Tuesday, November 30, 2004
(3:51 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Conservatives in the Academy
Robert "KC" Johnson, my twelfth favorite writer for Cliopatria, has a post up in which he engages Juan Cole -- undisputed divine oracle of the left half of the blogosphere -- in a debate about conservatives in academia. I personally find the entire debate to be rather annoying, especially nonsense like this from George Will (quoted by "KC"):In contrast, American campuses have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more intellectually monochrome. They do indeed cultivate diversity -- in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought.I know that I have been vocally opposed to things like "theology of X ethnic group," but I'm just going to come out and say it: for the most part, differences in race, skin color, ethnicity, and sexual preferences are also intellectual differences. They affect what one thinks is worth studying, the appropriate way to weigh varying claims, the task of an intellectual -- a womanist theologian, for instance, will draw on significantly different sources and have significantly different priorities from a Radical Orthodox theologian. Although there may be some broad trends that could be worked out, intellectual debate within given scholarly groupings and cross-fertilizations among them are rampant.
What is most offensive in Will's characterization is his deployment of the conservative/liberal divide as the intellectual divide. Once that premise is accepted, then conservative hegemony is basically assured -- the conservative/liberal opposition as currently operative in American discourse is already weighted so that conservative is good and liberal is bad. In other areas in which movement conservatives have managed to make their charges of bias or imbalance stick -- i.e., in areas where the majority of those in power do not have lifetime guaranteed jobs, such as in the "liberal media" -- the results have been that conservatives are now overrepresented. (See the numerous studies in which all networks, even including NPR, tend to disproportionately quote Republicans -- and see also the rise of an entire right-wing media machine, where a similar avowedly left-wing machine has only recently arisen, and that as a direct answer to the right-wing media.)
It is terribly unfair that certain scholars who align themselves with the Republicans are made to feel unwelcome in the academic world. But I don't think that this debate is really motivated by that kind of concern -- I think that it's really a full-on attack on one of the last areas of American society where left-wing voices hold hegemony. The academy is currently being gutted and turned into the preserve of transient workers who will be compliant to the needs of their employers rather than to the demands of intellectual inquiry, so the problems of leftists setting the agenda are probably not going to be operative in the future -- but until that day, I say, Hold out, guys. Please, hold out at least long enough to give left-wing intellectuals somewhere else to live. I'll admit that this is a completely political decision on my part and that the individual conservatives who are being discriminated against (and I'm sure this happens to at least some extent) are perhaps objectively better scholars than the leftists -- but please, tenured radical professors of literature, hold on.
(And I will remark in passing that the avowedly leftist alignment of many academics, as opposed to a tepid liberalism, has probably been the primary cause of continued left hegemony in certain parts of the academy -- because liberalism almost always seems to degenerate into a "no enemies on the right" position.)
