TThis week, students return to campuses across the country. And the whole country will be watching. With a presidential election looming and a destructive war waged by one of the nation’s closest allies, there will be plenty of attention this fall on college campuses, protests, campus speakers, and sophomore revulsion. Which begs the question: Why? Why are we so obsessed with what’s happening on a handful of college campuses, a term that’s been coined the “campus culture wars”?
Our obsession is a strange one. Is there really one culture that characterizes thousands of campuses — community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research universities, for-profit universities — or just a significant portion of them? Historian Samuel Catlin put it even more bluntly in an essay earlier this year: “Campuses do not exist,” he argued.
There are fewer of them now than ever before. The campuses we see in the news are overwhelmingly imagined as elite educational institutions. The old stereotypes of lush courtyards and ivy-covered buildings only apply to a subset of these institutions: the very small ones, and those getting smaller. But the attention paid to these schools, and the certainty of what goes on there, is only growing. Whatever it is, this imagined “university” is running wild with students and administrators alike. We’re told it was once something: a laboratory of ideas, a place of real debate, take your pick. But it’s no longer that.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that American universities are out of touch with the public; rather, it’s the opposite: Americans think they understand them too well. Many journalists, commentators, and politicians seem fascinated by imaginary “campuses” that resemble the ones they attended. These narrowly imagined “campuses” provide fodder for reactionary politics, and they undermine the broader political debate, rehearsing it primarily as worn-out campus panic tropes.
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The story of our overinvestment in “campus” begins with us going there more in the first place. After World War II, the GI Bill sent more than 2 million Americans to campus, diversifying who went to college. And what college looked like diversified, too. New forms of higher education developed or proliferated, from commuter schools and junior colleges (today’s community colleges) to for-profit colleges. As more Americans enrolled in higher education institutions, more were invested in what went on there.
By the 1960s, as the children of the first generation of VA recipients enrolled in college, their campuses also became arenas for generational conflict. For some, campuses became places where the children of wealthy postwar America couldn’t live up to all that was being poured into them, opting instead for campus protest, radical politics, and bohemianism.
In the 1960s, a significant number of college students participated in the civil rights movement. In the fall of 1964, students at the University of California, Berkeley, started the “Free Speech Movement” to advocate for student freedom of expression. Protests against the Vietnam War soon captured the attention of students on college campuses across the country. Suddenly, all eyes were on the campuses, or at least many of them. The “campus” was poised to become a center of conservative anxiety about disruption and change.
Ronald Reagan exploited these anxieties during his election as governor of California in 1966. “It doesn’t matter where you are—mountain country, desert country, or the state’s largest city,” he argued, “the first question is, ‘What are you going to do about Berkeley?’” Reagan was happy to give the people what they wanted, offering up titillating anecdotes from campus life, mostly marijuana, sex, and extremism.
Reagan’s anti-Berkeley rally offered a blueprint for reactionary politics moving forward: expressing dissatisfaction with the university was a way of expressing (though not always approving of) a broader dissatisfaction with liberalism.
Thanks to the neoconservatives, who experienced the campus upheavals of the late 1960s as an “invasion” of their utopia, an expulsion from paradise, and who wrote countless books reflecting on it, a generation learned to make sense of their conservative tendencies by positioning them as a reaction to the events caused by crazed leftists on college campuses.
As Diana Trilling wrote in her memoir of the 1968 Columbia debacle, their fight was not over “the abstract idea of a university” but for “the living university that must endure when healthier times arrive.” What they always meant was their university. In the hands of disaffected liberals, many of whom would later become neoconservatives, “universities” were stand-ins for their campuses. It didn’t seem to matter that their campuses were often elite enclaves, barely resembling the universities most American students attended. Their genius was to make the parochial seem global.
On campuses, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Allan Bloom, and Saul Bellow and Tom Wolfe were influential storytellers. Their specific critiques in fiction, criticism, sociology, and journalism were varied: Bloom criticized the moral relativism of the modern university, Wolfe the obsession with status. But it was their collective perspective that shaped the public debate: that “our” universities, collectively, had lost their way.
So influential was the generation of neoconservatives writing in the following decades that this perspective became almost synonymous with the critique of campus life: the idea that today’s universities have deviated fatally from the “living university” of the past, usually the period during which the author was last enrolled.
Think about how easy it is still to convince people who went to college that certain books are “no longer” taught, or certain words are “no longer” permitted on college campuses. Anyone who has attended college, read the syllabus, or completed the general education requirements should know better.
For example, in 1988, it was a widely repeated claim that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple “is assigned more times in college classes than all of Shakespeare’s plays combined.” Of course, this isn’t true, and Shakespeare classes are still offered everywhere, but it was a facile criticism of lax standards compared to when one was in college, and it was clearly, without much need to be explicit, a criticism of race.
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This is the world of the 1980s panic about Western norms and speech codes, the anti-feminist panic about campus sex, and finally the panic about political correctness in the early 1990s: as women and people of color made their way into these institutions and the old hierarchies seemed to crumble a little, a legion of observers emerged to sell a fierce reassertion of the status quo to the wider public.
Many of the books that reenacted these various campus denunciations were bestsellers, from Allan Bloom’s The End of the American Mind (1987) to Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2020). They depicted worlds of wrongly accused professors, hypersensitive students, and faculty obsessed with fashionable theories and even fashionable social justice movements.
Of course, few would say that these stories are completely unfounded, but 30 years of debate about “political correctness” have made these stories the “only” stories of “that” university.
This has obscured the larger economic shifts shaping higher education: donor power has grown, tuition has skyrocketed, and tenure protections have weakened. Campus stories have been particularly good at keeping us from talking about any of that at all, instead remaining obsessed with safe spaces, trigger warnings, and DEI.
Attitudes and policies are not just tailored for the few universities that opinion leaders fawn over, and the moral panics of yesterday still influence how universities (of many kinds) are run and funded.
These repeated panics over “campus culture” have convinced us that college students, in general, have got their college experience wrong. And there is always an oppressive element to that conviction. This fall, that oppression may again turn violent.
Adrienne Daub is director of the Michelle R. Klayman Institute for Gender Studies at Stanford University and author of The Cancel Culture Panic (2024).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about TIME’s Made by History here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.