This post continues my ongoing meditation on academe's ideological bureaucracy (for earlier installments, see my posts for July 25, July 27, July 29, and July 30). I closed my last post with the suggestion that this bureaucracy works effectively to paralyze personal accountability in the name of enhancing intellectual exchange. Today I begin a two-part conclusion to this series dedicated to the proposition that academe's longstanding institutional bias is finally less a political problem--though it is certainly that--than it is a moral one. The single worst thing about academe's successful administration of leftwing ideology is not that it is slanted toward a set series of views, but that it is bent on making students accept those views as their own.

A signal feature of bureaucracy is that it runs in the passive voice. In a bureaucracy, people do not do things; things are done. Bureaucracy is by definition a system that no one is responsible for running; it is full of people, but they are not independent agents. They are arms of the bureaucracy, and their work is to help the system perpetuate itself. It's bad enough when bureaucracy becomes the shape of business or government. Costs go up and rules increase and there is no one to complain to. It's worse with education. Recent years have seen a tremendous growth in the size of academic bureaucracy (due in no small part to the administrative weight of multicultural initiatives). Not surprisingly, academic bureaucratic growth has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in costs and rules (centered around policing the politically sensitive, socially aware campus--more on this in the final installment). Organized around producing and maintaining a utopian multicultural community, the politicized bureaucracy that shapes today's academic experience is a decidedly different animal from business and government bureaucracy. Like all topheavy systems, academic bureaucracy alienates and angers those who come under its impersonal power. But at the same time, it creates loyal ideological disciples, people who make careers out of managing the spread of diversity. Dedicated to the uplifting project of planning campus culture, the disciples of the leftwing academic administration manage not only to bureaucratize the intensely personal experience of learning, but also to bureaucratize conscience itself.

I touched on the problem of bureaucratized conscience when I discussed how opinion has become the property of the group on the politicized campus. Now I want to tie that point to a broader one about the erosion of personal accountability within the leftwing academic bureaucracy. The scenes of this erosion are numerous; they include affirmative action, speech codes, overbroad harassment policies, multicultural course requirements, and sensitivity workshops. Taken together, these things all work in concert to drive home two deadly lessons: the first is that you are not responsible for making your own way in the world, and the second is that you are not responsible for arriving at your own beliefs.

The idea that you aren't responsible for your own achievement is one of the signal accomplishments of affirmative action. Built on the belief that racism and sexism remain deeply ingrained in American culture and institutions, affirmative action is predicated on the notion that in our society, there is no such thing as making your own way. Privilege and oppression, rather than disciplined study and sustained hard work, it holds, are the decisive factors in our society's uneven distribution of wealth; as such, affirmative action cheapens the educational environment it aims to enrich by completely undermining the basis for academic standards. Penalizing students who cannot lay claim to victim status in order to engineer opportunity where by definition it has not been earned, affirmative action structures college as a time of reparation, payback, and dubiously gotten gains. California is so attached to the reparative admissions idea that it now counts personal hardship as academic criteria: victimhood is becoming more important than traditional qualifications at California state schools, where the abolition of affirmative action has only motivated admissions officers to find more creative ways to justify admitting "oppressed" students over those with higher grades and scores.

The effect of racial preferences on the college experience is profound. The resentments and misunderstandings it produces among students and between students and their professors are well-known. What is less known is how closely tied affirmative action is to a segregated campus culture. For many minority students college is a period of social and educational apartheid. Minority students are constantly encouraged to stick together; on many campuses this results in tightly-bound racial enclaves organized not around shared interests but around skin color. Such initiatives as separate orientations, separate dorms, separate yearbooks, separate student centers, separate graduations, and even separate majors are ostensibly designed to improve minority retention. But their cumulative insult is palpable: it powerfully announces that college administrators don't think minority students can function successfully in the world. It also says administrators think minority students can't make it through school on their own. It also says minority students are no more than their background--within the cold eugenic calculus of campus multiculturalism, one is never simply a person. One is always first and foremost a member of a raced, classed, and sexed group. Thus do policies ostensibly aimed at creating opportunity and eliminating racism work against themselves, heightening racial tensions on campus and corrupting the very notion of a fair shake.

There is no personal accountability in such an environment, nor is there the possibility of genuine success or pure failure. There is only the chronic tension that arises when a learning environment becomes the scene of a politically motivated experiment in shaping an alternative reality. The cheapening of education that results from morally dishonest attempts to engineer a model multicultural student body is most disturbingly exhibited in the twin premises that a) college students cannot be trusted to shape their own consciences; and b) that they must not be allowed to act according to their personal beliefs unless those beliefs are the same as those approved by their school. More on this soon.