secondary schools so children can be brainwashed at an early age. Just to give you one particular manifestation, it's increasingly true on university campuses, and this applies to religious schools as well as secular universities, that orthodox theism, whether Jewish or Christian, is increasingly considered an illegitimate worldview for an intellectual to take, to have. The only acceptable worldviews are either pure philosophical naturalism or a kind of primitive pantheism of the kind that Carl Sagan talks about when he makes his metaphysical ramblings about the cosmos and our place in the cosmos.

16:45There's a practical manifestation of this new age pantheism and that's of course the modern environmental movement. God and the forest are one, therefore you wouldn't want to cut out a part of God by cutting down a tree. So these things have very real practical significance. Now, I promised that I wouldn't dwell only on the bad news, but would also tell you some good news, and I'd like to do that. There are, I think, at least two silver linings to this dark cloud of preposterousness. The first silver lining is that these currently fashionable approaches I've outlined are so ridiculous that people outside the academy are beginning to notice. The second silver lining, which I'll come to in just a moment, is that the modern university itself is beginning to lose some of its influence and importance.

17:37Now what about this increasingly apparent silliness? Well, you all know about political correctness and how PC has become the butt of jokes in much of popular culture lately at talk shows. Everyone has their own favorite list of ridiculous politically correct terms. Of course I've No sir, those hooligans who vandalized your store were not looters, those were non-traditional shoppers. Yes, back in the 70s I used to have a pet rock, but now I have a companion mineral. Now, it's okay for me to make fun of these because I have my own special characteristic.

18:27I'm tolerance-challenged. Now in academic circles, we're even beginning to see a few courageous individuals stating publicly that this is all a sham, that the emperor has no clothes. Consider the famous Alan Sokol incident from last summer. You may have read about this in the papers. Alan Sokol is a young physicist at New York University, and he wrote an article called, quote, transgressing the boundaries toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. And he submitted this article to a trendy left-wing journal called Social Text.

19:13In this article, Sokol argues for a connection between quantum physics and radical politics. He calls for, quote, a liberatory postmodern science, quote. And he argues that, quote, physical reality, no less than social reality, is at bottom a social and linguistic concept, close quote. Naturally, this article was snapped up and published in a special issue of social text. Now, the very same day that the article appeared, Sokol revealed that the whole thing had been and hoax. He had made it up. He had made the article up completely. He submitted it to this journal Social Text, he said, to see whether, quote, a leading North American journal of cultural studies would publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if, A, it sounded good and, B, it flattered the editor's ideological preconceptions, which, of course, this article did.

20:03Now, the Marxist editors of the journal, along with their guru, the notorious Stanley Fish, who's Duke University Press publishes social text, reacted predictably, that they attacked Sokol viciously for academic dishonesty. Now, whatever you think of Sokol's motives, the plain and simple fact is that the editors of this journal could not distinguish this made up nonsense from the sort of nonsense that they normally publish. For example, appearing Something in the same issue of social text as Sokol's article was an article by a Harvard biologist Ruth Hubbard called Gender and Genitals, Constructs of Sex and Gender. In this article, Hubbard argues, quote, the time is right for physicians and scientists also to remove their binary spectacles and rather than explore what it means to be male or female, look into what it means to be neither or both, which is what most of us are.

21:04On the whole, this incident was a huge embarrassment for the academic left, a wonderful thing. Now my second silver lining is that the universities in general are beginning to lose a little bit of their relevance in society. Quite a number of commentators from various perspectives are arguing that the modern university is in a state of crisis. One thing is simply cost. A private university annual tuition fees room and board can cost up to $30,000. Public universities are facing increasing budget scrutiny. Cutbacks, downsizing and reorganization all loom on the horizon for major institutions. Now this wouldn't be so bad if it were perceived that the quality of the education were improving, but of course the reverse is true. Students are increasingly dissatisfied with large classes in different Poor instructors, poor facilities, poor safety on campus, and so on.

22:05Alumni loyalty is on the decline. Alumni giving is falling. Students increasingly transfer from one institution to the next. Now, of course, the university itself dates back to medieval times, but the modern university, this thing that we think of with a huge campus and complexes of buildings, classrooms, dorms, offices, and so on, is really only about 100 to 150 years old. But the simple fact is that these institutions, from the perspective of economic efficiency, are too large. They're just too big. They need to be scaled back. In all likeliness, the University of the future will be radically downsized and decentralized. Now already a lot of intellectual activity in the U.S. takes place not in universities but in private research organizations and think tanks, such as the Mises Institute.

22:57Top scholars have taken up positions at these kinds of institutions, where they're free from these large classes of indifferent students, the politicized curricula, the endless committee meetings, the mandatory sensitivity training seminars, and these sorts of things. I can tell you that both Jeff Herbner and myself spent the 1994-95 academic year as visiting scholars in residence at the Mises Institute in Auburn. The New York University psychologist Paul Vitz has written on these issues about the future of the university. As he puts it, quote, When universities fail to provide a decent environment for their original major functions, i.e. research and teaching, other institutions come along to replace them.

23:46The result is the development of a large intellectual community which no longer has any vested interest in the universities. At the same time, increasing numbers of students are uninterested in pursuing a higher education at one of these institutions. For example, the popularity of homeschooling is at an all-time high. Now think what kind of educational environment homeschooled kids are used to and expect. Act, personal attention, a serious curriculum, etc. They're certainly not going to find those things at most major universities. I believe that these students will begin and already are beginning to look for alternative models of higher education. They're going to specialize programs like the Mises University. They may be taking classes on video, classes To conclude, what should we do? What should our strategy be to deal with these problems?

24:54I suggest a two-pronged strategy. First, we have to continue to attack the academic left. Now, the easiest way to do this, of course, is merely to expose them. And I think that's the bottom line of the so-called incident. We have to encourage alumni, for example, to withhold their support as long as these kinds of shenanigans go on. Lew mentioned last night that a government that is laughed at cannot survive, and I think the same applies to an academic movement as well. Much like the Fed, these trendy, left-wing, postmodernist movements are surrounded with an aura of mystery that gives them a certain legitimacy and we've got to continue to expose them to show the sham that they really are.

25:43Second, we should work to continue to develop alternative educational institutions and private organizations much like the Mises Institute to support special educational programs like at Mises University, the Review of Austrian Economics, books, journals, programs to appeal to the current generation and future generations of students. By doing so, eventually, we can restore some rationality to higher education. Ultimately, we can reestablish the Western tradition as a central part of educational philosophy. Now, this is a long-term strategy, to be sure, but I think it's the only one that ultimately will restore our liberties. Thank you.