Telos 207 (Summer 2024): Politics and the University

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There is a fundamental arbitrariness about the work that is done at colleges and universities, which stems from the relationship between academic work and the political parameters of this work. The key issue is that the most basic aspect of our humanity involves having a sense of right and wrong. This sense of values sets the framework for all our other thoughts, actions, and decisions, providing direction and meaning for our lives.

The feeling that we are doing the right thing can motivate us to great achievements, and the loss of that feeling can lead us into inescapable despair. At the same time, when we perceive that others are doing wrong, we have a feeling of indignation at such injustice and seek to redress it. We will also judge the wrong doer in the same harsh light that we might use against ourselves when we fail to live up to our own ideals. Consequently, our sense of values will color all our perceptions and determine our decisions and judgments.

Moreover, because differences in values will lead to differences in how we perceive the world, our academic research also depends on the values around which it is organized. Our values will provide the framework for what we teach and how we teach it. They determine research agendas through decisions about where to put resources and which projects to pursue.

But because values are themselves not based in any rational determination, but rather in representation and rhetoric, there is no objective set of values that can provide orientation for our teaching and research. Instead, a political realm outside the academic endeavor itself will always determine the way in which teaching and research are carried out. Universities have always been chartered by churches and states that have an interest in what is taught and studied. When faculty attempt to maintain autonomy from these sponsors of a university, they might be able to do so based on the legitimate desire to maintain objectivity and present results that are unpopular. But they cannot claim the autonomy to change the values around which a university is organized.

In analyzing the relationship between politics and the university, it will consequently never be a matter of keeping politics out of academic decision-making. Just as we cannot keep a sense of right and wrong out of the way we view the world and run our lives, politics will always implicitly or explicitly determine the goals of our educational institutions by setting the mission of universities through a particular value orientation. In this issue, we consider the ways in which politics affect what happens at universities in China, the United States, and Europe.

While the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has always been crucial for academic work in China, particularly in areas such as history and political science, there has been a gradual shift in the last several decades in how the Party sees its relationship to the traditions of Chinese culture. As Alexander Lukin lays out, Chinese communists have recently begun to embrace Chinese traditions as a source of legitimacy for their political views. Until the 1980s, they complied with the orthodox view—imported from the Soviet Union—that Marxism is a universal ideology and there cannot be such a thing as different forms of it. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the success of economic development in China, however, the CCP has gradually embraced the nation’s rich cultural heritage as part of a strategy to bolster the argument that China offers an alternative form of Marxism—along with its own model of economic and social development—distinct from that of the West.

This trend has led to the idea that China is a civilizational state with a unique status. In suggesting that China has achieved its preeminence in world affairs because it is so special, Beijing seems to have returned to the center-periphery model of global relations that was established in imperial China. A mighty empire expects tribute from surrounding states relegated to subordinate status. Moreover, Lukin argues that the Chinese claim to be the only civilizational state is a rhetorical move designed to justify China’s use of its considerable economic and military power to influence other, not so special states. Such rhetoric aligns with other historical attempts—in the European Enlightenment period, for instance—to make use of the idea of civilization in order to demote other cultures to the complementary status of barbarism.

This ideological shift within the CCP toward a focus on civilization as a source of legitimacy has led to a reorganization of Chinese academic work, particularly that of political scientists. Rongxin Li provides an overview of the development of the new Chinese “political studies,” in which a previous orientation around Marxism-Leninism has given way to a focus on “indigenization,” as part of an attempt to develop specifically China-oriented methods of doing research on politics. While Li recognizes that some academic work in China simply repeats Party rhetoric, he also describes how there is also objective academic work being done in the context of an attempt to develop a distinctively Chinese form of political science.

Such work is still structured around Party goals, and Li’s description of the recent rise in China of “historical political study” as a method that seeks to “highlight the uninterruptedness and continuity of China’s history” clearly fits within the Party’s objective of establishing the importance of Chinese civilization. Li describes the second recent trend toward fieldwork-based research in Chinese villages as a way to privilege “reality over theory” and “fact over value.” In de-emphasizing theory and values, this approach affirms a technocratic method that claims to be exceptionally scientific and fact-based, thus suppressing any political conflict coming from below that would influence the existing authoritarian order.

This description of an academic field in China demonstrates the type of political exigencies that structure research around the values of a ruling elite. The Communist Party establishes parameters for academic research oriented around providing ideological support for authoritarianism. Accordingly, academic researchers assume an authoritarian model of governance and seek to stabilize this model rather than looking for ways to establish liberal democracy. This overriding aim is promoted through the shift toward history as a basis for investigations into politics, with Chinese exceptionalism at the center. At the same time, fieldwork emphasizing facts over values turns value decisions into an unalterable aspect of political and social reality.

Unfortunately, the values of liberal democracy are also losing sway in the United States, threatening to undermine the basis of its constitutional order. A consensus between government and academia with regard to the welfare state requires that academics help manage people through state programs administered by technocratic means. At the same time, the responsibility for the failures of these programs is being placed on “systematic racism” rather than the deficiencies of these programs themselves.

Consequently, in the field of history, for example, the narrative embraced by D.C. is one that has moved away from a previous focus on the nation’s liberal democratic values, and toward the idea that the country has been built on prejudice against people of color, settler colonialism, and imperialism. The same sort of appeal to technocracy as in China allows the expanding American administrative state to function as a means of suppressing popular dissent. In both China and the United States, academic endeavor has been grounded in a framework of values that supports the dominance of an overarching alliance of administrators spanning academia and government at once.

While this alliance has led to increasing nationalist sentiment in China, in the U.S. the attempt to blame problems on racism and settler colonialism has resulted in a kind of anti-nationalism that has most recently expanded to challenge basic liberal democratic values at the university. The breadth and seriousness of these developments have been put on display with the recent student protests, as well as faculty and administration responses, regarding the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Our special section on “Contemporary American Academe before and after October 7” attempts to understand how these recent events relate to broader trends in academia that have undermined the university’s mission of supporting liberal democracy through teaching, research, and debate. Gabriel Noah Brahm has done a tremendous job of editing this special section, and his introduction to it provides an overview of its contents.

David Pan is Professor of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He is the Editor of Telos.