What Conservatives Misunderstand About Radicalism at Universities
Since William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale—a best-selling book that criticized the “collectivist” sympathies of professors at Buckley’s alma mater—in 1951, conservatives have argued that prestigious American universities are hotbeds of dangerous Marxist brainwashing. Whether espoused by Buckley in the ’50s or by conservative firebrands today, the assertion that elite universities are sites of far-left indoctrination is and has always been a fantasy. The most popular major at Harvard, Yale, and many other supposedly leftist universities is economics—not exactly the subject of choice for aspiring anti-capitalists. At the University of Pennsylvania, 50 percent of graduating students take jobs in finance or consulting. The figures at other Ivies aren’t much lower. If these institutions are trying to produce Marxists, they are failing spectacularly.
Yet conservatives are right when they say that the Ivory Tower is a breeding ground for ideological extremism. The politics on offer at elite universities are not leftist in any substantive sense—at least if by “leftist” you mean redistributive—but they radical. We might call it “corporate radicalism”: a political sensibility that blends what the late writer Mark Fisher derisively referred to as “capitalist realism”—the conviction that radical. (Consider the tensions between faculty and administrations during the campus protest movements of the 1960s.)
