John M. Ellis has served on college faculties since 1963. He has seen a lot of change over the years, much of it deplorable. He has written The Breakdown of Higher Education, an excellent book about this. I review it in today’s Martin Center piece.

Back when Ellis began his academic career, higher education was uncontroversial and enjoyed the confidence of almost everyone. Today, it has become highly controversial and many Americans no longer have any confidence in it. The reason? Ellis argues that the almost-complete takeover by radical, activist leftists (faculty and administration) is to blame. We now routinely see the loss of civility and rank animosity towards anyone who dares to disagree with any aspect of the “progressive” worldview. The old academic norms have given way to a kind of intellectual tribalism.


Ellis provides lots of evidence. A case I find especially revealing is the vicious attack on University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax merely for having co-written an op-ed with some good words for bourgeois norms. Instead of calmly presenting counter-arguments, half of her faculty colleagues signed a letter demanding that she be fired. That mentality has spread throughout our higher-education system.

Of course, that’s just what the radical Left wanted. Ellis traces the ugly transformation back to the Students for a Democratic Society — the early 1960s group that opposed traditional American society and government. They knew that they’d never accomplish that unless they took control of our education system. That plan was extraordinarily successful.


How do we turn the tables? Ellis advances several ideas, the best of which is just to stop feeding the beast.