next »

[chronicle_moderator]

Conservative pundits are now well ensconced in the news and entertainment media. But what about academe? In his essay this week, Mark Bauerlein argues that several recent books show that conservative thought -- and how liberals understand it -- could benefit from rigorous academic scrutiny. What do you think?
Read more...

[pushmonkey]

Here's hoping Mr. Bauerlein already has tenure!  I congratulate him for his willingness to alienate his peers.  In the spirit of the season of Advent, one is reminded of a voice crying in the wilderness.  May academe be redeemed, and soon!  P.S., Bauerlein's book, Negrophobia is a jaw-dropping window onto the history of American race relations.

[daurousseau]

I can understand why Hayek was required reading in 1957, when I had to read him along with Dewey, Rheinhold Niebuhr, Hilter, Stalin, and Plato. Why anyone now woud read Hayek, or Niebuhr, is beyond me. In the 50s Niebuhr came across to young students as a standard-issue liberal, though Hayek seemed to be of Granpa's generation even then. Both of them in retrospect seem like middle-brow journalists, two Thomas Friedman's of the 1950s. Dewey, Hitler, Stalin and Plato on the other hand have some historical roles to continue playing.

David McCullough
(not the big guy)

[inigomontoya]

Oh, please.  How many times will the Chronicle publish this cartoonish essay?  I swear I've seen it at least a dozen times in the last thirty years.  David Horowitz has written it a thousand times and is making a very tidy living, thank you very much.

"Conservatives" have been whining about academia since the creation of academia.  Change a few of the references and this essay could have been written in 1980 or 1950: academia is monolithic, controlled by conformist subversives who hate freedom and America and are poisoning the minds of our children.  I'm a victim, I'm ignored, I'm a victim, nobody listens to my ideas.

If the essayist is right, why is every economics student in America taught market-based micro- and macroeconomics?  Why is every American politics student taught about the founding and the American constitution?  I could go on and talk about a dozen other disciplines...

Academia is not monolithic.  Academics hold many different points of view about politics, culture, and life in general.  There are plenty of conservatives in academia.  Examples of bad treatment of conservatives are just that: examples.  They do not constitute evidence of systematic oppression or exclusion.

I could find an equal number of examples of left academics being oppressed or excluded and it would prove nothing.  Anybody who's spent any time in the faculty of a college or university knows that academics fight like cats over everything, especially ideas.

[chapterfourteen]

How did it come to surprise anyone that explicitly political labels (as meaningless as the labels on any other bit of fashion) are not eagerly embraced by the academy? If there is anything worth paying attention to in this article it is the implicit attempt to convince us that the academy's standards are systematically liberal -- and if that's true then every sort of propoganda would then have a moral highground from which to storm the walls. "Liberals" should ask themselves whether or not he has a point (even insofar as the point may have been unintended!).

I'll toss up two legitimate reasons for excusing ourselves from feeling the need to heal the breach between conservative thought and the academy:

1). Conservative thought is a mess at its roots and cannot sustain a claim to represent a systematic approach to politics. In its refusal to acknowledge such gaping flaws as its call to market freedom combined with cultural and moral conservation it reveals itself as nothing more than the thinking habit of a branch of the aristocracy (and hence its loss of coherence as soon as it tries to cross class boundaries, as in the present-day case). Classical Liberalism, on the other hand, does not suffer from these flaws, or at least not to the same degree. Time for a change of terms?
2) It is inappropriate to teach conservative thought to young, impressionable minds, for the same reason that you wouldn't teach social darwinism or laissez faire to your seven-year-old: the ideas make compelling appeals to facts-of-life and self-interest that would interfere with higher moral development. Okay... this is really a parody. Continuing:
3) The academy already teaches conservative thought by teaching the Great Books, and their close relatives. Real conservative thought - e.g. Burke, rather than the caricaturist (or caricatured), Hayek - is based on preparing the mind to contend in politics without the aid of "system." To be conservative means to exercise judgement. It began with the Enlightenment precisely because the Enlightenment called in to view the inadequacy of Enlightenment ideas - science, idealism, systemization - as guides for political action.

[epicuria]

The author should have taken into account the sociological forces operative in the academy.  A large percentage of the professoriate came of age during the aftermath of The Greening of America to use the title of Charles Reich's widely cited if not widely read manifesto.  Their alienation from mainstream America only hardened after years of being sequestered on campus, since those in the social sciences and the humanities did not have to take part in the market economy.  Of course Foucault would come to dominate over Hayek (and Friedman, Becker etc.)

[larryc]

Very few conservatives would be willing to work for my salary.

[case_insensitive]

Very few conservatives would be willing to work for my salary.

That could be why very few conservatives choose your field? (I'm mostly joking).

I think in business schools you'll see slightly more conservatives, but even there, not many.

[oldtrey]

Professor Bauerlein's point is valid.  However, he is needs to probe a little bit deeper.  To wit, our universities are becoming as wealthy, isolated and irrelevant to today's societies, as did the great monasteries to the Renaissance.  They have lost their way by knee-jerk liberalism, exercising extreme contortions of Political Correctness, and worshiping at the altar of "Diversity", to the exclusion of reason, among other inanities.

I believe it was originally said of the Grand Ecoles,  "they were created to sharpen intelligence, instead they created intellectuals".

[zharkov]

our universities are becoming as wealthy, isolated and irrelevant to today's societies, as did the great monasteries to the Renaissance.

An interesting point, but (1) there are a few wealthy universities, while most rely on tuition and/or state appropriations and (2) most people go to at least some college, so higher ed can't be irrelevant.

FWIW, I haven't found college to be particularly political, either as an undergrad, grad student, or prof. 

[oldtrey]

True, not all universities are wealth, but its the wealthy ones that set the tone.

I wonder what your major was, Professor?  Take an undergraduate course in English, Liberal Arts, or Political Science, and see what kind of grades you get espousing a conservative bent.  From the Ivy League to Podunk State Teachers, you will so at your own risk.

[jds2006]

One of my department's (English) majors very much voices his conservative views--actually, many of our majors at this SLAC are conservatives--and is so committed to his pov that he will ship out to Iraq as shortly after his graduation next spring as possible.

How do we punish him for opening his filthy conservative mouth? By giving him the A's he deserves. By engaging in friendly hallway conversations that include politics. By going to his wedding to (another conservative student) this afternoon at 2.

Another of our students, a non-traditional who had retired from the military, had some personal issues. His oldest son, a meth-head, had abandoned my student's grandson, a pre-teen who grew into a troubled teen while our student did his damnedest to care for him. One of his tactics was prayer; he would come to school and tell the faculty and his classmates that he might not be up to par on such-and-such a day because he had been up all night praying and looking for the Lord's guidance.

And how did we pansy-liberal atheist Ph.D.s in Liberal Arts punish this stalwart of the right? Yep, you got it. By making him valedictorian and making him do a speech. That'll show him what we think about conservative values.

(Really: The banality of the "No Conservatives in Academe." Super big yawn.)

[zharkov]

Take an undergraduate course in English, Liberal Arts, or Political Science, and see what kind of grades you get espousing a conservative bent.  From the Ivy League to Podunk State Teachers, you will so at your own risk.

An interesting assertion, but one without evidence.  Critical thinking -- which is what colleges are supposed to teach -- requires that we make arguments based on evidence and logic.

I have to wonder whether these vague complaints about students being dinged for their views is really a matter of the students not demonstrating the habits of critical thinking.

 

[jmai1]

By agreeing with at least half of D'Souza's thesis - that radical Islam murdered so many people because they hate the same thing in American culture that Conservatives hate - isn't Bauerlein turning conservatives into precisely the kind of fundamentalists he claims they are not?  So the terrorists are, intellectually speaking, right?  Is the difference that the Cultural wars aren't terrorist wars?  But then couldn't we just call conservative intellectuals the fundamentalist elite, theoreticians rather than footsoldiers?  So is intellectual conservatism only a few names?  What the hell is it, especially "independent of political struggle" and what makes it so valuable?

And on the other side, rank individualism, self-entitlement, and the vacuity of mass media hardly seem to be Left values (though they might be (neo?)liberal).  Fear Factor, Survivor, techno-obsessions, our sense of self-entitlement, and "cultural debauchery," seem far more linked to the free market system, which, I assume, is a "conservative" value.  I'd love to read a column on the benefits of conservatism, so that conservative values can at least make their way to the public forum for critique or support, rather than continuous lamenting on the monopoly of liberalism.  It seems to me that Bauerlein will find a far more sturdy critique of conservatism and liberalism in analyses coming from the far Left.

[zharkov]

I'd love to read a column on the benefits of conservatism, so that conservative values can at least make their way to the public forum for critique or support, rather than continuous lamenting on the monopoly of liberalism. 

That's an excellent point.  Some conservatives are libertarians, who basically believe that government should leave people alone.  Some are traditionalists, and want the government to enforce an agenda of "family values."  How and why both groups would call themselves conservative is beyond me.