Radicalized academia is fiercely resisting the self-correction it needs

This has been a terrible year for the higher education industrial complex. Among the many crises are a year and a half of assaults by the Trump administration against research grants and foreign money, discriminatory hiring and admissions policies and reliance on foreign students.

Meanwhile, higher ed is finally going over the long-awaited demographic cliff, with declining enrollments and shrinking endowments. There are growing numbers of closings and mergers of institutions; layoffs of faculty and staff; reports that college students cannot handle basic math or reading assignments; the onslaught of AI undermining critical thinking and in-depth learning; the exposure of massive administrative bloat; and acknowledgment that public trust has plummeted as to the cost and utility of higher education itself.

Academia is facing a reckoning. Can it self-correct? A new report sponsored by Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis gives some hope.

A panel of eminent scholars examined the roots of academia’s many self-made crises, pointing in particular to politicization that resulted from the adoption of “scholar-activism” as the reigning paradigm, embracing subjectivity to pursue “social justice” in place of an apolitical search for objective truths with a small “t.”

Their survey of different fields in the humanities and social sciences found “a deterioration in scholarly standards, fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

In anthropology the situation was even worse; “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity, together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.”

The authors point to relativism — the negation of clear epistemological and moral standards — as the root cause. They also point to the outsized role of left-wing foundations, such as the Mellon Foundation, which has devoted enormous resources to quietly remake all branches of academia toward “social justice” including by funding........

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