BOOK REVIEW: ‘The University We Need’ by Warren Treadgold

OPINION:

THE UNIVERSITY WE NEED: REFORMING AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION

By Warren Treadgold

Encounter Books, $23.99, 224 pages

For conservative academics who are intimately aware of university life under leftist machinations, “The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education” by Warren Treadgold is a book that not only will augment personal experiences, but will offer what just may be a way out of the apparently hopeless mess that leftists have made of higher education.

You would think that the college campus is where young minds are free to explore a wide range of ideas, sharpen their perception and expand their horizons. Yet, your thinking would be “wrong” and unwelcome on so many of today’s campuses, if your concept of exploration, sharpening and expansion included overt exposure to conservative thought.

This wrongheadedness is especially noticeable as a student progresses through the “progressive” education system. At the Ph.D. level, a student is likely to be encouraged to be a Mini-Me to his leftist faculty dissertation advisor with independent thought often discouraged or even dangerous.

The emergence of entrenched leftist ideology is admirably portrayed in “The University We Need” by Mr. Treadgold, who earned his BA from Harvard in 1970, staying on for a Ph.D. a few years later. Through his many subsequent teaching and research positions, the author experienced the evolution that trended from the 1960s counterculture through to the contemporary campus culture we have today.

Mr. Treadgold astutely discerns some serious deficiencies in the postmodern ideology infesting American educational institutions. He notes in a section titled “How to Judge Research” that the worst defect of postmodernism “is its excessive tolerance of errors, fallacies, and obscurities, as long as they are postmodernist, ’innovative,’ and ’interesting.’”

He later states that “Marxists, feminists, and postmodernists — while they may be more likely than others to identify authentic class struggles, important women and misleading ideas — are also more likely to exaggerate or imagine the existence or significance of such things. The essential criterion for evaluating ideological scholarship is that it should argue its case on the basis of facts and arguments that can also convince readers who do not share the same ideology.”

“The University We Need” thankfully proffers workable solutions to the academic morass. In the chapter on “Proposals for Legislation,” Mr. Treadgold recommends the establishment of two national boards — “a National Dissertation Review Board to evaluate new doctoral dissertations, along with a separate National Academic Honesty Board to judge claims of plagiarism or fraud in dissertations and academic publications” — with Congress passing a law to provide funding for these boards. Other recommended legislation proposals are included, such as applying a percentage cap on university administrative costs.

Mr. Treadgold asserts that “[t]he high administrative costs of colleges and universities have been a largely overlooked scandal for years.” He gives ample quantitative details to back up his claim.

Perhaps the best solution for the university we need is given in Mr. Treadgold’s proposal for a new leading university. He observes that “[t]he decline and confusion that afflict our universities today are the results not of a reasoned debate but of a herd instinct, a sense of inevitability, and intellectual intimidation.” His vision is for a new prominent institution “to offer students the best possible education, to hire the best available professors, and to do the best possible research.”

As Mr. Treadgold discerns from these obvious aims, “right now they appear not to be those of any of the major universities in the country, all of which are worried about being labeled ’elitist’ and give priority to ’diversity’ and ’inclusiveness’ rather than ’meritocracy.’” Mr. Treadgold concludes that a successful new university would challenge postmodernism which “inevitably discourages competition among ideas, because if all ideas are equally valid, competition among them is pointless.”

As students make their way back to campus this fall, diversity of the physical appearance of the student body should be quite manifest; it’s the diversity of thought that will likely be lacking. But, to import some opinions on the right at existing universities could be quite risky. Irrespective of contentious speaking engagements at college venues, simply brandishing titles by Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro or Sarah Palin that counter campus-culture thought could shut down a university. Imagine what toting a copy of Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” might do.

And yet, a serious stir could even occur on today’s campuses if someone dared to openly carry a copy of more scholarly works such as Thomas Sowell’s “Inside American Education,” or David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin’s “One Party Classroom” — or maybe even Warren Treadgold’s “The University We Need.”

• Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist and author of “In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail” (Stairway Press, 2016).