Ivy League American universities, along with a number of others in the top tier, plus Oxford and Cambridge, West Point, VMI and the Pentagon’s system of war colleges are gateways to admission in the bipartisan elite. Having gained admission is itself often more important than what you subsequently choose to study. For example, one of my former students, on his first day of freshmen orientation at Yale, before he had attended even a single class or opened a book, already had three top-level summer internships at blue chip firms lined up before dinner. That’s the cachet of a gateway university. But what these institutions teach future leaders also matters as the college years often constitutes a formative experience in young adulthood. And the values inculcated at elite colleges have changed since the early-mid 20th century.

American universities were once fairly conservative places in the main, methodologically as well as politically. The philosophical impact of the European academic exodus on American higher education has already been fiercely debated after the publication of Closing of the American Mind by the late Straussian scholar, Allan Bloom .I will not retread that ground except to say that the brilliant minds of the old European Left refugees were an intellectually significant force here. What is less frequently observed is that they added weight to an already existing American radical tradition that had been in the minority in the Humanities, particularly the Social Sciences.

Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, Charles and Mary Beard, Ralph Bunche, C. Vann Woodward, Howard K. Beale, William Appleman Williams and numerous others ( including non-academic Progressive and Populist intellectuals) constituted an alternative viewpoint, often economically determinist and anticapitalist (though non-Marxist) view of American society and history. Always vocal though never dominant, the advent of European Marxists in American universities breathed new life into their attempts to foster a critical scholarship of American values and state interests. Williams, for example, influenced a generation of more radical – and often explicitly Marxist-” revisionist” historians.

These intellectual trends coincided with the golden age of postwar academia, the baby boomers, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the New Left, Feminism and wider societal changes. Universities changed as well. The intellectual Left did not succeed in imposing a neo-Marxist worldview on most American college students in the 1960’s nor do they today. Their disparate efforts did succeed though in dismantling the Western canon from its old pedestal in undergraduate education, replacing it with a less coherent array of course choices, frequently taught from the critical perspective, albeit unsystematically and with less rigor due to grade inflation. The humanities disciplines suffered more than the hard sciences in terms of changing content but even the science and math departments were pressured to conform to politically correct shibboleths in hiring, tenure, funding and policy decisions.

The net result of eliminating or omitting so much of what had been the prior emphasis on positive aspects of Western culture and the critical thinking that accompanied the classical curriculum was not acceptance of socialism or various trendy schools of bastardized academic Marxism. That might have been the hope of radical professors and subscribers to Z Magazine but adherence to impractical, strange and esoteric-Left doctrines is utterly useless in seeking a place in the foreign policy establishment. Instead, there seems to have been a twofold effect on those students who went on to become members of the bipartisan elite.

First, except perhaps for those members of the elite who come up through the military institutional gateways, the elite are emotionally detached from the traditional moral center of the American body politic. Exposed to primarily critical appraisals of American history and culture – and getting less exposure to history than previous generations – they lack the pragmatic and realistic identification with state interests that animated men like Stimson, Kennan or Eisenhower and informed their strategic choices.

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