Poison Ivy

Karl Dietrich Bracher, in his study of Hitler’s rise, The German Dictatorship, notes that the Nazis’ first and fiercest converts, aside from “food faddists, vegetarians, and nature worshippers” (p. 39), were university students and faculty. He explains this by suggesting that universities are by their nature undemocratic: “Professors and students felt … their status and prestige threatened by democratic ideas of government and society” (p. 165). So they preferred any alternative to the Weimar Republic.

Exactly: the university by its nature is the opposite of a democracy, and is antithetical to it. It is a rigid hierarchy, a self-selected elite.

This is not necessarily a bad thing—for untrammeled democracy is not necessarily a good thing. It can serve as a check and balance against popular excesses.

However, it is well to remember that the university is by its nature opposed to democracy, by its nature reactionary, and by its nature represents an upper class jealous of its “status and prestige.” Universities are, among society’s institutions, one of those most resistant to change.

Long after Marx and Freud have been discredited, for example, they remain dominant in the universities. Long after the rest of the world had migrated to desktops, universities were still working and teaching on mainframes. Any university becomes a repository for ancient traditions, passed down generation to generation. Any university seeks the ivy-covered walls that imply stability and long duration. To be able to go to university, by and large, implies that your parents are relatively rich—it is an important way in which a ruling class can perpetuate itself. It is conservatism personified.

More: the prestige and livelihood of a university or a faculty member depends upon the premise that he or she possesses some special, privileged knowledge. Change makes any such repository of knowledge relatively obsolete. Suddenly anyone can play. So progress and the university are not friends.

All well and good—there is a beauty in the changelessness of it all, in preserving the ancient verities.

But the most disturbing thing about the modern university is this: rather than acknowledging this truth, this inevitable bias, the typical university and the typical faculty member nowadays seeks to conceal it. They seek to masquerade instead as agents of change—especially of social change. This is suspect—this is hypocrisy. This strongly implies a ruling class that has grown corrupt and self-indulgent, and is doing something of which it is ashamed. It is a cover-up.