The current culture in higher education is afflicted by a situation analogous to regulatory capture in industry, nationally syndicated political columnist George Will GS ’68 said in a two-person discussion with politics professor Robert George on Monday.
Just as companies learn to produce changes in regulatory bodies that are favorable to themselves, it is possible that the tenure system produces professors who are largely replicas of the tenure committee, Will explained. However, he added, this is not the full picture because small groups and publications, whether on campuses or in Washington, D.C., can have disproportionately large effects on the intellectual culture.
One example of this phenomenon, Will noted, is the success and proliferation of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies since the 1980s, which has changed the culture of law schools toward a heightened awareness of originalist interpretations of the Constitution.
Serious conservative thought has forced President Barack Obama to be the first “principled progressive” president since Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879, in the sense that his discussion of his political views has had to encompass political fundamentals, Will said, as opposed to political expediencies and emotions. In particular, he explained, Obama has taken an active part in a debate about the authority of the executive branch that extends back to Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Class of 1771.
However, college campuses have lost the level of relevance in public life they once had, Will said. During the John Kennedy and Richard Nixon administrations, college campuses were seen as political “ornaments” that conferred legitimacy and relevance to one’s views, and college faculty members like Henry Kissinger eventually grew to have a significant role in public affairs.
The tenure of more radical faculty members, however, has diminished this connection between the ivory tower and Washington, D.C., Will said.
“The most explosive force in the modern world isn’t capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism — it’s boredom,” Will said, paraphrasing a publication of George’s. “When people get bored, all hell breaks loose. And I do believe campuses, with their homogenized culture, can be boring, and as a result I think young people … are going to chafe against this, and this chafing and boredom will be explosive.”
George highlighted what he believed to be the differences between the University and other institutions — that, because of a “critical mass” of dissenters and people of heterodox views, speakers are not shouted down or uninvited, and students of views different than their professors and graders are accepted.
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