February 15, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Charles Kuffner asks what's the
Charles Kuffner asks what's the fuss about the academy being skewed to the left?
Well, there's two ways to respond to that. The first is to ask how you would feel if Oral Roberts and their ilk were the gateway to the good life for your children? Would you be happy that the only way you could get your children the most prestigious education was by sending them somwhere where the political center was around, say, the National Review -- and there were no professors in many departments with any other point of view? Would you send your children to an institution that was likely to draw blank stares when they went for job interviews so that they could get a balanced education, or would you send them off with the other kids? Would you smile when they told you that evolution actually wasn't a fact and affirmative action was dead wrong, and treated their new opinions as revealed wisdom instead of debatable ideas? Of course not. Of course if you're on the left, having a mostly left academy feels nice'n'comfy. But that's not an education, it's brainwashing. And if that's what you want for your children, I guess I'm not going to convince you it's a bad thing.
Which brings me to the second reason that it's a problem. The problem isn't the skew, per se; personally, I imagine that the distribution will be skewed to the left for quite some time. The problem is that if you drew the political distribution of the country as a normal distribution and stuck a line through the center, then plotted the distribution of most american universities, you would find almost nothing to the right of that center line. To hell with skewed; that's a political culture as monolithic as the one at those religious schools Ivy League professors like to make fun of.
Idea systems are like ecosystems; they do better when they are diverse. The whole scientific method, in fact, is founded on the belief that ideas maintain their vitality and fitness only in the hurly burly of an intellectual marketplace where they are constantly tested and challenged.
Professors in many subjects never have their core ideas challenged in any substantive way. Reading an argument is not the same as debating a subject with a competent opponent; I'm sure we've all had the experience of reading something that disagreed with our deeply held beliefs, thinking "Well, this is clearly ridiculous," and throwing the article or book aside in irritation precisely because it challenged something we wanted to believe was self-evident. The benefit of a diverse academy is that it forces people to actively defend their beliefs, and thus refine and improve them, discarding those which cannot stand the test of competition.
Students, who pay no taxes and have rarely had to actually make something work in the real world, are naturally liberal. I don't think the job of college is to change that -- but I do think that the job of any competent university is to present multiple viewpoints and encourage debate so that the students are forced to analyze and hone the ideals they embrace. The total dominance of the left is encouraging intellectual complacency, shutting down debate in many areas, and in general creating an unhealthy atrophy in the intellectual atmosphere of many humanities departments -- just as it would be if 94% of the academy hailed from the right. Homogeneity does not breed sharp thinking in any atmosphere. That is why the best conservative writing is the writing aimed at a general audience; it assumes nothing, proves every point, and offers genuine insight instead of complaining.
Kuffner suggests I want affirmative action for conservatives. Far from it. However, I think that there is probably outright hiring bias against conservative candidates that pollutes the applicant pool, as well as the eventual makeup of the faculty. I think that this should be forcefully stopped by outraged alumni, parents, and donors. I think that it would be, if we got some proof. So that's what I want; proof. Which is why I'm pretty sure the academy will go to great lengths to make sure that I don't get it.
Posted by Jane Galt at February 15, 2002 09:44 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links