The following two comments from Alan Wolfe and Bruce L.R. Smith are from "Conservatism in Academe: An Exchange," in response to "Taking the Right Seriously," by Mark Lilla (both in The Chronicle Review, online edition, September 11).

There is more intellectual diversity on American campuses, taken as a whole, than Lilla acknowledges.

Still, there is not nearly enough, and on the larger points he tries to make, Lilla is correct. The academic world suffers from too many people trying to hire people too much like themselves. We simply do not give intellectual diversity a high priority in academe, and intellectual life suffers as a result.

Interestingly enough, the effects can be found among the few conservatives in academe as well as among the many more liberals and leftists. When conservatives do congregate on campus, they tend to view themselves as an embattled—and therefore embittered—minority.

Although articulate critics of political correctness and identity politics, they make claims on behalf of their own group that are intellectually indistinguishable from those they spend too much time criticizing. Look at all the discrimination directed against us, they howl. We have rights, too. Without ever quite saying so, their arguments on behalf of a politics of recognition for conservatism come a bit too close for their own comfort to the arguments that liberals make for affirmative action.

The resulting conservative sectarianism and sense of victimization hardly make for a pluralistic politics. Conservatives publish in their own journals, hold their own conferences, cite one another's work, and speak in their own jargon. Liberalism would be strengthened by greater engagement with conservatism, but the reverse is also true. Conservatives could use less financing from their own foundations and more engagement with publications such as The Chronicle.

Alan Wolfe
Director
Boisi Center for Religion
and American Public Life
Professor of Political Science
Boston College

Lilla rightly notes that many students are somewhat more conservative than their professors, but he fails to draw out the full implications of that observation.

Students do not arrive at college with minds like blank sheets. They come with the values they formed earlier in life, and for the most part they leave college with those same values. Students tend to avoid classes from professors they regard as tendentious or biased, and are canny enough to know when a teacher is saying something worthwhile and learned, and when not. Those few academics who consider it their duty to convert students to the right (i.e., left) way of thinking practice a poor pedagogy, and are remarkably unsuccessful in this quest.

The problem facing American universities is not just that conservative views are underrepresented, but that virtually all serious political discussion is lacking on campuses. Professors flee from politics because they, like other Americans, dislike conflict and because they consider policy debates to be journalistic, unscholarly, and unlikely to lead to academic rewards.

I certainly don't want overt partisanship or a shallow leftism to suffocate the intellectual atmosphere on campuses like radon gas. What I do want is a serious debate, in and out of the classroom, of the classic questions of political theory and constitutional order. The core curriculum, I think, does the job rather well.

Bruce L.R. Smith
Visiting Professor
School of Public Policy
George Mason University
Fairfax, Va.

To the Editor:

I have a few disagreements with Mark Lilla's analysis of how academics respond to the right in this country. He mentions the need for political diversity on campuses because it rarely happens that teachers "introduce students to their adversaries' books and views."

I have been studying the political right since graduate school (my first publications were on women who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment). My interest in the right was born in graduate school, where I wanted to better understand how people could think differently from the way I do. I still have that interest. Although I would not define myself as a conservative, I teach two courses on the topic—one on modern American conservatism and a seminar on iconic books of modern conservatism. The classes are both enormously popular. Like Paul Lyons (whose book I also loved), I find my students to be evenly split ideologically. You do not have to be a conservative to appreciate its ideologies or to understand its myriad complexities.

I also think that many self-identified intellectual conservatives avoid the academy because money is more important to them when they think of future jobs. In other words, it isn't as though liberal job panels form and prevent the hiring of conservatives, although I am sure that does happen. But there are few conservative Ph.D.'s who want to teach full time. Many would rather become lawyers or work at the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, etc.—and that's a shame.

An intellectually diverse academy is important for a variety of reasons. But Professor Lilla is too narrow in his thinking if he believes that only people on the right can—or do—teach the right.

Iva E. Deutchman
Professor of Political Science
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Geneva, N.Y.

To the Editor:

Mark Lilla makes several excellent points, and I too would be appalled to find that serious, responsible students and professors are being unduly censured based on their political views. I wonder, however, if outright proscription is really the issue; self-selection may be even more prominently involved when Lilla's "brightest conservative students" who are "brought up on hair-raising tales of political correctness" refuse to pursue their intellectual interests in academe. Unfortunately, these tales are undoubtedly promulgated by academic authorities worthy of attention, such as Lilla himself.

As an undergraduate in 1989, I first read Leo Strauss—presented with just as much respect and sympathy as other authors studied—in an English course on 20th-century theory at Duke University. (May I trust that The Chronicle Review readers will not think of that university's English department in the late 80s as a bastion of conservatism?) I read Edmund Burke, among others, while studying in a cultural-studies Ph.D. program in the 1990s. Of course, I was also exposed to approaches designated as postmodern, poststructuralist, feminist, and so on. In other words, in "the politically correct sauna of the 1980s and 1990s," I was able to study, and study with, writers and teachers whose beliefs and influence are all over the political map.

What I learned was that the academic culture wars were not really between left and right, between liberals and conservatives, or between traditionalists and multiculturalists, but between people who took thinking and writing seriously and those who did not. Are there self-styled leftists as well as conservatives among the latter? You betcha.

For the record, honestly, I have read at least something by all of the conservative thinkers listed in Lilla's essay—at first I wasn't sure about Peter Viereck, until I recalled that I had read his 1941 Metapolitics very carefully, only later understanding just how similar his argument was to that of Georg Lukács, a Marxist critic who understood well the cultural influences on the rise of fascism. I also note that Whittaker Chambers is perhaps best known to me for his exquisite denunciation (in the National Review, no less) of the totalitarian aspects of Ayn Rand's work, perhaps underscoring Lilla's point about the difference between conservative thinking and anti-intellectual hysteria.

It is a shame that the brightest conservative, liberal, or not-yet-labeled students may choose to miss out on the rich intellectual traditions still actively enlivening academic discourse. It is more of a shame that some professors convince them in advance that such traditions are unavailable to them. Those who can avoid, or overcome, the false binaries will be rewarded with an education worth having.

Robert T. Tally Jr.
Assistant Professor of English
Texas State University
San Marcos, Tex.

To the Editor:

Mark Lilla says rightly that at many liberal-arts colleges, a pervasive ideology insensibly normalizes views that are narrow and arbitrary, and Alan Wolfe says rightly that colleges promote too little intellectual diversity. But nothing very "liberal" is being normalized by today's campus mix of political correctness and corporatist discipline.

Visit any Ivy League Economics 101 course or classes in microeconomics, statistics, computer science, and most social sciences. The homunculae economicae and the number-crunching "methodologues" at the podium may not be flag-waving conservatives, but neither are most of them liberals or leftists, except in the "color equals culture" sense that big corporations embrace for management and marketing purposes.

"Diversity" itself is an industry, and universities themselves are run like corporations whose students and faculty members are "customers," as one unfortunate Yale memo actually put it. But, then, increasingly, students are customers: Thousands of visits per capita to vapid Internet sites and shopping malls before matriculation have annealed them against whatever campus Marxists or postmodernists could hope to impart. Before 2008, most seniors at most Ivies flocked yearly to recruiters from investment banks, consulting firms, and their ilk.

So, yes, liberal-arts colleges promote too little intellectual diversity, and, yes, a pervasive ideology (of free-marketing, self-marketing, predatory marketing) normalizes orientations that are narrow and arbitrary, indeed. Even the supposed campus leftists are pitchmen, like the Harvard Shakespearean scholar Marjorie Garber, who, in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety and Sex and Real Estate, swings like a semioticist with marketing that's reshuffling our libidinal and racial decks.

Other leftists administer revival meetings for penitent racists and sexists who want to feel better about making money by backing reforms that now divide blacks from blacks as well as blacks from whites and whites from whites and women from women as well as women from men and men from men. Progress, perhaps; but "progressive" it's not.

Could conservative scholarship discipline this campus capitalist circus? America warehouses its "radical lunatics … in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated," David Brooks has claimed, but lavishly funded nunneries for conservative lunatics are sprouting at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont McKenna, Chicago, and elsewhere, and some hire conservative activists and national-security functionaries as teachers who cast Thucydides as a prophet of the war on terror. That's not how to balance humanist truth seeking and civic-republican leadership training.

Yet Lilla is right to want serious study of conservative ideas. I'd trade lunatic semioticists in a heartbeat for more on Adam Smith's abhorrence of capitalist corporations, John Gray's doubts about capitalism tout court, and Edmund Burke's indifference to anything more religious than a state religion that's the Tory Party at prayer.

Serious conservative scholarship would highlight American conservatism's failure to reconcile its yearnings for ordered, sacred liberty with its obeisance to every global capitalist riptide that's subverting liberal education more than tenured radicals ever did.

Jim Sleeper
Lecturer in Political Science
Yale University
New Haven

To the Editor:

It is hard to believe that Mark Lilla read my book The Professors or acquainted himself with my activities when he described me as someone who "inclines toward witch-hunting." That is a malicious and false charge promoted by opponents of my efforts to protect students from professors who violate their academic freedom. My book clearly states in its introduction that it is not about professors' political views.

I have publicly defended Ward Churchill's right to teach. I supported Erwin Chemerinsky when conservative donors pressured the university chancellor at the University of California at Irvine to withdraw his job as dean of the new law school because he was a leftist. I have never called for the firing of a professor because of his or her political views, nor have I ever said that certain views should not be represented on a university faculty (provided they are academically expressed).

I am in complete agreement with Stanley Fish's views on academic freedom and have said so in many venues and in several books, including The Professors. I have worked with Gerald Graff, an academic leftist whose outgoing presidential address (printed in the May 2009 PMLA) agrees that there is a problem of political indoctrination in our universities and encourages his colleagues to address the issues I've raised.

Lilla accuses me of being hostile to the university and telling conservatives to avoid it. On what basis could he have come to that conclusion? It certainly can't be on the basis of what I have written and what I have done. In all my books—The Professors included—I have written that 90 percent of professors, regardless of their perspectives, are scholars and are doing a good job. I have always said—and written—that the problems I am dealing with are confined to 10 percent of the faculty.

In The Professors I explain how I arrive at that figure. I have spent the last five years working with provosts, professors, and students trying to make the university a more hospitable place for all students, including conservatives, by requiring faculty members to behave professionally and adhere to the 1915 declaration of the American Association of University Professors. My efforts led directly to a path-breaking statement by the American Council on Education embracing academic freedom and intellectual pluralism as core educational values, and for the first time recognizing students' rights to be educated, not indoctrinated. I have worked to create centers and programs within the Universities of Colorado and Texas, Emory and Pennsylvania State Universities, and the University of California at Los Angeles that would encourage conservative scholars.

Lilla's article lazily spreads the lie of the AAUP and other organizations of the left who set out to destroy me when I challenged their practices. I have great respect for Lilla's intellectual work, which makes this reckless attack all the more regrettable.

David Horowitz
President
David Horowitz Freedom Center
Sherman Oaks, Calif.