Jim Sleeper: What 'Liberal' Academy?
[Jim Sleeper, a writer and teacher on American civic culture and politics and a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W. Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).]
A couple of years ago The Nation's Eric Alterman published What Liberal Media?, shredding the familiar conservative charges. It may be too soon to ask, What liberal academy? -- although I've had fun exposing what I called "Wile E. Coyote conservatives" who were rushing off cliffs a couple of years ago blaming liberals for ousting Lawrence Summers from the presidency of Harvard (the high-capitalist Harvard Corporation did it, and not for politically correct reasons) and for enrolling a former Taliban rep as a special student at Yale (an older, more conservative Yale foreign-policy network blessed it).
Now comes a Chronicle of Higher Education debate on whether and why liberal academia still spurns conservative scholars. Never mind that the fiscal crises gripping public and private universities show them to have been far more captive to market riptides than to leftist doctrines; in the Chronicle, Columbia intellectual historian Mark Lilla writes that on many campuses a pervasive ideology still normalizes "liberal" views that are rather narrow and arbitrary. Boston College's Alan Wolfe agrees that colleges promote little true intellectual diversity, although he says conservatives are part of the problem.
Others add brief observations, mine noting that what's actually normalized by the typical campus mix of political correctness and corporatist discipline isn't very "liberal," as most Americans use the term. Baiters of tenured radicals -- the conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke, the propagandist Roger Kimball, the provocateur David Horowitz -- can't so easily claim, as David Brooks claimed in 2002, that America "houses its radical lunatics ... in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated." Not only do market forces rule; lavishly funded nunneries for failed, aging neo-cons are sprouting or entrenching themselves at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont- McKenna-Pomona, Chicago, and elsewhere.
At some of these places, conservative activists and national-security functionaries teach undergraduates to read Thucydides as a prophet of the war on terror and to pursue national-security state networking through habits of discretion and public dissimulation that hobble the humanist truth-seeking conservatives claim to defend.
I support the conservative argument that colleges have to balance humanist truth-seeking with civic-republican leadership-training and that serious conservative thinkers are invaluable to it. A liberal arts college's mission, after all, (as distinct from that of a research university in which it may be housed) isn't to produce many scholars, much less the dray horses of the financial and legal establishments that many leafy campuses actually do produce in large herds; it's to turn 18-year-olds into citizens who are intellectually and morally strong enough to carry on public life through deliberation and choice, not force and fraud.
Why aren't colleges doing enough of that? Read the Chronicle discussion and my 450- word contribution to it for a hint at why "liberals" aren't really the problem.
Read entire article at TPM
A couple of years ago The Nation's Eric Alterman published What Liberal Media?, shredding the familiar conservative charges. It may be too soon to ask, What liberal academy? -- although I've had fun exposing what I called "Wile E. Coyote conservatives" who were rushing off cliffs a couple of years ago blaming liberals for ousting Lawrence Summers from the presidency of Harvard (the high-capitalist Harvard Corporation did it, and not for politically correct reasons) and for enrolling a former Taliban rep as a special student at Yale (an older, more conservative Yale foreign-policy network blessed it).
Now comes a Chronicle of Higher Education debate on whether and why liberal academia still spurns conservative scholars. Never mind that the fiscal crises gripping public and private universities show them to have been far more captive to market riptides than to leftist doctrines; in the Chronicle, Columbia intellectual historian Mark Lilla writes that on many campuses a pervasive ideology still normalizes "liberal" views that are rather narrow and arbitrary. Boston College's Alan Wolfe agrees that colleges promote little true intellectual diversity, although he says conservatives are part of the problem.
Others add brief observations, mine noting that what's actually normalized by the typical campus mix of political correctness and corporatist discipline isn't very "liberal," as most Americans use the term. Baiters of tenured radicals -- the conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke, the propagandist Roger Kimball, the provocateur David Horowitz -- can't so easily claim, as David Brooks claimed in 2002, that America "houses its radical lunatics ... in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated." Not only do market forces rule; lavishly funded nunneries for failed, aging neo-cons are sprouting or entrenching themselves at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont- McKenna-Pomona, Chicago, and elsewhere.
At some of these places, conservative activists and national-security functionaries teach undergraduates to read Thucydides as a prophet of the war on terror and to pursue national-security state networking through habits of discretion and public dissimulation that hobble the humanist truth-seeking conservatives claim to defend.
I support the conservative argument that colleges have to balance humanist truth-seeking with civic-republican leadership-training and that serious conservative thinkers are invaluable to it. A liberal arts college's mission, after all, (as distinct from that of a research university in which it may be housed) isn't to produce many scholars, much less the dray horses of the financial and legal establishments that many leafy campuses actually do produce in large herds; it's to turn 18-year-olds into citizens who are intellectually and morally strong enough to carry on public life through deliberation and choice, not force and fraud.
Why aren't colleges doing enough of that? Read the Chronicle discussion and my 450- word contribution to it for a hint at why "liberals" aren't really the problem.
Related article:
Intellectual Diversity and Conservatism on Campus