Columbia exemplifies the failure of universities

Yesterday, with growing sadness, I read a wonderful book about teaching and learning, written by one of the great teachers of the past century. Why the sadness? Because the author, Gilbert Highet, was a revered professor at Columbia in the Fifties and Sixties. It is impossible to read his paean to learning, written a half-century ago, without weeping for what his university has become.

When Highet wrote of learning, he meant absorbing from history’s greatest minds, from Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, and teaching their lessons to students who wished to learn from them. Reading Highet’s words a half century later, we realize he was speaking of another time and place — virtually another university.

Today, at Columbia and its sister institution, Barnard, some students are stomping on that treasured legacy. They are a minority, to be sure, and you could rightly say that there are always barbarians at the gates of learning. The problem is that they are now inside the gates, intimidating students who want to study and learn. Their fiercest opposition is to anyone who disagrees with them. They have plenty of support from faculty and silence from administrators who should know better.

The failure of university leaders to punish these violations is especially troubling. They have a basic duty to keep students and faculty safe, to preserve and nourish a benign environment for teaching, learning and research. They are failing in that basic duty. University trustees, who should hold them accountable, are also failing.

Their failure yields a predictable result: still more disruptions going forward. That’s exactly what is happening now. The recent disruptions come after the same universities refused to punish encampments and violent takeovers of university buildings last spring. Public officials, led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, did nothing to prosecute this rampant illegality — yet another failure.

The disruptions come in the name of “free Palestine” (or “hate Israel,” which means the same thing for them). Their militant leaders come from the Middle East and the American left, supported by antifa and funded by “progressive” foundations. (Just look at the expensive tents in the encampments.) They have taken over buildings, coerced fellow students and disrupted classes. University leaders did nothing to stop these outrages or reestablish order on their campuses. No punishments. No expulsions for students who violated the most basic rules of any university. Nothing.

Columbia is hardly alone. The Department of Justice is now investigating at least ten major universities for their failure to protect Jewish students. The list includes UCLA, Northwestern, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Berkeley, among others. The immediate charge is virulent antisemitism and abject failure to protect Jewish students from threats and coercion, as required by law.

But it is crucial to understand that the universities’ failure extends well beyond one beleaguered group.

These universities have repeatedly failed in their fundamental duty to protect all students and, more broadly, to protect the environment for teaching, learning and research, to ensure it is free from intimidation and disruption. Both students and faculty need that protection. They need institutions of higher learning where free inquiry and free speech are valued, not crushed by thugs.

The same schools have failed in other ways. They have hired far too many faculty whose goal is to indoctrinate their students. They demand rigid conformity to pre-ordained views, instead of encouraging robust discussion among diverse viewpoints. Whole departments adhere to a single ideology and refuse to hire faculty or admit students who differ. Conservative students no longer bother to apply. Many Jewish students are turning to southern universities, which ensure their protection.

These “selection effects” are the predictable result of failures by universities like Columbia, Harvard and UCLA. They have repeatedly failed to foster an environment where open inquiry, vigorous discussion and serious intellectual disputes are prized. The same university leaders have created bloated, costly bureaucracies on campus, filled with ideological zealots. This ideological bias among administrators is well-known on campus, but not beyond it. It’s a major problem for anyone who doesn’t march in step since these administrators oversee student activities, housing and discipline.

“Progressive” faculty contribute to these problems. They fill whole departments in the humanities, social sciences and some professional schools (especially schools of social work and journalism). The faculty there are intolerant of other views, the antithesis of what good teachers should be.

Contrast their failure with what Professor Highet wrote so lovingly of higher learning. “The chief aim of education,” he said, “is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning.” Books, he said, are not “lifeless paper, but ‘minds’ alive on the shelves.”

He was echoing a wonderful comment Machiavelli made to a friend five centuries ago. The great scholar had been exiled from Florence and spent his days working on a farm, a few miles from the city. “When evening comes,” he wrote, “I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely.”

Just try doing that at Columbia or Barnard.

Students at too many universities are being denied the right to “nourish themselves,” to think freely and seriously because of political encampments outside the library and shouting inside. They cannot learn from what Matthew Arnold once called “the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits…”

While some students scream and administrators stand mute, other students are denied their rights to think, learn, listen to others’ views and reach their own conclusions. Those rights should be fundamental in our universities. Today, they are not.