Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an UnHerd columnist. She is also a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. Her new book is Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.
July 1, 2022
What is the point of university? It used to be, when Harvard was founded in 1636, “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity”. But in recent years the university has taken on an altogether narrower character. Learning is no longer enough. Activism is demanded. Yale and Harvard have come to resemble the mythical Ouroboros, eating their own tails to satisfy an insatiable appetite for conformity.
In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. warned in God and Man at Yale of his alma mater’s inability to prepare its students for the real world. Its subtitle, The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”, hinted at the already existing tendency for administrators to hire academics who only teach ideas they deem acceptable. Scepticism was banished: to Buckley, political radicals were subverting American society by indoctrinating their students with atheism and collectivism. Yet he remained an “epistemological optimist”, hoping that sense would prevail both in the Ivy League and across the nation.
More than 70 years later, that sense has manifestly not prevailed. Take the case of Roland Fryer. A hugely gifted and until recently celebrated black professor of economics at Harvard, he was suspended for two years without pay following the most tenuous sexual harassment claims. Many suspect the real reason for his humiliating treatment was his research showing that African Americans are not disproportionately the targets of lethal violence by the police. There were, Fryer wrote, “no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account”.
Though published well before the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 decided that the police were state-funded agents of racial oppression, Fryer’s research nevertheless made him enemies in the academic world. Though he was only following the evidence, he had offended the progressives who now dominate the university’s governance and culture. On Fryer’s return to campus after two years of exclusion, the Harvard Crimson newspaper had only this to say: “Fryer should not return to Harvard classrooms.” Similar stories can be told about other illustrious institutions. Joshua Katz, a tenured Classics professor at Princeton, was not merely suspended but fired this year over a long-ago relationship with a student. Given the investigation into his behaviour was based on selective evidence, it seems likely his real crime was daring to criticise Black Lives Matter.
By Tomiwa Owolade
If universities once made promises to teach their undergraduates how to think, they now aim to teach them what to think. Students are now taught that disparities between groups are always the result of discrimination; the US is irredeemably racist; racism is everywhere; invisible power structures of structural oppression are equally ubiquitous and need to be dismantled; meritocracy is a myth; colour-blindness is a misleading concept; a focus on individual rights distracts from the real struggle. Gone are those such as Roland Fryer who sought to inquire freely into the most important questions facing society today through well-gathered evidence and rigorous logic. Hounded out by a vocal minority of thin-skinned students and zealous administrators, they are replaced by progressive conformists.
It was with these issues in mind that, last week, I taught five classes on freedom of speech at the new University of Austin. UATX is intended to be a free-thinking, free-speaking alternative to existing universities, and our summer school was aimed at attracting current undergraduates from precisely those places. But while one could have forgivingly expected at least some of these students to be scared of questioning progressive orthodoxies, the reality couldn’t have been more different.
These students were hungry for knowledge, eager to learn and to excel — and yet many of them hailed from established institutions such as Dartmouth, Brown, Berkeley. Others came from overseas: the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of British Columbia in Canada. My class was an equally diverse group of students: three women, one transgender person, and seven men. One student was of Moroccan origin, another of Indian ethnicity. On paper, they were a diversity, equity and inclusion officer’s dream.
However, far from protesting that the US was a “structurally racist” society oppressive to supposedly marginalised communities, the students I met were eager to be of service to their country, culture, and society at large. Not one was in the slightest bit woke.
By Matthew Goodwin
Yet what they taught me in the five sessions we had together was the near-absence of critical thinking and free inquiry in their respective universities. Even the Frenchman said there was very little debate in the Sorbonne. The American students suggested that most of their peers were just like them: eager to learn, debate, and compete — all in a civil manner. What they worried about was a minority of students, professors and administrators who spoil the experience of college for everyone by grandstanding, virtue signalling, and enforcing the tenets of progressive orthodoxy. Those in student government and student media certainly didn’t represent the majority, they said. Their union policies and mantras spoke only to the small group inside their autocratic bubble.
It was clear from my conversations with the students at UATX that the elite educational institutions are doing the next generation a fundamental disservice. If we are to teach the leaders of tomorrow how to think — how to ask probing questions rather than repeat dictated answers — we need a fundamental re-evaluation of the modern university. It’s clear these institutions are still in high demand — just look at Harvard’s ever-increasing application numbers — but that doesn’t mean they are fulfilling their function.
Harvard’s motto is a single word: Veritas. Yale’s is Lux et Veritas. But truth is the first casualty of progressivism. And as for light, there is a great deal more heat generated by the endless identity politics of the modern campus. Still, I came away from the UATX summer school feeling relieved. Young people — some of them, at least — don’t want indoctrination. But the only way to get back to “advancing learning and perpetuating it to posterity” is to found new universities. Let’s not forget: even Harvard was a start-up once.
The University students I have met from less illustrious UK Universities are like the one’s described by the author, and I have met a few as I have two sons at University. However, like the University students I met as a young man in Husak’s communist Czechoslovakia they know not to openly question the orthodox views as it might harm their future. There is the same cautious covert contempt for the party line.
The eventual implosion of legacy universities, or at least their liberal arts faculties, is an appealing image but I suspect it will be very hard to achieve in practice. They are deeply entrenched institutions and will not fade away peacefully.
Much as I admire the new University of Austin, I wonder if it will still be around in a decade and whether such luminaries as Ayaan Hirsi Ali will still be associated with it.
I like the idea of placing more of the financial risk for student education on the universities themselves. If their graduates can’t repay their loans then the universities should carry much of that debt. Modern universities might be driven by the market but they don’t yet shoulder all the risks of the market.
Indeed, the endowments of the largest American universities, including Harvard, almost guarantee that they will be around after most other colleges and universities go bust.
Zero chance of Harvard and Yale closing down. The problem of academic wokeness is far more structural that spoilt students or zealot administrators (although they are there, sure enough). The cultural logic of wokeness, which was presaged by Burnham already in the 1940s and now come to fruition, is that the managerial class has found its “bliss point”. I pity those that think somehow wokeness is Marxism 2.0. Not at all. It’s a system that dissimulates its classist nature, provides a structural role for global corporations (“sticking up for minorities”), and allows the managerial bourgeoisie to remain unchallenged. There is no incentive for the management class, or its academic priesthood or loyal knaves like street artists and ‘antifa’, to keep reframing concepts of social structure and process. Identity politics is perfect for the managerial class — it makes their role in the power hierarchy invisible (as long as they say they’re for diversity and equity, i.e. they gaslight) , and as long as they can use “divide and rule” tactics over the lower classes, especially by use of racialism.
Of course woke is Marxism 2, for the simple reason that like Marxism it uses a notion of “revolution” to justify the hierarchy, bureaucracy and dictatorship of “the party”, as the “vanguard” of the “oppressed”. Your naïve notions that Marxism does not involve “class” – think party privilege; and that this new “class structure” is not largely staffed by renegade “bourgeois”, are themselves left wing delusions. And as for “racialism”, it is implicit in the Marxist project, at first in a Lamarckian sense, for the “bourgeoisie” is held to be a rigid, impermeable category of humanity which hands its characteristics on to its progeny. That this readily devolves into outright racialism of the traditional, pseudo-Darwinian sort, is vividly demonstrated in the various genocides carried out by Stalin, the last of which, germinating from the so-called “Doctors’ plot”, was mercifully nipped in the bud by the old monster’s death. So stop trying to rescue Marxism. It is the fons et origo of almost everything rotten and disgusting in European society from the mid-nineteenth century on.
The reason I find UnHerd so stimulating is not just the articles. It’s the quality of the readers’ responses.
I disagree with your critique of Mr. Alexander. You make some good points about the Marxist legacy but Mr Alexander’s reference to Barnham was cogent. The managerial class (what I would call the political and corporate power elites) are more than happy with the “Marxist” label. This label shields their real identity from the public.
Wokery is the unholy alliance of the elites in academia, corporations and the media, for its proponents have infiltrated and now held hostage their managements to their utopian vision.
Marxism is the lens of viewing society as the dichotomy and tension between oppressors and oppressed. That is precisely the central perspective wokeists demand of all society, and their presumed mission is to correct its inequity.
This is carried along by a religious belief in its inherent virtue, such that it cannot be contradicted without appearing evil, and worthy of removal from society by cancellation to protect the “virtuous.”
Like all dogmas, wokery is hijacked by those who seek power and recognise its utility – and this truth echoes Jones’s comment that parties form to monopolise application and enforcement of the dogma. Thus is where we are now.
@ Ian Alexander:
You have said it, exactly. Wokeness is a perfect fit for corporate capitalism, which is why large corporations are so willing to adopt it. It provides a lovely facade of warmth and kindness, behind which there is no alteration of the brutal extraction of resources (human and otherwise) that feeds the corporate coffers. It only requires a bit of reshuffling of personnel to meet diversity identity requirements, together with some added Diversity & Equity administrators in Human Resources (so aptly named).
Alas, your class was a 11-person group. Good beginning but a lot of work ahead !
Our universities teach White students that they are immoral and contemptible if they don’t support the White Genocide that’s being carried out by massive third-world immigration and FORCED assimilation i.e diversity for EVERY White country and ONLY White countries.
Their professors never tell them, “White self-hatred is SICK!!!“
Those professors claim to be anti-racist. What they are is anti-White.
Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White.
Someone’s going to have a heavy lift convincing me the idiots holding the sign deserve an elite education. Everyone I see wearing masks outdoors automatically gets placed in the numbskull column.
These institutions have been built by, and for, the aristocrat class. When they were founded, education itself was an exercise only for the wealthiest. Even as education became more democratic, these institutions retained their aristocratic character, placing themselves above other institutions in the same manner aristocrats have always placed themselves above commoners. They retained their rich clientele over decades and centuries, fostering generation after generation of world leaders, business tycoons, and supposed luminary intellectuals. To say they are entrenched in the power structure of the modern world would be a vast understatement. I doubt anyone can fell them without first felling the aristocrats that sustain them, but if those aristocrats change their tune, maybe because they fear popular revolution and complete destruction, their institutions will follow them like the obedient dogs they are.
Harvard and Yale were founded to educate clergy. The religion has definitely changed, and the desire for literate clergy has disappeared, but the function continues in a degraded fashion. Woke apostles are the new goal.
You make a good point. I had forgotten the technical circumstances of their early origins. Of course, the Puritans who founded these institutions were the closest thing to an aristocratic class America had at the time. Then and now, the aristocrats were a bunch of religious nuts who were determined to convert the world to their one true faith and make America into a ‘shining city upon a hill’.
“However, far from protesting that the US was a “structurally racist” society oppressive to supposedly marginalised communities, the students I met were eager to be of service to their country, culture, and society at large.”
Well, that’s unfortunate. Not that is your fault or the university’s fault. But it isn’t something to be pleased about. We shouldn’t want a world where there are leftwing universities and rightwing universities, woke universities and anti-woke universities.
At the ideal university, some of the students would believe the US was a racist society. And others would not. And they would freely debate it.
It should not be a question of cancelling those who think the US is racist or enforcing patriotism. Rather it is a question of facilitating free speech and allowing both left and right to have their say without either side trying to cancel the other.
I don’t question what is written in this article. However it doesn’t even mention Harvard’s (and other colleges’) racial bias in their admissions policy.
A chance for Supremes to end Harvard’s Asian discrimination (nypost.com)
Harvard’s previous defence for its racism was that Asians have less ‘personality’ than other races!
I doubt the average middle aged reader of UnHerd will have much impact on the way this plays out. We may tend to agree with each other that the traditional ideal of a university should be x, y and z but it is the opinions of Gen Z students which matter.
What I think would be a mistake, however, is to assume that that the attitudes of the students of next five years will remain fixed, “woke”, “critical” and progressive as at present. They may have radically new ways of seeing society. In the 1960s – the last period with as dramatic a shift in values – the initial wave of unrest, which drew on preexisting ideas, was soon overtaken by assorted new ideals: the New Left, Hippy Communes and Consciousness enhanced by LSD, etc. Instead of just adopting the ideas of some of their radical professors they started coming up with their own. I have no idea what comes next but I suspect it will be as different from current “critical” patterns as it is from our own way of thinking.
But we are just bystanders. I suspect UnHerd needs more insightful reports from correspondents for teenage and student attitudes and less repetitions of our generation’s liberal consensus. I totally agree with the points everyone is making but I fear we are largely irrelevant in a philosophical debate about the ideal future university. Perhaps we should focus our efforts instead on reforming the internet to encourage constructive debate but be fatalistic about the conclusions Gen Z and their successors draw from those debates.
Two examples and a personal anecdote do not a summer make.
I have been trying to name the wokeist movement for some time. I have come to a few conclusions: it is inspired by Marxism, in that it looks at hierarchies of power, but not as generated under classic capitalism but rather under contemporary imperialism, where the 1st world elite (mainly white, western and (manly) men) rules the rest (so-called BOPOC, feminine and queer). It seems to have taken hold in academia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, where they abandoned hope in socialist, working class led revolution and instead looked to a kind of coaliton of oppressed minorities to take over and bring some kind of socio-economic equity (under a more ‘just’ corporate capitalism presumably). The Social Justice Warriors who have assumed leadership of this movement seem to be liberal arts graduates by and large, i.e. middle class intellectuals. They don’t seek to overthrow capitalism but rather join it or at least get lucrative grants or managerial positions, thereby ending socio-economic inequality, at least for themselves, in the name of righting historical injustices. So, really a form of perverted civil rights movement where designated identities are elevated above the rest and the most attention seeking individual rules over the collective.
What is to be done? Here is my own modest proposal: No university in the UK should be permitted to enrol a student on any course(s) unless and until the student has signed a declaration in the following form:
I understand that I may find the content of the course(s) on which I have enrolled distressing, sometimes severely so, but I have enrolled on that understanding and expressly agree that the content cannot be adjusted to accommodate my sensibilities.
I further understand that in the course of my studies, both in the faculty, and from visiting speakers, I must expect to read and hear opinions and points of view with which I disagree, sometimes violently. I understand that the only permissible way to counter such opinions and points of view is by reasoned and courteous argument. I expressly agree that I will not urge or participate in the censorship, cancellation, exclusion or other actual or attempted suppression of any such opinions or points of view or the person(s) expressing them.
I further understand that any attempt to censor, cancel, exclude or suppress opinions or points of view with which I happen to disagree is inconsistent with my participation in the course(s) and may be regarded as gross misconduct leading to my immediate exclusion; and that in any such event my tuition fees will not be refunded.
I further understand that this declaration applies equally to all students and members of the faculty, regardless of their gender, ethnicity or other background and regardless of any actual or pretended harm supposed to have been caused by adherence to the principles set out above.
New and better Veritas comes from debate… which originally meant beating thoroughly. So one cannot throw a light, lux, let alone establish veritas without a modicum of mental violence. New and better truth is always an aggression against the established mental… let alone financial or economic… order. This is why, historically speaking, most of humanity’s top thinkers blossomed in only a few places and times… And yet found themselves to be the object of violence, often fatal, at a rate much greater than the average population.
New truth, better veritas, always contradict the established order, this is what deep and genuine novelty does to minds.
Instead, plutocratic universities, aka legacies universities, teach the established order, and how to get inserted within. Enough money and effort is deployed by students and, or their families to attend elite universities, so as to ensure that students have the appropriate mentality of, and for, plutocratic insertion. Thus rebellion within is unlikely. Wokism has become a purity test of dedication to the fake truth of the established order. Exhibiting enough wokism demonstrates that one is eager, and one can display enough hypocrisy and polish, to rule the gullible masses… and thus join the master class.
Theories adverse to the established order are adverse to the plutocratic universities’ sponsors, thus will be discouraged by administrators and teaching staff. Whereas theories which make no sense or are deeply regressive are friends of the established order, and will be encouraged.
This will go on until, and if, the established order is wiped out by a tsunami of veritas… or then total civilizational collapse… something easily engineered with nukes… Harvard did play an important role in establishing Yeltsin’s Russia… which then installed Vlad, modulo a genocidal war in Chechnya… It all fits together nicely.
Wokism is greatly fake, but so has been the fight against the pollution crisis (in particular the CO2 crisis, aka global heating), or, for that matter the taxation schemes which have only ensured ever greater power and wealth inequality… A fake and silly universe, such as wokism, will often hide another, much more dangerous, such as increasing feudalism.
Calling self-aggrandizement and blind elite hypocrisy born of denial of the vicissitudes of life on earth is a crime against nature. Truth be known the best and brightest are not who they claim to be but the pampered and pernicious are.
Hi, I was at UATX although not in your session. I just want to offer one insight that several students including myself raised about future prospects while we were there: scaling. As the number of people enrolled increase, the culture depends less on planning, statements, or even faculty, but instead evolves into something heavily driven by incentives (think tiktok, or lebanon for that matter). It’s hard to see the witches’ brew of detachment, careerism, and fanaticism in most student bodies separate from this.
I’m not sure if it’s typical for authors to respond to these comments, but getting a general discussion started on how this scaling effect will be guided would be great in any case.
As much as I have an appetite to discuss the failure of our present universities to encourage or instruct students in the skills of critical thinking and logical argument, I find this brief essay to be very thin gruel. The author presents no more than anecdotal historical and recent evidence toward the politically-liberal bias in higher education, followed by her own anectdotal experience from interacting with 11 students for one week.
I have no objection against the general idea that critical thinking and logical argument are no longer taught in most universities, but I don’t believe the author’s experience will convince anyone else who is not already of the same mind.
“.. but I don’t believe the author’s experience will convince anyone else who is not already of the same mind”
Perhaps you are not so curious after all.
“The author presents no more than anecdotal historical and recent evidence toward the politically-liberal bias in higher education, followed by her own anectdotal experience from interacting with 11 students for one week.”
I think your second use of the word anecdote is right, but not the first, because the author gave examples, not anecdotes, and she knows that her readers know of many other similar examples.
Anyway, this is a very short piece of writing that contrasts what the older universities are doing compared to this new one, and how encouraging she found the students’ attitudes. It’s not a PhD thesis.
The idea of education is to teach you to research with an open mind and think.
In this case a bit of research would confirm the brief essay – what’s the mix of university educators in terms of their political support, what’s the typical profile of people who are “excluded”, what are the “acceptable” principles imposed on universities these days.
The picture that emerges is consistently gloomy.
I really do NOT understand the downvotes. This commenter has made a valid point. One may agree with it or not, but wanting to shut it down? It does seem to me one follows the Harvard way here. After all this article is indeed only a few hundred words long and rather heavy in the anecdotes. I too was expecting something more interesting from Ayaan having read many of her other pieces, here and elsewhere.
Where do you get the idea from that anyone wishes to “shut down” the comment by Curious Person? I believe you’re falling into the very woke trap of assuming criticism to be something that it’s not! It’s the very essence of critical thinking to disagree, and that’s all the responses to CP have done, quite validly.
As for the short essay (and that’s all it is, not a dissertation) the intention is surely to provide a point, or points, for further discussion. Ali has succeeded, and all voices are being heard!
I found the downvotes uncalled for. He didn’t say anything offensive or even controversial. S/He simply pointed out this article is very light in content. What is the downvote for?
Becaused it is just post-WOKE and propagandist and vacuous.
I tend to agree but I suppose a downvote can just be seen as a signal that someone disagrees with what one is saying. I get lots of downvotes generally but I don’t let it worry me and, in and of itself, I don’t regard a downvote as an attempt to shut me down. I am less enamoured of ad hominem comments by people which do seem to be attempts to bully someone into silence. polidori redux is the only person here who appears perhaps to have strayed into this territory with the comment “perhaps you are not so curious after all” and even that is fairly mild stuff (and apologies from me to polidori redux if it was intended more as a witticism than a criticism).
Perhaps the reader is short of time to make a written response? For instance, they could be on a lunch break, or reading on a train journey nearing their destination?
The downvote (or indeed, upvote – why not complain about that?) is a perfectly valid way of expressing disagreement/agreement, and it’s not ‘confrontational’ as your response seems to suggest. I should know, i’m often downvoted, and accept it as part and parcel of lively debate.
Suggesting the article is “light in content” is also to assume that UnHerd articles are intended to have the kind of rigour that one would expect in a fully-extrapolated academic paper. It seems a perfectly fine means of expression for those us who’re bored with the MSM and which enables commentary which is often as enlightening as the original piece.
I agree – too many Unherders attempt to enforce their own orthodoxy through group-think downvotes.
Personally I upvote answers when I think they are well argued, regardless of whether I agree with the point or not.
I will very ocassionally give a downvote to someone rude or engaging in ad hominem attacks.
But many unherders seem to think that downvoting something is equivalent to refuting it. And they tend to downvote things that grate with their assumptions about the world, rather than consider whether the point is well argued.
You may be right – I don’t read enough comments to make a guess one way or the other. Perhaps the issue is that we cannot know what they are thinking since the voting is binary – up or down. I would have assumed a down vote simply means ‘I disagree’. Speaking for myself, I disagreed with the comment criticising the article since it was clear that the article was not attempting to be a dissertation. I didn’t down-vote it either though.
Surely a down-vote simply signals disagreement. The contributor’s post isn’t removed or ‘cancelled’ is it?
Downvotes indicate disagreement and disapproval, just as upvotes indicate agreement and approval. Both are feedback. Downvotes are not a call for censoring the comment. They are a shortcut for people who don’t want to write a rebuttal.
‘Anecdote’ – when you wish to denigrate.
‘First hand experience’ – what I read.
Ayaan fanboys
Why do downvotes mean ‘shutting down’? As someone regularly downvoted – a lot – I thought they just meant that people really disagreed. A simple expression of opinion. Now I may find it regrettable that people on this forum do not agree with my opinion on Donald Trump or vaccine mandates – and downvote even my well-argued posts – but I can hardly be upset about it.
The writer’s “lived experience” in Somalia, the Netherlands and the US provides ample anectdotal and historical evidence to support her observation that free thought and speech can be repressed under the guise of either progressivism or religious autocracy. Even a cursory look at her writings supports this.
“
A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Her efforts may be small, and certainly not enough to counteract the indoctrination agenda of the education establishment that has been going on for decades, but at least the author is doing something rather than just complaining on the internet.
We welcome applications to contribute to UnHerd – please fill out the form below including examples of your previously published work.
Please click here to submit your pitch.
