Universities Today

Philip Carl Salzman, Ph.D. (Chicago)

Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, McGill University

Senior Fellow, Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Year of Publication: 2020

ISBN 978-1-9992710-1-5

Professor Salzman’s sober assessment of university culture is backed by decades of first-hand experience and extensive research. Its eye-opening analyses, replete with many contemporary examples, should be read by all concerned students, parents, educators, and members of the general public. 

Janice Fiamengo, Professor, University of Ottawa, and author of Sons of Feminism: Men Have their Say. 

There used to be a time when the jungles were approaching our cities and the barbarians were at the gates. Today the jungles have become our cities, and the barbarians, slick and well-educated, are today’s intellectuals, cognoscenti and the elite professoriate. Today they have ushered in an age of nihilism, cultural relativism. and replaced the last bastion of human civilization, the Universities, into crass and unreflective indoctrination institutional terror cells.  Today, they are killing Western civilization, not apocalyptically, but by bleeding it to death by thousands of tiny scratches. If you want an insight into the unspeakable horrors taking place in today’s universities and sober and plausible antidotes to fighting the nefarious forces against reason, liberty, individualism, free speech, and the unassailable values of western civilization, then Professor Salzman’s book is the only one today that I can honestly recommend. It is both a moral and intellectual tour-de-force, a beautifully written one, that lays out all the horrific agendas of the fascist educational left, but that inspires those who believe in the proper goals behind the role of a university to never capitulate to the destroyers of modern culture.  I cannot recommend this brilliant book highly enough. 

Jason D. Hill, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Honors Distinguished Faculty, De Paul University

Dr. Salzman’s compilation of published essays addresses issues and questions that should be of concern to all reasonable and fair-minded citizens, regardless of their political orientation. The key issue is that universities have changed from being institutions that have used free and open enquiry as a means of searching for truth to institutions that have committed themselves to a political ideology known as “social justice”. This has been done without consultation with, much less consent from, the larger society whose interests universities are trusted to serve. Dr. Salzman’s essays address questions such as: How did this happen? What is the content of the propaganda that our universities are transmitting to students under the guise of education? And what are the implications for Western civilization if our universities are not taken to task? Citizens ignore Dr. Salzman’s work at not only their own peril, but that of future generations who are at risk of never knowing the rights and freedoms that we have taken for granted.

Rick Mehta, PhD, Former Professor of Psychology, Acadia University (2003 – 2018)

Philip Carl Salzman has no peer as an analyst of the disaster that higher education has become. He does not sugar-coat any of the unprincipled decisions that got us here, or the painful choices that will have to be made on the long road to reform. This book is a guide for students, parents and the general public who rarely hear what really goes on in the ivory tower.

John Leo, Editor, Minding the Campus https://www.mindingthecampus.org/

The mission of universities has changed over the years, to the point that learning HOW to think has faded relative to WHAT to think. Physical diversity is obligatory, difference of opinion is verboten, groupthink is standard operating procedure and goal. This state of affairs does vary somewhat from campus to campus, even across campus. It has taken root gradually but relentlessly since the 1960s. The transformation is frequently a surprise to the public (parents), who experienced no such harness in their own collegiate days. Assurances of free speech from today’s campus gatekeepers to the contrary, the actual campus experience today for a contrarian faculty member or student is not welcoming.

A contest of ideas is missing. Actually, alternative viewpoints are not just missing from many campuses, but are actually often aggressively suppressed. Dissent is too often regarded as unhealthy. It appears that the free exchange of ideas is “unwelcome,” to the point of career limiting or ending. Conform or else. Shouting down, or otherwise de-platforming has become too common, as has career mobbing. Hence, the value of this collection of articles by Professor Salzman, which articulate the progression of this transformation. Faculty young and old can benefit from its assurance that the phenomenon is real, and that the consequences are most destructive of a contest of ideas. As Edmund Burke said, “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

John Mueller, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Werklund Faculty of Education, University of Calgary

Professor Philip Salzman’s new volume systematically and comprehensively treats the contagion of “social justice” ideology and its pervasive and pernicious impact on the academy, and by extension, on Western society at large. Here we have a well-organized, thoroughgoing, and surgical rendering of social justice—its premises, beliefs, practices, and outcomes. And by no means do the outcomes amount to anything like justice, not in any recognizable sense of the term. Instead, as Professor Salzman makes eminently clear, social justice represents the totalitarian enforcement of a peculiar, neo-Marxist, anti-Enlightenment, postmodernist, and post-truth perspective on the academy—at the expense of universal human rights, free speech, viewpoint diversity, national sovereignty, and the very possibility of objective truth and reality. In short, we should understand the term “social justice” as one of the greatest misnomers of our time, one that would have John Stuart Mill performing somersaults in his grave. It’s about time that this imposter and menace has been examined—and eviscerated—with such precision and integrity.

Dr. Michael Rectenwald, former NYU Professor and author of Springtime for Snowflakes: “Social Justice” and Its Postmodern Parentage.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University

Chapter Two: What Happened to Our Universities?

Chapter Three: Welcome to the Social Justice University

Chapter Four: Marxism Failed in the World, but Conquered Western Academia

Chapter Five: Universities Strive for Diversity in Everything but Opinion

Chapter Six: Diversity Replaces Merit at Canadian Universities

Chapter Seven: Word by Word, SJWs Are Changing America

Chapter Eight: Cultural Relativism Undermines Human Rights

Chapter Nine: How “Social Justice” Warriors Kill Free Thought

Chapter Ten: Are Our Educators a Fifth Column?

Chapter Eleven: Official Racism in Our Universities

Chapter Twelve: Are Educators Enemies of the People?

Chapter Thirteen: Commissars in Our Universities

Chapter Fourteen: No, the College Free Speech Crisis Is Not a Right Wing Conspiracy

Chapter Fifteen: The Growing Threat of Repressive Social Justice

Chapter Sixteen: Canadian Government Imposes “Social Justice” on All Universities

Chapter Seventeen: The Death of Merit and the Race to Mediocrity in Our Increasingly Marxist Universities

Chapter Eighteen: Sanctuary for Illegal Aliens and Persecution of Males in Our Universities

Chapter Nineteen: How They Hijacked Anthropology

Chapter Twenty: Anthropology: Abandon All Truth Ye Who Enter

Chapter Twenty One: Today’s Social Science Courses—More Feelings, Fewer Facts

Chapter Twenty Two: The Rise of Anti-Semitism in the 21^st Century

Chapter Twenty Three: Anthropology and Anti-Semitism

Sources of Chapters

Author Biography

Introduction

Between 1958 and 2018, I spent my life in colleges and universities, first as an undergraduate student at Antioch College in Ohio, then as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and then fifty years as a professor of anthropology at McGill University, Canada’s premier university.

I chose academia, above all, because the search for understanding and explanation appealed to me as a worthy and gratifying pursuit. Teaching, too, seemed similarly worthwhile. As well, the freedom and independence granted to professors to follow their intellectual interest was attractive, especially in comparison with the conformity and obedience required by work in business or government bureaucracies. When I entered academia, if you did your teaching and research reasonably successfully, you were left alone to carry on.

Anthropologists, such as myself, had the freedom to take up any subject that they care to, for social and cultural anthropology is a broad field covering all aspects of society and culture. Biological anthropologists, anthropological archeologists, and linguistic anthropologists complement the work of social and cultural anthropology. Primary research for social and cultural anthropologists is through ethnography, the first hand study of people and their culture through residence in one or more communities, in many cases abroad. The wide range of cultures studied by anthropologists is a unique contribution of anthropology. At the same time, various theoretical points of view were tried out and tested, to see if they bear fruit in understanding and explanation.

I had the privilege of carrying out ethnographic field research among the Shah Nawazi nomadic tribe in Iranian Baluchistan, reporting that research in various articles and in Black Tents of Baluchistan. Following that I carried out research among Bharawad pastoralists in Gujarat, and Reika pastoralists in Rajasthan, northwest India, reporting that research in articles and in Pastoralists. Finally, I lived in Villagrande Strisaili, Sardinia, and reported findings in Pastoralists and especially in The Anthropology of Real Life.

When I began studying anthropology, it, like all social sciences, aspired to a scientific approach. After all, science has transformed knowledge and technology in other fields, and could, it was believed, provide a sound foundation for understanding society and culture. This, I assumed, would never change, but I was wrong. In the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, there was a “paradigm shift,” as the change was dignified, away from science. Objectivity was rejected in favor of subjectivity, impartiality replaced by advocacy, and knowledge was replaced by activism.

This great intellectual shift resulted from the convergence of three popular intellectual and social movements: Feminism championed advocacy, activism, and subjectivity. Marxism was framed as advocacy. And postmodernism “deconstructed” objectivity and left us with subjectivity and nihilism.

In consequence, universities shifted priorities from advancing knowledge to a political project that came to be called “social justice,” which characterized society as oppressors victimizing females and marginalized minorities. Universities took as their main objective the championing of alleged victim categories. Academic researchers no longer strive to discover the patterns of society and culture; rather, they begin with ideologically dictated “truths,” and seek only examples that affirm and illustrate those truths. Empirical findings that contradict ideological “truths” are suppressed.

Under the rationale of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” preference is given to members of alleged victim categories in admission, funding, hiring, and special facilities and events, often segregated. Females, African Americans, Hispanics, Indigenous Natives (especially in Canada), LGBTQ++, the disabled, the poor, Muslims, and illegal aliens are favoured and celebrated, while males, whites, Christians and Jews, the abled, members of the middle class, and often East Asians are vilified and discriminated against.

Only “social justice” opinions are regarded as legitimate, and other views, critical views, are suppressed through selective avoidance in hiring and invitations, or silenced through de-platforming and characterization as alt-right, far right, fascist, KKK, and Nazi. The beloved “diversity” no longer applies to diversity of opinion, which is now rejected as a white male supremacy talking point. But universities do not leave policing to student and staff ideological vigilantes. They hired, at great cost, multitudes of political commissars called “diversity, equity, and inclusion officers” at every organizational level to police thought and expression. Social justice and anti-bias courses are set up, sometimes required for all staff, to re-educate those not sufficiently “woke,” and those who had strayed into unacceptable thought or language.

As someone who holds classical liberal values, I favor an even playing field, providing as much as possible equal opportunity to succeed. No one should be blocked because of gender, race, origin, ethnicity, etc. People of my ethnicity were blocked in the past by Harvard, McGill, and other elite universities. But, if in the past, the playing field was tilted in favor of the majority and against minorities, now it is tilted in favor of minorities and against members of the majority or unpopular minorities. This is not social justice and inclusion; it is intentional exclusion and injustice to members of unfavored categories.

Guidepost values for universities in the past, such as merit and excellence, have been rejected as white supremacism, and replaced by gender and racial diversity. This is a serious abdication of academic and pedagogical responsibility, and a path to mediocrity and partisan particularism. Universalistic values have been rejected by universities, in favor of partisan “woke” ideology. In a competitive and dangerous world, this ideological corruption is leading to the decline of the West. Universities will not mourn, for they now advocate the doctrine that the West is evil, and the rest are virtuous. The decadence of Western universities is saddening, but, more important, it is a dangerous mistake.

Chapter One: What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University

Universities in the 20^th century were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. Scholarship and research were pursued, and diverse opinions were exchanged and argued in the “marketplace of ideas.”

This is no longer the case. Particularly in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, a single political ideology has replaced scholarship and research, because the ideology presents fixed answers to all questions. And, although the most important thing in universities today is the diversity of race, gender, sexual practice, ethnicity, economic class, and physical and mental capability, there is no longer diversity of opinion. Only those committed to the ideology are admitted to academic staff or administration.

Universities have been transformed by the near-universal adoption of three interrelated theories: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and social justice. These theories and their implications will be explored here.

There Is No Truth; Nothing Is Good or Bad

Postmodernism: In the past, academics were trained to seek truth. Today, academics deny that there is such a thing as objective Truth. Instead, they argue that no one can be objective, that everyone is inevitably subjective, and consequently everyone has their own truth. The correct point of view, they urge, is relativism. This means not only that truth is relative to the subjectivity of each individual, but also that ethics and morality are relative to the individual and the culture, so there is no such thing as Good and Evil, or even Right and Wrong. So too with the ways of knowing; your children will learn that there is no objective basis for preferring chemistry over alchemy, astronomy over astrology, or medical doctors over witch doctors. They will learn that facts do not exist; only interpretations do.

All Cultures Are Equally Good; Diversity Is Our Strength

Our social understanding has also been transformed by postmodern relativism. Because moral and ethical principles are deemed to be no more than the collective subjectivity of our culture, it is now regarded as inappropriate to judge the principles and actions of other cultures. This doctrine is called “cultural relativism.” For example, while racism is held to be the highest sin in the West, and slavery the greatest of our historical sins, your children will learn that we are not allowed to criticize contemporary racism and slavery in Africa, the Middle East, and the equivalents in South Asia.

The political manifestation of cultural relativism is multiculturalism, an incoherent concept that projects the integration of multiple incompatible cultures. Diversity is lauded as a virtue in itself.  Imagine a country with fifty different languages, each derived from a different culture. That would not be a society, but a tower of babble. How would it work if there were multiple codes of law requiring and forbidding contrary behaviors: driving on the left and driving on the right; monogamy and polygamy; male dominance and gender equality; arranged marriage and individual choice? Your children will learn that our culture is nothing special and that other cultures are awesome.

The West Is Evil; The Rest Are Virtuous

Postcolonialism, the dominant theory in the social sciences today, is inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism, in which the conflict between the capitalist and proletariat classes is allegedly exported to the exploitation of colonized countries. By this means, the theory goes, oppression and poverty take place in colonies instead of in relation to the metropolitan working class. Postcolonialism posits that all of the problems in societies around the world today are the result of the relatively short Western imperial dominance and colonization. For example, British imperialism is blamed for what are in fact indigenous cultures, such as the South Asian caste system and the African tribal system. So too, problems of backwardness and corruption in countries that once were colonies continue to be blamed on past Western imperialism. The West is thus the continuing focus on anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist sentiment. Your children will learn that our society is evil, and the cause of all the evil in the wider world.

Only the West Was Imperialist and Colonialist

This ahistorical approach of postcolonialism ignores the hundreds of empires and their colonies throughout history, as well as ignoring contemporary empires, such as the Arab Muslim Empire that conquered all of the central Middle East, North Africa, southern Europe, Persia, Central Asia, and northern India, and occupied them minimally for hundreds of years, but 1400 years in the central Middle East and North Africa, and occupy them today. China, once the Communists took power, invaded Inner Mongolia to the north, Chinese Turkestan to the west, and Tibet to the south. Once in control, the government flooded these colonies with Han Chinese, in effect ethnically cleansing them. Postcolonialists have nothing to say about any of this; they wish to condemn exclusively the West. Your children will learn to reject history and comparisons with other societies, lest the claimed unique sins of the West be challenged.

Western Imperialism Was a Racist Project

Postcolonialists like to stress the racial dimension of Western imperialism: as an illustration of racism. But postmodernists are not interested in Arab slave raiding in “black” Africa, or Ottoman slaving among the whites in the Balkans, or the North Africans slave raiding of whites in Europe, from Ireland through Italy and beyond. Your children will learn that only whites are racist.

Israeli Colonialists Are White Supremacists

A remarkable example of this line of thinking is the characterization of Israel as a settler colonialist, white supremacist, apartheid society Allegedly white Israelis are oppressing Palestinian people of color. The (non-postmodern) facts make this a difficult argument to sustain. As is well established by all evidence, Jewish tribes and kingdoms occupied Judea and Samaria for a thousand years before the Romans invaded and fought war after imperial war against the indigenous Jews, and then enslaved or exiled most of them, renaming the land “Palestine.” Then, five centuries later, the Arabs from Arabia invaded and conquered Palestine, going on to conquer half of the world. The Jews returned to “Palestine” after 1400 years; most were refugees or stateless, so not colonists from a metropolis. Almost half of Israelis are Jewish Arabs thrown out of Arab countries, not to mention the Ethiopian and Indian Jews. Furthermore, Arab Muslims and Christians make up 21% of Israeli citizens. So to characterize multicolored Israelis as “whites” oppressing “Palestinian people of color’ is an imaginary distinction.

Canadian? You Have No Right to Stolen Native Land

If indigenous Jews are deemed to have no claim to their ancient homeland, then Euro-Canadians, Asian Canadians, African Canadians, and Latin Canadians are colonialist settlers without even an excuse. You have stolen Native land. The only moral course, according to postcolonialism, is to give everything back. At the very least, in order for “decolonization” to be implemented, the First Nations must be ranked above the interloping settlers, must be given special preference in all benefits, the law must make special exceptions for them. First nations must receive ongoing grants, pay no taxes, be given special reserved places in universities and government offices, and they have a veto over any public policy and be ceremonially bowed to at every public event.

As we are guided by postcolonialism rather than by human rights, we can disregard the human right of equal treatment before the law. That is just a rule of foreign settlers anyway. And the cities and industries and institutions built by the settlers, so the decolonialization story goes, really should belong to the natives, even though they lived in simple settlements or were nomads, depending upon simple shelters, with limited hunting or cultivating subsistence economies. There was no civil peace among the many Native bands and tribes, with raiding, enslavement, torture, and slaughter common.

White Men Are Evil; Women of Color Are Virtuous

Social justice theory teaches that the world is divided between oppressors and victims. Some categories of people are oppressors and other are victims: males are oppressors, and females are victims; whites are oppressors, and people of color are victims; heterosexuals are oppressors, and gays, lesbians, bisexual, etc. are victims; Christians and Jews are oppressors, and Muslims are victims. Your sons will learn that they are stigmatized by their toxic masculinity.

Individuals Are Not Important; Only Category Membership Is

Social justice theory has taken university life by storm. It is the result of the relentless working of Marxist theory, adopted by youngsters during the American cultural revolution of the 1960s, then brought to universities as many of those youngsters became college professors. Marxism as an academic theory was explicitly followed by some in the 1970s and 1980s, but it did not sweep everything else away, because the idea economic class conflict was not popular in the prosperous general North American population. The cultural Marxist innovation that brought social justice theory to dominance was the extension of class conflict from economics to gender, race, sexual practice, ethnicity, religion, and other mass categories. We see this in sociology, which is no longer defined as the study of society but has for decades been defined as the study of inequality. For social justice theory, equality is not the equality of opportunity that is the partner of merit, but rather equality of result, which ensures the members of each category equality of representation irrespective of merit. Your sons will learn that they should “step aside” to give more space and power to females. Your daughters, if white, will learn that they must defer to members of racial minorities.

Justice Is Equal Representation According to Percentages of the Population

As there is allegedly structural discrimination against all members of victim categories, in order for equality of result to prevail, representation according to percentages of populations must be mandated in all organizations, in all books assigned or references cited, in all awards and benefits. Ideas such as merit and excellence are dismissed as white-male supremacist dog whistles; they are to be replaced by “diversity” of gender, race, sexual preference, ethnicity, economic class, religion, and so on. (Note that “diversity” does not include “diversity of opinion,” for only social justice ideology is acceptable. Any criticism or opposition is regarded as “hate speech.”) Academic committees now twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain that “diversity is excellence.”

Members of Oppressor Categories Must Be Suppressed

Of course, the requirement of representation according to population applies only one way: to members of victim classes. If whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians, etc. are underrepresented, that is fine; the fewer the better. For example, females now make up 60% of university graduates, although in the general age cohort males are 51%. There is no social justice clamoring for males to be fully represented.  Members of disfavored oppressor categories are disparaged. The classics of Western civilization should be ignored because they are the work, almost exclusively, of “dead white men.” Only works of females, people of color and non-Western authors should be considered virtuous. So too in political history. The American Constitution should be discarded because its writers were slaveholders.

Victims of The World Unite!

“Intersectionality” is an idea invented by a feminist law professor. It argues that some individuals fall into several victim categories, for example, black, female lesbians have three points in the victim stakes, as opposed to male members of the First Nations who receive only one point. Further, on the action front, members of each victim category are urged to unite and ally with members of other victim categories, because sharing the victim designation is the most important status in the world. This leads to some anomalies. Black victims of racism are urged to unite with Arab victims of colonialism, even though Arabs have been and still are holders of black slaves.

Female victims of sexism are urged to support Palestinian victims of “white” colonialism, even though Palestinian women have always been and continue to be subordinated to men, and are subjected to a wide range of abuse. Your children will learn that to be accepted, they must assume victim status or become champions of victims, and ally with other victims.

Being Educated Is About Being on The Right Side

As Karl Marx said