The University: Sickness Unto Death

It’s university week as various opinion media trot out their annual state of the academy pieces. In
James Piereson’s
The Left University we saw a picture of the university drawn using the German historical method,
penciling out the progress of the academy from teacher of absolutes to liberal research institution to the current
left university that amounts to an establishment of secular religion.

On the other hand,
Victor Davis Hanson shows the university as a corrupt institution approaching terminal
sickness, or as we Kierkegaardians say, sickness unto death. You can tell there is something wrong by
comparing the antics of today’s college presidents with the giants of the university’s golden age: men
like “Woodrow Wilson (at Princeton), Robert Hutchens (at Chicago) or James Bryant Conant (at Harvard).”
Today’s presidents are pigmies by comparison.

There’s the infamous trashing of Harvard President Summers by the Harvard faculty for daring to suggest informally that
there might be innate differences between men and women.

There’s “Denice Denton, the newly appointed chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz,
heralded Mr. Summers’s public humiliation as a `teachable moment.’” Maybe there is a teachable moment
also in discussing
the shenanigans surrounding her appointment. Her partner got herself a six-figure job at the
university and a move-in allowance in the deal. What’s all that about?

And what about University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman?

She recently resigned, ostensibly following athletic scandals, but more
likely as a result of the uproar over Ward Churchill. We remember him now as the strange
professor who compared the 3,000 murdered in the Twin Towers and Pentagon to "Little Eichmanns,"
supposed cogs in the military-industrial wheel who deserved their fate.

It turned out that everything about Churchill was a lie: his Native American ancestry and his academic
achievements.

But none of these worthies hold a candle to new Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau of the University of
California at Berkeley. On taking up his office

the chancellor complained that Berkeley has fewer Native American, Hispanic,
and African-American students enrolled than it should--the campus was only 3% black, 9.5%
Hispanic, and 0.4% Native American, in
contrast with about 45% Asian-American and about 33% white.

The chancellor blames the underrepresentation of traditionally marginalized minorities on Proposition
209 that banned racial quotas in state government.

"I personally don’t believe that most of the people who voted for 209 intended this consequence."

Oh really. But it really doesn’t matter what the people intended, chancellor. As a famous United States
Attorney General often used to say: “It’s the law.” Your job, as a government functionary, is to obey
the law. For changing the law we have legislatures and elections, initiatives from the people, and all
that stuff.

You wanna change the law? Run for election.