Book Review- The Assault on American Excellence - Wall Street Journal

[johnkarls]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/politics-b ... 1567177930


Politics Books: The Agony of the Elites
A pointed critique of egalitarianism on campus by former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman.

By Barton Swaim - Barton has written for the Journal as a regular book reviewer in 2012 and began a column on political books in 2017. He came to the Journal as an editorial-page writer in 2018. Before that he was opinion editor at the Weekly Standard. He is the author of "The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics" (2015).

Aug. 30, 2019


What is college for? The answers that colleges themselves give are almost exclusively utilitarian: A college education prepares you to succeed in the global marketplace, trains you to “think critically,” and so on. Anthony Kronman proposes a very different answer. The true purpose of an undergraduate education, he argues in “The Assault on American Excellence” (Free Press, 272 pages, $27), is to induct students into an “aristocracy” of soul and mind.

The author, a committed liberal and former dean of Yale Law School, is fully aware that the idea of aristocracy is anathema on college and university campuses today. What he has in mind, though, has nothing to do with lineage or race; rather it involves “a reverence for human excellence that is valuable for its own sake and as an aid to the independent-mindedness on which the health of our democracy depends.”

To explain his idea of aristocracy, Mr. Kronman draws on the writings of John Adams, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Alexis de Tocqueville and H.L. Mencken. All four believed that the purpose of a humane education was to give its recipients the sort of subtlety of mind and solidity of character that would enable them to lead and govern; and all four believed that American culture constantly threatened to ruin the education of the country’s best and brightest by democratizing it; or, as we would say, by dumbing it down. Tocqueville, the most insightful and systematic of the four, believed that an educated aristocracy was necessary in a democracy like America’s to counterbalance its natural tendency toward populism and demagoguery. In “Democracy in America,” he suggested that the church was the primary means by which ancient learning might be preserved from “the ills that equality can produce,” but elsewhere he asserted that “a few excellent universities” could accomplish the same goal.

What we’re witnessing on today’s elite campuses, Mr. Kronman thinks—hysterical accusations of racism, demands that monuments be torn down, assaults on conservative speakers—is the infiltration of an otherwise valuable egalitarian spirit into a realm in which it doesn’t belong. We rightly value equality in law and politics, he contends, but to overemphasize equality in university life contradicts the inherently aristocratic and “elitist” purpose of higher education and so turns the institutions into highfalutin vocational schools.

I am not convinced that the spirit of egalitarianism is somehow creeping into higher education from somewhere else in society. The bizarre scenes unfolding on college campuses are far worse than anything we see in our political or economic life; universities are leading, not following, in PC lunacy. The root of the trouble that Mr. Kronman rightly laments is modern liberalism itself—a political worldview that, ironically given its name, elevates equality at the expense of liberty. Most liberal elites find a way to live with the contradiction between their egalitarian philosophy and their eliteness; Mr. Kronman has made the mistake of trying to make them cohere.

He rightly inveighs against today’s universities for their obsession with “diversity,” which they define mainly in terms of race, and so fostering a tribalist attitude on the part of faculty and, especially, students. That would seem to require a repudiation of affirmative action, but no: Mr. Kronman lays the blame instead on University of California v. Bakke, the 1978 Supreme Court decision written by Justice Lewis Powell. The university had instituted admissions policies to favor minority applicants in view of past injustices done to them. The high court eventually invalidated that policy on the grounds that it unfairly punished qualified white applicants but ruled that an institution could favor minority applicants for the purpose of “achieving a diverse student body.”

So, Mr. Kronman believes, rather than straightforwardly favoring racial minorities in the admissions process for the purpose of righting old wrongs and advancing racial justice, schools must now deny that this is what they’re doing and pretend that their admissions policies are meant to foster diversity in the classroom. If schools were allowed to discriminate as a matter of justice, Mr. Kronman implies, the practice of race-conscious admissions might end some day. Now, “diversity” always being a worthy goal, it never will. Bakke, he argues, has allowed the diversity industry vastly to expand its reach on American campuses and thus encouraged students to think of themselves as aggrieved or guilty members of victim groups. There can be no disinterested search for truth among young people who think of themselves in this way.

I applaud the author for daring to criticize the cult of diversity, but does he really think that the lunatic fixation on racial injustice among many students, faculty and administrators at today’s elite universities came about as a result of a muddled Supreme Court ruling? Or that universities would be better equipped to demand excellence from their students if only Justice Powell had let the University of California discriminate more openly? I dissent.

In “Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses” (Yale, 142 pages, $25), Wesleyan president Michael Roth attempts to offer a realistic assessment of the cultural controversies dogging American higher education. Mr. Roth’s book nicely captures the dilemma that university administrators find themselves in: hemmed in by campus radicals on one side and a bemused public on the other.

On the question of affirmative action, for instance, Mr. Roth acknowledges some of the unintended consequences of race-conscious admissions policies but insists that, all the same, the post-Bakke stress on the value of diversity is good and right. “In my own classes,” he writes, “I’ve seen time and time again how learning can be deepened when a student brings a surprising perspective into our conversations. In a course on virtue . . . when an undocumented student talks about a ‘moral hero’ from her family who has sacrificed enormously in order for others to pursue an education, it amplifies issues of justice we’ve read about in powerful ways.”

This strikes me as a well-intentioned but after-the-fact justification for a corrosive policy. A naturally curious person will encounter many people from backgrounds and circumstances different from his own in the ordinary course of life; he doesn’t need to haul off to Wesleyan to hear about some kid’s “moral hero.” After a half-century of social-justice mania in admissions offices, administrative departments and academic programs, American colleges and universities are today frequently paralyzed by racial and other group-based tensions. Our most ostentatiously forward-looking institutions have somehow moved backwards.