Telos 211 (Summer 2025): Dispatches from the Culture Wars is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
As
we survey the landscape of war today, it has become truer than ever
that hot wars are a consequence of culture wars. Trump’s support for
Israel against Iran contrasts with the discourse on college campuses
that opposes Israel as a white supremacist, settler-colonial state. In
opposing the most egalitarian liberal democracy in the Middle East, this
left-wing perspective poses a major threat to the liberal values that
the United States has always stood for. But the anti-Israel protests at
colleges represent only the tip of the iceberg of a more widespread form
of hierarchical rule that has established itself globally through a
“new class” of managers. Looked at in this way, the culture war at U.S.
universities will have far-reaching consequences for the future of the
world. At stake are not merely research funding and tax breaks, but a
social structure that privileges expert opinion over popular rule in all
areas of our society. Colleges and universities are the key to this
system, as the social sciences train the professionals that go on to
manage the lives of the uncredentialed, while the humanities develop the
perspectives that justify this form of managerial rule. In this issue
of Telos, we consider how today’s culture wars over universities will shape the global future.
In his essay, Adam Webb
establishes the global framework for understanding the role of
universities in the world today by describing the global shift toward a
managerial “new class” that rules over the rest of society. With the
rise of higher education as a meritocratic institution, Western
countries have established a hierarchical society that resembles the
Chinese bureaucratic system Karl Wittfogel labeled as “oriental
despotism.” Because an increasing share of the economic, educational,
and political elite graduates from this unified system of higher
education, alternative centers of power erode. Culturally, this new
class espouses a “secular theodicy” that replaces religious and national
traditions with a focus on individualism and upward mobility.
Politically, the new class favors managerial solutions that are carried
out by educated elites with a focus on protecting and extending life
rather than on the meaning of life. Consequently, the primary ideologies
of the new class revolve around climate change, public health and
safety (as exemplified during the pandemic), and inclusion (as an
individualist substitute for traditional culture), all of which justify
the expansion of new class bureaucracies to manage the unwitting masses.
Webb describes this modern form of oriental despotism not so much as an
expansion of a Chinese model as a convergence of Anglo-American
neoliberalism, European social democracy, and Chinese bureaucratic
socialism toward the same model of new class governance.
As an alternative to university education, social media has become a
source of ideas and ideology, perhaps displacing traditional education
and media as the primary way in which attitudes and opinions develop. In
their analysis of Chinese social media, Xue Ranran, Alexandra Bocharova, Alexander Lukin, and Olga Puzanova
trace the rise of the Chinese view of Russia as the “warrior nation.”
While the term itself was popularized by Chinese fans of the Japanese
anime series Dragon Ball Z, its application to Russia began in
the early 2010s and it gradually spread in Chinese social media, in
spite of some attempts by official media to suppress it. Promoting a
stereotype of Russians as courageous, aggressive, and tough, the term
has coincided with a growing sense of solidarity with Russia as another
opponent of the West. It remains unclear, though, whether social media
represents a disruptive alternative to higher education as a shaper of
culture or whether it in fact forms a more pervasive and surreptitious
means of managing popular opinion.
The idea of academic freedom has served as a key ideological tool for
the new class, as the idea has expanded from the defense of free speech
to a more general defense of university academics’ right to be free from
outside influence in defining the goals of their teaching and research.
The discussion of academic freedom is thus central to an understanding
of the modern transformation of society, and I would like to thank
Salvatore Babones for organizing a conference on academic freedom and
collecting the resulting essays for this issue of Telos.
In the first of these essays, Mark G. E. Kelly
argues that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are not simply a set
of discrete policies but part of a larger ideological framework that
works to justify the privileges of a ruling class of high-paid managers.
By shifting attention to diversity as an end itself, the ideology of
DEI establishes a notion of ultimate values that displaces any other
understanding of truth at the university as well as any other critique
of existing meritocratic hierarchies in a variety of social and economic
institutions. These two aspects of DEI—the normative dimension that
grounds much university teaching and research today and the ideological
dimension that supports an existing institutionalized
professional-managerial power structure—combine to create a practically
impregnable resistance to all attempts to dismantle it. Intellectual
attempts to oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion as normative values
can be denounced as not just wrong but morally evil, leading defenders
of DEI to forbid any criticism of it in academic discourse. More
broadly, in his own articulation of Paul Piccone’s artificial negativity
thesis, Kelly argues that DEI provides existing institutions with “a
noble cause by which to justify their baser and more central concerns.”
DEI allows elites to promote ethnic minorities as a way of deflecting
criticism from the more fundamental division between managers and the
managed. Ultimately, DEI will remain powerful because it is part of an
overarching ideological and institutional framework that establishes a
system of values buttressed by embedded institutional interests.
Salvatore Babones
suggests that academic freedom has always had an ambiguous significance
in that it has been used to defend free speech but also to establish
the authority of disciplinary knowledge. As he points out, the
contemporary notion of academic freedom developed during the twentieth
century and consequently coincided with, and was driven by, the
establishment of today’s undergraduate majors and their corresponding
academic disciplines. While the 1915 statement of academic freedom by
the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was more
expansive, subsequent statements in 1925 and 1940 limited academic
freedom to a professor’s disciplinary area of expertise. This
restriction has tended to increase the power of the disciplines over the
freedom of individual professors who might challenge consensus views,
as Babones notes in the attempts to silence those who tried to express
views that contradicted public policy during the pandemic. Moreover,
while the tenure system in the United States and Canada provides
relatively strong protections for professors with diverging views,
academic freedom is not well protected in other parts of the world where
the tenure system does not exist and where academic freedom depends on
customs and legislation.
Emma Baillie
describes the way in which academic freedom is in danger today because
of the extreme polarization that has led some academics to exclude
opposing, unorthodox views as unworthy of discussion, often because such
views are held to be racist or sexist. This environment leads those who
hold such views to hide them, thus undermining open debate about
significant issues in which real divides often exist outside academia
but go unrecognized within it. In order to foster an exchange of
opposing viewpoints, Baillie suggests a mode of discussion in which each
party does not try to persuade the other but instead simply lays out
their own view as well as their understanding of the opposing
perspective. In addition, she suggests a model of adversarial
collaboration in which two writers with opposing views work together to
produce one essay, thus challenging each other to find common ground.
Katy Barnett and Bill Swannie
argue that academic freedom is an individual right that society should
protect in order to maintain the role of universities as places for the
pursuit of knowledge. They provide examples of how university
administrations restrict or undermine academic freedom in order to
maintain their own brand image. As a corrective to this pressure on
universities to restrict academic freedom, they lay out a framework in
which academic freedom might be established as a legal right that can be
enforced against university administrations by allowing individuals to
sue.
In their review of data from surveys and reports of specific incidents in New Zealand, James Kierstead, Michael Johnston, Stephanie Martin, and Max Salmon
conclude that both students and professors are hesitant to state their
opinions on a variety of contemporary issues, especially those
surrounding gender, race, and the Treaty of Waitangi. They argue that
the main threats to academic freedom stem from radical progressivism,
the Chinese Communist Party, and the increasing market orientation of
university administrators.
In our ongoing discussion of the Trump administration, we include
several contributions that explore the meaning of the current conflict
between the new administration and universities.
As Salvatore Babones
argues, Trump’s attack on U.S. universities marks the end of an era of
cultural policing to enforce a diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda
and the beginning of a full-blown culture war. While this culture war
appears on the surface as a conflict between a “woke” agenda that seeks
to privilege certain gender and racial groups on the one hand and an
ideal of equal opportunity on the other, the conflict goes much deeper.
Campus antisemitism is only a small part of the ideological conformity
around diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as the broader faith in
a managerial class that is viewed as the voice of reason against the
imputed prejudices and irrationalities of the MAGA movement.
Mark G. E. Kelly
cautions that the Trump administration’s attack on DEI will face
formidable resistance due to its centrality as an ideological support
for the managerial class, which dominates not just universities but the
private sector as well. The larger issue for Kelly is the extent to
which Trump will be aligned with an accelerationist agenda that pushes a
technological transformation that would eventually marginalize state
power in relation to a new world of AI supremacy. The alternative of a
decelerationist restoration of national identity in a citizen republic
seems for Kelly to be more an outdated fantasy than a concrete
possibility. But to the extent that the accelerationist dream also
aligns with a managerial vision linked to the ideologies of climate
change, public health, and DEI that the MAGA movement has been
attacking, there seems to be a much more serious fight than Kelly
allows.
Jay Gupta
sees Trump’s attack on universities and government agencies as a form
of barbarism that denigrates both research and culture. He contrasts
this attack with Al Gore’s successful rationalization of government
bureaucracy during the Clinton administration, which was carried out as
an attempt to refine and improve, not to disrupt. The unanswered
question, however, is whether the goods of research, culture, and
efficiency are meant to be the preserve of government or whether these
goods might be achieved through the return of these spheres to private
hands, in which competition allows for freedom and individual choices.
Tim Luke
highlights the way in which the breathtaking cascade of initiatives in
Trump’s first one hundred days has had a profound media impact. Whether
it is the attack on universities, the DOGE “chainsaw,” the tariffs
announcements, or the Oval Office tiff with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump
has always had an eye for what makes for “good television,” and Luke
suggests that a key conflict today might be the one between university
culture and popular culture.
My own contribution
discusses the ways in which academic freedom has become part of the
ideological superstructure of university faculty attempting to protect
their privileged status. Rather than promoting freedom of speech, the
defense of academic freedom today functions to exclude conservative,
pro-liberal democracy perspectives and entrench a hierarchical structure
of society. Consequently, the attack on academic freedom is not a
barbaric turn against culture and rational thought but rather an attempt
to democratize learning and knowledge. To the extent that the Trump
administration continues to receive popular support in its struggle
against universities, the conflict over academic freedom will remain
central to the future development of U.S. politics and society.
David Pan is Professor of European Languages and
Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held
positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University,
Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth
(2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt
Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He is the Editor of Telos.
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