A little over two years ago, I wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post titled “As a Republican, I’m on the Fringe,” in which I argued that conservative and classic liberal views are marginalized in academe. I set up a new e-mail account to divert the likely deluge of responses; 234 responses later, I felt depressed. Conservative academics wrote of their trying experiences in academe. More common, however, were e-mail messages from conservatives who expressed what can only be described as a loathing for higher education. The belief “that academia will reform itself,” one typical correspondent wrote, “is sheer fantasy.” Others praised the “outing” approaches of the conservative activist David Horowitz, who has made a cottage industry of exposing “dangerous” professors, and backed his proposal for an “academic bill of rights” to protect students and faculty members from ideological discrimination.
Responses from the left, though less common, were angrier: “Higher Ed faculty tend to be engaged and concerned individuals (and, well, smart) ... and the type of people who react negatively in these days to the terms ‘conservative’ or ‘Republican.’” A spelling-and-grammar-challenged Berkeley graduate student wrote: “When almost all of the world’s most brilliant well-read people hold a set of views (that modern pork-fest republicans are worse hypocrits), and almost all of the most ignorant supersticious religious people hold an opposing set of views (that they are patriots) ... Then there is a conclusion begging to be made.”
This graduate student will soon teach undergraduates; perhaps he already does. According to him, conservatives have no place in academe because they are too stupid. To deny the power of any and all conservative ideas shows a remarkable degree of alienation from American society; it also shows the cognitive rigidity of a true believer—not a true intellectual.
Such a mentality contrasts sharply with that of Democrats I have known outside the ivory tower. I spent four years in the 1990s at the Brookings Institution and in the Clinton administration, serving in the U.S. Federal Executive Institute, a training center for political and career executives from across the government. The moderate Democrats I met in Washington, on the whole, accepted that central planning is the economic equivalent of intelligent design; they took it for granted that Ronald Reagan’s policies had more or less won the cold war, that conservative policing had reduced crime in New York, and that welfare reform, passed in 1996, had done more good than harm. They had, in other words, learned from real-world experience. The Democrats (and Marxists) I work with in academe, on the other hand, face no such pressures. Insulated from real-world stakes and constituents, they can enjoy the luxury of single-mindedness.
This is not a healthy situation. It is unfortunate that so few universities host regular, formal debates about affirmative action, same-sex marriage, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is lamentable that professors I know who take the less popular (read: conservative) perspective on such issues fear that they would pay a price if their positions were made public. In academic departments, like most workplaces, majorities have considerable power over minorities—from deciding who will teach 8 a.m. classes for years on end, to who gets grants, tenure, and promotions. Conservative and libertarian professors are not paranoid to fear coming out of the ideological closet.
In response to the anti-academic views of conservatives and the anti-conservative views of many academics, I have three pleas and two suggestions. My first plea is that academic critics of the right and rightist critics of academe make their criticisms in a polite, measured fashion—criticize practices rather than people. Granted, the tenure system and the often-artificial impenetrability of certain fields place much of academe beyond the oversight of markets or political institutions. That freedom enables us intellectuals to think great thoughts, but it also saddles us with more than our share of Ward Churchill types who deserve public censure.
Yet the Ward Churchills are an exception, and to paraphrase Bill Clinton, there is nothing wrong with academe that cannot be fixed by what is right with academe. For example, a former colleague of mine landed on David Horowitz’s “most dangerous professors” list. While it is true that my friend sometimes says foolish things when he strays outside his field, he is a capable teacher and researcher, and does not deserve the flaming e-mail messages he has received since the publication of Horowitz’s book in 2006. As Frederick M. Hess, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, puts it, if conservatives criticize those on the left who promiscuously label others racist or sexist, then conservatives should likewise refrain from overusing the label of political correctness as an epithet. We must model civility if we hope to persuade the persuadable of our views.
My second plea is that those on all sides of the debate attempt to put themselves in the shoes of others. Academics need to understand where their critics are coming from; and detractors of academe need to understand that the academic enterprise requires social criticism in both teaching and research. As John Agresto, president emeritus of St. John’s College, in Santa Fe, N.M., has noted, a culture of questioning is fundamental to the mission of academe. Each side, in other words, needs to understand “the other.” Academics critical of the groupthink exhibited by the Bush administration, for instance, have a responsibility to demonstrate their own open-mindedness and seek out the opinions of conservative students and colleagues (if they can find any). Barack Obama’s tenure as editor of the Harvard Law Review serves as a good model of inclusivity. (The president, it is worth adding, is probably too moderate to teach in most sociology departments.)
My third plea is for each side to show a willingness to be swayed by evidence. In The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope, and Reforms (AEI Press), which I co-edited with Hess and Richard E. Redding, a professor of law at Chapman University, the contributors present statistical data indicating the extent of conservative underrepresentation in academe, particularly in the social sciences and humanities fields, where ideology matters. (Who really cares if physical-education professors tend Republican?) Conservatives are particularly absent at elite institutions, which have the most impact on the national conversation.
In part, this phenomenon is explained by lifestyle choices: Conservatives are less likely to put off childbearing for the half decade or more it takes to get a Ph.D., and they are reluctant to leave their families and communities to attend the best graduate schools. (Matthew Woessner, an associate professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, and his wife, April Kelly-Woessner, an associate professor of political science at Elizabethtown College, have shown that while liberals talk more about relationships, conservatives value them more in their career choices.)
But lifestyle choices are only part of the story. In the social sciences and humanities, data indicate that conservatives must publish more books and articles to get the same teaching posts. Merit matters, but so too does ideology. Our universities can do better.
To conclude, I can offer two suggestions about how we can reform universities.
First, those of us who study political correctness must develop a dialogue with the American Association of University Professors and other defenders of the status quo. Over the long term, with data on our side, we can persuade many academics of what is all too apparent to conservative and libertarian academics: Our relative absence from academe is a real problem.
Second, we need to encourage academe to debate the issues of the day, from affirmative action to Iraq, on the premise that America’s colleges and universities should rejoin their host nation’s vibrant democracy. As Pauline Maier puts it in her 1997 book, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Knopf, 1997):
Let interests clash and argument prosper. The vitality of the Declaration of Independence rests upon the readiness of the people and their leaders to discuss its implications and to make the crooked ways straight, not in the mummified paper curiosities lying in state at the Archives; in the ritual of politics, not in the worship of false gods who are at odds with our 18th-century origins and who war against our capacity, together, to define and realize right and justice in our time.
Only debate can set universities free, and real debate requires a diversity of ideas.