September 28th, 2005
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http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4859
The Lefts domination of American higher education, from humble community colleges to Ivy League universities, has been repeatedly and convincingly demonstrated for nearly two decades. The irrefutable evidence of this domination includes the overwhelming imbalance of Democrats versus Republicans on college faculties and administrations; the corresponding rise of major universities (e.g., Harvard and Berkeley) as the leading donors for Democratic Party candidates; the pervasiveness of critical pedagogical approaches that emphasize inequality and oppression based on race, sex, class, and sexuality; the denial of objective, universal standards of meaning and logic under the guise of deconstructionism; harassment of conservative students and organizations; and rampant political correctness. The result, as Allan Bloom, David Horowitz, and others have argued, is the ongoing transformation of the college experience into the main front of the radical political assault on American society itself.
The start of a new school year provides a fresh opportunity to consider this problem, which strikes at the very heart of this countrys democratic, capitalist tradition. The question is, what can conservatives do about it? David Horowitz has famously embarked on a campaign to have an academic bill of rights adopted by state legislatures to ensure that students are exposed to a broad range of scholarly research and opinion in their courses of study. Mr. Horowitzs efforts have been indispensable in focusing attention on the problem. However, while I support the academic bill of rights as a matter of principle, I seriously doubt that the solution Mr. Horowitz proposes will be effective in combating left-wing bias in college classrooms. After all, the very persons responsible for the problem college professors and administrators will be charged with implementing the reforms mandated by the academic bill of rights.
It is easily foreseeable that they will implement these reforms in bad faith, if at all. For example, will a Marxist political science professor provide students with a fair discussion of Friedrich Hayeks critique of socialism? Or a women studies professor explain the wage gap between men and women on the basis of market forces and lifestyle choices? Not likely. Thus, while the academic bill of rights articulates an important ideal, we should not expect that adopting such legislation will produce more than marginal improvement in the standing of conservative ideas on college campuses.
Recently, Heather Mac Donald in City Journal suggested another approach for bringing traditional scholarship and intellectual diversity back to campus. She highlighted new initiatives at Princeton, Brown, and Duke aimed at exposing students to conservative-oriented texts and thinking. At Princeton, politics professor Robert George founded the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which brings conservative scholars and speakers to campus to address issues of constitutional law and politics. At Brown, political theory professor John Tomasi started the Political Theory Project, which sponsors courses and discussion groups in liberty and democratic values. And at Duke, political philosophy professor Michael Gillespie created a first-year seminar called Visions of Freedom, which introduces students to the seminal works in the Western philosophical and literary tradition, in order to explore concepts of freedom and moral authority. Significantly, each of these programs was started by a tenured professor who was backed by non-university sources of funding. Ms. Mac Donald argues that these programs should serve as models for others to follow in establishing similar conservative beachheads at other universities. The National Reviews Stanley Kurtz has made the same argument.
Ms. Mac Donald and Mr. Kurtz are quite optimistic about the ability of these programs, in Ms. Mac Donalds words, to break the Lefts illiberal stranglehold on their institutions intellectual life and restore true academic freedom to campus. This optimism strikes me as misplaced. Certainly, these programs perform an invaluable service for their respective universities and enhance the learning experiences available to all students. But the notion that they have succeeded in break[ing] the Lefts illiberal stranglehold on their institutions intellectual life is pure fantasy. Princeton, Brown, and Duke are among the most left-wing universities in the country. The fact that there is now some space on these campuses for conservative ideas hardly constitutes true academic freedom. Indeed, rather than bringing conservative perspectives to courses generally (where Marxist paradigms and identity group politics reign supreme), these initiatives tend to treat conservatives as just another academic interest group to be afforded their own separate recognition, along the lines of black studies, women studies, and gay studies programs. This may be progress of a sort, but the belief that from such beginnings will come meaningful reform of American higher education strikes me as naïve.
If conservatives are serious about challenging the Lefts domination of higher education in this country, they must first stop pretending that existing colleges and universities especially elite schools where the Left is most firmly entrenched can be reformed, either through internal initiatives, like the ones described by Ms. Mac Donald, or through external pressure applied by wealthy alumni. For example, billionaire publisher Steve Forbes for many years contributed most generously to his alma mater Princeton, and also served on Princetons Board of Trustees, but he could not dissuade Princeton from hiring the despicable Peter Singer, despite vowing he would no longer donate any money to the university so long as Singer is a professor. Then there was the $20 million grant from oil magnate Lee Bass for a Western civilization program that Yale infamously turned down. The fact of the matter is that schools like Princeton, Yale, Brown, Duke, Harvard, Berkeley, et al., do not need conservatives money. Between their existing endowments (or guaranteed public funding in the case of state universities) and donations from wealthy liberal alumni (as well as from alumni who simply do not think in political terms), these schools are effectively insulated from any meaningful reform efforts by conservatives. Denying this reality will not make it go away.
Why, then, do leading conservative intellectuals so heartily endorse a solution to the problem of left-wing bias in higher education that promises, at best, to relegate conservatives to permanent minority status on Americas college campuses? Frankly, I suspect it is because many of them attended elite institutions themselves, and they are reluctant, for personal and professional reasons, to sever their ties to their prestigious alma maters. Hence, the existence of conservative-oriented educational programs, like the ones at Princeton, Brown, and Duke, enable these intellectuals, and conservative alumni generally, to believe that these schools remain worthy of their allegiance and support. This is folly. The road to true academic freedom will never pass through Americas elite universities. As the National Reviews former editor John OSullivan has sagely warned, in contemporary liberal culture, any institution that is not self-consciously and deliberately conservative inevitably will become liberal. The history of American higher education over the past four decades amply proves his point.
So what can be done? In thinking about how to defeat the Lefts domination of higher education, a useful analogy is how conservatives have approached the problem of liberal bias in the mainstream media, which similarly serves as a vehicle for left-wing politics and propaganda. Most importantly, when discussing the mainstream media, conservatives are honest with themselves about the nature of the problem. They do not pretend that the presence of a few right-leaning writers on the editorial pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times means that these newspapers are not fundamentally, and irremediably, leftist in orientation. Nor do conservatives believe, for example, that broadcasting occasional stories by John Stossel means that ABC embraces free market libertarianism. Or that hiring Monica Crowley to co-host a political talk show means that MSNBC is equally supportive of liberal and conservative opinions.
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