The absurdity of the non-ideological university

Evan Mandery’s long piece about UATX, Bari Weiss’s right-wing grift masquerading as some sort of new “non-ideological” university, is fascinating on several levels.

Mandery is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The sheer level of naivete he brings to his investigations is one of the most noteworthy aspects of the whole thing, especially since his attitude was and remains so commonplace among the sorts of centrists and liberals who were so startlingly credulous about Bari Weiss’s — Weiss started her brilliant career by trying to get professors fired from Columbia for having politically incorrect beliefs about the Israel-Palestine conflict — claims that she was going to save American higher education from illiberalism and censoriousness.

For example:

In a Bloomberg op-ed, [in November 2021] Ferguson declared, “academic freedom dies in wokeness.” Lonsdale penned a piece for the New York Post, boldly promising that UATX would “prepare a new generation of leaders to think for themselves about all sides of an issue, speak truth to power, and take power back from ideologues.”

The announcement reverberated through the American academy; anyone who has spent time on a college campus over the past decade understands these concerns. In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62 percent of responding students said they believed their campus climate prevented students from saying things they believed. A 2024 survey, by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, found that 35 percent of faculty self-censored or toned down their written work — about four times the rate reported by social scientists in 1954, at McCarthyism’s peak.

Kanelos said that universities had failed both students and the nation. Democracy was weakening because schools had become illiberal and incapable of producing citizens interested in or competent to participate in democratic governance. “We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves,” he concluded in soaring rhetoric. “And so we are building anew.”

“I want to work there,” I told my wife.

If you wanted to work at a place whose thot leaders were using the phrase “wokeness” unironically five years after Donald Trump’s initial election to the presidency, you are either a Trumpist or incredibly naive. Mandery pretty clearly falls into the latter category, like so many other bien pensant liberal types who were and disturbingly still are buying the bullshit that Weiss et al are selling.

What Weiss was selling was the sort of unreflective idiocy that sees a statistic such as that 62 percent of responding students said they believed their campus climate prevented student from saying things they believed, or that 35 percent of faculty self-censored or toned down their written work, and automatically thinks that’s good evidence of some sort of actual crisis of illiberalism and censoriousness in American higher education.

I mean if you think about it for ten seconds, why is it necessarily bad that a campus climate would prevent students from saying things they believed? I’m really trying not to be too censorious and illiberal here, but I would like to ask Mandery if he thinks it’s bad that his white supremacist students hesitate before saying openly white supremacist things in class? (And if he thinks he doesn’t have any such students, in America 2026, he shouldn’t be allowed out in public without a minder). Similarly, why is it bad for faculty to “self-censor” and “tone down” their written work? I very consciously self-censor every single day in class, for example, because as a professor I’m not going to talk to my students in the same way that I would talk to friends or colleagues or on this blog, for reasons that I would hope would be too obvious to require elaboration. I also self-censor in my published academic work, for closely related reasons. I say things on this blog that I would never say in an academic journal, because people who are more than roughly five years old generally come to understand that sometimes you say things in some places that you wouldn’t say in other places, because not every place is like every other place. Jesus fucking Christ.

In other words, that everything from fundamental power relations to basic rules of social etiquette call for certain forms of self-restraint in regard to self-presentation was another thing that was formerly understood to be self-evident, before people fighting the heroic fight against “illiberalism” and “self-censorship” and “cancel culture” decided that being told that it wasn’t generally a good idea to use the N word or tell rape jokes in class was pretty much comparable to being thrown into the Gulag archipelago.

Moving right along, Mandery thinks that fascist plutocrat Joe Lonsdale’s vision of higher education is simply a right wing “mirror image” of what’s wrong with the Woke University:

“[According to Lonsdale] all staff and faculty of UATX must subscribe to the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism (this is the first time I [Michael Lind] heard of these four principles);

“That ‘communists’ have taken over many other universities and that he, Joe Lonsdale, would stay on the board for fifty years to make sure that no ‘communists’ took over UATX (the identity politics crowd and some Islamists are a threat, but the Marxist-Leninist menace in 2025?)”

Lind said when he asked for definitions of “communists” and “socialists,” he’d been told they included anybody who didn’t “believe in private property” and “hate the rich.” This, he wrote, struck him “as a libertarian political test excluding anyone to the left of Ayn Rand.” Lonsdale had said that the board would make a case-by-case determination on whether “New Deal liberals” would be allowed to work at UATX. Lind said that he considered himself “an heir to the New Deal liberal tradition of FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ.” He was “in favor of dynamic capitalism in a mixed economy, moderately social democratic and pro-labor, and anti-progressive, anti-communist, and anti-identity politics.”

According to Lind, Londsdale repeatedly said that if the faculty weren’t comfortable with what he was saying they should quit.

Does Mandery believe that the Woke University had, by the bad old days of 2021, become a place where a chancellor could inform the faculty that if they didn’t embrace the abolition of private property, atheism, and the destruction of the state of Israel, they should quit? Becausethat would be the actual “mirror image” of Joe Lonsdale’s and Bari Weiss’s new Tolerant and Liberal University, Open to All Ideas at All Times.

Speaking of which, at the very center of all this nonsense is another incredibly idiotic idea, which remains as common as whale piss in conversations about the supposedly illiberal and censorious university:

Over the past three months, I had more than 100 conversations with 25 current and former students, faculty and staffers at UATX. Each had their own perspective on the tumultuous events they shared with me, and some had personal grievances. But they were nearly unanimous in reporting that at its inception, UATX constituted a sincere effort to establish a transformative institution, uncompromisingly committed to the fundamental values of open inquiry and free expression.

I’ve said this before, but “open inquiry” and “free expression” are, in the context of an actual university, as opposed to the Fantasy University conjured up in these arguments, merely pragmatic tools, NOT “fundamental values.” The intellectual purpose of the university is not to further open inquiry and free expression: it is to pursue the development and dissemination of knowledge. Every academic discipline is by its natureas an academic discipline quite properly designed to, as a matter of its very constitution, limit open inquiry. Geography departments don’t entertain open inquiry into whether the world is flat, history departments don’t entertain open inquiry into whether the Holocaust actually happened, atmospheric science departments don’t entertain open inquiry into whether anthropogenic climate change is happening, and medical schools don’t entertain open inquiry over whether vaccines cause autism. Etc etc etc etc ad infinitum. That’s what it means for something to be an academic discipline: that certain questions and intellectual positions are, under these circumstances at this time, out of bounds, AND FOR VERY GOOD REASONS! Again, if I may repeat myself, Jesus fucking Christ.

It should be even more obvious, if that’s possible, that universities are not supposed to be open forums for “free expression.” A university classroom is not the public comment portion of a city council meeting or a top 100 political science blog forum or your living room etc etc etc.

Which gets me to my last point, for now, which is that the whole idea of a “non-ideological” university, so beloved to those who dream of a world without Cancel Culture, is completely incoherent and oxymoronic. “We should keep politics out of the university” is bothitself a completely political position, down to the last turtle, and, under present circumstances, an astonishingly naive thing for residents of American academia to advocate. Donald Trump and his minions want to destroy the university as a site for intellectual inquiry and edification, and turn it into a factory for fascist indoctrination. Umberto Eco on one of the fundamental characteristics of the many forms of fascism:

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

Donald Trump, Joe Lonsdale, Bari Weiss, and many many other powerful and influential people in America in 2026 want to destroy the American university, because they are fascists, and fascists hate real universities, which is why they want to create fake ones to take their place.

Which side are you on?