Many people complain about American universities, but almost nobody does anything about them. Anyone interested in the subject knows that American colleges and universities increasingly prefer promoting leftist social change to seeking objective truth in their research and teaching. Professors, students, outside speakers, and any others with opinions that contradict a consensus that moves ever-leftward are ostracized for their supposed racism, sexism, heteronormativity, binarism (believing that people are either male or female), ableism (regarding disabled people as disabled), species- ism (valuing people more than animals), and other prejudices thought so noxious that many students, professors, and administrators refuse them even a hearing. Rigor and objectivity in teaching and research have steadily given way to indoctrination.
Writing from my own perspective as a professor of ancient and medieval history and literature—fields to which leftist ideology might once have been thought irrelevant—I recently published a book, The University We Need, describing the long slide of American universities into intolerance and academic mediocrity. My book's approach to the problem is mainly tactical, analyzing the situation and making specific proposals to improve it. This essay will deal more with strategy than with tactics, showing how my proposals could offer some hope of reversing the decline of quality and tolerance in American higher education.
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