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 he campus culture
wars are back — with a vengeance. The scandalous suppression
of David Horowitz’s
ad
opposing slave reparations continues, with the vast majority of
college papers refusing to print it. Last Friday, for daring to
run the ad, the Brown Daily Herald saw its entire press run
stolen by a mob of students, who then tried to force their way into
the newspaper’s office to destroy the remaining 100 copies of the
paper carrying the ad. Herald staffers had to lock themselves
in, while the mob pounded the doors and demanded an apology and
financial amends. Meanwhile, the debate over the abolition of the
SAT has hit Nightline and the cover of Time, while
Harvey Mansfield’s fight against grade inflation at Harvard made
it to 20/20. And looming over it all is the maddeningly foolish,
but still active campaign by conservative Republican senators to
reappoint President Clinton’s man, William Ferris, as head of the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
Unlike the campus culture wars of the eighties, today’s battles
over higher education aren’t about letting multiculturalism and
postmodernism into the academy. The question today is whether conservatives
are going to be entirely shut out. Nothing exemplifies the plight
of traditionalists within the academy more clearly than the now
superheated battle to save the St. Ignatius Institute, the award-winning
great-books program at the University of San Francisco that, for
a generation, has educated some of our finest Catholic citizens,
journalists, and public servants.
As
I reported last month, 25 years of tension between the liberal
Jesuits who run the University of San Francisco and the traditional
Catholics who teach at the St. Ignatius Institute broke into the
open in January, when USF’s new president, Steven Privett S.J.,
summarily fired the directors of SII and attempted to reorganize
the program’s staff. Privett, a proponent of multiculturalism, and
an afficionado of neo-Marxist liberation theology, wasn’t satisfied
with the leftist Jesuit monopoly in power within the university
as a whole — including the department of theology and religious
studies. He and his fellow Jesuits were determined to root out the
St. Ignatius Institute, the one remaining program at USF where traditional
Catholicism reigned.
But Privett’s coup, undertaken in secrecy, without the usual consultations,
has turned into a fiasco. The traditionalists, ordinarily mild-mannered
folk, have staged a rebellion. And though the powers that be at
USF are stacked against them, victory for the beleaguered St. Ignatius
Institute is by no means out of the question.
The rebellion at the St. Ignatius Institute is a case study in what
conservatives should do — and can do — but too seldom
have the guts to do, to fight the leftist powers within the academy.
Father President Privett’s firing of the beloved, long-time administrators
of St. Ignatius Institute prompted the core faculty to resign from
the program (these professors would still retain their tenure in
their respective departments). And Privett’s move immediately stirred
the loyal SII alumni into action. The Friends of the St. Ignatius
Institute promptly put up a website publicizing the rebellion and
calling for support from the university community and the general
public. Supportive columns in the Wall Street Journal, National
Review Online, and several Catholic publications followed. After
my earlier column appeared, NRO readers flooded the
website with a hundred hits per hour and numerous letters of
support (for which the Friends of the Saint Ignatius Institute are
deeply grateful). A campus-wide poll showed that 96% of USF students
were “very upset” about Privett’s actions.
The unexpected uproar took Privett by surprise, but USF’s board
of trustees, having just chosen the new president, was ill-disposed
to second guess him. Although some on the board may have been disturbed
by the fact that Privett consulted with only a few board members
(and those, inadequately) prior to his move against SII, Privett
still looked unbeatable.
But Privett doesn’t look unbeatable anymore. A statement protesting
the fiasco at USF, and signed by some of the most prominent scholars,
journalists, and public figures in the country, has attracted major
press attention and is building new momentum against Privett. (Full
disclosure: I drafted the statement and circulated it for signatures.)
Appearing
as a full-page ad this past weekend in the San Francisco
Chronicle and in the bay area weekly, Catholic San Francisco
(and paid for by the Friends of the St. Ignatius Institute), the
statement condemns the effective gutting of the St. Ignatius Institute
and bemoans the exclusion of traditional religious perspectives
from the supposedly “diverse” curricula of our colleges and universities.
Signers include former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett,
AEI’s Michael Novak, Princeton’s Robert George, Amherst’s Hadley
Arkes, well-known Catholic columnist George Weigel, First Things
editor Richard John Neuhaus, Editor and Publisher of Crisis
magazine Deal Hudson, University of Chicago Divinity School Professor
and famed public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Weekly
Standard book editor, J. Bottum.
The full-page ad carrying the statement has jump-started the press,
with wire-service reports and articles in the San Francisco papers
now due. Still more ominous for President Privett, the national
newspapers and weekly magazines are watching the story, waiting
for the critical meeting of the USF board of trustees this Friday,
March 23, at which the president’s gutting of the St. Ignatius Institute
will be reviewed. And some key USF contributors are starting to
make noise, with some even withdrawing support.
So Privett’s honeymoon with the board may be over. The objective
situation has changed. The battle over the St. Ignatius Institute
is now a symbol of the growing exclusion of traditional religious
and cultural perspectives from the academy. Unless the affair is
resolved this Friday by the board, USF faces a publicity and fundraising
nightmare. That very real prospect may induce a majority of the
board to reconsider the bland reassurances they’ve received up to
now from President Privett. The University of San Francisco is not
a well-known institution. Whatever happens to the St. Ignatius Institute
will permanently stamp USF’s image nationally. Up to now, only President
Privett’s reputation has been on the line. But if the board endorses
Privett’s campaign against the St. Ignatius Institute, the university
as a whole will have to bear responsibility. It behooves the members
of the board to think carefully about their decision.
It behooves all of us to think carefully about this critical new
juncture in the culture wars. Although the outcome cannot be foreseen,
it is clear that we are at a turning point. The last traditionalist
holdouts in the academy are under siege, but fighting back. We simply
do not know whether they will be fully expelled, whether they will
manage to secure a continuing foothold, or whether the whole sorry
spectacle will finally provoke a national reaction against the travesty
of a university system from which the ideas and beliefs of half
our nation are systematically excluded.
After weeks of publicity about the shameful banishment of David
Horowitz’s ad from college newspapers, the knowledge that leftist
mobs can still confiscate an entire run of papers with impunity
— literally besieging the courageous editors of the Brown
Daily Herald in their offices — is the measure of the emergency
we face. And where is William Ferris of the National Endowment for
the Humanities at this moment of crisis? He is busy currying favor
with conservative Republican senators by publishing books on the
culture of the South.
Will President Bush really pass up the opportunity — nay the
necessity — to appoint someone who can call the academy to
account at this moment of crisis? Will the one part of our society
most entirely in the thrall of the Left be abandoned to the besieging
mob by a Republican president? Don’t young Catholics deserve the
option of a traditional Catholic education? And how can an ethic
of free speech survive in this country without universities that
educate for democracy? Save the NEH President Bush, and let all
of us save the Saint Ignatius Institute.
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