How universities lost their balance

What has happened in higher education that has allowed political convictions to replace reasoned, evidenced-based research and analysis?  

The 2023–24 events represent extreme examples of this trend, but not its origin. The trend has been less apparent in publications than in classroom teaching, where faculty political advocacy can lack nuance.  

When the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1970 delicately modified its 1940 statement on academic freedom, it dropped its opposition to faculty raising political issues with no relevance to the course subject. The broader prohibition had been invoked in the AAUP’s founding 1915 declaration and had thus held for more than half a century. In 1970 the AAUP instead warned against “persistent” intrusion of irrelevant political subjects. That gave licence to, say, a chemistry teacher addressing the outbreak of World War II or the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in class. But it did not countenance the recruitment of students to a political cause.  

In 2024, however, we saw faculty members using class time not only to express their views but also to urge students to support the anti-Zionist encampments. That was not what the AAUP had in mind. A lecturer can honourably express anguish at Israeli and Palestinian deaths but not encourage students to take specific political actions in support of such feelings.  

Of course, a faculty member condemning Israel at a campus rally is still sending a message to students, but there are ways to reinforce classroom neutrality. One can differentiate between public and pedagogical roles, though some teaching staff are increasingly disinclined to do so.  

In “Freedom in the Classroom”, a 2006 AAUP policy paper that I helped draft, we endorsed an idealised view of faculty classroom advocacy that now seems naive. We believed that faculty could model reasoned, evidence- based advocacy, showing students how to do politics responsibly. 

We wanted universities to differentiate themselves from rancorous practices in the public sphere and to encourage students to adopt better standards for the rest of their lives. We believed that faculty must welcome student disagreement and expression of different views. Faculty could not require students to parrot their own opinions. Faculty who ridiculed or disparaged students for their views, let alone downgraded them for expressing them, could be subject to review and sanction.  

But faculty members who believe mindless themselves to be morally superior may dishonour these principles and they are rarely penalised for doing so. I still believe we understood how advocacy should be done, but the ideal does not dictate the reality. For our model to work, students need to hear a variety of competing views. They don’t need to hear from all sides on every topic, but they need enough exposure to differing opinions to train them to respect alternative voices and learn to examine and challenge what they read and hear.  

Paradoxically, moves by universities to divide into specialised subdisciplines – a trend designed to reinforce the search for the truth – have worsened pressures to conform by formalising authority over much more narrowly defined areas of research. Academic disciplines as we know them emerged in the mid- to- late- nineteenth century in conjunction with the secularisation of universities, but disciplines remained few and general. Such categories as “the natural sciences” sufficed until disciplines like physics and chemistry were named. The number of disciplines proliferated in the following century. Computer science began to be established as a distinct academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s.  

The number of disciplines continued to increase, with new thematic disciplines – including African American studies, women’s studies, Asian American studies, Latina/Latino studies, Native American studies or their European equivalents – emerging as recently as the 1970s and 1980s.  

Academic disciplines were increasingly accepted as the arbiters of what was considered true in the fields they defined. Specialised scholarly journals and disciplinary associations play a major role in managing the state of disciplinary consensus, and a local academic department’s reliability was typically judged by whether it hewed to disciplinary truths. That was the standard advocated by a number of AAUP leaders. It wasn’t that disciplinary consensus was considered infallible. Rather, it was assumed general standards for evidence would enable disciplines to be self- correcting when they went off the rails. Centuries of experience made clear that socially, politically and religiously enforced truths could be wrong. History’s lesson for universities was that academic certainty should aways be qualified by a measure of doubt. Or so we thought. Enter the more politically committed university of the new millennium.  

A few institutions added a social justice imperative to their overall mission statement, making identification with minorities that had faced historical discrimination part of how they defined themselves. That risked transforming what seemed a principled devotion to a worldview based on an oppressed/oppressor dichotomy. The University of Illinois Chicago adopted the following mission statement: “The Social Justice Initiative (SJI) at the University of Illinois at Chicago advances racial and social justice by nurturing intellectual insurgency and furthering the production of knowledge that seeks to change the world. Our work is centered around connecting scholars and activists inside and outside of the university with community-based social change agents in our city, country, and globally.” The social justice initiative was an institution- wide commitment. It seemed a logical choice: Chicago is probably the most rigidly segregated city in the American north.  

But a series of unforeseen consequences would follow: hiring activists, rather than scholars, to teach courses; giving students academic credit for participating in community activism; faculty hiring and student recruitment practices favouring applicants committed to the social justice mission. People who disagreed with the mission might be shunned. Individuals and departments alike would favour arguments that supported the cause regard less of their veracity. At that point, higher education would have become something it was never intended to be.  

Outcomes like these would transform higher education and its academic standards beyond recognition. At most campuses, rather than redefining the whole university as a social justice engine, new programmes or institutes were created to fulfil that mission. Often the newer thematic departments took on that responsibility. Each of the thematic disciplines, moreover, is focused on a specific identity, studying it and advocating for its equity rights. Thus, multiple academic divisions would each advocate on campus for their own politicised social and educational goals. Some divisions have done this for forty or more years, and programmes that have their origin in off- campus movements for social change have up to sixty years of political organising built into their knowledge base. Universities have been susceptible to their internal organising campaigns. Unsurprisingly, they typically urge the campus as a whole to adopt pedagogical and administrative goals that they consider moral imperatives. 

As these programmes have evolved, they have consolidated around their advocacy missions. It has often become less important to “study” their defined subject area than to reach a consensus about what should be considered the truth about their subject and then urge others to agree with that conclusion and act to advance it.  

As these programmes have expanded to cover antisemitism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, they do so exclusively in advocacy campaign mode. 

This article is an edited extract from Mindless: What happened to universities? by Cary Nelson published in the March edition of the Jewish Quarterly.