The Anti-Liberal University

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) had a wonderful colloquium at the Union League Club.  Anne Neal, the head of ACTA, organized the event, and chair was Benno Schmidt, chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees.  The audience consisted of trustees like my great friend Candace de Russy, academics, and leaders in the academic reform movement like Greg Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.  Several leading philanthropists were among the 35 to 40 participants.  The speakers included Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School, Neil Hamilton of the University of St. Thomas Law School, and Donald Downs, Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The distinguished group of trustees, donors, activists, and academics engaged in a riveting dialogue.  Professor Downs and I have subsequently exchanged some emails about the nature of the university.  I emailed him my views on the history of the university:  Universities never had a golden age, for they have always been anti-liberal, and the political correctness since the 1980s follows directly from universities' totalitarian roots in Germany.  This is what I wrote to Professor Downs:

I agree except for this question:  Was the university ever a liberal institution?  Americans are liberals, and liberalism in America was due to the American people themselves, neither to the Founding Fathers nor to the Constitution.  As they have been induced to adopt state activism, which by definition is not liberalism (Louis Hartz notwithstanding; he is brilliant until he gets to FDR), they have discarded liberalism, and so has the Supreme Court.   The university has contributed to and possibly induced the rejection. 

Were American universities ever liberal institutions?  They began in America as Christian colleges; they were transformed in the late 19^th century by Daniel Coit Gilman and Charles Eliot mimicking German universities.  The German universities were not liberal institutions, as Readings’s* history implies.  Their role was to support the German state.  State activist liberalism in America came from the German universities via the historical school of economics (Wisconsin’s Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons were pivotal in that regard).  The German historical school had fought with the Austrian school in the 19^th century,  and it was ultimately triumphant when one of its last followers, Werner Sombart, evicted Ludwig von Mises from the German Sociological Society under the Nazi racial laws (Sombart was old then, and he died a year or two later).  

In other words, I suspect that from the beginning Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Wisconsin, etc. were formed by anti-liberal actors; the liberal intonation coopted popular American belief in liberalism and was context or background to the inner impulse of the university, which was anti-liberal from the beginning. 

People who (a) believe in liberalism and (b) believe in learning want to believe that there was a golden age of university liberalism, but I am doubtful.  I don’t think the histories of universities will bear out that belief.  It is true that someone like William Graham Sumner advocated laissez faire at Yale, but the Mugwump, Gilded-Age period was still one when the university was a Christian institution. Yale had not evolved into a research-based university until the end of or after Sumner’s career.   There was, I recall, a conflict involving Ely when he taught at Cornell, which caused him to be fired; he moved to Michigan before Johns Hopkins and Wisconsin. That was still during the Mugwump period, and as Progressivism became ascendant the AAUP adopted the principles of academic freedom based on liberal rhetoric.  But the AAUP and universities themselves were Progressive institutions; in a sense, they were the source of Progressivism.  The rise of Progressivism during the 1890-1920 period (I would argue we are still in the age of Progressivism) followed directly from the influence of the German university on America.

*Bill Readings, The University in Ruins. 

FrontPageMag Covers Mitchell Langbert's Rebuttal of Left Wing Extremists

Phil Orenstein has published an article in Frontpagemag concerning my rebuttal of an anonymous left wing extremist's assault on trustees of the City University of New York. Orenstein writes:

"Professor Mitchell Langbert posted a scathing reply to an extensively researched article, Look Who's Trusteeing at CUNY featured on the GC Advocate, the on-line student paper of the CUNY graduate Center. The writer excoriates City University of New York (CUNY) Chancellor Matt Goldstein, the CUNY Board of Trustees, and the Chairman of the Board, Benno Schmidt, as a 'veritable rogue’s gallery of hand-picked business elite.' The anonymous writer blames 'CUNY’s ruling body' for 'pushing to turn CUNY into ‘Walmart U,’' for hiking tuition and fees, shoving minority and working students out the door, and for the failure of the big bankers JP Morgan Chase and Citibank to provide student loans while their friends at the fed bail out Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae."

Orenstein adds:

"Instead of calling for the revolutionary overthrow of the rule of the Trustees and CUNY administration to be 'swept away' by the 'democratic' control of 'students, teachers and workers,' it’s the eccentric professors and CUNY officials running amok in radical politics and rallying for the defense of convicted terrorists and extremists, that have to be fired and directed to find a new line of work in a society 'under the rule of capital.'”

I must say: hear, hear. And read Phil's whole article here.

Leftist Conservative-Baiters Attack CUNY Trustees

The Chancellor of the City University of New York, Matt Goldstein, and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Benno Schmidt, have done a stellar job of improving standards at this once-great and now reviving university. In the 1930s CUNY challenged Harvard for national eminence. In the 1970s, left wing progressive educationists, in an effort to destroy the career prospects of minority and working class students, aimed to turn CUNY into a laughing stock by ending admissions requirements and introducing elementary school-level "remedial" classes. Schmidt and Goldstein, together with CUNY's stellar board of trustees, have raised standards, improved quality and made CUNY an attractive educational "buy" for many New Yorkers. In response to the improvement of standards, the introduction of a nationally competitive honors college and increasing SAT scores, a leftist bigot, hiding behind the Ku Klux Klan-like cowl, mask and robe of anonymity, wrote a conservative-baiting and anti-Semitic article in an obscure website called "the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate". The article is here. My response on their site is as follows:

This article is an embarrassment. I am concerned that CUNY has admitted students who are so ignorant of history that they confuse JP Morgan with his son, Jack Morgan. The author states that JP Morgan, the "robber baron", made his fortune selling World War I bonds, but, as any schoolchild knows, JP Morgan died in 1913 and World War I started in 1914. This article exemplies the ill-bred conservative-baiting that passes for academic work in education, social science, history and humanities departments around the country, where conservative-baiting and insulting those who disagree with sociopathic, left-wing ideology passes for academic work. For instance, the writer quotes Lenin, a mass killer whose Soviet Union ended up killing between 25 and 60 million human beings, a mass killer of the stature of Adolf Hitler. Quoting Lenin is morally equivalent to quoting Hitler, but apparently much of this goes on. Official Soviet reports admitted that fully 30 million Soviet citizens were in danger of death by starvation by 1921, and Lenin's forces murdered at least several hundred thousand peasants in the Bread War. With a record of murder equivalent to Hitler's, Lenin's appeal to this writer is understandable. It is much worse to work for JP Morgan Bank or Colgate Palmolive than to kill hundreds of thousands of people. The author goes on to make a number of ill-informed, conservative-baiting and anti-Semitic comments. Personally, I am offended by the bigoted equation of Jeff Wiesenfeld's Zionism with racism. This anti-Semitic remark is a disgrace, and this website is racist. The author's conservative baiting begins with his discussion of our excellent and honorable trustee, Peter Pantaleo. There are two sides to labor relations in this country (unlike in the former Soviet Union for which this author pines) and these are labor and management. If Mr. Pantaleo represents management interests, that makes him no more a criminal than Victor Gotbaum's representing labor's interests. I met Mr. Gotbaum, former head of DC 37, in 1988 when he occupied a teaching position at the CUNY Graduate Center to which he had been appointed despite a lack of qualifications. He did not have a Ph.D. and had studied international relations, not labor, at Columbia. Yet, he was given a position in a research capacity teaching doctoral students. Did the author or his or her professor argue against that appointment? If not, why is appointing a pro-management lawyer problematic? The author's incompetence follows through almost every paragraph. The author objects to William E. Macaulay's $30 million donation. Is the writer aware of how universities work in this country, or is he or she so dedicated to the Soviet model that he is completely ignorant of practical reality? Similarly, the insipid complaint about Philip Alfonso Berry's having worked for Colgate Palmolive. Better he should have worked for Gosplan or the KGB, or better yet managed a prison camp in the Gulag Archipelago and murdered 6,000 Jews. That would have been much more pleasing to this conservative-baiting bigot.