No War but the Culture War?

Conservatives are mobilized to oppose the left’s long march through higher ed. The old Marxist battle cry — no war but the class war — is woefully out of date as it applies to the contemporary American scene. Today’s adage, echoed from the halls of Congress on down to public school classrooms, is “No war but the culture war.” And nowhere is the culture war more bitter — or more consequential — than the university.

From the conservative perspective, at least, academe is the source of some of the greatest challenges that America faces today. Higher education is not, in fact, an isolated ivory tower — it is where the nation’s elites, for better or worse, are formed. As a result, trends on campus have enormous consequences for the course of the country writ large. The university matters — its influence has been evident in almost every major cultural debate over the course of the past decade.

For years, conventional wisdom held that the more outlandish and illiberal iterations of campus politics would remain confined to the classrooms. “Do young people, drunk on their first engagement in politics, sometimes express themselves in ways that are hyperbolic and bullying? Absolutely,” the writer Amanda Marcotte scoffed in Salon in 2015. “Most of them will probably grow out of it, and maybe even be a bit embarrassed at how they took things too far in their college years.”?

But today, many of the ideas that one encounters in academe — that small-l liberal norms surrounding free speech and debate perpetuate oppression; that words can be tantamount to violence; that the pursuit of equitable outcomes justifies explicit racial discrimination; that “white supremacy,” in the words of Biden’s UN Ambassador, is “weaved … into our founding documents and principles” — have become widely accepted in varied milieus from Silicon Valley to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.?

@drjknanda