Here’s a thoughtful survey of the ideological condition of higher education and attempts to improve it by <a href=”http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2007/06/twenty_years_in_the_vineyards.html“>Steve Balch. His picture is mixed. On one hand:

As to how things stand, let’s start with the plus. First, we have a genuine academic reform movement where twenty years ago there was none. A sizeable community of organizations, with distinct missions and partially distinct if overlapping bases of support, now act in concert. Some, like the American Academy for Liberal Education, the American Council for Trustees and Alumni, the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and The Historical Society, came into existence, in large measure, because of the NAS. Others, like that indispensable campus civil liberties watchdog, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, took shape under their own inspired leadership. Another, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, has a productive history reaching back to the fifties, but, over the past two decades, has assumed a great many new and vital reformist roles. Groups like the American Civil Rights Institute, the Center for Equal Opportunity, and the Center for Individual Rights, while not confined in their concerns to higher education, are the vanguard in the fight against academe’s entrenched and emblematic system of ethnic preference. Donor organizations like the Center for Excellence in Higher Education, and the Manhattan Institute’s own Veritas Fund, have also come into being, with the promise of generating the financial resources which any growing movement requires. This infrastructure has produced real successes. Reverse discrimination has taken a pounding at the polls, leaving its defenders unsure as to how or where to mount a stand. The outcome is not foreordained. The moral mission of the postmodern university has become too centered on rectifying all supposed hierarchies to surrender preferences without a struggle. Most likely is a solution that pays hypocrisy’s tribute to virtue, replacing preferences de jure, but not de facto; that is to say, with policies pretending to be something other than they what they actually are. But in a nation largely defined by its ideals even such a limited victory is no small achievement. Laurel wreaths are due for the great heroes of this battle, Ward Connerly at their head, but also the NAS’ own Glynn Custred and Tom Wood, who, through our affiliate, the California Association of Scholars, drafted Proposition 209, the original anti-preference ballot initiative that California voters approved in 1996. Victories have also been won on the civil liberties front. Nothing has so kept public awareness alive as to the gap separating basic American ideas about individual rights from academe’s penchant for thought control than the succession of campus outrages against intellectual freedom exposed, and quashed, by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Through its work, victims have been repeatedly succored and restrictive rules revoked or relaxed. Of greatest significance, administrators have been put on notice that there is a high price to be paid in embarrassment, or even in the courts, for coercing conscience and throttling expression. (A second group, the Alliance Defense Fund, specially devoted to vindicating the rights of religious students, has recently entered these lists as well).

But then, there’s the other side:

Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc., etc., however distinct from each other, all have characteristics that set them apart from the realms of humane inquiry. All lend themselves to experiment or, at least, to highly controlled observation. All deal with phenomena that, compared to human behavior, are relatively simple. All yield knowledge of broad and incontestable utility. With a few exceptions, mainly in biology and studies of the environment, they avoid rousing lay passions or producing findings that challenge contemporary ideological interests. They are self-correcting because they have dispositive tests generating valued results, and – in consequence – a massive flow of appreciative rewards. As fields they are extroverts, the world awaiting, even hanging, upon their public judgments. The realms of human inquiry are markedly different. They can produce real knowledge, but with occasional exceptions, not of the kind that is incontestable, or gets clear credit for the solution of real world problems. In contrast to the natural sciences, they are introverts, authors and auditors often the same, and applause coming almost entirely from the cognoscenti – except, of course, when they tap into the world of political conflict, providing argument, rhetoric, visions, recruitment, and benediction, to the warring camps. Yes, they do some good and are not peas in a pod. Economic analysis has shown genuine advance and attained some theoretical power. History, where the powers of critical description are allied to common sense, is clarifying and instructive. Literary scholarship, putting works and authors in context, can enhance the understanding of general readers. Good work is done in many other fields as well, including some of those otherwise deeply compromised. But work in these fields is also capable of readily descending into characteristic pathologies. The obvious and immense utilities of natural science produce a self-correcting discipline. When these utilities are less abundant, two things often happen. On the one hand, fields can devolve into mere cleverness competitions in which, against a backdrop of external indifference, assessment becomes entirely internalized. The typical result is scholasticism, trivial disputes, empty jargon, and pretended theory whose maxims describe the rules of a game instead of the rules of the world. On the other, fields can be tempted to generate purely political utilities by finding patrons among interest groups and movements for whom they can flack. Women’s studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, cultural studies, social work, among other scholarly pursuits, basically fall into this category. Here then is much of academic life as we presently find it – less a temple of science than an arena of intellectual sport or a church of militant creeds. In either case, and some fields manage to combine these seemingly disparate aspects quite happily, power overshadows reason. How so? Because their “bodies of knowledge” are inevitably weak and unverifiable. If practitioners can’t submit disputes to dispositive tests, but professional status and political causes nonetheless ride on their resolution, power becomes the natural recourse. The academic appeal of postmodernism, with its equation of knowledge and power, owes much to this fact.