Institutional Capture: It Can Happen Here

My former employer has gone the way of all leftist-led colleges.

My name has now been added to the long and depressing list of high-profile academic “cancellations.” I recently resigned my tenured position at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, due to an episode — sadly typical of American higher education — that has been widely documented in national media. Like so many recent academic debacles, the actions of the administrators who precipitated the affair were ridiculous and wholly unnecessary. But my ouster was perhaps unique in the speed with which it unfolded and the degree to which it perfectly tells the tale of why so many of our institutions are in free fall. It illustrates what we must confront — whether we find ourselves among the small number of countercultural voices in academia or the much larger number of citizens who seek to preserve an educational system, and a culture, whose directions are not dictated by fanaticism.
The problem colleges face is institutional capture. This capture is of course ideological, but it’s broader than that. It also has important moral dimensions — it is not only, or mainly, an intellectual phenomenon. It usually happens relatively quickly, but early warning signs are easy to spot. It must be nipped in the bud if there’s to be any hope of saving the vital remnants of intellectual seriousness that can still be found on many American campuses. But it can only be stopped if faculty members and administrators, with the support of an awakened public, exercise the moral virtue of courage — the critical virtue without which the other virtues are impossible. As I have written in these pages, it’s a virtue that is in catastrophically short supply where it’s most needed.
The proximate cause of my resignation was the cowardly administrative takeover and humiliation of the college’s Center for Political and Economic Thought (CPET), which I had directed for many years. CPET is a research and public-affairs institute dedicated to the scholarly exposition of freedom, Western civilization, a...