The theologians and secular intellectuals who had the respect of average Americans and the political class wrote books and articles that sometimes criticized their country. But they were not cynics. They did not interpret every action by opponents as purely a self-interested power grab, and they did not think of their main professional duty as helping laypeople see the world through a hermeneutic of suspicion. Many had served in combat or government administration during wartime and retained a core confidence in the American project. “We cannot make democracy a fighting faith merely by exhortation nor by self-flagellation…. we must somehow dissolve the anxieties which drive people in free society to become traitors to freedom,” the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1949.
This spirit of critical patriotism extended into the classroom. After World War II, colleges nationwide drew inspiration from Harvard’s 1945 report, General Education in a Free Society, which recommended assigning “great classic books” to help students “reconcile the sense of pattern and direction deriving from heritage with the sense of experiment and innovation deriving from science.” The point was to study history, philosophy, and literature with an eye toward the long time horizon of a civilization rather than the immediate demands of the job market or election cycle. Yes, American universities were helping to fight the Cold War by focusing research on the space race and other military applications (thanks to unprecedented levels of federal funding). But they also nurtured a counterculture: not in the sense of a political underground, but in resistance to utilitarian pressures to define “useful skills” narrowly.
Today, by contrast, many academics—especially humanists—have adopted pedagogies and research methods based on critique, cynicism, and deconstruction. Many lack the credibility and perspective that come with time in a military uniform or government service. In a series of autobiographical essays by retired Yale faculty published recently by the university, veterans dominated the older entries; their numbers dropped to nearly zero among recent retirees. Instead, many wrote about avoiding the Vietnam draft. Professors, like other Americans, lost trust in institutions.
That loss of trust has gradually extended to their own institutional homes, the universities themselves—especially as vocational majors like communications, exercise science, and engineering have won over student interest and administration support. In an effort to cope with the resulting crisis of purpose—and feeling, increasingly, like the have-nots of the academic prestige hierarchy—some humanists have found a new identity in the culture-war tendency to politicize all parts of life and deem certain academic methods and topics ideologically unacceptable.
The problem was never the presence of left-wing dissent in academia. Professors at secular universities have long leaned left. The problem was that, over time, elite universities made cynical critique the marker of original scholarship and adopted a narrow idea of what counts as countercultural “life of the mind.”