1965-1975: The Decisive Decade

"Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults" w/Dr. Lyell Asher

1965-75: The Decisive Decade. There are two main sources for the madness on college campuses today. The first, I'm sorry to say, involves people like me: college professors who, as a group, have political biases that skew dramatically to the left. Though professors flatter themselves by imagining that their left-leaning bias has to do with their intelligence, it has more to do with an accident of history, specifically that critical decade between 1965 and 1975. This was the decade dominated by the war in Vietnam, but it was also the decade in which the number of students going to college and the number of professors hired to teach them doubled. It was as if the United States took a century to build one system of higher education and then, in a single decade, built a second one of the same size. In some ways, it was a second system of higher education. That's because waves of new professors were getting their bachelor's degrees and doctorates at exactly the same time that, in response to the Vietnam War, college campuses had become centers of left-wing, anti-war, and at times, anti-American radicalism. In the same way that the Depression in the 1930s left a mark on my grandparents regardless of how good the economy ever got, those radical politics left a mark on that generation of professors, and those professors reproduced themselves and their politics in the graduate students they trained and in the colleagues they hired for the next 40 years.

In 1988, the writer and professor of English at Middlebury College, Jay Parini, admitted that, and I quote: "After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn’t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest."

That work of reshaping the university not only succeeded; it's gone far beyond what many in the 60s ever imagined. Forty years later, in 2017, Middlebury students shut down a talk by controversial author Charles Murray and physically injured Middlebury professor Allison Stanger. So, were the violent protests that happened not only at Middlebury but in the colleges across the nation just a matter of a 50-year-old process of reshaping the universities getting out of hand? Or is there another source for this madness that has so damaged not only higher education, but the country as a whole? I think there is. In the next video, I'll talk about the role many college administrators have played in bringing us to our current state.

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Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)