BY HARVEY J. GRAFF

New York Times right-wing opinion writer Ross Douthat led the November 11, 2021, print edition of the editorial pages with “Why We Need New Colleges.” Readers familiar with his fantasy-laden writing will not be surprised. I always shake my head when reading Douthat’s never-documented imaginings, but sometimes, like that day, I slam my fist on the table. Recently Douthat recreated both Papal Catholicism and American Catholicism. In the wake of the public relations announcement of a University of Austin (UATX) to open in 2024 (they claim), he reinvents the American “college” both past and present. It is quite a feat of imagination and misrepresentation.

First, Douthat radically exaggerates the content of UATX’s aspirational announcement. What is their “unfettered pursuit of truth” and “fully committed to freedom of inquiry… conscience, and civil discourse” in an undergraduate institution imagined for three years in the future? The proposed board of advisers is not so “notable.” The credentials of the leadership, as others have noted, are compromised, to put it diplomatically (see Hank Reichman’s blog post “Welcome to Rogues’ Gallery University” for details). That’s par for the course and for fact-free Douthat.

Of greater concern to me as a historian and professor are Douthat’s hyperbolic assertions about university “elites” (an undefined term) and their “rapacious business dealings . . . , hedge-fund habits and administrative bloat.” He writes, “At the same time, they suffer from a self-inflicted McCarthyism, a climate of increasing ideological conformism punctuated by cancellation controversies and policed by diversity-equity-inclusion loyalty oaths.” Wow!

I don’t have the time or space to parse that screed. That is the voice of Tucker Carlson, Fox News, One America News Network, Newsmax, the New York Post, and the Washington Examiner—not the legitimate press and certainly not “notable” scholars or responsible journalists.

Douthat desperately needs to take lessons in the long history of the domination of the American college and university by sectarian religious denominations; the decades-long struggles for professional recognition, free speech, academic freedom, and academic tenure; and the realities of McCarthyism’s impact on civil society in the 1950s. Or the very real divisions across almost all campuses since at least the 1930s and actively since the 1960s. I have witnessed and participated in these since I was a first-year undergraduate in 1967.

If he and his cohort read, I recommend that they begin with such basic works as Paul Mattingly’s American Academic Cultures: A History of Higher Education (University of Chicago Press, 2017) or Julie Reuben’s Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and her recent articles on the period after the mid-twentieth century. There is much more to peruse. Such scholarly research tells an essential story of the long battles over professionalism, accountability, responsibility, and constitutional rights—a story that is alien to Douthat and other right-wing ideologues (including Senators Cruz, Hawley, and Cotton, the forty-fifth and former president, and the novelist-financier turned Ohio US Senate candidate J. D. Vance).

The American public and even readers of the New York Times cannot afford to be misled by Douthat’s ideologically biased and historically ignorant opinions. Tellingly, the best he can state, in touting his “new college” is to softly proclaim it “altogether, then, a sector seemingly in need of novelty and new experiments, ideally in the name of higher academic values.”

Douthat then gets lost in a self-contradictory muddle about “new colleges” as “start-up enterprises.” It is never clear where the metaphors and false analogies end and fiscal sensibilities begin. How I long for actual editing to return to the pages of the daily press . . .

I rest my case and ask the New York Times’s opinion editors to rest Douthat’s as well.

Harvey J. Graff is professor emeritus of English and history and Ohio Eminent Scholar at the Ohio State University. He is the author of many books on social history and many essays on universities and disciplines.