Nick responds to my cavalcade of embarrassing quotes from liberal professors ("Unlike conservatives, we believe in working for the public good and social justice," etc.) by saying, "[M]y response is: go forth and do good research. If you can write something compelling and pathbreaking, you'll end up in an at least decent job."
That sounds very true, and I know that Nick is in a better position than I to evaluate whether conservatives get short shrift at universities. However, my problem with left-wing bias is not that it makes life difficult for academics on the right, but that it is morally indefensible. This kind of fierce animus towards a respectable minority is a form of bigotry regardless of how many conservative professors there are. The original article points out that, had a professor suggested that gays or blacks or whoever were underrepresented in academia because they reject the scientific method (!!!), there would have been righteous outcry. When a professor says so about conservatives, people may disagree but they don't raise eyebrows. That indicates a moral failure, and that's the heart of the offense, not underrepresentation.
2. Defending Jonah Goldberg and Dinesh D'Souza.
Adam Bellows' piece in World Affairs explains why a little sensationalism goes a long way, and in the right direction:
I had by now become a seasoned culture warrior, used to being attacked (in print and in person) for publishing quote-unquote “bad” books. That is what it meant to have skin in the game. Other editors were essentially aesthetes whose judgments rested on conventional moral opinion. I was a mad scientist, recklessly mixing unstable elements in a test tube to see what kind of explosion I could get. That didn’t mean I operated without any standards at all in some kind of ethical gravity-free zone. My strategy was to publish a thoughtful and substantive book, titled and packaged in a way that pushed emotional buttons on both sides. That way you triggered the kneejerk response of the liberal media, unleashing a national firestorm; but when conservatives opened the book they found that it was in fact an intellectually serious effort.3. Is a rise in food prices the best way to bring about Crunchy Con agricultural habits?
Well, it certainly is a way.
4. Gay man sues publishers over Bible verses.
In case you missed this.
5. The feminist commenter too busy to hate!
Have you ever wondered about my reasons for being so far to the right on gender issues? Check out the back-and-forth that's been going on in the comments section of yesterday's anti-feminism post. A worthy foe is Anonymous.
6. Yale Mafia update
TKB explains the motto of New Haven's own blogger flophouse.
3 comments:
Part of the problem is that academics talk a lot, and like most people who speak a good volume of words, have a tendency to say occasionally stupid things. Add to that the real value placed (by all parts of the political spectrum) on the novel and the shocking, and you have a recipe for a bunch of exceptionally stupid, unfair things to be said. The sensational moments tend to be played up, for somewhat obvious reasons, but I'm not sure they're representative. I'm almost positive that my advisor and I don't agree on politics, but at a certain level, all research is esoteric and it just doesn't matter. (I was on a panel this year on the topic of just war; what would be the point of discussing politics since all our answers were going to be refracted through the 14th-17th century sources we were using?).
Or, to put it briefly: I think at this point the belief that academia is hostile to conservatism is driving away more potential conservative academics than any actual hostility.
I think I agree with both your long and short versions. The phenomenon of smart people thinking the conservatism is "fundamentally malign" (Matt Yglesias) exists in academia, but in lots of other places, too, and complaining about it in the context of "academia's liberal bias" risks confusing a lot of different complaints, some which are valid and some of which are tired and better buried (i.e. "conservatives are underrepresented in academia"). Also, I appreciate your point about wanting to preserve academia as a place where people "speak a good volume of words" and let ideas flow without the omnipresent threat of media embarrassment that has stifled political discourse.
Still, it's a prejudice that bothers me, in part because I know a number of liberals who say that kind of thing about conservatives, and I know that they're otherwise very nice people who should know better.
Re: #2
Any article that calls Naomi Wolf shrill but thinks that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is a "serious work of intellectual history" strikes me as absurd. Goldberg thinks Bush's support of Medicare bills are fascistic but his support of Chinese torture techniques on prisoners of war is a-okay! Sounds like true intellectual rigor to me.
Perhaps Goldberg didn't want to weaken a book about fascism by putting in anything about mere authoritarianism. Imagine how nonsensical such a book would be if it tried to make an argument by shoehorning every aspect of a diverse social movement stretching over decades into one, poorly-definedideological straitjacket.
Why, one might end up with some hackish partisan screed!
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