Friday, December 10, 2004
(7:11 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
With Apologies to Ralph Luker: Yet Another Post on Conservatives in the Academy
I know we here at The Weblog are beating this particular horse to death, but so is the whole damn blogosphere, so live with it. Anthony has mentioned before that there exists a whole network of conservative religious universities, and I would add that there are also many right-leaning think tanks out there. While simply consigning all conservatives to these schools is not the solution, I'd just like to compare the general dynamic to the right-wing take-over we've recently seen in the media. The strategy was to complain of bias in the mainstream institutions, while simultaneously building alternative institutions such as right-wing radio and eventually Fox News. The result has been that right-wing opinions are now disproportionately represented in the institutional mainstream media, and due to the small circulation of avowedly left-wing media, in the media universe as a whole. The concrete result has been, I would argue, the Iraq War.Now I don't think that anyone is going to die as a result of some future arrangement whereby all literature professors make cutting jokes about President Hillary rather than about Shrub; I'm just saying that this whole controversy seems to be following a general pattern. I'd also say that the fact that the conservative movement didn't start in on the universities to begin with displays their political acumen, in that they knew that a stranglehold on the terms of the media debate was much more important than anything that was going on in the academy. You've got to hand it to these guys -- they know what they're doing. I kind of wish that some left-wing cabal had applied the insights gleaned from a close study of Gramsci to the take-over of the media rather than the humanities.
My moderately "conspiracy-theory" examination of this problem is not intended to simply dismiss those aspiring academics of a conservative bent who felt either excluded from a fair shot at a job or ostracized by their peers after attaining one, any more than talking about how the Iraq War was the worst fucking idea ever is intended to minize how much it sucks to be a soldier over there or, more importantly, how much it sucks to be an Iraqi right now. The key here is that the controversy, as it is in fact taking place in the current political setting, is not "about" those excluded conservative intellectuals any more than bullying rhetoric about how we need to support our troops over in Iraq is "about" those troops -- both the troops and the conservative literature grad students are nothing but pawns in a larger power struggle.
I'm sure this is all academic anyway, since university administrators will eventually look at the numbers, shut down humanities departments altogether, and allot more money to the business school. The machinations of capital are conspiring to put proportionately more Republicans in the academy in the long run -- though I'm sure there'll be a huge swarm of commentators poised to blame the decline of the academic humanities on those stubborn radical leftist professors. Because, I mean, they use jargon and stuff and have opinions out of the mainstream of American debate!
As a sidenote, I'd really like to see someone put this whole thing into the context of adjunctification. (If someone has already done so, please point me in the right direction.) The fact that this debate seems so disconnected from the realities of academic employment just solidifies my opinion that this is more about extending right-wing hegemony into yet another sphere of public life than it is about redressing a real grievance.
