The Culture Wars are Real

Jenn on Jenn violence at the University of Tulsa exposes the rot of an ideologically motivated culture warring.

The University of Tulsa made waves a few years back by nabbing an up-and-coming academic superstar in Dr. Jennifer Frey. She was an Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina before being lured to UT as the founding dean of a new honors college, a position she held until yesterday, apparently.

In THIS X THREAD she lays out what she built and what has happened. It has caused a flurry of activity (at least in my algo’d silo) because we have overlapping interests and friends. She’s a real one, with not only a deep love for the liberal arts in a more “traditional” register, but unafraid to lean heavily on the classical virtues. And even more offensive, she is married to a fellow philosopher Christopher and they have six children. And they are practicing Catholics.

Gross, I know.

She also runs a podcast called Sacred and Profane Love, which I listen to with some regularity. She is great. Her own intellectual journey is similarly telling: after a deep engagement with St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, she abandoned her youthful atheism. She is intellectually honest and a true believer, so to speak: she believes in the ability of the humanities to transform your life. She retells her story and her family of origin in a remarkable conversation with Marcus Grodi here. She is of the same stock, to be honest, as current Vice President J.D. Vance, in a basically irreligious home, but an encounter with some great books altered the trajectory of her life. And, like many of us, she has dedicated herself to giving that gift back to her own students.

Getting the opportunity to start an endeavor like an honors college is a dream for most academics, and Tulsa lured her away from South Carolina, and she and her husband moved to realize this vision. As you can see in the detailed thread linked above, her new college was flourishing by all standard metrics. They grew enrollment and retention. This ship was going into orbit. The mission of the college was clear and compelling:

To offer an excellent general education, focused on the study of classic texts in the liberal arts tradition, in a vibrant intellectual community that fosters friendship, growth in excellent habits of mind and character, and service to the common good.

Until it got shot down by new provost Jennifer Airey yesterday, with the corporate speak reason that the college needed to “go in a different direction.”

I do not know Dr. Frey. I have followed her for quite some time on X. I was hopeful that what she was doing could become a model for the salvaging of the liberal arts in an academic world that has not only abandoned them, but has actively worked against their promulgation. I went through an intensive alternative liberal arts college in the 90’s for my undergraduate education. I was inspired, in part, by that prior proto-woke movement that blew up in the original round of the curriculum wars. They lost the PR battle and the term “political correctness” was born and became a bit of a cultural joke. However, the forces that were hellbent on destroying the evils of Western Civilization did not accept defeat. They hunkered down and seeded the revolution in fantastic “Gramscian” fashion. When the moment was ripe, they pounced through the BLM movement and created a real mess. Similarly, though the “woke thing” has become the butt of jokes to normies, they still very much run the universities. And unlike the earlier expressions in the 90’s, they now not only have the infantry of the professoriate, but also the officer-class of the administration. Let me be clear: these teachers and administrators LOATHE the tradition. They wish to “de-colonize the curriculum” which means eliminating the classics. To a non-academic this might seem odd: wouldn’t a professor or an administrator at a college WANT a swell in majors? Wouldn’t they welcome the success that Dr. Frey and her team have been able to manufacture?

No.

They are so motivated by ideology that they would rather kill a golden goose rather than see it flourish on the enemies terms. You see, the Dr. Frey’s of the world stand for the true, good, and beautiful. In this age of modernist and post-modernist critique, meaning is a threat. They have spent the better part of 50+ years ridding higher education of such retrograde figures as Dr. Frey. The larger project is a transformation of higher education into a kind of madrassas of inversion. The dynamic is eerily similar to that which you can see play out in J.K. Rowlings The Order of the Phoenix, where Dumbledore is sacked by the ministry of magic because he dares point out the truth. The execrable Dolores Umbridge is brought in to Hogwarts to reinstall order from the rouge professor and headmaster.

The figure in this case is Dr. Jennifer Airey, a PhD in English and the new provost of Tulsa.

It is a case of Jenn on Jenn violence.

She is the Umbridge figure who would rather Hogwarts be destroyed from the inside rather than admit to the deeper larger truth.

Curiously, and maddeningly, many folks on X are crying foul, saying things like “Tulsa is going to regret this decision” and “don’t they know that people will think twice about uprooting their families to teach at a place like this?”

The reality of elite overproduction means that people will be lining up to get a tenure track position, no matter what, because these slots are vanishing in real time. Sure, a few convervative-ish folks will cry foul. But they don’t care because there are plenty of replacements. They would rather chase out a successful person like Dr. Frey because her success calls into question their whole project.

They hate meaning. They hate tradition. They simply won’t risk letting her program take off. And so here we are.

Did we really think that they would just sit back and watch her create something meaningful? They are playing a different game.

You may not like the culture war, or even the very notion of a culture war, but that doesn’t change the reality. All such attempts to create will be squelched because the apparatchiks are in control of the institutions. Their project is focused on exterminating the patrimony of the tradition, because they see the patrimony as the enemy. It is positively Screwtapian. And like the forces of Belbury in Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength, these academics would rather destroy the pillars of civilization, even if it means ruining their colleges. The “progressive element” are firmly ensconced. They will not rest until all vestiges of the old and outmoded classics are memory-holed or problematized out of existence.

I wish Dr. Frey well, but it is high time that folks understand the nature of the conflict. The Culture War is real and they have gotten their scalp. I do not understand why so many still insist that this Culture War isn’t real. It is real and they are clear on what their objectives are.

Alternative institutions are the only way forward.

Let me know what you think: