It was not coincidental that the modern university emerged at precisely the same time that the modern liberal movement was in the process of defining itself. One might go further to say that for 140 years, from the close of the Civil War to the present day, the fortunes of liberalism in America have been intertwined with those of the university, and that important changes in the one have been accompanied by parallel and consistent changes in the other. Looking back over this period, therefore, it appears that liberalism as we knew it in the 20th century originated with the emergence of the modern university.

V

DURING THE FOLLOWING FIFTY or so years, from 1910 into the 1960s, the American academic system continued to evolve according to patterns that were established during this formative generation. The research university, supported heavily by public funds, expanded exponentially. The gulf grew between research universities and the smaller liberal arts college. Faculty governance was institutionalized. The elective system was applied more or less universally, leading to debates about the "core" curriculum and concerns that specialization and the emphasis on expert knowledge had gone too far. A college degree was viewed by students and parents alike as a key requirement for professional employment and upward mobility. By the 1960s, public officials and academic leaders were nearly unanimous in the view that a college education should be made available to all.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, many leading institutions, Columbia and Harvard prominent among them, made sustained efforts to leaven the new emphasis on specialization and expertise with broader curricula in the arts, humanities, and social sciences--as these fields came to be called when the universities turned in a secular direction. Jefferson's ideals regarding his "republic of letters" were thus not completely abandoned in the modern university. Columbia established its widely emulated courses in "contemporary civilization" in the 1920s in an effort to expose students to the great literature of Western civilization dating back to the ancient Greeks, and to give them (in the wake of the world war) a more general understanding of how modern institutions came into being. Following World War II, the Harvard faculty sought to combat specialization with its core curriculum in General Education, which included broad courses in science, history, literature, and American democracy. These thoughtful innovations provided a counterweight of sorts to the progressive emphases on expertise and political reform; moreover, they provided intellectual weight to the academic enterprise itself by linking it to the American past and to the civilization out of which the nation and the university evolved.

By 1965, the American university was probably at a high point in terms of public esteem. Academic scientists had played a leading role in the discoveries that had led to victory in World War II. Veterans returning from the war enrolled in colleges and universities in large numbers, contributing a sense of maturity and seriousness to the academic enterprise that it had lacked before (and has lacked since). Professors in all fields, including the arts and humanities, enjoyed wide prestige. College sports reached large audiences through national television broadcasts. The baby boom generation, the largest in the history of the nation, was about to enter university life, causing a more than doubling of enrollments (from 3.5 million to 8 million) between 1960 and 1970.

It is plain in retrospect that the American university changed as fundamentally in the decade or so after 1965 as it did in those formative years between 1870 and 1910. The political and cultural upheavals of the period, spurred by the civil rights movement and opposition to the war in Vietnam, combined with the demographic explosion, brought about a second revolution in higher education, and created an institution (speaking generally) that was more egalitarian, more ideological, and more politicized, but less academic and less rigorous, in its preoccupations than was the case in the preceding era. It was in this period, from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, that the left university emerged in place of the liberal university.

VI

THE MAJOR CHANGES or reversals that took place in a short period of time were unprecedented in the history of American education: single-sex colleges all but disappeared; college regulation of student morals disappeared as well; government regulation of employment expanded, putting pressure on institutions to hire women and minorities for faculty positions; the line between teaching a subject matter and advocating political positions was blurred or even eliminated altogether as the new campus radicalism asserted that all teaching is political in nature; the liberal underpinnings of academic culture--the freedom to teach and conduct research--were attacked and eroded in the name of political correctness; the unifying character of the humanities was subverted and discredited when they were said to represent an oppressive tradition formed by white European males; new fields, usually with ideological preconceptions, were created outside the traditional departments and areas of study, thus expanding the positions available for radical faculty; serious academic requirements, including foreign language proficiency, were softened or eliminated. Faculty opinion, already skewed in a liberal direction in the 1950s and 1960s, moved decisively to the left. All of these changes were blasted into place in the tumultuous decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, and were institutionalized in the decades that followed.

In many important ways, the left university reversed or modified the assumptions and practices of the liberal university. The architects of the liberal university were optimistic about the prospects for the nation, and looked ahead to the progressive advancement of democracy and liberty, but the leaders of the left university are dour and pessimistic and view our history as a tale of oppression. The liberal academics believed in progress through the application of reason and knowledge, but the academic left asserted that reason and knowledge were masks for corporate or conservative interests. Yet, while the old liberals carved out a role in politics for experts and expert knowledge, the left disdained expertise and embraced the doctrine of diversity, which is based on the naked assertion of group interests. The liberals believed in academic freedom for all, but the academic leftists support academic freedom only for themselves, not for conservative or moderate faculty, not for speakers who disagree with them, and not for students who wish to learn from a nonideological standpoint. The liberals of a century ago took over the university with an intellectual vision grounded in 19th-century philosophy, while the radicals of our time seized control through politics and political pressure by organizing demonstrations and protests and by shrewdly leveraging assistance from governmental regulatory bodies.

There was, in addition, a powerful countercultural element in the left university that was never a significant dimension of the liberal university. While liberals had pressed for practical reforms in American capitalism and the Constitution, the radicals of the 1960s went further to launch a wholesale attack on American culture and the middle-class way of life, which they condemned as repressive and, worse, boring. The cultural radicalism of the 1960s, derived from the Beats of the 1950s, was so appealing to the new campus left because it promised something beyond political reform--namely, a different way of life with a revised set of morals, new styles of dress, and an alternative to conventional careers. The cultural radicalism of the Beats was thus imported more or less wholesale to the campus, which was in turn conceived as a sanctuary from the moral repression of middle class life, a place where any number of different lifestyles might be explored. In the past, Americans in search of bohemia, or a refuge from middle-class expectations, had fled to communes in the country, or to European outposts as Hemingway and other writers did in the 1920s, or to Greenwich Village or San Francisco, but now they found homes on the modern campus.

There were some obvious weaknesses in the liberal university that the radicals were able to exploit in executing their takeover. The leaders who built the liberal university a century ago erected a set of effective defenses against attacks coming from the outside world--from conservative businessmen, trustees, and donors who disagreed with the political views of professors or from legislators or politicians who sought to punish universities for the unconventional views of some faculty. As things turned out, the protections of academic freedom were much less effective in dealing with internal attacks from organized students and left-wing faculty who disrupted classes, picketed faculty homes and offices, took over administration buildings, issued threats to faculty and administrators, and generally used the tactics of street politics to take over the university.

The liberals never anticipated a revolt from within their own family, and did not know how to respond to it without betraying cherished beliefs about rational discourse and authority legitimized by achievement. The liberals, moreover, invited the contempt of the radicals by erecting a comprehensive critique of American capitalism and the Constitution, based on theories developed from the Progressive Era forward through the 1950s, but then by failing to accomplish anything significant in the way of real change--a failure that made them appear ineffective and weak. So liberalism was wide open to the assault from the left, and within a few years, liberalism--and the university--had been recast as a doctrine of identity politics, group rights, and diversity. It also happened that liberalism was quickly discredited in the eyes of most Americans when it associated itself with these ideas, and that the Democratic party declined into minority status once it had embraced them. Such consequences reveal something instructive about the doctrines that took over the American university.

VII

SO THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY went through two major revolutions in the past century, the first driven by ideas of progressive reform, and the second by radical preoccupations with cultural change. The first revolution created the liberal university and the second the left university. Both were far-reaching in the sense that they contributed to a reformulation of liberal or leftist doctrine and were thereby linked to broader movements for political reform. The left university has now been in place for more than a generation. Are there signs that another revolution is in the offing, one that will move the academy in a more constructive direction?

Consider, for example, the important developments of the past generation that academics in thrall to left-wing doctrines did not foresee and do not understand. There was, first of all, the fall of communism and the Soviet Union, both of which were said by academic experts to be in good shape until the very day they collapsed. There followed equally anomalous events as first socialism and then the welfare state were discredited at the same time that the market revolution gained force in Central Europe and Asia. The emergence of the United States as the world's sole superpower confounded international relations experts who were convinced that a multipolar world was in the making or, alternatively, that the Communist and capitalist systems would eventually converge at some point close to the Swedish welfare state. The passionate interest around the world in liberty as conceived by Locke, Adam Smith, and the American Founders is perhaps the most puzzling development to the left academics because they have so little sympathy with it. In the domestic policy arena, academic experts claimed for thirty years that welfare programs were in no way implicated in urban poverty, crime, family breakup, and teen pregnancy--ideological views that were discredited by the success of the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Nor could academics, committed as they are to secular doctrines, foresee or understand the recent rise of fundamentalist religion around the world. Step by step, the outside world is systematically debunking the ideological prejudices of the left academy.

But the above is just the beginning of an extended catalog of errors, illusions, and misconceptions. For a generation now, universities have promoted research and coursework in something called "multiculturalism," a doctrine that purports to encourage study of foreign societies and cultures. After the terrorist attacks in 2001, however, we quickly learned that the nation had trained few specialists who understood the Arabic language or Islamic cultures and who might help us understand and counter this new threat. It turned out that multiculturalism was not at all about studying foreign cultures and languages, since this requires real effort, but rather about mobilizing various national groups to exert political influence within the United States. In terms of content, "multiculturalism" was every bit as hollow as "diversity."

And if it is true that the United States is in the midst of a moral counterrevolution that seeks to repair much of the cultural damage done by the excesses of the 1960s, then here, too, the universities are out of step. Rates of divorce and illegitimate birth are declining, urban crime is down from the epidemic levels it reached a few decades ago, teen drinking and drug use are declining, and various other measures of cultural vitality are showing signs of similar improvement. All of this suggests a rejection of the kind of antinomianism that took over the academy in the 1960s, and a reassertion of the enduring strength of middle-class ideals.

The academics have thus been wrong--and far wrong--about the most important developments of our time. From their point of view, as Yogi Berra said, "the future is not what it used to be." To a great degree, university faculties outside the sciences have lost the capacity either to understand or to influence the outside world. Their place is increasingly being taken by private research centers and independent scholars in closer touch and in greater sympathy with these new developments. Centers like the Manhattan Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution have had far more influence in the public policy arena in recent decades than all the academic public policy schools combined. Various independent magazines and journals, such as the New Criterion, Commentary, and the Hudson Review, have seized intellectual leadership from the academy in the arts, humanities, and public affairs. The most prominent historians writing today are nonacademics like David McCullough and Ron Chernow, who, along with benefactors like Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, have done far more than any academic historian to revive the study of American history. The academy is losing influence today because a generation ago it placed a wager on the radical ideas of the 1960s--a wager that it has now lost.

Furthermore, the failures of the left university, along with the excesses of some of its representatives, are gradually leading trustees and donors, and even some presidents and deans, to ask some long overdue questions about the path their institutions have followed. How, for example, can any university carry out its responsibilities if all faculty members think the same way, if genuine debate over vital questions is discouraged, if ideological rhetoric crowds out thoughtful discussion, if students know more about the peace movement than the Constitution and more about Ward Churchill than Winston Churchill?

Two decades ago, when Allan Bloom published his bestselling book The Closing of the American Mind, his was one of the few articulate voices calling attention to the destructive assumptions of the left university. Today, by contrast, there are numerous initiatives on and off the campus that not only diagnose the problem but also point to practical remedies. Indeed, there are now dozens of organizations promoting intellectual rigor and pluralism on the campus.

College and university trustees are beginning to break through the artificial barrier that says that only faculty are qualified to pass judgment on matters of curriculum and appointments. Earlier this year, for example, the alumni of Dartmouth College elected to its board of trustees two insurgent candidates who ran on a platform that called for intellectual diversity and higher academic standards on the campus. Trustees of the University of Colorado, disgusted by the Ward Churchill fiasco and what it implied about the intellectual standards at their institution, have gone further by creating a new undergraduate program in Western civilization. Trustees at the State University of New York and George Mason University in Virginia, encouraged by the Washington-based American Council of Trustees and Alumni, have also acted to bolster academic standards in Western civilization and American history. Several years ago the trustees of the City University of New York, alarmed by the collapse of standards that followed a radical takeover a generation ago, took steps to strengthen standards for admission and to incorporate real substance into the curriculum. Trustees elsewhere, encouraged by such examples, are discovering that, if their institutions are to be rescued, they dare not rely on faculties to do it.

Legislators and public officials are also taking a look at possible actions in response to growing concerns about trends on campus. Thus, in response to concerns that anti-Semitic acts on campus have been fueled by Middle Eastern Studies programs receiving federal support, Congress is now considering legislation to strengthen oversight of such grants--and to strip institutions of support where such abuses are found. And, responding to similar concerns, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently announced that it will look into the scandal of campus anti-Semitism.

At the same time, some philanthropists have begun to see a connection between anti-Americanism on campus and other pathologies, particularly anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism, racial separatism, and hostility to business. They are surely right to see a connection among these malignancies, and right also to see that they need to be attacked as strands of a broad ideology that has found a home in the left university. Such donors, once they are in the field, will bring a new urgency to the challenge of dislodging this orthodoxy from the academy.

Perhaps the most promising development on campus in recent years has been the creation of various centers and programs dedicated to the study of political liberty and the history of free institutions--for example, the James Madison Program on American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton, the Gerst Program at Duke, the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College, the Political Theory Project at Brown, and the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization at Colgate. Such programs have grown out of a collaboration between a handful of donors, often alumni concerned about left-wing trends at their institutions, and conservative and moderate professors concerned that students are learning a great deal about racial and gender identity, but little about the intellectual foundations of their civilization. Exemplary programs like these could come to exist on every major college and university campus, funded either by private donors or, better yet, out of the vast sums that have accumulated in academic endowments.

These developments represent just the leading edge of a growing movement to challenge the practices of the left university. The purpose of such efforts is not to give representation to conservatives on an equal footing with other campus interest groups. Intellectual pluralism, the search for truth, and respect for the heritage of free institutions are neither conservative nor left-liberal ideals. Jefferson, indeed, understood these ideals to be at the heart of the university, and central to his vision of a "republic of letters"; Humboldt, too, saw his liberal university as the means of carrying forward the principles of liberty, free inquiry, and the unimpeded search for truth. The effort to restore these ideals on campus is thus something that both conservatives and liberals should applaud. The left university should not be replaced by the right university. It should be replaced by the real university, dedicated to liberal education and higher learning