The Review: Hysteria, contagion, and the vicious student-admin feedback loop

Why campus leaders are making noises about free speech now. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. Almost 30 years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote an essay in Harper’s with a title that could have been ripped from the headlines today: “[Demonizing the Academy]( The political situation Rorty describes will sound familiar. “Among the many convenient targets that Republican politicians and intellectuals have at their disposal,” he begins, “the one at which they direct their fire with perhaps the most delight is the academy.” Politicians like Newt Gingrich, Rorty says, have exploited fear of what was then called “multiculturalism” to convince the American public that the academy was “under the control of a ‘political correctness’ police.” Swap out “woke” for “political correctness” and “DEI” for “multiculturalism,” and you have a good chunk of contemporary Republican attitudinizing, pickled and preserved from the 1990s. Despite his conviction that this characterization of the academy was dishonest, Rorty himself describes what he sees as the excesses of the campus left in terms almost as harsh as the ones he uses to excoriate the Republicans. “There are more shallow-pated, resentful multiculturalists around than one might have thought”; some scholars “write in a barely intelligible jargon”; campus multiculturalism “has turned into an attempt to get jobs and grants for psychobabbling busybodies.” DeSantis might profit from Rorty’s superior command of invective. Rorty attempts to resolve his essay’s schizophrenia by insisting that, his derisive portrayal of the campus left notwithstanding, concerns about it are strategically exaggerated, indeed inflated beyond all measure. Perhaps 2 percent of faculty members, Rorty estimates, conform to the caricature pushed by conservative politicians as well as intellectuals like Allan Bloom. (Among humanists, Rorty allows, the share could be as high as 10 percent.) “The right has been astonishingly successful in impugning the integrity of the entire system of higher education by pointing to the frivolity and self-righteousness of this 2 percent.” Rorty died in 2007. His fellow left-liberal Todd Gitlin, who died last year and who shared Rorty’s bleak assessment of Bloom and company back in the ’90s, lived long enough to decide, in a qualified way, that Bloom had gotten some things right: “Bloom’s exaggerations undermined the case for liberal education. It must also be said that they were, at times, disconcertingly and grimly prophetic.” If you’re sympathetic to that judgment, you need some account of what changed between 1995 and the last several years. The answer often given — Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Snyder have made a robust version of the [case]( in our pages — is that the political commitments of Rorty’s 2 percent have been institutionalized by campus bureaucracies of various kinds, which today dwarf anything in the administrative landscape of the 1990s. In scores of cases — at Yale and Stanford Law, at Macalester, at Hamline, at Augsburg University, at the University of Michigan, at the University of Southern California, at San Francisco State University, at George Washington University, at American University, at Georgetown University, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, at the New School, and so on and so on — students and faculty members have come into speech-related conflict with diversity administrators. Nor is it obvious that this administrative program is “left” in the way people like Bloom supposed back in the ’90s. The sensitivities of religious conservatives are particularly well-suited to administrative protocols. At American, pro-choice students were [targeted]( for offending Christian conservatives; at Macalester, an Iranian feminist was [targeted]( for offending traditional Muslim sentiment about modest garb. As The Chronicle’s David Jesse [wrote]( last week, there is in response to all this a sense that college presidents and other senior leaders are reasserting a strong libertarian position on academic freedom and campus free speech. In one of the most prominent cases he mentions — Stanford Law — that rearticulation comes at the expense of administrators hired to manage diversity. When Stanford Law’s dean, Jenny Martinez, [issued]( a powerful rebuke to the students who had disrupted a speech by the conservative appellate judge Kyle Duncan, she also implicitly scolded Tirien Steinbach, Stanford Law’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, who was felt to have enabled the protests. (Steinbach has been placed on leave.) From Martinez’s point of view, Steinbach had failed to uphold school policies. From Steinbach’s, as she [described]( in The Wall Street Journal, she was doing exactly what she had been hired to do — and seems to have been punished for it. The tension here is surely very common and very damaging. As Ariana González Stokas, a philosopher who has served as chief diversity officer at a number of institutions, [wrote]( last week in the Review, the role seems to ask for an impossible balancing act: between upholding university policies on the one hand and, on the other, somehow assuaging the criticisms of activists who suspect that those policies are themselves the root of injustice. “It became quickly apparent,” González Stokas writes, “that one could work on diversity so long as one did not too dramatically unsettle the institution’s traditions and seek to reassemble them, or to open up the arteries of inequity and dig around to find what needed to be abolished.” From this point of view, people like Steinbach have been hired to say what activists want to hear — and then to be fired for saying it. This isn’t fair to anyone. SPONSOR CONTENT | University of Auckland [How the University of Auckland is Turning its Sustainability Strategy Into Action]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. But a cascade of clear [statements]( like Martinez’s might help in the future to mitigate these ambiguities. Clarity about speech rights, academic freedom, and the university policies governing both should make life easier for everyone: students, who will know where the line is; faculty members, who will feel better protected from administrative investigations they often perceive as punitive; and diversity officers, who will no longer be expected to satisfy irreconcilable imperatives or to somehow fix deep structural injustices. Rorty wrote in 1995 that concerns about campus climate had been exaggerated and that the real threat to intellectual life was the right. Gitlin, conversely, came to see Bloom as a minor prophet. Who was right? In states like Florida, Texas, and North Carolina, Republicans are commanding an assault on higher education that Gingrich could only have dreamed of. That’s why Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, [responded]( skeptically to the Washington Post editorial board’s approval of what it called “universities … pushing back on censorious students”: “Such nonsense. Many schools have been protecting academic freedom a long time. The serious threat now isn’t from students, trigger warnings, celebrity speakers being heckled. No, it’s from governments defunding #highered, banning books, decimating tenure.” I asked Roth about the topic. “I think the dean at Stanford was sensible, as was the president of Cornell,” he told me. But he considers the threat of censorial overreach from activists overblown. It seems fair to suspect, though, that incidents like the one at Stanford Law have energized Republican campaigns against higher ed enormously. There’s a reason DeSantis and Chris Rufo [discussed]( the incident enthusiastically in a right-wing media appearance. That DeSantis and his ilk want to defend academic freedom by destroying academic freedom — and whipping up their base in the mean time — might make them opportunists, hypocrites, even nihilists. But that doesn’t mean they have conjured their foe out of whole cloth. The image of the university that DeSantis and Rufo have constructed is a sort of Frankenstein’s monster — a grotesque distortion of the original made out of mostly real parts. That’s one reason that college leaders at places like Stanford Law, Penn State, and Cornell have felt it necessary to make the pro-free-speech motions they’re making now. And they have come to suspect that a decade’s worth of apparent administrative support for activist agendas on campus may have backfired politically. In a remarkable new [essay]( for the Review, the University of Illinois at Chicago art historians Elise Archias and Blake Stimson — who have themselves suffered from the punitive overreach of university bureaucrats — develop a theory of contagious hysteria, a sort of feedback loop between students and administrators. Faculty members who find themselves caught in this student-administrative forcefield suffer the consequences of what Archias and Stimson call, drawing on the great Austrian novelist and intellectual Hermann Broch, “kitsch social justice.” Crucially, Archias and Stimson don’t blame students for their sensitivities. On the contrary, they suggest, the administrators who ratify those sensitivities, rather than take them as occasions for the cultivation of critical thinking, are guilty of something like dereliction of duty. While pretending to care about students, they are depriving them of an education. Read Richard Rorty’s “[Demonizing the Academy,]( Todd Gitlin’s “[What Allan Bloom Got Right]( Elise Archias and Blake Stimson’s “[The Labor of Teaching and Administrative Hysteria]( and Ariana González Stokas’s “[Higher Ed’s DEI Lip Service]( ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Strategic-Leadership Program for Department Chairs] [Join us in June]( for a virtual professional development program which will provide the space, time, and tools to help department chairs take on the challenges and opportunities of the role. Through workshops, high-level seminars, and individual development plans, chairs will think strategically about their departmental and institutional impact. [Register today!]( The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [I’ve Worked in Admissions for 40 Years. It’s More Stressful Than Ever.]( By Jon Boeckenstedt [STORY IMAGE]( Unreasonable expectations have become more unreasonable. 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Recommended - “It might seem evident that shock is the signifier of truth and reveals more about the people who feel it than about the artistic objectivity that caused it, but in the case of Annie Ernaux, the usual operation of time in reconciling people to truth did not seem entirely to have occurred.” In The New York Times Magazine, Rachel Cusk [writes about]( Annie Ernaux. - In her own life, Arendt chose not to have children; natality was not pro-natalism, not an argument for why women should give birth or become mothers. But she understood that while we may not choose birth, birth has already chosen us.” In Commonweal, Jennifer Banks on “[reckoning with birth]( - “Richard Rorty was MacIntyre’s polar opposite in all ways except one: Both men liked and respected the other.” In The Nation, George Scialabba [compares]( MacIntyre and Rorty. - “Perhaps, during lockdown, the idea of a man losing his mind in a room by himself had become more relatable.” In The New Yorker, Alex Abramovich [profiles]( the screenwriter and film director Paul Schrader, whose new movie, Master Gardener, gets its American release this month. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Restructuring a University - The Chronicle Store]( [Restructuring a University]( In 2022, Henderson State University declared financial exigency after realizing it could no longer avoid hard choices. 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