As of this month, which saw the broadest and most concentrated campus unrest in 55 years, the academy is undeniably at a crossroads. But its reckoning has been obvious since last June, when the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action in universities is unconstitutional. It’s been even more obvious since October, when some student groups de facto endorsed terror with the implicit backing of DEI departments. Since Affirmative Action and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) are the subjects or contributing causes of these landmark events, they naturally become the focus of the discourse around them. But viewing the situation through a broader lens suggests that both may be symptoms of deeper issues in higher education.      

This is especially evident when we consider that many of Affirmative Action and DEI’s most vocal proponents and opponents are speaking mirror-image versions of the same language. This language, in turn, is premised on a basic, and disquieting, assumption about the relationship between knowledge and power. 

Digging into this assumption, and its history, raises a troubling possibility: that as universities, particularly elite private ones, have increasingly become accoutrements of national power, they have minimized their ability to fulfill one of the purposes of knowledge since Socrates: using reason to carefully and systematically question authority and equip people for self-government. 

Questioning Authority, Seeking Power

Today’s arguments about higher education constantly emphasize the link between knowledge and power. Speaking in February to New York Magazine, the financier and Harvard donor William Ackman, fresh from successfully pushing for the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay and in the middle of a push against DEI, critiqued “the idea that the university was primarily a place for the transfer of knowledge.” Instead he argued that “the real purpose of a university…[is] ‘to distribute privilege’” and to answer the question “‘Who is going to manage society?’”

Less than a year before that, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ketanji Brown Jackson, defending affirmative action in her dissent to Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, argued that “for marginalized communities…it is critically important that…institutions produce highly educated professionals of color” who can attend to and represent them. She was reiterating a point made by Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor twenty years earlier, when O’Connor gave affirmative action a lease on life after reading briefs submitted by corporate and government leaders. 

It’s accurate to acknowledge a link between power and education. Certainly, even before elite universities became uncontested national power centers, there were clear connections between being educated and assuming authority. The problem lies in the implication that education should be defined by the function of allocating power—when, oftentimes, both its classical purpose and its actual function have been defined and practiced in the opposite ways. 

Indeed, social science departments at schools like Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago grew to a great extent from heavy government investment in research universities, particularly elite ones, during the Cold War. There, scholars and teachers like C. Wright Mills, Bernard Bailyn, and William Julius Wilson gave students the language to carefully question concentrated power and its effects on liberty, based on granular observations of social patterns and governing structures as well as close reads of texts. They asked questions which shed light on how the increasingly concentrated government authority of the postwar era got used, and how it worked in peoples’ lives. 

Mills actually coined the term “power elite.” Bailyn resurrected language from the Revolutionary period that framed politics in terms of resisting arbitrary power, a historical lesson not lost on Daniel Ellsberg, who used Bailyn’s work to justify his leaking of the Pentagon Papers. Wilson showed the structural ways, ignored by both post-Kennedy Liberals and “Neo-Conservatives,” that outsourcing and urban “renewal” had visited fallout on black (and increasingly white) laborers. The reason that some of these arguments seem familiar, or even like tropes, today, is because these thinkers introduced them fifty, sixty, and seventy years ago, often against strong intellectual currents flowing in the other direction.

We still live in the world these thinkers saw, but mostly without the benefit of their knowledge. What increasingly made this model obsolete was an accelerated version of what created it: the government-backed transformation of major universities into uncontested passageways to power, as the city parties and labor unions, moral associations and business clubs which shared influence with them faded during the Cold War. “There’s a river of power that flows through this country…” America’s current President, the product of a state university who’d come to Washington, was already telling friends in the 1970s,  “…And that river flows from the Ivy League.”

Advocacy groups became regular features of campus under the label “multiculturalism,” sometimes shutting down speech in the name of “harm” to marginalized communities. 

This river-of-power approach can be fairly alienating for the 18-to-22-year-olds doing the swimming—and in the late 1960s, students responded. The sometimes violent protests against the Vietnam War at Berkeley and Harvard and Columbia were often seen as immature, but the protests and the quests also reflected students’ belief that universities had sold out. They had become career-minting outgrowths of corporate and defense power at the hands of the “best and the brightest” who were then “prosecuting the profoundly immoral [Vietnam] war.” Students believed, as well, that the universities had ignored those groups, mostly ethnicities of color, living with arbitrary power’s effects. 

The Columbia-turned-Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell was one of those opposed to the students’ sometimes-violent demonstrations who still perceived the problem the demonstrations exposed. He summed up the challenge he saw it creating in 1968:  

If there is a problem for intellectuals, it would seem to me a double one, which is part of the role of a university [after 1945]. It’s how you humanize a technocracy and how you tame the apocalypse. Having seen some of my students attain the apocalypse, I would submit that it is much easier to humanize a technocracy.

Humanized Technocrats versus Social Justice Warriors 

Much of the development of higher elite education can be explained through this framework. On the one hand, humanizing technocrats (economists, lawyers and doctors, political scientists, sometimes psychologists) made universities into de facto government-backed corporations while trying to make professionalization and power more compatible by accenting leadership and good works. This meant an increasing emphasis on both “teaching the technical skills demanded by a complex society…” and on promoting “social responsibility” to “inspire…students with a purpose large enough to fill their lives with meaning ….” The new emphasis was criticized by Bernard Bailyn among others for diminishing the promotion of “learning for its own sake.”

From 1968 to 2000, leadership schools like the Kennedy School became regular features of universities; economics degrees skyrocketed; and “quantitative reasoning…[became] an essential element in undergraduate education.” University presidents from Bell’s humanized technocracy talked about “blur[ring]” the lines between applied sciences and the liberal arts in favor of “data-driven ways of knowing.” Meantime, the majority of this humanized technocracy endorsed affirmative action since, as the sociologist Nathan Glazer put it, “the Harvards, the Berkeleys, and the Amhersts…have become, for better or worse, the gateways to prominence, privilege, wealth, and power in American society” and “to exclude [certain groups] from them by abolishing affirmative action would undermine [their] legitimacy.” 

On the other hand, academics whose work increasingly focused on historically marginalized communities which were detritus of America’s technocracy (anthropologists, sociologists, gender and ethnic studies professors) pushed themselves and their students toward explicit activism. They were galvanized by what they saw as the genuinely apocalyptic situations of marginalized groups ignored by process-absorbed technocrats. Many of these academic-turning-toward-social-justice fields were naturally receptive to likely beneficiaries of affirmative action, who often come from marginalized groups. As these trends increased, ethnic studies courses and departments went from roughly zero to 700 between 1968 and 1990. Humanized technocrats sometimes tried to invest seriously in these or related departments, for example the African American Studies Department at Harvard. But the most obvious effect on student life seemed unintended by administrators, even if it was sometimes encouraged by them: advocacy groups became regular features of campus under the label “multiculturalism,” sometimes shutting down speech in the name of “harm” to marginalized communities. 

An institution where scholarship is pushed by humanized technocrats is unlikely to ask hard questions about the relationship between authority and freedom on campus.

Between 1968 and 1990, the main opponents of the technocracy-advocacy divide were practitioners of the liberal arts. Some of these professors still tried to preserve room for a humanities-based approach to learning that pushed students to pursue philosophy in service of knowledge and genuine enlightenment. But they tended to emphasize this practice in relation to the practice of university life, particularly elite universities—as a “minoritarian” position in increasingly technocratic and ideological bastions. Contemporary, applied questions of power’s effects were less a subject of their thought.

What’s been minimized by the convergence of these three approaches is the academy’s ability to promote careful and accessible questioning of power and its effects. The effect of this absence on the leaders it produced was epitomized in 2016, the last year of the Administration of America’s first black president whose White House was staffed by a multiracial cohort from the Ivy Leagues. That year, Eddie Glaude, the Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton, wrote in his book Democracy in Black that: 

The idea that you can have black leaders representing the interests of all black people but who are not accountable to black constituents…undermines mechanisms of accountability as black elites broker on behalf of black people whose interests are, so it is claimed, readily identifiable….The quality of life in black neighborhoods has changed dramatically since the 1960s. The steady loss of jobs, decades of government neglect, and deepening class divisions within black America have left certain black communities profoundly isolated…

It was reinforced that same year with a controversy over the work of the sociologist Alice Goffman, also the daughter of an eminent postwar practitioner in the field. There, the academy’s increasingly specialized research methods and the focus on marginalized communities merged to torpedo a potentially revolutionary book that made a specific criticism of concentrated power and its effects on liberty. 

Goffman’s subject was the “War on Crime” from the Kennedy-Johnson to the Obama Administrations, and its impact on black communal life and upward mobility deplored by Glaude. This meant it involved observation-based field research with the black community, which opened it to criticism on two fronts. As The New York Times put it, “as a qualitative researcher, Goffman paid relatively scant attention to the dominant mode of her data-preoccupied field…” and also “frustrated…critics [with] the fact that,” as a well-educated white woman, “she…[didn’t expend] a lot of time or energy…on an accounting of her own privilege.” Eventually, backlash ensued that seemed out-of-proportion to what may or may not have been the book’s flaws. At the hands of technocrats speaking the language of methodology and apocalyptics speaking the language of “positionality,” she was hounded from academic life. 

Looking for Solutions 

Today’s controversy over Affirmative Action and DEI, especially at elite universities, doesn’t show much sign of undoing the fifty-year knot that’s squeezed out the question of power and its effects on liberty. 

Since October 7, social justice advocates have become more obviously apocalyptic, intimidating students, silencing speech and assaulting the idea, shared by genuine power questioners from Socrates through Milton, that knowledge is founded on reason, not force. Nor did this intimidation really begin October 7; indeed, James Hankins has indelibly described in these pages the effect at Harvard of years of quieter institutional intimidation in DEI’s name. But since April, this apocalypticism has become actually impossible to ignore. Students have paralyzed campuses in an overt revolt against a symbol of the humanized technocracy’s proximity to government power: universities’ (extremely limited) investment in corporations with ties to the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The humanized technocrats’ alternative to this revolt brings its own limits, examples of which are provided by some of the leading advocates of post-October 7 university reform. One of them, Harvard’s Danielle Allen, advocates and practices progressive politics based on political theory, not careful research of power and its effects. Another, Steven Pinker, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, recently wrote an entire book premised on making a philosophical case that “the Enlightenment is working” since “the world has improved by every [metric] of human flourishing.” A third, Flynn Cratty, is the associate director of the Human Flourishing program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, which encourages undergraduates to read “the great books” while directing research to use metrics to solve questions of happiness. 

This has very little to do with using intellect to solve actual problems of power and its effects on liberty on the ground. Nor does it necessarily help the university, since an institution where scholarship is pushed by humanized technocrats is unlikely to ask hard questions about the relationship between authority and freedom on campus. Indeed, such a university, which will be inevitably dissatisfying to at least some of its students, will likely end up inviting a different version of “apocalyptic” opposition—this time perhaps with the issue of climate, not ethnicity, as the dominant concern. 

The solution to this problem may come from the states. In Arizona, civic education programs in universities work with students to analyze how power gets allocated. In Indiana, legislation is ensuring not just that DEI programs are being pushed back but that tenure is dependent on faculty featuring provocative views in the classroom. This democratic intervention is a direct response to the failure of tenure at state and private universities to allow for intellectual exploration free from the blandishments and coercions of arbitrary power. 

Focusing on states has another possible benefit which Lee Trepanier has suggested in these pages: providing a site for making liberal arts’ fundamental question, how to pursue knowledge for its own sake and live a purposeful life, applicable to subjects often studied at state colleges and universities—“the crafts and trades of vocational training…or the service professions.” Since questions of purpose lead naturally to questions of agency, explorations like these are hospitable to creating careful, thoughtful questioners of power. Certainly, in the past, state universities have served as the sites of pioneering intellectual departments devoted to that purpose.

Fifty-six years after Daniel Bell laid out a choice between humanizing the technocracy or “attain[ing] the apocalypse,” we may be arriving at a different solution: shrinking the technocracy to avoid the apocalypse. This solution proceeds directly from the expansive republic of accountable institutions envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and founded the University of Virginia, and James Madison, who drafted the Constitution and succeeded Jefferson as the University’s rector, which successors like Abraham Lincoln made into a reality. 

In a country in which government-backed funding has pushed higher education to become corporatized, and the most publicized counter-examples are themselves funded by private donors, this move might seem radical. But what has been radicalized the last seventy-five years is the role of higher education—by the national government and its funding power. In this context, returning power to the states is part of the essentially conserving, and conservative, commitment to allowing the successes of tradition to be our guide.