On campus encampments and the non-traditional right

The Week in Review: September 2, 2024

As students make their way back to campus, concern has been rising over a possible resurgence of the Gaza encampments. Georgetown’s Jacques Berlinerblau offered a measured and thoughtful take on the matter in our pages, suggesting that “college presidents should acknowledge that protest has a place in university life—but not a central place…. That said, the accommodation of protest is not part of the core mission of any institution of higher education,” which he insists is “the production and transmission of specialized knowledge, the credentialing of students, the promotion of upward social mobility, the teaching of critical thinking skills, and the defense of unpopular ideas.”

Berlinerblau goes on to question “why these schools couldn’t perform the discursive function that they are, arguably, built to achieve? One answer,” he suggests, “has to do with the decimation of the American professoriate at the hands of these very administrators.” Tenure-track positions are on their way to going “extinct,” and the task of forming America’s future leaders is being entrusted to a “collection of brainy gig workers with little job security and minimal academic freedom” (a statement which made me feel very much “seen” as someone who moonlights as an adjunct professor). 

At least one thing that’s virtuous about these encampments is that they bring attention to the “philanthro-ideological arms race on campuses across the country” (a problem previously addressed in our pages). Berlinerblau calls for university presidents “to examine how their curricula have been impacted—distorted—by strings-attached money…. Let the super-rich fund scholarships for the underprivileged and fair wages for low-level university employees.” 

I’ve written—both for Compact and The New York Times—about the impinging threat of the corporatization of universities, something I fear the student protesters fail to adequately address due to the extent to which their platform suffers from tunnel-vision and their susceptibility to mimetic “social contagion.” (Incidentally: This and other issues plaguing universities will be the focus of a discussion panel on Sept. 19 I’m hosting with K.C. Johnson, Jonah Howell, and Compact contributor Hamilton Craig.)

The top-heavy, overly bureaucratic structure of universities is perhaps one of the greatest hindrances to devising quality curricula as well as to students’ intellectual and psychological maturation. Sadly, for many of them, college is, at worst, an extension of adolescence and a (wildly expensive) entry ticket to parties, and, at best, a means to get a credential. 

This week, I took the opportunity to ask my freshmen, to whom I had assigned The Apology of Socrates, why—in the face of the inevitability of death—going to college is worthwhile in itself. Surprisingly, one student remarked that she was there because she enjoys “learning new things, and that knowing more about the world makes life more full.” Perhaps there’s more to these Zoomers than they let on….

This week in Compact

Trump’s recent statements about public funding for IVF treatments and expanding abortion have left many of his supporters feeling betrayed. Matthew Schmitz acknowledged that Trump’s statement on IVF is a markedly natalist—but not pro-life—response to a very legitimate concern about declining birth rates. And Patrick Brown pointed out that there’s a positive correlation between IVF usage and declining birth rates, and proposed that Trump should instead back lowering the expenses associated with childbirth—which would both be more cost effective and “help the Republican ticket deliver on their vision of a working-class, pro-parent party.”

As Tucker Carlson made headlines this week for interviewing Darryl Cooper, whose comments on the Second World War generated outrage, Matthew Walther warns that “outrage will only feed Cooper’s self-conception as a Promethean figure, carrying his benighted listeners out of the darkness to which they have been consigned into the pure light of historical knowledge.” Walther continues to diagnose how “the Cooper imbroglio is symptomatic of a larger problem: the epistemic gulf between the current consensus—however broadly defined—of practicing historians on any given subject and the at and the attitudes of the ordinary person of general education.”

The accusation of being “weird” has been thrown around a lot recently in our political discourse. Ashley Frawley contended that it implicitly is meant to associate those to whom it is applied with that which is “undesirable” and “bad,” as opposed to that which is normal—which is to say, “moral.” Those using the insult, she argued, “are less interested in describing reality than in attempting to manifest it…. They are attempting to bring about a future in which their views will be accepted as the norm for the cultural mainstream, setting the parameters of acceptable discourse.”

The results of Germany’s recent elections signal that “there is something corrupt about the German party system,” said Christopher Caldwell, adding that “‘right’ and ‘left’ mean no more in Germany than they do in any other Western country.” The hard-right Alternative for Germany and Sarah Wagenknecht’s new “conservative leftist” formation emerged triumphant, much to the concern of the country’s “bourgeois parties,” which in reality “are no longer protecting democracy from extremists—they’re protecting themselves from democracy.”

Aaron Renn observes that over the last few decades, New Yorkers have shockingly become “nicer”—to a fault. Gone are the days of people screaming at you in public, which is surely a blessing…though Renn laments how it has led to a loss of “people with the competence and public spiritedness of Richard Ravitch. Nor as many intellectuals on par with Irving Howe or Midge Decter.”

Valerie Stivers reviewed Garth Greenwell’s recent novel Small Rain, which she judged to be “in some ways, a pandemic novel—the first great one, and a very subtle one.” Greenwell’s style of storytelling is so inspiring that Stivers admitted she “could watch Greenwell watch the world forever.” (Greenwell replied to her review on X, expressing  that “it’s an extraordinary privilege to be read with this kind of attention and care.”

And be sure to check out Sohrab Ahmari’s newsletter this week on the relationship between social democracy and national security, and to listen to the team discuss Trump’s shifting tone toward abortion and Cooper’s appearance on Tucker on the podcast.

Traditional, not conservative

The conservatives critiquing Trump’s recent pro-natalist but not-so-pro-life comments called to mind certain critiques of conservative “traditional family” rhetoric from the right. Plenty of progressives have called to “abolish” the nuclear family, due to how it excludes non-heterosexual couples and stigmatizes those who choose not to marry. Yet Camille Paglia calls to abolish the nuclear family on the grounds that it’s not traditional enough.

 She cites that living with one’s extended family members–who “help form your identity”–had been the historical norm up until the Industrial Revolution. “Human beings were never intended to be trapped in a house with just their parents.” She fears that the “claustrophobic cell of the modern nuclear family” has given rise to psychological fragility, which in her eyes explains the “sudden spate of transgender claims” and other indicators of psychic maladaptation. (Chloe Valdary once tweeted that Paglia’s take made her “realize that BLM’s explanation of its position and conservative responses to it are completely incoherent.”)

As is often the case with right-leaning culture warriors, their reaction to left-wing rhetoric fails to adequately critique its errors and to propose an alternative view of real substance—rendering them the mere flipside of the same neoliberal coin (and sometimes ventures into pure idiocy, as Darryl Cooper demonstrated earlier this week).

Positions like Paglia’s can respond to the concerns of both those on the left and right. Let’s forgo indulging ourselves in empty polemical posturing and take advantage of chances like these to forge a new center that takes human flourishing seriously.