The philosopher John Searle passed away a few weeks ago. For years he was considered one of the leading lights of American philosophy, especially during the period when the subfield called philosophy of mind was at its peak of prominence and prestige. Searle also made signal contributions in the philosophy of language and in social philosophy. Near the end of his life, he lost his emeritus status at the University of California at Berkeley, where he had been a professor for sixty years, “canceled” in particular due to accusations about his conduct toward female students. Though the accusations ranged in seriousness, they led to a slew of corroboration across the philosophy profession. What seemed harder to justify, not out of respect for Searle but out of respect for the progression of philosophy itself, was the sudden evaporation of interest in his ideas, theories, and arguments.
Searle was perhaps best known for an argument called “the Chinese room.” Imagine a room, door closed but with a slot in it, with a human sitting at a desk next to a large book. On each page of the book are two columns: on the left one set of symbols in Mandarin, on the right another. The human, who does not speak Mandarin, receives through the slot sheets of paper with Mandarin written on them, matches the characters up with sets of symbols somewhere on the left of the book, writes the corresponding characters from the right of the book on a blank sheet of paper, then passes that sheet back through the slot. This, Searle says, is what computers do. But the human in the room doesn’t understand Mandarin. Therefore, computation or syntax is not sufficient for understanding; in fact, it is not even sufficient for “aboutness,” since it is, Searle thinks, hard to see how the communication from the room could be about the things the Mandarin symbols purportedly represent. This argument occasioned many objections but remains relevant for modern disputes about artificial intelligence. It also shows the classic analytic-philosophy style, which combines precise thinking with wild scenarios to test the limits of our concepts, as well as reflecting Searle’s consistent focus on the issue of “aboutness” or intentionality in mind and language.
In the rest of this essay I won’t write much more about Searle’s famous philosophical work or his infamous misdeeds. Rather, I want to write about something I’ve never heard anyone talk about at all: his 1971 book The Campus War, an analysis of the 1960s tumult in higher education. Searle’s characteristic sharpness offers a clarity that’s rare in discussions of such issues, but at the same time his diagnoses are reminiscent of many offered today.
“The orthodox view of social commentators in the late 50’s and early 60’s,” Searle writes, was that “we had come to ‘the end of Ideology,’” the name of a 1965 book by Daniel Bell. (In the 1990s, it was “History” that Francis Fukuyama took to have come to an end.) But soon the landscape looked different. “In the 1968-69 academic year,” Searle could not “recall a week during which a a major student upheaval was not taking place somewhere in the United States.” It was less clear whether these upheavals represented “the rise of a new Nazism” or “the greatest hope for the survival of democracy.”
Searle surveys a set of explanations already on offer for the student rebellions: “an Oedipal response of hatred for father symbols, . . . the product of a loving and permissive family life, . . . the Vietnam War and the race crisis, . . . a Luddite’s dying gasp of the technologically backward against the electronic computerized era now aborning; . . . the feeling of being redundant in an advanced economy”—and so on. But Searle is unhappy with these explanations, in part because they are insufficiently general. To Searle, “student revolts exhibit certain formal mechanisms in exactly the way that trade cycles, or the pattern of successful political revolutions, or the industrial development of traditional societies all exhibit formal mechanisms.” If he is right, then his book will shed real light on more recent events too.
The first thing most explanations missed back then—but certainly not this time around—was “the search for the sacred.” Campus tumult was “a religious movement” because people need something “larger than themselves” or “transcending their own immediate needs and desires.” Moreover, “official institutions . . . do not provide adequate outlets for these religious impulses.” Religion in this sense is also tied up with “intense feelings of community”: “Someone must play the role of the enemy. Indeed, lacking a coherent ideology, the ingroup of US is defined by our shared hostility to the outgroup of THEM.” Demands, then, cannot be subject to compromise, which would be “a sellout to the enemy.” This means that for Searle, in addition to the religious element, there are two consistent features of campus protests: “the creation of an adversary relationship” and “the rejection of authority.” Indeed, one of the reasons that meaning may require revolution is that “official career options” may be “discredited,” as they seemed to be in the sixties.
In addition to these three features, there are three stages to campus revolts Searle identifies. First, an issue must be identified (or “created”), which challenges the administration in a way that makes it impossible for them to straightforwardly resolve, relates to a “sacred topic,” and relates to some larger anxiety about national or international politics. Second, a “rhetorical climate” must be generated so that the university itself can be taken as the real enemy in the struggle. “One of the hardest things for outsiders to understand,” Searle writes, “is how it is possible for an otherwise intelligent young person to believe that he is taking a meaningful action against racism or militarism by throwing a brick through the window of the office of a college administrator.” Third, when the university reacts (or overreacts), for example by calling in police, protesters are joined by those who were previously only bystanders in “an enormous and exhilarating feeling of revulsion” which represents “the collapse of authority” on campus. Adapting Georges Sorel, Searle writes that “student violence confines campus authorities to their role as oppressors”; the activists, he thinks, act in exactly the way that would elicit the responses that fit the picture of the university they’re trying to draw.
Searle’s observations about the campuses of his time are not exhausted by these frameworks. He notes that higher education had become “increasingly compulsory” and that the university was increasingly a “homeland” for many. He separates student culture into five parts: fraternity-sorority, professional, intellectual, bohemian, and radical. He emphasizes that radical culture provides not just a community but an “identity” for protesting students, as well as “dramatic categories” which allowed them to interpret their experiences in novel ways and even have experiences that might otherwise not have been possible. A dramatic category, like protest or confrontation, can become “an end in itself” which is more important than the issues or demands it purportedly serves.
Searle also has a rare sympathetic view of university administration. A modern university president, he thinks, must be in part a kind of mediator between factions, including trustees, faculty, and students; the challenge is that university administration has no natural constituency, an authority without authority. Searle emphasizes the level of stress this puts on administrators: “Courtney Smith, the president of Swarthmore, died of a heart attack in the midst of a crisis, and Franklin Ford of Harvard suffered a stroke during the events of the spring of 1969.” College leaders tend to be “moderately successful” academics who are “not, in general, combat-oriented”; their deputies are “friendly . . . self-effacing . . . mild-mannered,” and “amateurs all.” At the same time, his demand that “administrations need bigger staffs” in order to cope with campus crises rings a bit hollow today, though his more “wildly impractical suggestion,” that administrations be abolished entirely so as to rest authority entirely with the faculty, might have had more beneficial effects in recent years. Trustees and regents, meanwhile, govern universities while knowing little about their internal processes. Ultimately, Searle sees “no justification for the present system.”
The book also includes, very surprisingly to me in particular, a critique of the “Special Theory” of academic freedom which strongly resembles an article I recently wrote for this very magazine. Alongside it, Searle places a defense of the concept of neutrality, also highly relevant in a moment of questions about the future of liberalism. He notes: “One of the many paradoxes of radical rhetoric is that the decline in the right to dissent brought about by radical intolerance is paralleled by virulent rhetoric in favor of something called ‘the right to dissent.’” When he writes that “the dramatic category [of] faculty fight[ing] for academic freedom against left-wing students . . . does not yet exist in the minds of most faculty members” he seems to predict the future.
At other times Searle seems already to be there. He writes that “there are very few conservative activists and only a small percentage of conservatives at all in the better universities” and that “the present college generation has had a style of upbringing . . . quite unique in American history. It is usually described as ‘permissive,’ but it might more adequately be characterized as participatory or gratificatory or self-realizing. . . . The traditional ‘virtues’ of self-discipline, respect for authority, and desire for conventional success have been replaced by spontaneity, immediate gratification, and self-fulfillment as the ultimate personal values.” Such students – whose population grew from one and a half million around 1950 to seven million around 1970, Searle notes, and have further grown to almost twenty million today – “tend to hunger for someone or something to fill the vacuum of their own identity.” The book ends with a series of proposals, themselves radical, for reforming the university.
The Campus War was not Searle’s only writing about “the university” and its politics. In late 1990, he reviewed Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals alongside a collection of Oakeshott essays on education and proceedings from a radical conference at Duke called The Politics of Liberal Education. Among other things, this review establishes his humanist bona fides while also including a unique discussion of the role of the natural sciences in liberal education. As a coda, Searle offers his own theory of liberal education, which he thinks involves only “elementary points” made by none of the books on offer: liberal education requires an understanding of one’s cultural tradition, of the basics of the natural and social sciences, of at least one foreign language, of philosophy or at least logical argumentation, and of how to think, speak, and write clearly and rigorously. It sounds pretty good to me!
A thread running through the review is the loss of standards. Any standard, it seemed, was apt to be interrogated for its exclusionary effects. If you care about reality, you exclude the imaginary. If you care about truth, you exclude people’s false opinions. If you care about excellence, you exclude almost everything almost all of us have ever done. Searle says, quite rightly, that you cannot have a university without exclusion. What would be its curriculum – everything? What would its degrees confer – nothing? In fact the university is an aggressively exclusionary project. These disciplines merit study, these people are qualified to teach and evaluate them, and these people have successfully learned them: the academy is nothing if it cannot say such things with a certain amount of conviction and authority.
In my life I have entered four degree-granting programs: college, law school (which I left), a master’s program, and a doctoral program. In every single one, some graduation requirement or another was weakened or removed while I was there. These included course requirements, language requirements, paper requirements, and exam requirements. Standards are lowered for many reasons, and lazy oaf and occasional dropout that I am, I’ve been a beneficiary of these relaxations. Reading Searle’s review, though, it struck me that very few of the many contemporary writings on the university concern its revitalization as a place to pursue excellence. We stress instead the avoidance of homogeneity, perhaps precisely because we no longer believe that we can teach people to think hard on their own.
How do Searle’s efforts compare to contemporary books about campus unrest? Really very favorably, I think. Among other things, Searle’s sensitivity to the relationships of different causal factors far outstrips most modern treatments. He writes that “the present state of the disaffected young [is] a condition, like the condition of lowered resistance to disease. . . . One will need two different levels of etiological analysis; at one level one describes the germs that spread the particular epidemic; at another level one describes the factors that produced the lowered resistance to the disease in the first place.” If this is right, then elaborate expositions and genealogies of wokeness are only surface-level understandings of what’s been going on at our universities. In fact, Searle’s approach calls into question the whole project of trying to understand woke students by attributing an ideology to them.
Searle’s book is multifaceted enough to be rather overwhelming to the modern reader. Even books by very intelligent writers tend to consist these days in a small number of claims clearly stated and then supported by various kinds of simple graphs and charts. The Campus War is instead a series of complex claims and observations whose evidence base and relationship to one another is not always clear. At the end of the day, in fact, Searle doesn’t seem to quite make good on his promise to demonstrate the so-called formal structure of campus crises. And while some details he brings out remain important today, others seem to have shifted noticeably. Campus administrations, for instance, often seem to be on the side of protesting students, somehow against themselves. And to the extent that campus revolts involve a search for the sacred, in Searle’s sense of something greater than ourselves, so too do defenses of the traditional university, and so it is hard to see how this can explain much.
More than recent anti-woke writers, Searle takes himself here to be not just a recipient of a certain tradition but an active participant in it. The book makes reference to Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, not exactly common in the analytic philosophy canon, and opens with two epigraphs about the French Revolution: one from Crane Brinton about “unmistakable signs of the theological temperament” in the Jacobins, and one from Friedrich Nietzsche, who calls it “a gruesome farce, and unnecessary.” He writes, essentially, against revolutionary psychology and revolutionary violence.
What sticks out as the real selling point of The Campus War as against contemporary anti-woke writing is precisely this desire to connect to a history of observations about political circumstances and human actions within those circumstances. Searle is primarily concerned not to win the campus war but to learn something from it. This motivation is, I think, more important than the fact that not all of his lessons seem to hold true. This is the attitude that anti-wokeness should be taking on now: reflective, cumulative, conversant with the history of political thought, and eager to make a contribution to it. If we eschew that attitude, we risk abandoning the very things we are trying to defend from the aggressors in the campus wars of our time.
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