Re-Examining the State: The American University in the Defense of Western Civilization

An edited presentation given at the symposium, “The Crisis of Knowledge & The American University: James Baldwin and the Struggle for Our Human Future” on June 1st, 2024.

It is humbling to be in the Church of the Crucifixion in Philadelphia, the place where the great W.E.B. Du Bois was engaged in a study of social science. What we are doing here today in this conference is in that spirit of scientific examination of society, for which we look back to Du Bois. 

We are also organizing this year to commemorate the legacy of James Baldwin. I think this is important not just for America but important for the world. James Baldwin is a thinker who deserves to be read and understood by the whole world. I want to begin this presentation by noting that our effort today is in the spirit of these two great men: Du Bois and Baldwin.

The topic of this panel today is “The University as an Arm of the State: Zionism, the War Economy, and the Consequences for Knowledge.” I want to begin by talking about the concept of the State. It is a concept that is in the domain of political theory. 

One place to begin to think about the concept of the State is to go back to Friedrich Engels and his idea that the state is the product of society at a certain stage of development. Engels said further, that the state is a power arising out of society—but places itself above society. This is an important place to begin. 

The other person who we have revisit for a theory of the state is V.I. Lenin, and his idea that the state is an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class—which means then that the state is built for the defense of the exploiting class, which in Leninist or Marxist terminology, you would call the bourgeoisie or the property owners. 

I think that as important as this theorizing and these definitions are, I don’t think it captures the nature of the American state today. The need of today is to go forward in our ideas to be able to truly understand what we are facing; what we are up against. The concept that gets us closer to the truth is that the American state, as it is configured today, in the current stage of development of American society, is in defense of a civilization. It is in defense of the supremacy of Western civilization. I think that’s something that Meghna argued by pointing out the transition from industries to universities.

This leads to the question of civilization, and a lot of people give different answers in defining civilization. Some historians want to tie civilization to religion and some political theorists would say that civilization is about culture, about a way of life. I don’t want to give a formalistic definition to civilization, but I think we all have a sense of what civilization means and, as a concept, it really helps us to understand the American ruling elite. What the ruling elite is doing is trying to defend Western civilization. 

There is a debate between James Baldwin and William Buckley in 1965, and at the end of that debate when William Buckley is speaking—giving a weak response to Baldwin’s magnificent presentation—Buckley ends by saying, “If the only alternative to the status quo is to overthrow that civilization which we consider the faith of our Fathers, then we will fight the issue.” 

Buckley is very clear that what Baldwin is suggesting is literally a new civilization; and what Buckley is arguing, as a representative of the American ruling elite at that time, is that we will fight to defend a certain way of life; we will fight to defend Western civilization as it is presently constituted. But the question then becomes: How do you defend a civilization? You can use the police to defend property. The police and other arms of the state are ways to defend the means of production.

To defend a civilization, however, what you have to do is to control the means of ideological production. You have to control the means of knowledge, and that essentially is how the American ruling elite, I think, conceptualizes what it is doing and why the American university has become such a central part of the state and of the strategy of the ruling elite.

About three years ago Gideon Rachman, who is one of the foremost analysts of the Financial Times, had written an article on the idea of Western and American decline. He writes, and I am just paraphrasing him: “Even though I might be in the camp which believes that there is a decline, there are two things that I think check the idea of excessive American decline, there are two things that hold up the place that America has in the world.” And he argues those two things are the American dollar and the American university. 

He argues explicitly that it’s not the American military, but the American university that plays a more central role in the defense of the place that America has in the world.

So what is the American university doing? I would like to repeat that the American university is set up as a means of ideological control, for setting the boundaries of discourse. The Ivy League colleges, in particular, are really built to train the ruling elite, and I just wanted to give a couple of statistics that I think bring out the point. 

The first one is: if you look at the staff in the Biden White House, it turns out 40 percent of them have Ivy League degrees. Seventeen percent are from Harvard. The American population has less than 0.5 percent of Harvard graduates, I don’t know the exact numbers.

What is clear is that these universities, and particularly the elite ones in the Ivy Leagues, are built to train the ruling elite. In August of 2022, there was a poll on whether the U.S. is doing enough to support the war in Ukraine and it turns out that those who had a high school degree or less were much more likely to say that the U.S. was doing too much to support the war in Ukraine. And as you went up in the level of educational qualification, the statistics changed and people thought that the U.S. was not doing enough to support the war in Ukraine. What this brings out is really how these universities become places to train you into thinking in a certain type of way. 

I want to leave aside the social sciences, I know we’re going to get into them tomorrow and I think there’s a lot to say about the social sciences and we’ll discuss that as the conference goes forward. I want to really talk about the sciences, because the natural sciences are seen as that field which is “free of ideology”; supposedly they involve work that you do independent of ideology. 

This idea of seeing the natural sciences as separate from ideology, of seeing it as separate from philosophy, is relatively recent and I would argue it is linked to Cold War America. It is known to some extent that the CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and all of these organizations played a role in influencing the artistic and literary work, but I think it is lesser known that these organizations were equally interested in science and the scientific work that was happening at American universities but also around the world. 

What some scientists argued in 1950 was that it was the natural sciences that set apart Western civilization—that the Western civilization permitted science and scientific discovery. The CIA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and all of these institutions played a role in creating this idea that the individual scientist was to have “freedom” to work, and this freedom really allowed America and the West to make progress.

I think what that freedom amounted to, and particularly what that freedom amounts to today, is really the freedom to get paid. I think that’s about it. You can really see this take place when people go in at the level of, say, graduate school, into universities. 

First of all, how you choose your research is not up to you. I would actually say, particularly in the natural sciences, you don’t decide your research topic. You join a research group and the topics are already given to you. Then within the research group, you may have some other idea, let’s say, but ultimately you have to get it published in journals. And the journals have their own system of peer review. So there are many mechanisms to ultimately limit what kind of work you can do. 

I’m not even talking about all of the funding agencies—the Department of Defense, the federal funding agencies, which ultimately limit the kind of research that’s done. But if you get away from all of that, you still have to deal with the sociology of it, the sociology of what’s considered the “right thing to do,” and I don’t know if I can fully begin to describe the kind of pressure that is on a graduate student deciding what kind of work he or she is allowed to do or not allowed to do. But I think it’s very, very real and a lot of people who have gone through that process would agree with me. 

Finally if you end up making your way through all of that and still do something outside of it, well, then, essentially, you’re going to get ignored by the scientific community. You’re going to get insulted, you’re going to be called names, and all of it really, in some ways, it’s to train you, to ideologically discipline you, to make you think in a certain way, even in the natural sciences.

So what I have tried to argue before you today is that the whole point of the university is really to ideologically discipline you, to bring you into political alignment with a certain way of thinking of the ruling class, which is why the so-called “radical professor” does not exist in the American university. 

If you’re a young student at the undergraduate level joining the university, you’re under intense pressure, intense ideological pressure and that’s why if you look at some of the statistics of the mental health condition at these universities it’s astonishing. Forty-four percent of students report symptoms of depression and anxiety. These are places where you’re supposed to be setting your moral direction, where you’re supposed to be learning. These institutions put extreme pressure on young people and unless you behave in a certain way, unless you conform to the kind of ideological discipline that is being laid out, you essentially undergo social isolation.

I just want to summarize and say that at this stage of social development that we are in, in American society, the university is inseparable from the state. The university is a place of ideological disciplining and control which is necessary for the state to defend the supremacy of Western civilization. I want to end by talking about something that we’ve discussed in the Saturday Free School: the crisis of the state, and we have discussed it as a crisis of legitimacy. 

I think that the crisis of legitimacy is also something that the universities are facing. If you look at polls, the confidence in higher education keeps falling. It has fallen to 36 percent; it was much higher, say, even 10 years earlier. The internal crisis, I think, is alongside a global crisis. What the American ruling elite would always argue is: “You can say what you want but we have technological superiority. If we are doing something that allows us to be superior in the technological realm, we must be emulated.”

Well, this is no longer true. A recent report says that China is ahead, “stunningly in 37 out of 44 critical emerging technologies.” Rather than appreciate this as human achievement, we’ve seen the kind of response the Western ruling elite has given to the rise of China. This is because essentially they’re training you to be anti-human. The ruling elite has really come to a place where they would literally end human history rather than give up on the idea of white supremacy, rather than accept the world where they are not at the center.

I think one of the achievements of this conference, one of the achievements of the Call at this conference, has been the declaration in the Call that Israel is a Nazi state. That is not something that you can do at a university, that is something that you can only do here. And like everybody else I want to pay homage to the young students who are bravely protesting, and I want to say that they are being watched and admired by the world. 

I’ve been trying to keep up as best as I can from India, and I have to say not a lot of places are actually asking the students to speak for themselves, asking the students what they think. There’s a lot of expert commentary on the students but not a lot of listening to the students. I think that the students are literally challenging the means of ideological control that I have described. From what I hear, I think they’re literally fighting for a new civilization. 

I think they are questioning, very deeply, the intellectual and moral foundations of the university, which is why I think the state has had to come down on them so heavily: because it can see that what they’re challenging is really this means of ideological control. It’s different for some of us who saw these big protests in 2020 for Black Lives Matter; the state in fact actively supported some of those protests and gave a very different response. 

In some ways you could think of the university as a parallel, really, to the medieval church. The trained professionals that come out of these universities are the parallel to the theologians, but obviously what we’re dealing with is much more complex, much more sophisticated than anything the church could have imagined. The last thing that I’ll end with is some words by Baldwin. I’m going to use them for the university: What we are faced with today is really a condition where the destruction of the university as it is presently constituted may not only be desirable, but necessary.