Yes, David Horowitz has said much about how Leftist protesters were able to pressure college administrations into creating “grievance studies” departments that served as the vanguard for this current whole “wokeness” culture.
Traditionally, universities were places that only an intellectual could love. I was lucky enough to experience university culture back in the early 1960s, as a little boy who wanted very much to be a scientist someday.
My father liked the university environment, I guess you could call him an intellectual, although he was an intellectual who was cynical about intellectuals, which is an unusual combination... although in hindsight I think it was a rational position, perhaps even a brilliant one.
Anyway, he gravitated to the university environment, and succeeded in getting himself hired as a computer programmer, back when the typical big university had a “computer department,” not directly involved in teaching computer science, but instead involved in maintaining the various data processing functions like payroll, academic records (grades), providing access to time-share and batch processing computer services... integrating computer power into academic life, before the discipline known today as “computer science” had emerged.
As a result, I got pretty much unrestricted access to a big university campus from an early age, with some help from my father as my interests developed; he was able on a number of occasions to get me into lectures and presentations by visiting scholars, and to introduce me to professors and technical people who were kind enough to give me a bit of their time and encouragement.
I loved their laboratories, with their unique sights and smells, intricate and delicate instruments, their disordered orderliness. Highly attracted to a science-oriented young person, but of little interest to the sort of go-getters who were changing the world back in the late ‘50s and through the 1960s.
But things were changing fast. A lot of very valuable innovations were coming out of the academic community; also, science and technology were heavily involved in the national security apparatus of the United States, and very large amounts of money began to flow into the universities to spur development in the various fields of science, engineering, and mathematics. Huge building programs were underway, and the seedy old laboratories were giving way to gleaming, industrial-scale invention factories.
The humanities were left behind in this, and (again I realize this in hindsight) a great deal of resentment developed among those professors. Professors of science and engineering were enjoying large pay increases, both in terms of the direct salaries they got from the university, and by means of “rake-offs” they were able to steer to themselves from government and industry contracts.
I think that this resentment was a big reason for the growth of the “grievance studies” departments. They are essentially the embodiment of institutional backlash from the humanities, a way of righting a set of imbalances that resulted from the post-war technology boom, the atomic energy programs, the space program, the computer boom, etc.
It’s taken a long time, but the whole sequence is now entering a new phase, in which the academics turn on each other and themselves in new and more direct and unpleasant ways.