I am someone who loves long, complex sentences. The 19th century was peak prose style for me. The Gettysburg Address is a fantastic bit of writing. The fiction of that time can be a joy.
But this style is hard to do well. The Emily Post example given above is readable, though not unusually inspired. It moves through a series of examples and exceptions in a faintly herky-jerky way. But the prose is well-enough fit to Emily Post’s goal. She is trying to introduce many of her readers to the manners of a different social class, and her choice of vocabulary and syntax are part of that. Her readers wish to appear refined, and thus, some fancy words will please them.
Contrast this with Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Démocratie en Amérique from 1835. This is often considered an unusually good example of aristiocratic prose, at least among the sort of people who write academic introductions:
Parmi les objets nouveaux qui, pendant mon séjour aux États-Unis, ont attiré mon attention, aucun n’a plus vivement frappé mes regards que l’égalité des conditions. Je découvris sans peine l’influence prodigieuse qu’exerce ce premier fait sur la marche de la société ; il donne à l’esprit public une certaine direction, un certain tour aux lois ; aux gouvernants des maximes nouvelles, et des habitudes particulières aux gouvernés.
Bientôt je reconnus que ce même fait étend son influence fort au-delà des mœurs politiques et des lois, et qu’il n’obtient pas moins d’empire sur la société civile que sur le gouvernement : il crée des opinions, fait naître des sentiments, suggère des usages et modifie tout ce qu’il ne produit pas.
Ainsi donc, à mesure que j’étudiais la société américaine, je voyais de plus en plus, dans l’égalité des conditions, le fait générateur dont chaque fait particulier semblait descendre, et je le retrouvais sans cesse devant moi comme un point central où toutes mes observations venaient aboutir.
If you don’t read French, look at the length of the sentences and the punctuation. There is a great degree of parallelism here, and a pleasing rhythm. You could, if you wished to be overly cute about it, reformat much of this writing as a series of bulleted lists. But if you diagrammed the sentences, the structure would be quite clean. Tocqueville is a masterful writer, and here he wishes to convey two things: his own impeccable elite credentials, and his sincere enthusiasm for the egalitarian nature of American society. His goal is to maximize genuine reform in France, while minimizing elite decapitations. This is a subject of immediate interest to his readers.
But for every Alexis de Tocqueville, I could find you a hundred or a thousand writers who wrote needlessly convoluted slop. Long sentences are hard to do well. They demand an almost clockwork precision to remain truly clear.
Today, 19th-century prose is out of fashion. Multiple factors drove this change, including the influence of writers like Hemingway, a frustration with hopelessly convoluted prose, and a growing impatience on the part of readers drowning in oceans of text. And, yes, a vast increase in the portion of the population with a college education. And of course we explain the basics more than we did, because we are increasingly conscious of a broad audience with many odd gaps in their knowledge. Every skipped step risks losing a reader who might have benefited from an author’s thoughts. And some of our readers may even speak English as a second or third language. Even if they are extremely well educated in their native tongue, they may not realize that the “anthropology” department teaches very different things in the US than it does in Europe.
The modern style can be done well, though doing it truly well still demands considerable skill. Perhaps more interestingly, the modern style usually fails more gracefully. Simple sentences and bulleted lists usually succeed in conveying the author’s main points, even if the author is a mediocre writer.
This is certainly a popular bit of political propaganda at the moment, spread by the dominant political forces in 2025, with a goal of crushing our universities and of making them ideologically subservient to state power and state beliefs.
The reality on the ground is rather different. If you actually sit in the median university lecture, you will be extremely hard-pressed to find any professors promoting violence. Typically, you will find professors promoting the importance of differential equations, or if you lean towards the humanities, the joys of ancient Aegean art. If you search more deeply, every university can produce a handful of oddball radicals who argue for revolution (or counter-revolution) in the abstract. This has always been the case. Every university needs a few faculty cranks, if only to teach students to recognize the species and to check the course catalog more carefully in the future. (My alma mater had a notorious right-wing crank, and one very radical feminist, plus several more esoteric sorts of cranks.) You can also, of course, find a great many 19-year-olds who believe strange things, and who occasionally dream of revolutionizing society. But such is the nature of 19-year-olds who have recently discovered that society is frequently awful, but who have not yet realized quite how fragile civilization can be. But honestly, there is no dignity in 50-year-olds getting worked up about the fact that 19-year-olds have terrible ideas for reforming society.
But this does leave a more specific and pressing issue: the tolerance of mass-protest “encampments”, especially those with significant numbers of university outsiders. Typically, these protests are not especially popular among the student body as a whole. University administrators do not enjoy dealing with mass protests, and they are often quite bad it. They do realize that handling protests poorly often leads to larger protests, and they are reluctant to punish students for exercising their First Amendment rights to say awful things while waving signs. (This is true, in my experience, even when the people saying awful things are conservative. For a well-known US example, The Dartmouth Review was disliked by administrators for decades, but it was still permitted to litter copies all over campus.)
But at the same time, protests should never be allowed to threaten students or to disrupt the educational mission of the university. And yes, this has happened a number of times in recent years, and not every university dealt with it well. This was also true in the 60s; there were protests which nearly became angry mobs, and there were people dragged into Maoist “consciousness-raising” sessions, and all sorts of other unpleasantness.
Still, if you actually visit a university, walk around, and talk with the students, it is exceptionally hard to walk away with the impression that “universities promote violence.” You can, if you are determined enough, perhaps find a professor who promotes Marxist revolution in the abstract. And it isn’t hard to find administrators who’ve bungled a protest. But if you look at what universities do promote and teach on a day-to-day basis, you would really need to stretch to find “violence” even in the top 100.