Institutional Capture: It Can Happen Here – The American Spectator

My name has now been added to the long and depressing list of high-profile academic “cancellations.” I recently resigned my tenured position at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, due to an episode — sadly typical of American higher education — that has been widely documented in national media. Like so many recent academic debacles, the actions of the administrators who precipitated the affair were ridiculous and wholly unnecessary. But my ouster was perhaps unique in the speed with which it unfolded and the degree to which it perfectly tells the tale of why so many of our institutions are in free fall. It illustrates what we must confront — whether we find ourselves among the small number of countercultural voices in academia or the much larger number of citizens who seek to preserve an educational system, and a culture, whose directions are not dictated by fanaticism.

The problem colleges face is institutional capture. This capture is of course ideological, but it’s broader than that. It also has important moral dimensions — it is not only, or mainly, an intellectual phenomenon. It usually happens relatively quickly, but early warning signs are easy to spot. It must be nipped in the bud if there’s to be any hope of saving the vital remnants of intellectual seriousness that can still be found on many American campuses. But it can only be stopped if faculty members and administrators, with the support of an awakened public, exercise the moral virtue of courage — the critical virtue without which the other virtues are impossible. As I have written in these pages, it’s a virtue that is in catastrophically short supply where it’s most needed.

The proximate cause of my resignation was the cowardly administrative takeover and humiliation of the college’s Center for Political and Economic Thought (CPET), which I had directed for many years. CPET is a research and public-affairs institute dedicated to the scholarly exposition of freedom, Western civilization, and the American experience. It is, or was, one of the oldest and most respected collegiate centers of its kind in the nation. 

In announcing the takeover, the president of the college, Father Paul Taylor, cited his disapproval of a single speaker (of the hundreds who have spoken under the center’s auspices over several decades). The speaker gave a presentation at a conference held in April 2022. The conference, entitled “Politics, Policy, and Panic: Governing in Times of Crisis,” was among the first that CPET was permitted to hold on campus since the college’s self-imposed COVID isolationism. Ironically, it was designed to bring to campus serious thinkers who could offer reflections on the nature and implications of the previous two years of political crisis and moral panic surrounding everything from public health mandates to violence in the streets. The speaker, David Azerrad, a professor at Hillsdale College’s graduate school in Washington, D.C., dived into controversies related to what he deemed “Black Privilege and Racial Hysteria in Contemporary America.” The title obviously played on the ubiquity, especially in institutions of higher learning, of the phrase “white privilege.” Had he spoken on that — simply asserting its existence and its overwhelming influence on American life — many campus voices would undoubtedly have praised his “bravery” for embracing what is fashionable. But in denouncing affirmative action in strong terms, he offended the jealous gods of diversity, inclusion, and equity to which most denizens of the academy are now expected to genuflect. 

The conference was attended by hundreds. A handful of students showed up for Azerrad’s talk apparently to express anger at his title rather than to listen to his presentation. (Many audience members were convinced that they had not in fact listened.) Also in the audience, for the entirety of the conference, was a partisan trustee of the college named Bibiana Boerio, a failed Democratic congressional candidate. In the immediate aftermath of the conference, she described the presentation as “rage-inducing extreme speech.” Impartial readers of such a comment may be forgiven for concluding that she was doing her part to license and encourage rage as a response to speech. 

Two letters quickly followed the conference. The first was signed by a dean who confirmed to me that he did not write it and was released before full videos of the lectures were even made available. When the dean was pressed into service to sign the letter, he did so as co-director of CPET, even though he exercised no control over the center’s political or cultural programming and had no input into the design of the conference — which was entirely my own. My views were not solicited by the administration, nor by the local news media reporting on the story. The letter implausibly claimed that the speaker’s remarks “may be interpreted as a form of invidious discrimination,” or that they promoted “systemic bigotry,” or that they perhaps even impeded “the evolution of the human race” or “evolution in our society” or … something. 

The letter even denounced the speaker’s “theory” that Kamala Harris “was selected as VP on the basis of her standing solely as an African American woman.” With respect to this point, it should be noted that, as theories go, it’s not a bad one. In fact, it appears to be one of the few matters in America upon which there is broad bipartisan consensus. But I digress. The letter also insisted, without any apparent self-awareness, that the college invites “responsible presentation of viewpoints.” 

That ham-handed missive hardly clarified or calmed the waters. The president soon followed it with another that he himself signed, though he relied on a PR firm to help him write it. It announced that Saint Vincent welcomes “a diversity of responsible opinion on a variety of topics” and that henceforth he and his cabinet would approve all speakers at the college. Presumably, this is to ensure that they are sufficiently “responsible.” The letter also insisted that academic freedom is “treasured” at the college — so long as faculty and students “responsibly debate” topics. That’s a lot of responsibility the president took on. It’s probably more than he should have, since the new policy — obviously drafted by tools that are not the sharpest in the academic shed — has the effect of holding the president and his cabinet accountable for words uttered by officially approved speakers.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) described the administration’s actions as perhaps “the most extreme example of guest speaker censorship” that it had seen in its decades of monitoring such matters (quite a claim for FIRE) and filed a formal accreditation complaint against the college.

Like so many Catholic institutions, Saint Vincent quickly folded under pressure from the mob so as to conform to the secular demands of the age. In its rush to conform, it not only did violence to academic freedom but also made a hash of Church teaching. One might have expected immediate pushback from large numbers of faculty members — particularly from those who are much better versed in such matters than the college’s president, whose graduate training is in “higher education administration” from an institution whose current priorities include “social justice” and “diversity.” (Note to parents and bishops everywhere: don’t let your priests run off to ed school.) Instead, even faculty members who were privately appalled would say nothing publicly. Few choose academic careers due to a surfeit of courage. 

*****

There is a backstory to all this that provides important clues as to how we might stop woke lunacy from co-opting what’s left of our institutions. Saint Vincent is the oldest Benedictine college in the country, and the monks who founded it were critical to the establishment of the Benedictine order in North America. It had long been a place largely unaffected by the most pernicious academic fads and fashions roiling higher education. Like most liberal arts colleges, its faculty leaned left, but successive administrations generally understood well enough the college’s heritage of Benedictine monasticism and the latter’s profoundly important place in the development of Western civilization. They allowed the college to remain a remarkably free institution when it came to the exchange and promulgation of ideas. 

In the “acknowledgments” sections of the many books I published during my time at Saint Vincent, I routinely found myself writing words to the effect that the college remained…