Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, has an interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “How Academe Shortchanges Conservative Thinking:”

The absence of conservative minds from the liberal-arts curriculum and the off-campus ignorance of them — or worse, treatment of them as hired hands — are standard features of intellectual life, and they are not unrelated. When it comes to ideas and values, campuses remain the foremost site of study, and the curriculum has a certifying effect. It bears the duty of imparting ideas and writings essential to the formation of thoughtful, informed individuals. The campus provides a space in which that can happen, an occasion for learning — not for advocating or using knowledge, but for acquiring and reflecting upon it. The ideas included are deemed suitable for academic study, which is to say they possess enough autonomy to be handled as part of an intellectual tradition.

The division of campus discourse from public discourse has a discrediting result. If a set of ideas and writings are missing in the classroom but present in the marketplace or government, we tend to explain them by their instrumental value. They owe their clout to their usefulness to business or politics, the reasoning goes, not to intellectual substance. If the university doesn’t put those works and ideas on the syllabus, they aren’t subject to the free analysis and contemplation that respectable works and ideas merit. When they crop up off campus, then, they seem to have no independent validity, no import separate from the interests they satisfy.

This is a disabling situation for conservative intellectuals. When a distinctive intellectual identity emerged 100 years ago in France, it did so as an adversarial one. People qualified as intellectuals by acquiring knowledge through education and extending their expertise into protest, rising above the blandishments of money and position to represent higher things. What kept them honest and credible was, precisely, their independence. What kept them authoritative was the fact that they had developed their opinions in a disinterested setting.

Herein lies the plight of conservative intellectuals. They seek to reflect upon the events of the day, but the ideas they draw upon are ignored by professors and cheapened by liberal intellectuals. Count the names Hayek, Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, etc., on syllabi in courses on “Culture & Society.” Tally how often, in left-of-center periodicals, those names are linked to moneyed interests. The framing is complete. Heralds of conservatism start and finish in the messy realm of politics and finance, never rising into the temple of reflection…

…The denial of legitimacy creates a distorted intellectual environment, and everyone suffers. American society, not to mention students, is poorly served when ideas in the public sphere don’t undergo conceptual, historical, and political analysis in the classroom. Unfortunately, the curricular attention that conservative minds and ideas actually gather is reflexive and shallow. It’s not even an adversarial relationship. It’s barely any relationship at all.

Stanley Kurtz weighs in:

In a nation divided by razor thin political margins, the academy is the only sector (well, movies too) where conservative voices are almost totally shut out. The academy is society’s brain, so to speak. Our best minds ought to be exploring, debating, and discussing the issues that divide us at our colleges and universities. Anything less cheats our students of the opportunity to decide for themselves what they believe. It doesn’t matter how good a discussion leader you are. If you’re preventing your students from considering the finest representatives of conservative viewpoints, you are cheating them.

Alas, this situation isn’t bound to improve as long as you have administrators unwilling to stand up to campus thugs and free speech-stiflers whose idea of an “intellectual debate” with conservatives involves pies and fire alarms.

comments (0)   trackbacks (0)