MCCORDICK: bow to the “illiberal” windmills

Exposing the so-called elite college leftism has been a standard right-wing fare for decades – William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” in 1951 pioneered the genre. By now we’ve all come across one version of the argument: elite universities like Yale are strongholds of a leftist and “illiberal” ferment, teeming with adherents brainwashed by their professors. radical and determined to destroy the foundations of American society. In recent years, however, criticizing left-wing orthodoxy on college campuses has become fashionable among self-proclaimed “liberals”, especially Harper’s letter variety. At a time of sustained right-wing assaults on the academy – de legislative attacks on university programs To teacher watch lists to the longer-term financing of higher education – the liberal hand writhing on the supposed radicalism of the students gives the conservatives a convenient bipartite alibi. But these arguments are not only dangerous. They are wrong.

Take, for example, the Economist magazine, which devoted its September 4 cover story and its “Briefing” section to what it calls “the threat of the illiberal left”. One article in particular focuses on schools like Yale, its title asked as a question: “How did the American ‘revival’ get from elite schools to everyday life? “

The argument – as it stands – is puzzling. According to Economist, a “vague set of once radical ideas about identity, social justice and self-expression” were “incubated for years in the humanities departments of (especially elite) universities” before that they, like viruses, do not spread on their ivy. garland the walls and infect the rest of the country. When exactly the overflow occurred, or why it occurred when it did occur, is left to the imagination. To reach such a radical conclusion, the article evokes a bizarre, quasi-conspiratorial chemistry: add a dash of helicopter parenting here, a dollop of Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Freire there, top it off with a sprinkle of limber college administrators and a dose of caffeine frenzy on social networks and – hop! – you get a recipe for everything from innocuous corporate DEI trainings to calls for open borders. For a publication so enamored of “reason” and “objectivity”, The Economist of course, indulges its share of the occult.

Of course, the Yale student body is not a political monolith. Yale undoubtedly plays host to a strong tradition of organizing students on the left, though right-wing hysterics vastly overestimate its size and influence over the university. There is also a sizable mass of conservative college students, which organizations, like the Buckley Program, boast of from afar. deeper pockets than any left equivalent. But the dominant political orientation at Yale is neither “left” nor “right” per se.

On the contrary, the political zeitgeist at Yale is no different from the common sense that has permeated elite American institutions over the past decades. This ideology is perhaps best captured by what critical theorist Nancy Fraser calls “Progressive neoliberalism”. A “real and powerful alliance of two unlikely bedfellows”, “progressive neoliberalism” refers to the union of progressive forces – the dominant movements for feminism, anti-racism and multiculturalism – with the forces of cognitive capitalism ( Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood). Think: Goldman Sachs diversity initiatives Where Nancy Pelosi donning kente cloth.

It should come as no surprise that this political sensibility flourishes in an elite school like Yale. Yale accepts more students from richest 1% vs. bottom 60% of income distribution, and the behemoths of finance, consulting and big tech include nine of the ten best employers of its graduates (with Yale itself the only outlier). If the biting writers of The Economist really want to see where the real socializing goes at Yale, they might consider attending a packed economics conference, or better yet, an investment banking recruiting event at The Study.

But The Economist’s argument suffers from a deeper misunderstanding. By treating students’ political preferences as an indicator of the content of an entire institution, they obscure how increasingly right-wing structures are in contemporary universities – especially elite ones like Yale.

Like historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique Noted Last spring, the 21st century university governance model gave tremendous power to boards of directors, which at Yale – like most schools – are a who’s who of corporate executives, lawyers of business and financial. What this practically means is that Yale is now governed less like a school and more like a corporation. Any institution that deploys a sprawling and irresponsible private police force through an entire city, which swallows up the earth while dodge taxes, who is known for anti-union even among the Ivy League and who employs more than half of its faculty on short-term and precarious contracts, can hardly be called “leftist” even in the most superficial sense.

The old view that Yale is a hedge fund to which a school is attached is in fact only a half-truth – like cultural critic Davarian Baldwin argues, it’s more like a full-fledged corporate town, with Harkness Tower a 21st century fireplace.

A sign of the intellectual laziness of the anti-awakening crowd is their tendency to delve deep into the past for questionable historical analogies that purport to explain our present moment. The Economist says that “left activists” in universities are reviving the “denominational” practices of the Catholic Inquisition. Yale professor and reprimanded by the culture cancellation, Nicholas Christakis, went even further in a recent tweet, saying that students are part of the resurgence of a “ancient culture of denunciation”(What an ancient culture it is, I would like to know).

To understand the politics of elite universities, we must instead take a close look at the transformations of the last half century of American life: the rise of win-win policy and the ideology of meritocratic individualism, the persistent diversion of substantial demands of racial justice towards cosmetic and superficial solutions, the erosion of democracy, the corporatization of the university and many other things. Liberals who turn to “illiberal” windmills are missing the forest for the trees.