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The Way We Were

Education, Culture Higher Ed, Culture & Society

Another college president has caved. After months of protests at Ithaca College alleging campus leaders are indifferent to racism, President Tom Rochon announced in January he would be stepping down before the end of his contract.

“I recognize that colleges evolve through eras defined by new opportunities and challenges," he said in a written statement. "I believe it is best for IC to be led in the future by a president chosen by the board specifically to make a fresh start on these challenges, including those that became so apparent to us all last semester."

“Though today's protesters like to claim the mantle of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, the truth is that college kids today have it pretty cushy: no danger of being drafted for them.”

Those challenges included an offensive fraternity party (the theme was "Preps and Crooks") and a panel discussion on the future of the school in which a white man referred to a black woman as "savage" after she described herself as having a "savage hunger" to succeed. The frat party was canceled before it happened, and the wayward panelist apologized profusely for what he had stupidly meant as a compliment. But the narrative had been established that the college is rife with racism. How, short of putting student activists in charge of the school, could the administration have made the protesters happy?

After four decades of capitulation to insurgents, the traditional ideals that made American universities great have been officially jettisoned.

If you want to see the beginning of the end in higher education, you might start with the Scranton Report. In 1970, Richard Nixon established the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, which came to be known by the last name of its chairman, former Pennsylvania governor William Scranton. In the wake of the killings of four protesters at Kent State University in Ohio and two at Jackson State University in Mississippi, the administration thought it necessary to investigate campus unrest and offer guidance to universities and the public on what to do about it.

Contributors to the report ranged from the New Haven chief of police to the president of Howard University. They included traditional political scientists — professors such as Nathan Glazer and James Q. Wilson — as well as student activists, including Joseph Rhodes (a Harvard junior fellow whose scholarship was devoted to the racism of imperial Britain). The commission heard testimony from people across the political spectrum in government and academia. The Chronicle of Higher Education thought it so important it reprinted the entire 419-page report.

Much has changed since Scranton was released. As one observer of the commission's proceedings, Suzanne Garment, recently reflected, "campus unrest of that time makes ours look like beanbag, with the contrast between grievances — from the Vietnam War to micro-aggressions — almost comic." Indeed, though today's protesters like to claim the mantle of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, the truth is that college kids today have it pretty cushy: no danger of being drafted for them. And while they may believe that this country does not offer equal protection to racial minorities, the evidence on college campuses is pretty weak. There are no Halloween costumes or house parties that would make a campus in 2016 resemble the Jim Crow South.

Despite the seriousness of the problems back then — or perhaps because of it — the Scranton Report exudes a calm confidence, the sense that level-headed people from different sides of an issue can get together to investigate a problem and arrive at a solution. Of course, at that time people had a lot more faith in government commissions: Whether it was violence or the federal budget, there was nothing some smart guys in a room couldn't solve. After taking much testimony and talking it all over, the commission recommended offering more funding to black colleges and universities and more funding to increase, through recruitment, the presence of racial minorities at other institutions. They also suggested the appointment of administrators to negotiate between student radicals and college leaders.

But Scranton also reflected a long-gone consensus on what a university was for and who was in charge of it. "We call upon all members of the university to reaffirm that the proper functions of the university are teaching and learning, research and scholarship," the authors wrote. The commission members' understanding of academic freedom was also a relic of another time. "Academic institutions must be free .  .  . from outside interference, and free from internal intimidation," they wrote. "The pursuit of knowledge cannot continue without the free exchange of ideas." Universities, they urged, "must remain politically neutral." And the commission quaintly advised students: "Heckling speakers is not only bad manners but is inimical to all the values that a university stands for." When dealing with law enforcement, students were encouraged to avoid "the use of obscenities and derogatory terms such as 'pigs' and 'honkies.' "

The Scranton Report was an effort to deal with campus unrest while upholding the traditional ideals of the university and at the same time mollifying the insurgents. Since that time those two forces — the traditional ideals and the new politics — have been living in tension on the campus, with periodic eruptions when a conservative ventures onto campus to give a speech or when a naïve professor accidentally makes a statement at odds with the reigning race and gender orthodoxies.

The resolution of these disputes is always in favor of the protesters. Speakers are disinvited, faculty members reprimanded, dissenters denounced. And more recently it's college presidents who are being targeted. The result? No defenders of the traditional ideals are to be found at universities, and the insurgent groups can turn the campus upside down to demand more resources and respect any time they want.

In the end, the Scranton Commission recommended that President Nixon use his "moral leadership" to solve this problem. But Nixon refused. In his letter following the release of the report, the president said that responsibility for keeping the peace on campus "belongs strictly to the academic community." He was right — this was not a problem the federal government was ever going to solve — but the academic community failed miserably.

While campuses have not seen the kind of violence that they did in the '60s and '70s, they have remained in a state of turmoil for almost a half-century. It's clear who the winners are.

This piece originally appeared in the February 15, 2016 Issue of The Weekly Standard

This piece originally appeared in The Weekly Standard