THE CAMPUS strikes again!

Or: The Right Wing's Long Love Affair with Ctrl+F

In The Cancel Culture Panic and elsewhere, I’ve tried to explain that there are serious political stakes to the bizarre “hyperobject” (as Samuel Catlin has called it) “campus” in the American political imagination. Those stakes have become, if anything, staggering over the course of the last month. It’s noticeable, of course, that Elon Musk’s DOGE team and various other Trump adjacent flunkeys seem very happy to destroy just about any institution without bothering to learn how they work or what they actually do. But in the case of the Trump administration’s moves on higher education, it’s quite obvious that Musk, Trump, Vance and the rest of the gang are not operating from ignorance. Americans never think they’re ignorant of higher education — nope, in fact everyone’s an expert on it! And their moves are based on a fantasy version of the US campus that has been a longtime staple on the right and among reactionary centrists — one that many who now decry the moves of DOGE and Trump have helped create and foster over the years.

Back in early February, news broke that the National Science Foundation (NSF) would flag for rejection any proposal that contained words from a (long!) list of disfavored terms. The list includes some obvious candidates — “bipoc”, “black and latinx”, “hate speech” and “lgbt” —, some thats seem just absolutely puzzling — apparently you’re getting flagged for “equality”, “historically”, “prejudice” and “victim”. But the vast majority of the list consists of terms where you can see how they got there, they just didn’t think about it hard enough: “advocate”? “Barrier”? “Biased”? “Cultural heritage”? "Gender”? “Female”? “Excluded”? Sure, it’s obvious that some proposals with those terms will fit the bill of what they’re looking to eliminate. I’d wager that the huge majority of them won’t! People had a field day pointing out that, once again, people who had lost their damn minds over any perceived “ban” on words (which was almost always nothing of the kind) at individual colleges, seemed perfectly happy with the national government clamping down on research on [checks list]: “diversity”, “female”, “genders”, “political” and “trauma”.

My brilliant Stanford colleague Arghavan Salles recorded a quick Instagram reel about the likely impact of these lists, where she also pointed out how many of these terms seem proscriptive of entire fields that have nothing to with what the authors of the list ostensibly had in mind. Part of that effect probably emerges from a serious myopia when it comes to the way these words are actually used in various fields — the kinds of people who come up with these sorts of things for the Trump administration are ideologues first, and if they have a day job in science or scholarship they’ve long stopped actually doing it. Arghavan’s point isn’t that it’s wrong not to research “diversity” (though she and I both think that’s true); it’s also completely bananas to screen for the word, given all the false positives you’d capture. When she, a trained surgeon, hears “trauma”, she’s not necessarily thinking historical trauma, she’s thinking something that happens after an accident. If the “trauma” is bad enough, she might think of “disability”, another term on the list. When she uses the term “bias”, it’s about statistical bias and eliminating it in study design — not about racism or anything of the kind. So even as an attack on what it thinks its attacking, a list like this is incoherent.

Her video drove something home for me that I had immediately intuited, but that it took for my very confused surgeon colleague expressing her bafflement to bring into focus: this list was very much designed by someone fixated on the humanities and social sciences. We in the humanities often feel invisible, as though the university sort of lacked object permanence when it came to us — in this case, it seemed that the authors of the list momentarily forgot that universities have hospitals and that university faculties include surgeons, for instance. In fact, much of the anti-”DEI” crusade (which I think we ought to just call neo-segregation, because why not call things by their name?) represents an extension of the logic of the campus panic to broader and broader swaths of society and the government.

Now, you might ask, is that perhaps because the NSF mostly funds research in the humanities and certain disfavored social sciences? Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Humanities research seems absolutely marginal in the NSF’s portfolio. And while the NSF is definitely important in some social science disciplines, those disciplines make up a very small part of the NSF’s remit. Fields in which NSF is the majority source of federal funding include mathematics, computer science and economics. The NSF has seven “directorates” (with an eighth one being in the process of being spun up before Trump got to power) — one for “Biological Sciences”, one for “Computer and Information Science and Engineering”, one for “Engineering”, one for “Geosciences”, “Mathematical and Physical Sciences”, and one for “STEM Education”. It has one directorate for “Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences”, whose remit includes neuroscience, management, psychology, science policy, economics, as well as sociology and anthropology.

Meaning, I think: that the vast majority of disciplines submitting grant applications to the NSF will use “bias”, “female”, “diversity”, “systemic”, and “trauma” in a very different sense than the people who compiled the list have in mind. Probably, I might add, in multiple, different senses none of which are the one the people who compiled the list had in mind. That’s not to say that these scientists can’t or don’t think of “bias” in its other sense as well. But there was a curious inability to see a range of applications, a range of disciplines, a range of conversations at work in academia, and a shocking readiness to assume that a word can only mean one thing and that that thing is either obviously valid or obviously nugatory. I don’t think it’s an accident that this synecdoche resembles the way people love condensing the many different things US universities and colleges are, do and comprise into a single discursive object “the campus”. As Samuel Catlin wrote in his excellent piece “The Campus Does not Exist” last year:

“Anecdotally, I find it exasperatingly difficult to get non-stakeholders to care very much about “the university,” a social institution which is, in fact, suffering an ongoing polycrisis (albeit not the one narrated in the discourse of campus panic). Yet some of the same people who could not care less about ‘the university’ get alarmingly excited about ‘the campus’.”

“The campus” is not the thousands of actually existing institutions of higher learning in this country. “The campus” is imagined as a leafy quad, not a brutalist urban campus. Talk of “the campus” imagines the university mostly consisting of departments in the humanities and sciences. Talk of “the campus” focuses on the humanities, and within the humanities on a handful of disciplines (English, history, usually not philosophy, unless a feminist is teaching it). And it focuses on the most elite colleges, the one that the writer (and reader) of such stories didn’t get into, though they feel like maybe they should have.

I make the point in the book that this is a statistical problem: not only are these descriptors true for a small slice of actual US campuses, they are becoming less true with every passing year. Leafy quads? Well, a lot of rural liberal arts schools have been closing down, as of late, the 2010s boom in for-profit colleges seemed to take place mostly in suburban business parks that don’t look like Animal House at all. Humanities and Sciences? Everyone talks about the dying humanities, but in fact fields across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences are shrinking in terms of both enrollments and majors. And universities are busy downsizing their requirements in order to allow student to learn to code more, since that was the solution to everything 10 years ago, and university administrators only update their talking points every 15. As for English, History and what-not? These majors have shrunk significantly, their academic job markets are collapsing. As for the share of elite colleges as part of the total number of enrolled students, just look at Harvard’s or Stanford’s admissions rates over time.

But here’s the thing: our cultural warriors are not at war with actual existing universities. They depend on the imaginary campus of their Fox News cloak-and-dagger stories, their dumb Heritage Foundation anecdotes, or College Republican attention play. Funnily enough: it’s not just that the targets of these kinds of stories are usually historians or literary scholars; so are many, many of their purveyors. What do you imagine the Fox News host studied in college? How about the Heritage intern making some money before going to law school? What about the College Republican hoping to be the next Brown Haired Guy Who’s Not Steve Doocy?

In my book The Cancel Culture Panic I pointed out that anti-campus screeds for the last forty years (and beyond, really) disproportionately come from people with humanities degrees. On one level, that’s not super surprising: for one thing, writing books is baked into humanities scholarship far more than into, say, computer science research; for another, in an age where humanities scholarship is increasingly marginalized in legacy media, writing an angry attack on “the university” is a pretty good way to get broader noticed.

But while some of these books were written by professors — certainly some of the most famous ones were — most were not. Many were instead written by people who had clearly hated their time at university — where most of them had studied either the humanities or political science. David Horowitz, who’s been warning against “PC” culture for longer than I’ve been alive? English B.A. and M.A., baby! Richard Prager, who’s been riding attack after attack against the university since the 1990s and who started his YouTube scam school PragerU in 2009, was a history major. Peter Thiel? Philosophy major. Charlie Sykes, author of Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (1988), The Hollow Men: Politics and Corruption in Higher Education (1990), Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add (1995) and Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education (2016) was an English major.

As always, there are specific grievances and anecdotes that circulate through the Right Wing Rage Machine that are now finding their expression in these sorts of misbegotten policy. The overall problem is made up, but individual data points are real. Just as the MP in the UK who can’t seem to lay off the absolutely lovely João Florêncio, just because she thinks the research project he supervises — “The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000” — and which was funded by the UK’s Art & Humanities Research Council, is somehow inherently illegitimate. She’s not lying, she’s just not showing her work: what’s the problem supposed to be? How much of a problem is this? Similar kind of fishing expeditions, where right wing staffers or journalists (or their centrist handmaidens) sift through hundreds of line item until they emerge, muddy but happy, with the one shiny pearl they think they’ve found, were of course targeted at the NSF over the years. For instance, right wing media in 2016 picked out a ($400,000) research grant which included a single sub-study on gender in glaciological research, and beat up on the NSF using it.

Some of the NSF list exists in response to these kind of anecdotal critiques, based on research consisting of — let’s be honest — control+F’ing a list of grantees and then picking out the strangest or least-intuitive sounding thing that pops up. But what we’re seeing here is something more, I think. It’s what makes this optic so pernicious: for years now, we have found our institutions of higher education increasingly at the mercy of people who see everything on campus — law schools, medical schools, schools of education, particle colliders, nuclear reactors, etc. etc. — through the prism of the most annoying interaction they had in a humanities class. And they’re expanding the fantastical and frankly delusional way they’ve looked at “the campus” to broader and broader swathes of US society.

I know a lot of people worry about DOGE’s little freaks using AI to generate firing lists, and there’s some suggestion that some of this is indeed something they are trying. But I think the hilarious kerfuffle at Social Security — where DOGE was unfamiliar with the coding language and assumed a bunch of social security recipients were dead — and the lists of forbidden words both suggest that DOGE’s approach is far less granular, but instead has not moved on from the right wing’s favorite form of critiquing institutions: search for a term that you don’t like or that strikes you, a non-expert, as ridiculous, then complain about the presence of that term. It’s a coup by control+F.

Is that an effective way to do a purge? Having never conducted a purge myself, I could not possibly say. Is this the way historic purges were conducted? Again, not my field of expertise. What I can say is that as a “research method” (and in the most formal fashion imaginable, it is one) this comes out of two discursive fields: “government waste” and “campus critique”. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember “fiscal responsibility” hawks who’d sort of cherry-pick vaguely gratuitous-sounding program involving, I don’t know, spotted owls or Inuit poetry. It was never anything defense or health-related, and almost always implicated a racial or ethnic minority rather than their white base. The amounts were piddling, but allegedly it represented everything that was wrong with government spending. It was the polite way of saying what the neo-segregationists’ quest against what they call “DEI” comes out and just says flat-out: that spending money on Black, brown, queer or female Americans is waste. Whatever the case, the main weapon of the opinion writers, K Street hacks, congresspeople engaged in this discourse was: Ctrl+F. They sought a buzzy phrase, the hilarious-sounding detail. The less context (such as how tiny the position in the budget, whether it had been approved or not, whether there were good reasons for it) the better.

In the language game around “government waste”, it had been about tax payer money. But around the same time Heritage, Olin and its brood turned the same logic loose on university bulletins. From the late 1980s onward, the habit of searching for articles/courses/books to spotlight in whatever anti-academic jeremiads you’re cooking up has become a shorthand in American discourse, irrespective of the fact that it’s unclear what, if anything, it proves. Think of the New York Times’s bizarre obsession with scouring the conference proceedings of the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting for the perviest thing they could find. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” is both an instance of, and an elegant reflection on this dynamic. When I was in grad school, my colleagues sometimes proposed panels with outré titles just hoping to make it into the Times. As I point out in The Cancel Culture Panic, why Times readers should care was super unclear even at the time — the MLA doesn’t use tax dollars for any of the conference proceedings, and a professional meeting, which, at the time, was still mostly a job fair for literary scholars, seems like a weird place to insist that it’s bad for academics to only talk to other academics. At the MLA, you literally were only surrounded by other academics and talking to them. There were people who asked for your badge as you walked in!

The same was true for course lists: people would scour course catalogues for course title and hold them up as … well, some sort of evidence. They’d never exactly have to say how it was evidence — “the phrase itself is already evidence,” as Sedgwick writes. Every book about the supposed rot in “higher education” had to have these lists. They were never pulled from across the university, but just the course offerings of one or two departments. Often it was nothing more than that the course title used the word “queer” that motivated their inclusion (sound familiar, perhaps from the NSF list?), or a mention of women. Arts courses were popular on such lists — think of the old joke about “majoring in basket weaving” in college —, even though they were then usually adduced to make fun of the humanities which, let’s face it, would never be caught teaching something as hands-on as basket weaving!

Here are two noted intellectual forebears of the current DOGE coup — Peter Thiel and David Sacks — writing about such courses at Stanford. The passage is from their 1995 book The Diversity Myth:

“Representing Sappho” is not some anomaly on the margins of an otherwise terrific Stanford education. At least three other classes explored similar themes—Feminist Studies 295, subtitled “How Tasty Were My French Sisters”; Comparative Literature 110, “The Politics of Desire: Representations of Gay and Lesbian Sexuality”; and Law 587, “The History and Politics of Sexual Orientation: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives.”

Together with Hana/Connor Yankowitz I am currently conducting a research project where we analyze all of the Stanford course catalogues Thiel and Sacks drew on for this assessment. We’re after something else, but the dataset was pretty useful for contextualizing their list here. You’ll be shocked to learn that (1) these courses were absolutely not representative of what was being taught at Stanford at the time, (2) these courses weren’t even representative of what was taught in (i) the humanities, (ii) literary studies or even (iii) feminist studies. That’s to say nothing of the fact that these are perfectly fine courses taught by absolutely stellar scholars, but even as a piece of analysis, even if we were to assume that there were something wrong with “Representing Sappho” (isn’t Thiel all about the Western Canon? Why doesn’t Sappho fit? Is it the two X chromosomes?), his framing is literally untrue. “Representing Sappho” was a highly unusual course (a small seminar taught twice, in 1991 and 1993 by the amazing Terry Castle). Admittedly, it was perhaps not as anomalous as “How Tasty Were My French Sisters”, which we have not been able to find in any course catalogues, or in our 4718-entry dataset of every feminist studies cross-list ever done at Stanford University. Yep, there’s every chance someone made this up.

The point here is: Thiel and Sacks’s method was not to go to these classes and observe; it wasn’t to ask for the syllabus and then interrogate it. It was to go through the Stanford Bulletin and underline anything that could serve as a “lol, get a load of these freaks”. Or — as the Tasty French Sisters thing suggests — pluck out misunderstood, mistranscribed or rumored course titles that sounded plausible enough. We’ve become inured to this deictic use of evidence, whereby a simple phrase becomes, as Sedgwick puts it, a smoking gun and every pundit Perry Mason. These lists do not operate with evidence, they presume self-evidence. Obviously, a class with that title is ridiculous on its face! Obviously, any project proposal with this word is woke nonsense!

What it does is: shift the locus of seriousness. It levels a fundamentally unserious critique (imagine if I told you I didn’t think a book’s argument passed muster, because I spotted two split infinitives). But it puts those who want to play defense in a position to likewise reach for Ctrl+F: rather than defend the whole they are stuck swatting away an endless list of tiny little details. Surely you must admit that this one is troubling, surely you must admit that goes too far, well, I did have questions about that one. Which is part of the problem: the problematic narratives about our universities, and frankly our institutions in general, are by now bipartisan affairs. Many centrists, many democrats, many university professors have signed on to them over the years. Whether it’s congressmen like Ritchie Torres, ostensibly liberal commentators fulminating about course titles they learned from a Heritage mailer, or major publications not bothering to contextualizing the anecdotes they devote disproportionate column inches to: I am afraid that this is the historic juncture at which these idiots will find out their uses.