I've been arguing that academic administration is increasingly oriented around producing, maintaining, and managing a strongly left-wing campus culture. I've shown how left-leaning ideology has become thoroughly institutionalized in American education by way of an ever-expanding, fabulously well-funded bureaucracy, and I've argued that one aim of a fully bureaucratized agenda is to perpetuate itself by substituting collective contemplation for decisive action. Today I continue that train of thought by developing a related observation: that within the left-wing academic bureaucracy, opinion formation is increasingly understood not as the work of the individual, but the work of the group.

The Mona Baker scandal offers a fine example of collective opinion formation at work. The uproar surrounding her decision to fire two Israeli scholars from the editorial board of an academic journal has been enormously revealing, not simply for the moral bankruptcy it reveals in some of today's academics, but also for the anxieties it has raised within academe about what the scholarly position toward Israel ought to be. In response to this anxiety, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently held an online colloquy dedicated to the question, "How should scholars respond to the calls to boycott Israeli academics and universities?" As a discussion, the colloquy was nothing special. But as an example of academic opinion formation in action, it was remarkable indeed, not only for its assumption that "scholars" are unanimously opposed to Israel's present policies (the question assumes that Israel's putative wrongdoing has been firmly established), but also for its assumption that "scholars" are a definable, coherent group (as in, "the scholarly community"), one whose members would naturally refer to the collective to find out what to think and how to act.

Trained in the art of leftist groupthink, the participants in this colloquy--who are admittedly self-selecting--never question the validity of the topic. Instead, they do as they are told. They obediently debate. Some say yes, and some say no; some say maybe and some say further study is required. But all agree implicitly that the purpose of the debate is to achieve consensus.

Only one poster, several days into the discussion, paused to reflect on the creepy terms of the debate: "My God...how is it that this issue is under discussion...are we all trying to see if there is some issue on which we can show unanimity?" The answer is clearly yes. The colloquy sets this desire in motion. Academics used to putting up a unified political front are embarrassingly divided on whether or not to boycott Israel. But they are apparently unanimously agreed that the academy should have an official position on the subject. A position must be adopted; scholars as a group should have a clear foreign policy.

Thus was this lone poster's question swallowed up in the angry pursuit of partyline consensus that made up the bulk of the colloquy. Apart from this anguished, intuitive aside, no one says the question is stupid; no one challenges the terms of debate. No one notices the obvious, that the question is insulting and intrusive, that it reeks of herd mentality, that it conceives of scholars not as thinking individuals but as some kind of undifferentiated intellectual mass that must seek consensus and must act in concert. It's a chilling testament to the quality of the well-administered academic mind.

Charles Johnson has picked up on the Palestinian Chronicle's version of such groupthink, which is currently enjoining Mona Baker supporters everywhere to loudly proclaim their belief that "academic freedom demands that Israeli academics speak out loudly against their government's oppressive actions in Palestine." The notion that academic freedom somehow mandates the expression of group loyalty, rather than individual expression, is as alive in the U.S. as it is in the Middle East.

Casting collective contemplation as decisive action and treating opinion formation as a collective activity are closely related, mutually reinforcing techniques for turning the university into a scene of static ideological consensus. The more you rely on the group for your opinions, the less able you are to think or act on your own. Similarly, the more you submit matters of private conscience to the group for adjudication, the more you begin to confuse the process of debate with the fact of action. As ideology increasingly replaces inquiry as the modus operandi of academic life, the intellectual, at least in his left-leaning incarnation, begins to understand his private beliefs as something that can and should be administered--chosen, monitored, policed--by the "scholarly community."

Such are the moral and procedural confusions of the leftist academic collective, a vast ideological bureaucracy that bears more than a little resemblance to a badly run socialist state. The results are, predictably, those sought by other collectivist regimes: privacy, personal choice, and free expression disappear; in their place arises a totalitarian approach to belief that has as its ultimate effect the paralysis of personal accountability. More on this soon.