The Mass Media Get Universities Wrong… Again

by Liberty and Power

Steven Horwitz has my complete sympathy on this issue. John Miller's WSJ piece is a dreadful hash. He lumps together St. Lawrence with Stanford and Duke and Yale—it’s hard to find a clearer signal of lazy writing on academia. And he endorses the so-called Academic Bill of Rights, which aims at things you’d expect one a them Right-wing culture warriors to oppose: mandating yet another form of"diversity," and creating a corresponding category of harassment with its own subjectively defined"hostile environment." Miller reports an official stand of the American Psychological Association (that opposition to"affirmative action" is proof of"symbolic racism") without bothering to note that many academic psychologists avoid joining the APA, which they regard as a lobby for clinical practitioners.

I will say that Bob Torres was pretty naive, if he thought that only 5 or 6 people were going to read his broadside against the College Republicans. If you put something on the Web, it’s out where people in Mongolia can see it, as well as your own students. I don’t care for the street rhetoric in the now-notorious piece, but I interpret it as venting, or as maintaining solidarity with ideological allies. (Surely Torres knows that he was presuming the truth of his charge against Republicans instead of trying to argue for it; in fact, some of his other blog entries are more serious about making such a case.) Still, I don’t blame students for wondering whether they’re guaranteed a D on a term paper should they take exception to his preferred explanations of poverty in America. I think he has fence-mending to do, but I also think that he might have figured that out by now, perhaps with a little help from the colleagues whose vigorous responses the St. Lawrence administration chose not to interfere with. Miller has accomplished little, except to add fuel to Torres’ suspicions that"McCarthyites" are on the loose.

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Robert L. Campbell - 3/14/2004

Sorry, the second last sentence should go:

...but what other response can you expect that sort of book to get?

Robert L. Campbell - 3/14/2004

Right after I moved to Clemson (in 1991), the College Republican chapter got really nasty when a group of students wanted to start a gay and lesbian organization on campus. We're not talking Queer Nation; it was a chapter of the Lambda Society. To its credit, the CU administration did not try to block the Lambda Society from being recognized, and the state legislature kept out of the matter (I understand that you can't count on that in Alabama). But the College Republicans threatened to take out an ad in the Anderson, SC newspaper, listing the names of every member of the new LS chapter. They didn't deliver on their threat, but as a consequence I've never wanted to go near them.

Anyway, you don't need to convince me that ideological identity politics of the sort that David Horowitz practices is hypocritical... or that it is a bad way to try to resolve some of the current problems of the American university system. How about the older forms of identity politics, though? Is it the proponents of identity politics by race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. that are more at fault? Or is it their critics?

I can't judge Christina Hoff Sommers as a speaker because I've never attended one of her talks (they haven't spent student activity money on her at Clemson). Her book Who Stole Feminism? is reviled by certain kinds of ideological feminists...but what other response can you expect that sort of book get? What makes her so mediocre?

Charles Johnson - 3/13/2004

I take issue with only one thing in Robert Campbell's post: 'And he endorses the so-called Academic Bill of Rights, which aims at things you'd expect one a them Right-wing culture warriors to oppose: mandating yet another form of "diversity," and creating a corresponding category of harassment with its own subjectively defined "hostile environment."'

But this should be the last thing in the world that you'd expect the College Republican crowd to oppose. For many years now the Right, particularly on college campuses, has been cultivating what can only be described as **ideological identity politics**: the idea here seems to be that your political convictions should be taken seriously just because you are on the Right, and that if they are not it must be because of 'bigotry' against people 'like you.' That this elides such minor details as the quality or lack thereof of the **arguments** that lead you to the convictions you have, has resulted in a number of unfortunate phenomena; among them the lucrative University speaking careers of fanatical ignoramuses like David Horowitz and thorough mediocrities like Christina Hoff Sommers. College Republicans routinely intimidate administrators into signing over several thousand dollars, often more or less the entire University activities budget for the semester, on these folks; the 'argument' for bringing them in as speakers is typically: well, they hold conservative opinions. If you don't invite them in, then obviously you are just a bigot.

This is not a disease unique to the Right. There are lots of reasons to condemn McCarthy-era intimidation of Communist and other Leftist academics; but one particularly lazy argument has been to appeal to the bare fact that they held unpopular political views--as if appealing to their ideological identity were all that it took to show that they are deserving of protection for their opinions. Nevertheless, the phenomenon does seem to me to be something that the College Republican crew has taken to new heights of rhetorical intensity, malice, and plain silliness. Sooner or later I hope that they will grow up and realize that the University is a place for vigorous argument within reasonable norms of scholarship -- not an industrial warehouse of equally-valid opinions. That sort of ideological relativism from the crusaders of the Right may seem at first surprising; but it's been central to their strategy for years.