Tuesday, February 17, 2004
(12:37 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Uses and Abuses of Morality for Intellectual Life
The debate on conservatives in academia rages on, at John and Belle's and elsewhere. Belle's story of C., which recounts the woe-filled tale of a more traditional-minded PhD candidate in the classics department who was made to feel very unwelcome by all those who disagreed with his opinions, helped me to understand a little better the objections that reasonable conservatives have to the leftist academy:
- They're assholes to people who have opinions that vary from their own.
- Their supposed opinions don't really have much to do with real life, and so discriminating against people based on their opinions, whether consciously or unconsciously, is in principle just as bad as discriminating against them based on other arbitrary factors unrelated to the work at hand.
- Furthermore, the expected political orthodoxy in some departments allows some people to get through by parroting the party line when in fact they suck as scholars.
Let me repeat: all our "political opinions" don't have much effect in real life. The average citizen only has a miniscule influence on public policy through voting, a right which most citizens do not even exercise. With that in mind, deciding whether or not to "support" the war in Iraq is deciding what particular things one will say in conversation. It would be wonderful if people could openly discuss issues in our nation, but the two-party system, which roughly corresponds to a two-ideology system (liberal/conservative, mostly overlapping with the two parties), turns political opinions into a certain kind of piety useful for identifying in-groups. Thus, even though it shouldn't make sense, it does make a certain kind of sense in our country for conservatives to be discriminated against in the same way that, say, Presbyterians might be discriminated against.
What concrete actions should be taken? I don't know. Is discrimination against conservatives in academia that big a deal? Do leftists automatically do innovative work, finding new connections, and right-wingers automatically do the grunt work of careful research and scholarship? Would an influx of Republicans into the academic marketplace bring us the new commentaries on Livy that we've all been itching for? In short, would significantly, qualitatively different work take place if more conservatives were in academia?
In any case, such discrimination, whether conscious or unconscious, is certainly not fair, but I think I agree with John Holbo that it's not a problem worth fixing -- or at least not worth fixing thoroughly. Maybe what it comes down to is encouraging grad students and professors not to be assholes to people with different opinions -- certainly to engage them critically, to interrogate their position, etc. -- but to be nice to them on a personal level. Maybe go out for a drink with the Republican after the faculty meeting in which she filibustered the department's resolution opposing the Iraq war. Maybe understand that, except in extreme cases, everyone's acting in good faith and doesn't want to destroy our nation and the world, and so we should probably just treat everyone as people, at the end of the day. Maybe just grow up a little and learn how to study gender performance in ancient Greece without forming little tree-house clubs based on which petitions you've signed.
