My professor voted for McCain.
Just kidding. That’s impossible.
Mark Lilla, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the lack of conservative faculty and lack of interest in conservative thought in American academia. He writes:
Over the past decade, our universities have made serious efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on the campus (economic diversity worries them less, for some reason). Well-paid deans work exclusively on the problem. But universities show not the slightest interest in intellectual diversity among faculty members. That wouldn’t matter if teachers could be counted on to introduce students to their adversaries’ books and views, but we know how rarely that happens. That’s why political diversity on the faculty does matter. As it stands, there is a far greater proportion of conservatives in the student body of typical colleges than on the faculty. A few leading thinkers on the right do teach at our top universities—but at some, like Columbia University, where I teach, not a single prominent conservative is to be found.
At Cornell, where I studied undergrad from 2001-2005, Jeremy Rabkin was the one and only conservative member of the government department, but he subsequently left the university. I don’t believe another token conservative has replaced him. At NYU Law, where I study now, there are a few conservative faculty members, mostly libertarian “Law and Economics” Scholars like Richard Epstein, and they enrich the debate on campus. I wish there were more.
I think the lack of conservative faculty and the lack of respect afforded to conservative thought in American universities contributes to the shrill, unproductive, too often non-conciliatory nature of political debate amongst elites. Conservatives leave campus, I imagine, feeling like liberals are an antagonistic, dogmatic, and naive bunch. Their right-wing ideas, should they have the courage to present them, are often shot down without much argument. One common response is for campus conservatives to radicalize defensively, becoming more right-wing than even mainstream Republicans. At Cornell, conservatives managed to generate some genuine fear of and hatred for the left on campus and in the country.
The liberal majority, on the other hand, rarely sees or hears from conservatives; all their teachers are very liberal; and along the way, many come to associate conservativism with anti-intellectualism, maybe racism, and something like the assertion of lowly urges and intuitions. They never have to defend their ideas, so they become a little lazy intellectually and just feel certain that they are right. How could all these smart people be wrong?
The end result is that people leave college incapable of have a decent, civil, or productive political discussion with a person on the opposite end of the political spectrum. It is during college that most people cement their views about their ideology and about people of different ideologies. It’s a shame that university administrations don’t understand the harm that not having conservatives on campus delivers to this formative process. Affirmative action for conservative students and faculty anyone?
-Jake
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