Musa al-Gharbi argues that the progressive left has successfully conquered university administration and schools of education.
As Sam Abrams’ research has shown, college administrators hail predominantly from the arts, humanities and social sciences. Graduates of these fields often have a distressingly limited understanding of how, concretely, many social institutions operate – and how, specifically, these institutions might be leveraged to achieve particular ends. However, those who gravitate towards administration often do understand, or come to understand, how to ‘work the (higher ed) system.’ And one of the key things they have done with this institutional knowledge is expand the size and influence of the administrative class itself.
…Perhaps the most genius aspect this approach (targeting ed schools) is the indirectness. This strategy was implemented in a very deliberate, systematic, forward-thinking way by a constellation of activists, scholars and practitioners (who were very explicit about the political goals of their pedagogical approach!). Nonetheless, when their efforts began to come to fruition, it appeared as though it was a spontaneous, organic, student-driven movement. Young people reached (elite) universities, and increasingly the workplace (in particular industries), attempting to mold these institutions in accordance with the logics that have been inculcated into them since primary school — by teachers executing the curricula designed by these activists, practitioners and scholars. Yet rather than taking up their disagreement with the people who had designed said curricula, who had laid out these modes of thought and engagement, critics were instead forced to contend with the students themselves — by then, true believers. The optics of this were not great (for the critics, that is, who came off as reactionary, out of touch, overly-judgmental, etc. for their apparent denigration of the students and their views).
Some random notes of my own.
1. I suspect that a lot of the growth in college administration serves to provide an employment safety-valve for people earning degrees, especially Ph.D’s, that are not very marketable.
2. My high school experience definitely preceded the leftist take-over of schools of education. My freshman year, the principal brought in Up With People to perform for us. They struck me as an attempt to promote social conformity, so that we wouldn’t become hippies or Vietnam War resisters. I told those around me that this was a right-wing propaganda exercise. The experience stuck with me, primarily because when I voiced my suspicions a very attractive classmate sneered at me, “Arnold, you have no soul.”
3. I don’t think that those of us on the right should try to make an issue of the political orientation of college administrators or at schools of education. Instead, I think that we should push for intellectual rigor in college courses and in education research and policy. I would rather make my stand on the cause of intellectual rigor than on the cause of political balance.
4. My father was a college administrator in the 1970s, as Dean of Arts and Sciences and later Provost at Washington University. The environment was different in those days. Continue reading →