The Compulsory Pieties of Higher Education

I. All We Like Sheep In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration chose the name Peacekeeper for an intercontinental ballistic missile sporting 300-kiloton nuclear warheads, critics of the program were over a barrel. Peacekeepers kill! Down with Peacekeepers! Support for Peacekeepers is support for war! You see the problem. Higher education gets similar rhetorical insulation with phrases like Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, which is why on American college campuses pledges of fidelity to some version of this trinity have been slipped into annual reviews, teaching evaluations, and applications for employment with hardly a whisper of opposition. Dissent always sounds diabolical. This was demonstrated last spring when two Villanova professors objected in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed to their institution's new teaching evaluation form which asks students to comment on the professor's cultural awareness and sensitivity to individual differences and social identities. The calumny wrote itself. A Response signed by one hundred Villanova professors implied that Doctors Sheehan and Wilson, unlike the faculty signatories, do not take seriously charges of insensitivity, injustice, and bigotry. Villanova's President …