DANIEL HENNINGER: University Presidents Flunk Out.
It may be no coincidence that colleges are abandoning SATs at the same time three university presidents were flunking questions in public about genocide. After receiving Fs for insisting that the answer to any direct question is “It depends on the context,” University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill lost her job and Harvard’s board of governors retained Claudine Gay with a limp vote of confidence—“she is the right leader to help our community heal.” Uh-huh.
This may be the moment to bring back vocabulary tests.
Question: What six-syllable word describes the three university presidents who testified before Congress?
Answer: Pusillanimity.
Next: Name as many synonyms as you can for “pusillanimity.”
Answer, by way of the Merriam-Webster dictionary (remember those?): Cowardice, cravenness, gutlessness, spinelessness and—my favorite—poltroonery.
In those plain words is written the history of academia’s plummet the past 50 years from respectability to antisemitic riots.
First came the speech codes. No, those came second. What began the long downhill roll in the 1970s was grade inflation. Students whose work deserved a C demanded an A or B. Professors who resisted this threat to standards gave up.
That was an early inkling that traditional college norms could be pushed around and politicized. Speech codes emerged at many schools, not least Harvard, arguing that certain words were—another new vocabulary addition—“hurtful.”
After establishing that words alone could bring reprimand by the university, the speech coders expanded the prohibitions to include something new called microaggressions, or inadvertent slights. Microaggressions had a fraternal twin, trigger warnings, which required profs to warn students that a text or even a thought might distress them.
It sounds like a joke now, but we know it was no joke. This was the moment when the adults in the room—presumably the universities’ presidents—should have intervened to protect free speech and inquiry from being diminished. They did not. Virtually without exception, they were pusillanimous. Fellow ostriches included hundreds of spineless boards of trustees.
Here we bring back to this space an important figure in the universities’ decline: Herbert Marcuse (1896-1979). Though Marcuse isn’t a household name, any purportedly serious university intellectual—say, Ms. Magill of Penn or Harvard’s Ms. Gay—knows about his contribution to governance at their institutions.
Marcuse, a left-wing philosopher who taught at Columbia and Harvard, proposed zero tolerance for conservative ideas. “Liberating tolerance,” Marcuse wrote in 1965, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” No one needs a doctorate in anything to understand that. He wasn’t done: “Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”
I can’t conceive a more concise description of cancel culture, which we got.
University presidents should have recognized—or acknowledged—that cancel culture was another sign their schools were off the rails.
They wanted off the rails.