"COVID feels like a turning point, a time when universities fully embraced the ideology of control, censorship, and compulsion, represented by universal quarantines, masking, and vaccine compliance, all rooted in symbolism rather than scientific realities. Freedom is the last thing you will find at elite institutions today. The ESG and DEI bureaucracies are deeply entrenched, and an anti-Western, anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason curricula pervades the whole of the elite establishment. It is reinforced at every level, including publishing, promotion, and tenure demands. Already by 2019, anyone in this realm who identified as a conservative was in the extreme minority. And yet this period might be more correctly seen, as it is in this brilliant book by David Barnhizer, as a codification of deep problems that already existed. We have certainly lived through the decline and fall of the older idea of the university. Now we may yet live to see the end of the university itself and its replacement by something else entirely.
Reforms can work but the reform will not likely come from within the institutions. They must be imposed by alumni and perhaps legislatures. Or perhaps the rule of ''Go woke, go broke'' will eventually force a change. Regardless, the idea of learning itself will surely return. We are in the transition, and David Barnhizer is our Virgil to give us an outstanding tour of the wreckage left behind and perhaps even a path out of the darkness." -- Jeffrey A. Tucker , founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and author of thousands of articles and ten books, including Liberty or Lockdown "As someone who writes frequently in the mainstream press about the ruinous effects of woke ideology on society, I truly appreciate David Barnhizer''s unique contribution to the literature on this subject. Conformity Colleges: The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America''s Universities is ''a one-stop shop'' for journalists, often working under time constraints, who seek well-organized, intelligently triaged evidence that is essential ballast in the creation of persuasive columns.
" -- Barbara Kay , opinion columnist for Canada''s National Post and the Epoch Times "It is grimly satisfying to read the words of an observer who understands the value of the university in American life and the extent of contemporary threats to it. David Barnhizer has produced an exhaustive roster of decay, a source book that contains little good news and lots of depredation. The ideals of academic life--disinterested judgment, peer review, Ivory Tower seclusion--have fallen again and again to identity politics, resentment, and cowardice. This book is a sobering compilation of events on the road downward, valuable because people who wish to defend the traditional conception must understand exactly how far we''ve fallen and how ruthless are the vandals still at work." -- Mark Bauerlein , senior editor, First Things magazine, and professor emeritus, Emory University "David Barnhizer''s book on intellectual conformity in higher education exposes the personal and systemic tragedies of what we call ''cancel culture.'' Behind every story described in his 2021 work "Un-Canceling" America, and further developed in the analysis in Conformity Colleges , are people whose lives have been upended and careers damaged by Identity Groups pushing political agendas by punishing innocent victims seeking nothing more than an understanding of the vital significance of the hard-fought vision of Western society and the Rule of Law. Prof. Barnhizer has gathered their stories in Conformity Colleges: The Destruction of Intellectual Creativity and Dissent in America''s Universities, as historical evidence of the damage groupthink and enforced conformity have inflicted on the integrity of academia and on an American society whose moral, intellectual, and economic integrity is dependent on the honesty and quality of education.
" -- William A. Jacobson , clinical professor of Law and director of the Securities Law Clinic, Cornell Law School; founder and president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation.