José Cabranes: The Present Danger at our Leading Universities: What is to be Don [12:50-17:56]

The expansion of the Title IX bureaucracy provides a useful illustration of this interesting process. At first, universities treat a Title IX as a matter of legal compliance. Perhaps a lawyer or two would, among other things, review the allocation of athletic funds to ensure parity between the sexes. Now, however, Title IX has metastasized into a vast bureaucracy central to university's identity. Title IX and related offices oversee orientations, investigations, and mandatory bystander training. I repeat bystander training. Amounting to the re-education of the faculty that I once imagined were the heart of the university. Title IX compliances no longer a regulatory detail to be dealt with so that the university can get on with its core business. Surveillance and re-education are now a part of the university's business. And so the university has been pulled from its day job as a place of inquiry and conscripted into the service of social change. A similar conceptual confusion has facilitated the rise of today's student activists. It may surprise some of you to learn that the faculty plays almost no role in the admissions process at our great universities. Instead, that process has been handed over to professional admissions departments. Relegated to toothless advisory committees, a faculty member is lucky if she is invited briefly as a spectator to glimpse the making of the sausage. Unsurprisingly, these admissions professionals are less interested in traditional academic criteria, quality such as scholastic talent and intellectual openness. Instead, they gravitate toward flashier virtues, virtues such as globalism, the need for change, activism, these role in quotation marks, leadership or overcoming adversity. Predictably, the use of such narcissistic and relevant criteria produces a student body that is ill-fitted to intellectual life. Students now arrive on campus having been instructed to promote themselves, you know this from experience with your children and grandchildren. They are instructed to promote themselves as social entrepreneurs, change makers. It is now widespread, if not universal, for applicants to claim to have founded some shiny sounding program or better still a platform devoted to beneficent acts. Upon arrival, these first-year students encounter a forning president or dean expounding on the fabulous records and unprecedented achievements of these future leaders of America. Compare, if you will, that obeisant attitude to the simple self-confident greeting of President Kingman Brewster at Yale to the freshman assembly, which I was honored to observe three years in a row. He began always as follows. Welcome to the privilege of Yale. The contemporary admission, in other words, you are very lucky to be here. Not we are very lucky to have you. Once you start telling students that we're so terribly lucky to have you, they may start to take you seriously. The contemporary admissions process thus reflects and advances a transformation of the university from a place of thought to an instrument for social action. Is it any wonder that students arrive on campus searching for windmills at which to tilt? As bureaucrats and student activists have come to dominate the university, they have reshaped it in their image. Whenever possible, they have sought to model the distinction between intellectual deliberation and political action, thus making certain thoughts like certain deeds, crimes, thought crimes as prefigured by George R. Woll and as referred to earlier by another of our speakers, thought crimes. When looked at in this light, many seemingly