Is the Liberal Academy Good for Conservatives?

The Iv(or)y

Such is the argument from Ed Tenner over at the Atlantic, and it provides the opportunity for our inaugural case from “The Iv(or)y”. Sit down Newsprint, you’ve been plenty busy. Although The Iv(or)y is not persuaded by Tenner’s brief, its three central thrusts demand discussion.

First, Tenner makes the obvious argument that conservatives on liberal campuses have to hone their argumentative skills. The need to defend their values against near-constant assault hardens conservatives, makes them quick to the draw with a talking point or a pointed question, and readies them for intellectual combat. Conservatives don’t simply graduate, we are told, they survive.

This idea is a recurring meme in discussions about the campus politics, and one embraced by right and left alike. The conservatives like the idea because it’s flattering to any conservative who finds himself on the late side of Pomp and Circumstance. We’re here, we’re still right of center, so we must be among the few, the proud, the tempered rightists who’ve made it through the grist mill of academe with our values intact.

Dinesh D’Souza has made a career of recounting his halcyon days at Dartmouth, doing ideological battle with intellectual radicals in the New Hampshire woods. Indeed, his satisfied reminiscences about his days as what we might call an “out and proud” conservative in Hanover dominate his pithy (and frequently pedantic) reminiscences in Letters to a Young Conservative. If it isn’t apparent yet, I don’t much care for the book. I find it trite – more talking points than real argumentation. But I’m largely prejudiced because I don’t care much for the general “survivor” view of life as a campus conservative. It’s too simplistic and it privileges the obdurate over the intelligent.

There’s a second, equally smug iteration on conservatism-as-endurance-test, but one that doesn’t lead to a reactionary position. My personal preference, it runs something like this: real skepticism means a serious investigation of the reigning orthodoxy, which in this case means Leftism. Finding oneself a Socrates among benighted Athenians means that the cream has risen to the top. In a word, we’re conservative because we’re smart. We see through the nonsense of academic authority and prevailing hegemony. We’re the real critical thinkers in a forest of self-deluding liberals who repeat the party line like an incantation but can’t hold up for five minutes in an honest debate.

This spin on the old theme came up just this week. After dispatching with Jon Stewart in an interview, John Yoo coyly suggested that he learned his debating tactics through a lengthy career of corralling uppity students who don’t do the reading.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t really do the job either, much as I wish it would. Testing might make for better argument, but it doesn’t necessarily make for greater intelligence. And given that neither side is often persuaded even by the clear light of the other’s reason, it’s hard to see an actual intelligence emerging from the narcissism and inanity of campus politics.

Moreover, as any conservative student in a university will tell you, universities are not democracies. Rather, of necessity, they’re agglomerations of a thousand little authoritarian fiefdoms, few of which permit the freedom of expression in good faith. Hence the central assumption of Tenner’s argument – that conservative students defend their views in open forums – may not hold.

As any conservative student can tell you, one learns to tread lightly, head bowed, and to slide under the ideological radar of one’s superiors. The power dynamics in departments and classrooms are clear and present, and at a certain point, discretion is the better part of valor.

Tenner offers two more arguments why liberal campuses help conservatives. Politically, he notes, the antics of campus radicals often enflame public opinion. This aggravation, he argues, proves a windfall for conservative politicians looking to illustrate the degeneracy of the left’s vision of the good society.

While this may have been true in the 1960s and 70s, when campus radicals were actually taken seriously, it seems an unlikely argument today. Even the recent lunacy at Berkeley, covered thoroughly by Tad Friend in the New Yorker, has failed to produce much more than a knowing shrug from conservative groups. And with today’s student protests so thoroughly domesticated, the likelihood of a campus movement for social reform grabbing national attention seems close to nil.

But this brings me to Tenner’s third argument. He suggests that the hostile environment on campuses scares off precocious conservatives, meaning that “a larger proportion of conservative talent is channeled into positions of real political and economic power” [italics mine].

Now, we may reasonably dismiss his rather facile assumption that achievement is merely a statistical question. But, if one sense, Tenner is right? Not about conservatives and the academy, but rather about the academy in general. What if universities really are irrelevant, a prospect suggested in the above observation that campus protest fails to rouse popular attention?

In this case, the absence of diversity of opinion in the academy does hurt conservatives, albeit indirectly. To suggest that universities are not places “of real political and economic power” is dubious, but if it is true, it says damning things about the modern university and by implication the society in which it ought to play an integral role. Without its institutions of higher learning serving as centers of creativity, our society is in grave trouble.

We should thus reframe Tenner’s question and ask: good for conservatives how? Are liberal campuses good for conservative students personally? Only if one believes that censorship is ennobling of the soul. Are liberal campuses good for conservative operators politically? There was a time when one could ride a backlash against campus activism, but those days have gone as the broader society has ceased to take campuses seriously.

So finally, we ought to ask if the liberal campus is good for conservatives vicariously by being good for the society as a whole. The answer here, again, seems to be a resounding “no”. Indeed a parochial academy, liberal or otherwise isn’t good for itself. Indeed, it’s good for nothing and nobody.