One might have thought the campus chaos that followed Oct. 7, 2023, would force a moment of academic sobriety.
After the massacre in Israel, the country watched elite universities descend into moral confusion — students chanting slogans they barely understood, administrators hiding behind procedural evasions, and faculty members serving not as guides but as accelerants. The congressional hearings that followed did not merely embarrass higher education. They revealed something deeper: The line between scholarship and activism had been blurred beyond recognition.
And yet much of the academy appears to have learned nothing.
In fact, it has chosen to escalate.
Earlier this year, a fellow social scientist asked me a simple professional question: Would I be participating in the upcoming American Sociological Association annual meeting in New York? My answer was no — not because sociology lacks importance, but because the discipline’s leading institutions increasingly confuse scholarship with mobilization.
Consider the ASA’s announced theme for that gathering: “Disrupting the Status Quo: Putting Sociology to Work for a More Equitable Society.” The organization explains that the goal is to consider what must be built upon, upended, and done differently so that sociology “not only examines social problems but also offers evidence-based solutions for social progress.”
This is not a call to inquiry. It is a call to activism. It declares openly that sociology is no longer primarily devoted to understanding society but to transforming it.
Nor is sociology unique. Similar language now saturates much of the modern university. Across disciplines, professional associations increasingly define their purpose in terms of political ends — equity, disruption, justice, social progress — rather than the pursuit of truth. The American Educational Research Association, for instance, themed its 2024 annual meeting around “dismantling racial injustice” — not just studying it, but actively attempting to dismantle it. Scholarly guilds are recasting themselves not as communities of analysis but as engines of social change.
The result is a profound professional deformation: the conversion of academic departments into ideological projects. Barnard College’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department, for instance, proudly declares that it “is dedicated to linking inquiry and action, theory and practice.”
Fortunately, mainstream observers have begun to acknowledge what was long treated as impolite to say: Faculty activism has become a gateway to campus radicalism. And even Harvard President Alan Garber admitted that the university “went wrong” by allowing professors to inject their personal views into the classroom, arguing that faculty activism has chilled free speech and debate. Professors are no longer simply interpreters of social life. Too often, they are organizers, legitimators, and moral enforcers — providing students with not only ideas, but marching orders.
The consequences are profound.
When a discipline defines its mission as “disruption,” it overtly and willfully abandons the central norms of scholarship. Research becomes, in the spirit of Max Weber, socially instrumental and outcome-driven. Questions are permitted or discouraged based on political utility. Peer review becomes ideological sorting. Students are trained not to analyze complexity but to rehearse commitments.
This is not what the founders of the social sciences intended.
Weber warned that the lecture hall must not become a pulpit. The scholar’s vocation, he insisted, is clarity — not conversion. Émile Durkheim believed social inquiry could strengthen cohesion, but only through disciplined attention to social facts, not perpetual agitation against inherited structures.
Yet today’s academic establishment increasingly treats the status quo not as an object of study but as an enemy to be overthrown.
What makes this moment even more alarming is that the drift is no longer confined to particular departments. Even the institutions meant to serve as guardians of academic professionalism have become political actors themselves. The American Association of University Professors, once the steward of academic freedom as a procedural norm, now operates openly as an advocacy organization, complete with legislative agendas and public political interventions. When the university’s supposed referees become ideological players, it is no surprise that departments follow.
The tragedy is that these disciplines once offered genuine insight into the forces shaping American life: loneliness, family breakdown, institutional mistrust, the erosion of civic belonging. These are urgent subjects, and they demand intellectual seriousness. But fields that define themselves as vehicles for “equity” and “social progress” rather than a search for truth will lose both credibility and capacity.
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The public is already catching on. Trust in universities is collapsing. Parents, students, donors, and citizens are asking an obvious question: Are these institutions devoted to education or to politics?
More than two years after the campus protests, after the hearings, after the exposure, higher education was given a rare opportunity to recover its bearings. Instead, many of its leading professional associations now declare, without embarrassment, that their purpose is disruption and political work, not scholarship. Universities that treat politics as their mission will soon find that the public treats them accordingly: not as centers of learning, but as ideological actors. Ideological actors do not command trust — they invite backlash. If the academy cannot recover the difference between understanding the world and remaking it, it will deserve the reckoning now arriving.