Discrimination against conservatives in Academia

Probably everyone has heard about the experiments in which a large number of students are given the same academic paper to read, the only difference being that half of the identical papers have a man's name as the author, and the other half, a woman's.

When asked to rate the papers, students given a significantly lower rating to their paper if it was signed by a woman.

Now there is an interesting study which shows that being a conservative is a handicap in terms of your professional advancement in higher education.

So, taking two groups of people whose academic achievements are the same, as measured by the number of published articles and books (and some other metrics), you are more likely to be teaching at a higher-prestige institution if you are on the Left, than if you are on the Right.

Of course, it is possible that the average quality of the academic work being done by conservatives is on the whole lower than that of liberals, and that this explains their relative exclusion from the more pretigious universities.

Or it may be that conservatives prefer to teach at less prestigious universities.

But I think that there is at least a strong prima facie case that some bias is being displayed when it comes to hiring.

Well, we could go all 'meta' here and wonder if it's an real, actually-refereed study, or just more nonsense from the likes of Horowitz. Do you have a cite, so we can evaluate the claims?

It's hard to discuss without knowing whether or not this is a real study - the obvious point that we can make even sight-unseen is that "quantity of papers published " is not a perfect dummy variable for "academic excellence". (Where does the work get accepted?, for one thing. Ten articles in Nature is not the same as ten articles in Finest Kind Journal of Creationist Biology)

If it's a real study, it's also not impossible that - as you say - it's showing a real effect: that the {Gingrichs/fill in random conservative academic's name} of the world wind up at the {University of West Georgia/fill in name of "lower-prestige institution"} and not at {Fill in name of "higher-prestige institution"} because, you know, they really aren't first rank scholars.

But without a bit more to go on, we can't even evaluate the claim.

Yes, you are quite right. The "quality of academic work" is the real issue, and it is difficult to evaluate such a subjective measure.

One's attitude toward this question is really, in the end, determined by one's political beliefs. If I had put the word "homosexuals" or "women" or "Blacks" in place of "conservative," all the head-nodding, or head-shaking, on the part of people reading this post would have been reversed.

Anyway, here is the source.

Thanks for the link, Doug.

Sure enough, the "study" is more of an "observation" (published in a non-refereed journal, a journal which isn't even in SSI) that they've surveyed some sub-set of academics and found that lo-and-behold, the academics surveyed tend to self-report as liberal (which is not even the same as proving that they ARE liberal...) - - but they don't hypothesize a reason.

We're left with confirmation of the conventional wisdom ("College professors are more often liberals than conservatives"), but there's nothing like evidence of discrimination, not in this study: discrimination on ideological grounds is only suggested as one of several possible explanations for the observed results.

Clearly, "More research is needed."

Quite right. And when I posted the exact same post, but with "women" substituted for "conservatives" -- because this research paper also found that, by their measure, there was discrimination against women -- how many people objected that, well, more women didn't wind up at first-rate institutions because they were not first-rate scholars, that a publication in Lesbian and Queer Studies was not the equivalent of a publication in Nature, etc.

My own guess is that both hypotheses (with relation to conservatives) are true.

And here is a thought experiment for everyone: you are a professor in a social science or humanities department. All of your colleagues either hold political beliefs which are similar to yours, or they are not very political. So political discussions are friendly, and your own beliefs are always strengthened and validated.

You have to decide whom to hire for a vacant position. You are going to have to live with this person, perhaps for the rest of your career. You may see them every day in the faculty common room. If you hire someone whose views are greatly at variance to the collective consensus, you are asking for trouble. At best, politics will become a very touchy thing to talk about. Perhaps it will have to become off-limits. At worst, you can see rancor and ill-will arising whenever political issues come up.

You have several candidates who are acceptable. One of them, however, holds political views which are wildly at variance from your own, and from that of your colleagues.

What chance would that person have of getting hired? Be honest, now.

Well, whatever the current political/ideological meanings of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" - and I don't know as the study even approaches that question (who are the 'conservative' and 'liberal' faculty at a Baptist college? at Berkeley?) - I think that they are also descriptors of temperment.

I think one plausible explanation of the observation that "academics tend toward liberalism" is that academia self-selects for a "liberal" frame of mind.

Further: Anyone smart enough to make it in a top-tier university is also smart enough to make to the top tier of corporate America. Yet academics have consciously choosen not to, because scholarship holds more appeal to them than does than the pursuit of great wealth.

I have trouble seeing the alleged problem as a real problem.

I don't argue that it is a "real problem".

I think it is just one of those facts of life that we have to put up with. We conservatives ask other minority groups to put up with various sorts of annoying unfairnesses, rather than run to the state for a legislative or judicial remedy for every little thing, and this is an example where we have to swallow our own medicine.

And there no doubt are other explanations for relative the conservative absence in higher education operating too, including the ones you mention. (As I was told as a high school student in Texas back in the Fifties, "Even if we integrated the colleges, most Negroes couldn't get in because they wouldn't have the grades." And at that time it was true.)

Here is an area where conservatives have to be creative. For example, let us say that there is a course on "Social Activism", where the students are given credit by their radical left professor for being active in a "social movement". Now anyone with a brain knows that the "social movements" the professor will expect his or her indoctrinees to be volunteer for are Leftist ones.

However, when called to account, only the boldest, or most suicidally-honest, Leftist will admit to this. They will no doubt say, "Oh, sure, if someone wants to join the Young Republicans, they would get credit for that too." What we have to do in such a case is to make sure that the incoming class knows this, and make it easy for them to contact conservative groups in which they can participate for class credit.

There are dozens of other ways we can try to get a hearing for our side on Left-dominated campuses.

Of course, we can expect physical violence against us, our meetings broken up, and our speakers attacked. We can expect to have our newspapers and literature stolen and destroyed --- so far as the Left is concerned, error has no rights ---but these people do not have state power and this is something we must just go through.

There is a slight qualitative difference between the signifiers "woman" and "conservative".

True. So are you saying that it's wrong to not hire someone because she is a woman, but it's okay to not hire someone because she's a conservative?

No. That's not what I said at all.

#5 - I couldn't tell if the candidate was conservative or liberal. And in the scenario you describe it probably wouldn't enter the interview process anywhere - not that I know much about the academic hiring process.

However the various alternatives you mention - women / black etc are immidiately obvious, hence discrimination is far more possible than against conservatives.

Do liberals face the same issue - if you are a corportate head honcho promoting your next manager, would you promote a liberal instead of a less well achieving conservative, in order to maintain 'peace' in the boardroom?

I've never been involved in interviewing someone for an academic position, but it seems to me that during the process, political leanings would come out during the discussion of influences and visions the interviewee has for the position.

I believe that in the hard sciences, and engineering, politics probably makes little difference. (By the way, liberals tend to dominate even here, although not by as much as in the social sciences and humanities, which shows that under any system whatsoever, higher education is going to be basically a liberal bastion, just as the military is a conservative one.)

However, in the humanities and social sciences, it is not difficult to discover the political leanings of someone applying for a post. For one thing, you read their publications (which you have to do anyway, if you are hiring someone). These will often reveal what someone thinks about the world. For another, if you want to, you can easily discover someone's political leanings in casual conversation.

And such has been the advance of the Left in higher education in the last few decades, that explicit committment to Leftist objectives and methods, or at least non-opposition to them, is nearly a requirement of employment now: the search committee just needs to ask the candidate how he or she would help implement the university's goal of "diversity", which is a code-word for racial and sexual quotas. If you are really Jesuitical, you may be able to fool your interrogators by a cleverly-crafted answer; or you can just lie. (But whatever strategem you invoke, you will have to keep it up until you have tenure.)

(Some departments of education have made a committment to "social justice" a requirement for a prospective student.)

Of course, if you are really, really good -- and if you are lucky enough to qualify for one or more of the "diversity" criteria -- you might still get hired.

KC Johnson is a high-quality scholar who left a tenured position at Williams College to come teach at City University of NY (Brooklyn College). But he didn't toe the leftist line, and when he came up for tenure, he was turned down, for not being "collegial". The injustice was so great, and the scandal so embarrassing, that this blatantly political move was finally reversed. And I should point out that many genuine liberal academics (as opposed to hardcore Leftists) supported him. (Read about his case here. This website, by the way, has more information and examples of how the radicals in academia keep out conservatives.)

In fact, that is a fact that is worth repeating: genuine liberals in academia are not really the problem. Liberals are committed to being fair-minded, and, in fact, I suspect they would be more fair-minded than conservatives if the terms of oppression were reversed and if conservatives dominated higher education.

But the problem is that there are a significant number of hard Left radicals of various sorts -- militant radical feminists, Chomskyites, etc -- in higher education now -- "tenured radicals," from the old New Left. And they are not fair-minded at all. As far as they are concerned, everything is political, everything is part of the struggle against racist-capitalist-sexist imperialism.

I don't expect liberals will want to look too deeply into this subject. They are human, and humans don't like to wrestle with purported evidence that may tend to undermine or discredit enterprises to which they are committed.

When we conservatives are presented with evidence of crimes committed by American troops in Iraq, and brutality short of crime, we are made uneasy. We tend to acknowledge that, well, of course, there are always going to be some bad eggs, but most of these stories are probably exaggerated by our enemies, and anyway, we know lots of very decent American soldiers, so ... let's not look too closely at the evidence.

This is just human. No one likes cognitive dissonance.

Geneg,

"I've never been involved in interviewing someone for an academic position, but it seems to me that during the process, political leanings would come out during the discussion of influences and visions the interviewee has for the position."

As I mentioned on another one of Doug's threads, one of my grad-student instructors admitted that the faculty would often ask the grad students what they thought of faculty candidates who were interviewing for a job. Now, they could do that just to see if their general impression of the candidate was shared, but they can also do it to glean information that they are prohibited from directly asking the same candidate. Grad students don't have the restrictions that the acting professors do when asking more personal questions.

Even beyond that, if I was interviewing, I would have a really hard time hiding my political views from the same kind of faculty interview ~ they would know I was prior service from my work and service history and if they wanted to probe, without violating the rules, all they have to do is pick out an artist or some well known art that is highly charged politically and ask me what I think about them, the art, public reaction, etc.

My tip-toeing around the topic may give off all the wrong vibes and impressions had I not thought through these types of questions before hand. But really, do I *want* to have to hide my political philosophies? Probably not.

This gets even more complex when you consider the students you will likely face, I would want to be able to fairly handle any obnoxiously outspoken activist student who dominated class discussions or critiques, and if the topic made me uncomfortable and hesitant in front of the faculty, what would it do to me in front of an entire class if it ever came up, to either political extreme?

I can understand the hiring faculty's wanting to know, and would volunteer the information and discussion, but what if they didn't hire me simply because they find my philosophies and conclusions anti-intellectual (in their minds), unsavory in general, or blatantly disgusting to them?

They'd be right to worry that I *could* use my leanings inappropriately in class ~ but *would* I? Do They?

How many times have we seen teachers with a lean to the left do just this with science classes? What I find amusing is that when they are dismissed for abusing their roles as teachers, a lot of people see *that* as political purging. This isn't just about Conservatives not getting or keeping a job, it can hurt the Liberals as well.

There's a Physics professor (now retired after being placed on paid leave) from the Mormon private university, Brigham Young University, who lectured on how WTC7 was intentionally demolished and lectured both in and outside of the classroom about it.

At first, his interest seemed quite reasonable and moderately balanced, but then he started talking about the "inside job" and the government's obvious complicity ~ which I didn't know Physics professors had any particular insight to, but, whatever.

If only he'd stuck to the facts as he could reasonably defend, without giving unsupported speculation, he'd probably still be working at the obviously Conservative university, which he did for over a year while giving lectures on the topic.

I don't know a lot about the topic, but I know a little ~ his name is Steven E. Jones. He's Mormon and purportedly a Conservative, but people will wonder, like I do, when he insists that his speculation on the government involvement should be treated as fact ~ why would you do that if you really don't know?

This has the potential of damaging a lot of different people in a lot of different ways ~ and it wouldn't be half the problem that it is if people could just be more honest and open-minded, the very thing education should be inviting and encouraging.

Conservatives don't usually run into problems at religiously-based universities. There, it is the liberals who have the problems. I believe that a few years ago Brigham Young fired a woman because she believed in abortion.

Of course, a private (religiously-based) university can be a little more strict, because it's their money and their private donor's money on the line, not federal money. But from what I know about BYU, they tend to not just fire you unless you're making your personal politics a big part of the classroom environment. The Physics professor mentioned above continued to teach for a good deal of time and it appeared to not be a problem. It wasn't until he stepped out of his physics lane and started making claims he couldn't really back up as a physics professor, claims that were highly speculative and more political by their very nature, that he was asked to retire.

The general question is: what do you do with a tenured professor who appears to have gone clinically insane?

My (prejudiced) view: nothing. It's too hard to distinguish clinical insanity from unpopular political/religious views.

I think there is a professor at Harvard who claims to have been abducted by aliens. I believe that certain Affirmative Action appointees have come out with really loopy Afro-centric views.

We just have to put up with this.

Isn't that the natural corollary to the line about a sufficiently advanced technology being indistuinguishable from insanity? Any sufficiently advanced thesis will be declared absurd...

The original observation, by Isaac Asimov, was "indistinguishable from magic".

Which doesn't mean that magic tricks are evidence of advanced technology, and the same goes for the transmuted version of the Asimov observation, with regard to "advanced theses".

That Harvard professor was not abducted by aliens (although his mind has evidently been abducted by alient molecules), nor did the ancient Egyptians have gliders and psy-powers.

I was going to make the same correction that Doug did, but then thought about it for a moment ...

I think it is quite telling that Jesse makes the linkage betwen "advanced" and "insane".

That could arguably be the core belief structure of the Left ... the crazier something is, the "more advanced" it must be, and those conservatives who don't like it must be regressive troglodytes.

I must file this away for future debates ... few things define the idiocy of the Left better!

 

Well, it's my experience students generally get to select who they will take classes from. I suspect after the word gets out, only those who have been abducted by aliens also will want to waste hours in a class covering that subject.

The same with the physicist.

Loopy profs after a while tend to weed themselves out.

BTRIPP, why do you insist on struggling so hard against the desire to say something cogent and intelligent? Just give in to it. You might find you like it.

Ahhh. yes. The joys of posting at 4:00 am in the morning.

And yes. I think it does point to a core belief of mine. That I'm not entirely fit to judge another person's sanity. Why do I feel this way. Probably because I was provided with a Christian upbringing which I've not entirely abandoned, so I'm still somewhat wary of displaying judgment.

>. the crazier something is, the "more advanced" it must be, and those conservatives who don't like it must be regressive troglodytes.

We were having a similar conversation when discussing "Creativity", no? I'm not so sure that it's so much about how crazy something is indicating how advanced it is. But there's always the chance that our current conceptions of the world around us are incorrect. So I believe in keeping the doors open to evidence, new arguments, and a chance to learn. Nor am I averse to considering the fact that I may be wrong when provided with a viewpoint that may differ from mine. It's been known to happen before. If this be insanity, color me fucking nuts.

As an atheist, I feel I should not get into the question of whether Christianity teaches us "not to be judgmental", although I am sure that it does no such thing. I would be very disappointed if this faith turned out to be simply an anticipation of the moral vacuousness and self-indulgence of the contemporary Bay Area.

A word in defense of Jesse, however. Perhaps he means this: a sufficiently-advanced set of ideas would appear insane, or unintelligible, to the less-advanced.

Perhaps he is making the following thought-experiment: you are suddenly time-transported back XXXX years. You are given the appearance of the people of that time, and are given the ability to speak their language fluently, and you know all their social customs, etc. You fit in perfectly, except that you have available all of the knowledge you had in the 21st Century.

The larger a value you substitute for XXXX, the more difficult a time you will have convincing your new contemporaries of your sanity if you reveal your beliefs.

Doug, enough with the Bay Area cracks. Seriously. I thought you were supposed to be reasonable.

And I'm currently residing in Huntington Beach.

Well, that's different. Go ahead, Doug, blithely assault Huntington Beach with cheap Jay Leno generalizations. That I can stand by.

Doug1943, Seems to me some fella already dreamt that scenario and set it down in a book. Called it A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. As I remember everyone pretty well thought Hank Morgan was crazy, too.

>Well, that's different. Go ahead, Doug, blithely assault Huntington Beach with cheap Jay Leno generalizations

I've heard more Def Leppard in the past month than I've heard in the previous ten years. And screaming at people from your car as you drive past them seems to be something of a city pastime.

I call it 'Frisco, too. And don't get me started on Marin County.

You know, I have a hankering to start generalizing about the South. Let's see how long that last before I get accused of being unfair.

Question: Why do Southerners go to family reunions?
Answer: To find a marriage partner.

To quote the esteemed Jeff Foxworthy:

"If your family tree does not fork, you might be a redneck"

Possibly on-topic: Ward Churchill got fired today.

I agree with David Horowitz on this one.

Being from the South, I am highly offended. And so is my cousin, I mean, my wife.

Ward Churchill was pwned for his litany of academic crimes, not his political views.

Can someone tell me who he is? Aside from the roosting chickens comment, I know nothing about him.

Ward Churchill is a fringe leftist activist and former professor at the University of Colorado. Before his firing, he was the head of the Ethnic Studies department at that school. His claim to fame was an essay he wrote in 2001 in which he referred to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as "little Eichmanns."

As repulsive as that comment was, he had every right to utter it. He no doubt reveled in the initial fame that comment brought him. However, that comment also brought undue attention to his academic career and personal life.

This Wikipedia entry does a decent job summarizing the claims against him:

In 2005, University of Colorado at Boulder administrators ordered an investigation into the allegations of research misconduct. On May 16, 2006 the University released its investigative committee findings. The Investigative Committee, a subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct, agreed unanimously that Churchill had engaged in "serious research misconduct," including four counts of falsifying information, two counts of fabricating information, two counts of plagiarizing the works of others, improperly reporting the results of studies, and failing to “comply with established standards regarding author names on publications.” In addition, the committee found him "disrespectful of Indian oral traditions."

He's also been accused of lying about his ethnic ancestry and lying about his military career.

As Bob pointed out above, these articles are based on individual observations not evidence. The stated opinions aren't based on research studies from which it is valid to draw these conclusions:

the problem is that there are a significant number of hard Left radicals of various sorts -- militant radical feminists, Chomskyites, etc -- in higher education now -- "tenured radicals," from the old New Left. And they are not fair-minded at all. As far as they are concerned, everything is political, everything is part of the struggle against racist-capitalist-sexist imperialism.

In my collegiate experience, i've seen quite a bit that doesn't fit that mold. For example:
* i was involved in a decision not to grant tenure to a political, lesbian professor at one of the ivies.
* i've studied with profs from a wide spectrum of political leanings and what really matters is the excellence of their thought, their passion for their chosen subject, and their ability to communicate.

An opinion was stated: If you hire someone whose views are greatly at variance to the collective consensus, you are asking for trouble. At best, politics will become a very touchy thing to talk about. Perhaps it will have to become off-limits. At worst, you can see rancor and ill-will arising whenever political issues come up.

This seems quite similar to another thread where people expressed discomfort at the thought of having to work with a group of black people. From my experience, ethnicity and political leanings are non-problems unless a person's temperament makes them particularly thin-skinned, determined to proselytize, craving group-think, etc.

i'm not going to drop names, but i have observed that at the highest levels of excellence - be it corporate, judicial, military - an affable temperament and collegiality is much more common than not. For example, it's well known that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia are good friends though they come from different ends of the political spectrum. i've had similar experiences with people whose views are very dissimilar to mine.

(* typo edits)

Yes, there are indeed many fair-minded academics, including on the Left.

I would be confident that the liberals who post in this Group would not discriminate against someone because of their politics. (And nor would we conservatives discriminate against liberals, if the situation were reversed. That's right, isn't it?)

But we must not repeat the fallacy of the defense attorney, who, when told by the prosecutor that the prosecution could produce five witnesses who saw his client commit the crime, triumphantly replied that he would produce five witnesses who didn't see him commit the crime.

The interesting question -- which is practically impossible to answer in a precise way -- is how common are situations where you have people who are notfair-minded.

For instance, we have the case of "KC" Johnson, as related here.

And we have the 88 Politically Correct lynch-mob academics at Duke, some of whom are examined here. I don't think anyone could say that this crowd would be fair-minded and affable in dealing with conservatives.

So my advice to any young conservative thinking about going into teaching in higher education: hide your politics until you get tenure. Lie if necessary. Learn to say, and write, race-gender-class, racism-sexism-classism, so-called American democracy, whiteskin privilege, liberation struggles, etc.

When you rip off the mask after achieving tenure, fair-minded folks will understand.

I am only familiar with my own field (philosophy) but I can tell you that if you've got the right stuff no one much cares about your politics. If you've got a supportable argument for it, you can pretty much take whatever position you want. Maybe its because enough Philosophers take seriously the possibility that their most cherished beliefs may be wrong or incoherent, but I just don't think we've ever gone down the road of the other social sciences and humanities departments, at least not en masse.

Now stepping out of my area a bit:

I think part of what accounts for the purported bias is that those in academia with the most ridiculous views seem to also be the ones shouting them the loudest and getting them into the mainstream media. Combine that with the fact that these folks are often protected by the PC anxieties of average faculty members (example: If I tell the women's studies prof. not to masturbate in front of her class I might be subjugating her somehow and I certainly don't want to deal with the fallout of any of those sorts of accusations) and you might have a representation of the current situation.

More conservative historians and literary critics are, I think, mostly doing what they've always done: writing history and criticizing literature. It's just that no one takes notice of a fellow writing a book about the civil war or whatever. That's what historians DO. It's when the professor of north-southwestern Polynesian cyborg feminism writes an essay about the hermeneutics of eating feces and links it to the "gendered power structures" behind the War of 1812 that people take notice.

I think, honestly, there SEEM to be more of the latter form of Academic than there really are, precisely because they are the most memorable, even if its for all the wrong reasons.

Final Thought: Academia really is pretty diverse ideologically, it's just that the brand of conservatism currently being embraced by the mainstream of the Republican part is conspicuously absent from the politics of most academics. This too leads to the charges of bias.

NoLongerAtEase: What you have written rings true to me. I have never been terribly impressed, and certainly not upset, by the studies showing that 90% of academics vote Democratic. It's not liberals, as that term has been traditionally used, who are the problem.

Rather, it's the corruption of academia by the race-class-gender warriors, and the acquiesence in this by the sane members of the faculty, that is disturbing.

Mind you, this same group (its ancestors, anyway) pretty much acquiesced to the witch-hunts and loyalty oaths in academia in the 50s (and of course we didn't hear any conservatives calling for more Marxists on the faculty in order to achieve ideological 'diversity'.)

I guess we all want a quiet life.

...just a point- it also depends on the school system in question, not just the individual professors.

I go to a very liberal school indeed, for reasons other than the political climate (and yes, in that sordid valley that is the Bay Area), and the intra-faculty strife I've seen as an undergrad has more to do with differences in teaching, rather than politics per se.

That almost everyone at my school is at least something of a liberal is hardly up for debate, and yet there isn't a lot of peace anyway. There isn't one way to go about learning, and I'm not sure if I feel that's a good thing or not.

And yet- this is what keeps me on campus- there is a lot to questioning every authority, even the 'liberal' ones. Even when it goes too far, which it inevitably does, there is something exciting and at the same time sheltering about being on constantly unstable academic ground.

Then again- I honestly have no idea if there are any conservative faculty on campus. I think perhaps the pressure of debating with every hotheaded freshman would be a bit ridiculous.

Final Thought: Academia really is pretty diverse ideologically, it's just that the brand of conservatism currently being embraced by the mainstream of the Republican part is conspicuously absent from the politics of most academics. This too leads to the charges of bias.

That is an interesting thought. Did you mean that the current US admin's conservatism is anathema to academia, or that it is absent through liberal subversion?

((and as for all the out-there ideas that get so much attention, I think it's a byproduct of academia at work. If you're not pursuing something that captures your attention and makes you put in those long hours, then why do it?))

Well, here is an example of "academia at work". I was looking at college campuses which I supposed to be "conservative," and turned to the Claremont Colleges. Wrong!

I quickly found the Cultural Studies Deparment. Here is their self-description:

"Cultural Studies situates culture as a terrain of political and economic struggle. We emphasize the ideological dimension of cultural practices, including the investment that cultural studies has in its own practices. But we also emphasize the radical political potential of cultural practices in subverting the mechanisms of power and money that colonize the life-world.

At CGU faculty work actively in a range of areas, including feminist and queer studies, film and media studies, post-colonial studies, psychoanalysis, science studies, as well as the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools. We are also concerned to link cultural theory to cultural practices and activist politics. Students are encouraged to enroll in a field studies seminar that promotes participation in and analysis of the local community's cultural practices."

Just garbage, really. Please don't tell me that this has anything to do with academic work, or even with liberal (properly understood) politics.

How do liberals (real ones) defend stuff like this?

Anything that links theory to actual practice has to be a good thing?

These days aren't there more conservative activist politics than liberal ones?

Would an atheist such as yourself also condemn Grove City College's mission as just garbage, really?

It includes:

* the College unapologetically advocates preservation of America’s religious, political, and economic heritage of individual freedom and responsibility

* rejecting relativism and secularism, (Grove City College) fosters intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social development consistent with a commitment to Christian truth, morals, and freedom

No, I wouldn't. It sounds pretty good to me. Of course, Christianity has a very checkered history with respect to freedom, and how it interprets morals.

But if the Grove City people are Christians in the tradition of the Enlightenment, as almost all Christians are nowadays, I would have no objection. I certainly don't believe that teachers must agree with my atheism in order to do a good job.

In fact, if all the academics teaching "Cultural Studies" (anti-Culture Studies in fact) were replaced by the kind of people I assume teach at Grove City, it would be a great step forward.

so Cultural Studies profs should be purged and replaced with Christian Studies profs?

Purged? My, that word choice seems unnecessarily hyperbolic.

"We are also concerned to link cultural theory to cultural practices and activist politics."

This description seems to me to suggest that the academics have it backwards: rather than derive theory from cultural study they are fabricating theory in order to change or influence cultural practices through the practice of activist politics.

This is academic dishonesty of the highest sort. I think THAT is what most conservative thinkers will find objectionable.

No, I would not be in favor of purging these horrible people. What I would hope for is that they would all emigrate to Cuba or North Korea.

And while I'm venting, let me pass on a little snippet I just read in a discussion section of the History News Network:

"The Age of Zinn (#33722)

by John Earl Haynes on April 21, 2004 at 8:53 AM

I was at the OAH meeting in Boston, but skipped the celebration of Howard Zinn's partisan history. I attended a number of sessions dealing with one or another aspect of the history of American communism, a special interest of mine. Each of the sessions saw the presentation of papers praising the contributions of Communists to American history and commentators praising the presentations for praising American communism. The sessions were hard-left mutual admiration societies. The makeup of the panels guaranteed a uniformity of interpretive stance and a lack of engagement with alternative views.

I did attend one session on aspects of modern American conservatism, with one paper offering a positive appraisal, one taking a sort of balanced view, and one mocking and ridiculing conservatives. This diversity was refreshing compared to the sessions on American communism.

John Earl Haynes"

You object to an OAH meeting because:

The makeup of the panels guaranteed a uniformity of interpretive stance and a lack of engagement with alternative views.

But you advocate:

if all the academics teaching "Cultural Studies" (anti-Culture Studies in fact) were replaced by the kind of people I assume teach at Grove City, it would be a great step forward.

>Well, here is an example of "academia at work".

The plural of anecdote is not data.

"Cultural Studies" is usually just a euphemism for Left-wing propaganda factories and job trusts for otherwise-unemployable ideologues. Most of what is produced by these people is garbage, neither right nor wrong. They should be given berths in an insane asylum, and not allowed to teach our young people.

In genuine academic fields, I am generally in favor of a plurality of views. No economics department should be without its Marxist. (Yes, yes, I know there are gray areas. No, I am not in favor of departments of astronomy hiring a supporter of the Ptolemaic system.)

"The plural of anecdote is not data" is an empty truism trotted out by lazy minds who don't want to analyze things. I use it myself when I am lazy. But think about it for a minute.

Try applying it to reports of police racism against Blacks, or stories about American war crimes in Vietnam or Iraq. Hey, the plural of anecdote is not data. (Okay, but what do you think about the anecdote, assuming it's true? Decide that, and we can argue about how typical it is, and what to do about it, if anything.)

Rigorous, systematic, unbiassed statistically-significant samples are impossible, or nearly impossible, to get in many areas of social reality. We still must think about these areas. We just have to do the best we can.

And yet you continue to trot them out...

So ... you object to the OAH meeting because the makeup of the panels guaranteed a uniformity of interpretive stance and a lack of engagement with alternative views however you would replace all Cultural Studies profs with the kind of people {you} assume teach at Grove City where their mission statement includes a commitment to Christian truth.

Notice any inconsistency?

You go on that Cultural Studies profs are ideologues whose work is garbage produced in propaganda factories and:

They should be given berths in an insane asylum, and not allowed to teach our young people.

This is how you would conduct an engagement with alternative views?

See any similarities to recent conduct in Iran?

(* usual typo edits)

See reference to Ptolemaniacs.

Who would decide which people would be not allowed to teach?

"Who would decide which people would be not allowed to teach?"

Good question. It's hard to say exactly...probably faculty members and community leaders should be the ones making such decisions, but I think you're asking a deeper question having to do with the kinda of criteria that could be used to determine if an individual or a field of study was worthy of funding/appointment.

I have no criteria to offer, however a strategy for approaching the question might be to muse upon an answer to another question: Is the purpose of academia to train and provide for scholarly inquiry or is it to advance political positions?

Now, someone might say that there is no unbiased scholarship, no mode of inquiry free from politicization. In fact, this is usually the line you get from cultural studies types. The problem is that you rarely ever get an ARGUMENT for this view. It's just accepted as a truism, part of the foundation of along with the new holy theoretic trinity of race, class, and gender.

So if an individual's explicitly stated research goal is "social justice" or "smashing the state" or whatever, we might pause before we offer them a tenure-track position, even if they are a trans-gendered albino from outer Mongolia. "I know we don't have enough Albinos on the faculty, but this guy hasn't even finished his dissertation and his stated research goal is to show that cyborgs feminism entails the complete massacre of all non-cyborgs using video footage of monkey knife fights....maybe we should hold off on giving him an appointment."

Or if, for example, an individual is a more-or-less unrepentant member (“I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.") of a terrorist group such as the Weathermen, we might give pause before making such an individual a *Distinguished* professor of education in the Illinois system.

Maybe, instead of hiring Angela Davis (who has never, to my knowledge published an actual piece of philosophy) to be a *Presidential Chair* at UC Santa Cruz, maybe we ought to use her several-hundred-thousand-dollar a year salary to fund REAL PHILOSOPHERS (you know, ones that publish philosophy instead spending their lives on public lecture tours rehashing failed ideology).

Of course these are just some obvious examples. More thought is required.

Nah, nah. If we had given some thought to the situation, this lady would not have been able to feel at home in her adopted country after enrolling at San Francisco State.

I'm utterly shocked, Doug, that you of all people wouldn't make the connection between San Francisco State and the city of San Francisco, that hell hole out west, as I think you would have it. What else is she going to see there. Maybe she should try Liberty University. She would certainly get a different slant on things.

Hello, I've been lurking for a bit now and thought I'd jump in now ...

I agree with enevada's assessment of the cultural studies program discussed -- i.e., rather than deriving theory from cultural study, this program is putting the cart before the horse by creating theory to be used as a tool for changing or influencing cultural through activist politics. The program organizers would, of course, argue that their theory is based on observations. However, even after such a discussion, I imagine the charge of arrogance and, more importantly, poor scholarship would be difficult to refute.

There is power in excellence and clear thought. When academic work is fallacious (even entire departments), it can be pointed out.

However, there is also power based on manipulation and suppression of freedom.

There's been some joking here, but, I find Doug's heated comment disturbing: He would give them "berths in an insane asylum" and they would be "not allowed to teach our young people."

While I personally am much more attuned to the teaching to be found in a school with a conservative orientation, that does not mean that I would ever advocate disallowing teachings I do not personally agree with.

Our power can be had through excellence and clear thinking, not through manipulation and suppression. Disallowing these teachings are the first step leading to a theocratic or ideological state and are guaranteed to ensure mediocrity.

Before we fight *against* any thoughts we disagree with, we must fight *for* freedom.

Here's a couple of quotes that speak to our core American freedoms:

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.

- Benjamin Franklin

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

- Bergen Evans

SnapDragon: My comments were ironic, not heated.

It's a weakness of mine, although perhaps I have also been reading too much postmodernist cultural studies mind-rot recently.

If I were in charge of setting up a state-funded university departments, I would not set up any department that was just going to be a base for partisan political warfare. And that goes double if it is partisan political warfare against civilized society. But it would also apply to a Department of DougThought studies as well.

I would certain oppose professors using their courses as thinly-concealed organizing platforms for their political views, as is quite common in many X-Studies Departments.

And in order to promote a truly critical approach to their subject matter, I would want to see academic disciplines have a spread of opinion among the faculty.

This is not because I believe that there is no such thing as truth, or that all opinions are equally valid, but because I want students to be genuinely educated and not just indoctrinated. You understand a difficult subject better if you have had to really wrestle with sophisticated presentations of false ideas about it.

So by all means let us have a Marxist in the Economics Department, and a Foucaldian in the English Department, and a follower of the late Richard Rorty among the philosophers, a critical legal theorist in the law school, and so on.

Of course, the owners of a private university can set up any kind of department they want. I might urge them not to set up this or that department (Intelligent Design, Flat Earth Studies) but it's their money.

But suppose they go ahead anyway -- a Department of Race, Gender, Class studies, or an Institute of Catholic Apologetics. Then I would urge them to expose their students to the academically-respectable views of all sides. (And it is my impression, by the way, that the Catholics are much better at this than the Protestant Fundamentalists, such as Liberty University. If I had any little atheist offspring I would be happy to turn them over to the Jesuits -- after they had passed the age of 7 -- for an education, whereas I think attendance at Bob Jones University would probably cause a loss of brain cells.)

By the way, I'm not for firing anyone in academia for their political views.

I am even against firing Ward Churchill, because, although the ostensible reason for firing him is not his politics, in fact his politics are the real reason his research record and other claims were examined closely.

Of course, the elevation of such a man to an exalted academic post reveals the Leftist corruption of our universities.

So I would not have hired this man in the first place, nor promoted him once hired, but since he did have tenure, I believe an injustice is being done.

I stumbled across this thread a while ago. My initial reaction was that it was just a bunch of whining conservatives again, and that this particular whine is almost as tedious as the endless whine about so-called liberal media.

But, I think there's actually something more going on. There may well be discrimination resulting from conservatives being relatively rare in many department, but I don't think discrimination is the fundamental reason conservatives are rare in the first place. I'd just note as evidence that the science department faculty where I went to college were just as liberal politically as the humanities faculty, even though I don't think any of the scientists involved would have cared in the least about the political leanings of their peers. (On the other hand, the economics department of the school was a noted hotbed of conservatism, with just a single token liberal).

The biggest reasons I think conservatives are underrepresented in academe are (a) there is an absolutely anemic conservative intellectual tradition in America in particular; the two most deeply rooted conservative traditions come out of high federalism, which was thoroughly discredited by the Jeffersonians and survived almost exclusively in legal thought, and conservative protestant theology, which has little remaining traction in many of the longer established denominations and has been immensely cheapened, intellectually, by fundamentalists; (b) conservatives are more often uninterested in making the financial sacrifices necessary to teach in academia (for example, that conservative econ department included professors who, unlike the English or History department professors, had lucrative outside consulting gigs available - their sacrifices were much less than those of other departments). The lack of a solid and long-standing conservative intellectual tradition is reinforced by the habit of most (though certainly not all) open anti-intellectuals, such as creationists today and know-nothings of yesterday, to allign themselves with the more conservative party.

But, if conservatives want a stronger voice in academia, I think they have to stop whining about discrimination and start focusing instead on the deficits in conservative thought and values that are more fundamental causes of their low representation in academia.

I have met with considerable opposition to my attempts to create an xxx-studies-department at my local college.

Shorter A_musing:

"If black people want a stronger voice in academia, I think they have to stop whining about discrimination and start focusing instead on the deficits of black culture, thought and values that are more fundamental causes of their low representation in academia."

Oh wait.

Waiting...

Stop whining. Kill affirmative action now. :)

A_musing,

I think that the statistics would point out that whining is not exactly what is going on in either academia nor the media.

While I would be concerned about discrimination (or is it not discrimination as long as it is a group that you don't approve of?), I agree with the conclusion that enthymeme drew from your remarks. The solution is not political tests so that we get a balanced faculty (or media) but a change in tactics so that we regain influence in arenas in which we have slipped. As such, you have come across an internal dialogue among conservatives. Which would make this not whining but discussion requiring action.

As we have made strides in the media, so we shall make strides in academia.

Your assertions about financial sacrifices are caricatures, considering that many tenured professors out earn members of Congress.

I think that you will find that economics is populated by conservatives because of the nature of the discipline more than outside consulting opportunities. In fact, if you would look closely at professors in all fields, you would find that the wall of separation between academia and industry went down years ago, and they are most all looking for outside income, whether it is through publishing, consulting, or patenting.

I am not sure where your assertion about "Know-Nothings" being a drag on conservative thought comes from. Perhaps you are simply repeating an 150 year old slur. Know-Nothings were a semi-secret society within the American or Nativist Party that was staunchly anti-immigration/anti-Catholic. The moniker obviously lent itself to insults, but the life of Know-Nothing politics was much too short and too small to have any influence on the long term development of Conservative thought.

It is funny that you insult fundamentalism as a negative influence on intellectual growth, since the impetus of that movement established almost all the universities at the birth of our nation, including many of the Ivy League schools.

I am not sure how Jeffersonian ideals "thoroughly discredited" High Federalism. Now, they thoroughly trounced the Federalists in elections, but Federalist ideals have long outlasted the anarchist ideas of Jefferson, who really didn't believe in them anyway, once he got a taste of power in the Presidency and began using Federalist ideas that he had denounced to make an end run around Congress to make the Louisiana Purchase.

I don't mind being criticized by Liberals. I would appreciate some facts to back up your assertions.

A_Musing: You say

"...the science department faculty where I went to college were just as liberal politically as the humanities faculty, even though I don't think any of the scientists involved would have cared in the least about the political leanings of their peers."

I'm sure that's true.

In fact, I said it myself, in Message #13:
"I believe that in the hard sciences, and engineering, politics probably makes little difference. (By the way, liberals tend to dominate even here, although not by as much as in the social sciences and humanities, which shows that under any system whatsoever, higher education is going to be basically a liberal bastion, just as the military is a conservative one.)"

Your argument that there are few conservatives in higher education because we are greedy and stupid may be true, but is hard to verify.

However, Ward Churchill never struck me as highly intelligent, and his $100,000+/year post -- for someone without a PhD, and with, shall we say, modest research -- would certainly tempt greedy old me (and others) but, although I may be stupid, I am not stupid enough to think that I could get where he got without mouthing the same Lefty ... whines.

As for the lack of a conservative intellectual tradition ...there may be something to that -- could you spell out what you mean a bit more?

Also: it is my impression that that the real unhappiness of most conservatives with Higher Educaton is not to the domination of it by liberals, but to the strong radical Left presence in it, to which the genuine liberals tend to acquiesce, especially when the radicals play the Race Card. (It is incidentally true that the radical Left have no committment to fairness, unlike liberals.)

mark, your post doesn't seem particularly informed:

statistics would point out that whining is not exactly what is going on
What statistics?

As we have made strides in the media, so we shall make strides in academia.
Finally - a conservative admits to the conservative slant in the media! No question.

Your assertions about financial sacrifices are caricatures, considering that many tenured professors out earn members of Congress.
What is the average net worth of congress members, mark? Are they representative of America?

It is funny that you insult fundamentalism as a negative influence on intellectual growth, since the impetus of that movement established almost all the universities at the birth of our nation, including many of the Ivy League schools.
Do you honestly believe that conservative, intellectually-oriented Protestantism can be compared to the modern, anti-intellectual fundies?

doug, why are you eternally conflicted over race?

it is my impression that that the real unhappiness of most conservatives with Higher Educaton is not that it is dominated by sliberal, but strong radical Left presence in it, to which the genuine liberals tend to acquiesce, especially when the radicals play the Race Card.

Mmmm hmmmm ... perhaps you should ask youself why the race card knocks most conservative arguments flat on their face? Is it because what most conservatives know about people of color could fill a thimble half way? Is it because in their secret heart-of-hearts most conservatives really believe they are superior to people of different races and they're terrified their prejudice will be unmasked? Is it because most conservative positions are simply stupid and don't have logical answers?

In another post you shared your horror at the very thought of being forced to work with black people. You might ask yourself why such a mediocre thinker as Thomas Sowell is lauded and applauded by so many conservatives. Hmmmmmm . . .

Wow, HueBris. You got our number pegged. No one can argue with that mighty intellect.

Now if you don't mind, I have puppies to kick and black people to suppress.

Cute. If the questions are so stupid, why not try answering them?

HueBris,

Welcome to the conversation. I will try to answer them for you.

I thought the bias was being stipulated, but since you insist on sadistics, I shall do my best.

Academic Bias: Try this article in the Washington Post. It basically breaks down to (self-reported) division of 72% liberal vs. 15% conservative.

Liberal Bias: Try here. Of course, we conservatives have made great strides in the media since the early 90's through talk radio, internet, and a lot of the commentary on FOX News. I don't know that I would call it a conservative bias, but at least we are well-represented now.

I find your question about whether members of Congress are representative of America howlingly funny. But I think that your point is that members of Congress are often independently wealthy. Fine, I shall concede that. How about this. Here are some statistics that put tenured professor median salaries at $73,000 to $121,000. Now, that is salary, which does not include health benefits (government subsidized is usually pretty decent), or retirement plans. Not to mention the freedom to do outside work, which is often precluded by non-disclosure agreements in the public sector. Salary alone would put them in the 90th percentile of American incomes. Decent financial incentive, if you ask me. (More than I make, anyway!)

Do you honestly believe that conservative, intellectually-oriented Protestantism can be compared to the modern, anti-intellectual fundies?

Yes. As I clearly stated, the impetus for the movement of modern Christian fundamentalism is rooted in the Great Awakening, from which the roots of modern higher education sprang. I fear that you are betraying your bias' by scoffing at a word (fundamentalism) without knowing much about the movement itself. Have you ever read any sermons of Jonathan Edwards? Some of his stuff without his byline would make you howl in protest. And many fundamental Christians of today are very well studied, very well read, and thoughtful workers for the common good. Or perhaps you mean by "anti-intellectualism" that they are idiots because they did not come to the same conclusions that you have?

Now, I will admit that there is quite a bit of anti-intellectualism in Christian circles. But there is anti-intellectualism in America. If you don't believe me, go to your local public high school and listen in for a while. Or go to the local college of your choice and track the study habits and thought life of the kids in these bastions of liberal education. Or watch an hour of TV. It is regrettable.

But I stand by my assertion. To be fundamental means that you must have a grasp of the fundamentals, be able to understand them, defend them, and propagate their message. We must grasp the meaning of life and how it is to be played out and convincingly encourage others to do so against the cravings of their lower natures. It is conservatism at its essence. And, it is the impetus that drove the founding of the aforementioned schools.

Thanks for your response mark -- my, you are attracted to the word howl. Do people howl a lot in your neck of the woods?

i'll give your response a closer read and respond properly in the morning when i'm more awake. Hopefully by then doug will have pulled together a response, too.

Do you have any links to the Jonathan Edwards sermons? i'm curious about anything that would elicit a howl from me. The only thing elicited at the moment is a zzzzzzz . . . . .

Perhaps it is just a howling mood I am in. Or maybe I am a lycanthrope and the moon is waxing.

For Edwards sermons, check out: Christian Classics Ethereal Library

The line that conservatives are folks who (a.) tend to shy away from matters of the mind or (b.) prefer to apply their thinking to various sorts of money making endeavors, as an explanation for the paucity of conservative academics, is just laughable.

It might explain why there are not very many greedy fundamentalists in academia, but "conservative" is a rather wide ranging term. It could be used to pick anyone from a Reagan Democrat to a White Nationalist to a Vegan Communitrian(I'm rather close to the latter position myself). It all depends on the context of utterance, and it seems to me that you've really just used this term to pick out a caricature.

Also, to the fellow who said their is no conservative intellectual tradition in this county: Go back to the library!

HueBris: Am I "conflicted" over race? I do think and read about it a lot, because it is a central question in the life of humanity, and is especially potent in America.

Anyone who does not know this is a fool. And there is a huge amount of cant, some of it consciously demoagogic, and some just sincere liberal piety, uttered around this issue.

But, in fact, I, and other conservatives, have actually discussed it very little here. Perhaps we should.

Does the "race card" knock most conservative arguments flat on their face? Only to someone who is a very shallow thinker. But give an example or two, and knock us on our faces.

You say "In another post you shared your horror at the very thought of being forced to work with black people." Which post was that?

And I leave it to individual readers of this thread who have read his works to decide whether Thomas Sowell is a mediocre thinker or not, or whether we have here an example of subconscious ... racism, allied with malice. (Speaking of mediocre thinkers, read any Cornel West lately?)

I will say that I had to smile when I saw, separated only by a few sentences, the assertion that conservatives are secret racists, and also that they laud and applaud Thomas Sowell.

Okay, okay, I admit it. After getting back from a cross-burning, my pals and I take off our sheets, and settle down to our weekly Reading Group. The dialogue last week went something like this:

----------------------------------

"Read the latest Sowell on emigration patterns Billy-Bob?"

"Hell, no, I ain't had no damn time, Doug. I been ponderin' on that Dinesh D'Souza's claim that the degeneracy of American culture is driving traditional Muslims into the arms of the radical Islamists. An' I've been meaning to ask ya: d'ya think that Clarence Thomas is an Orignal Intent guy, or an As-Originally-Understood guy?"

"Hey, John-John ... didn't that cross look purty, once the fire took a-holt?"

"Didn't see it, Billy-Bob ... I was tryin' a read Condileeza Rice's PhD thesis -- you know, tryin' a decide if her original foreign policy realism has any continuity with her current interventionist stance.... Hey, you hear about that John McWhorter? They say he's a comin' down here to study linquistic patterns among modern rednecks."

"McWhorter? Ain't he that nig -- ... I mean, that Black man at Berkeley what wrote them books on the grammars of Spanish creoles?"

"Yep, that's him all right. But he ain't at Berkeley no more, he's gone to the Manhattan Insitute ... so we got to start readin' his books and praisin' him!"

"Oh, no .. more damn books to read... hell, bein' a modern conservative racist just ain't no fun no more. Mah granpappy sure never had to read a buncha books by nig- ... that is, mediocre Black interleckshuals. If this keeps up, Ah'm a-gonna seriously think about becomin' a liberal!"

-------------------------------------------

Now, I don't generally believe in conspiracy theories. But I wonder if HueBris is not actually a clever construct made by a conservative? An illustrative sock-puppet.

I say this because here in the Political Conservatives Group we normally get some pretty sharp liberals, who back up their arguments with facts, and who are a long way from the ridiculous caricatures put about by Ann Coulter.

It makes for good engagements and keeps us on our toes. And the civility with which most of these arguments are conducted is a wonder to behold in today's America.

Yet here we conservatives have been yelling about how the universities have become strongholds of race-gender-class fanatics, who indoctrinate but do not educate their students. We claim that these people cannot advance genuine arguments, but just say over and over: racism, racism, racism, racism, racism, racism.

Our liberal guests must scratch their heads and say, "Who, me? That's not what liberals are like! That's a caricature ... sure, maybe there is the occasional Ward Churchill nutjob or two, but they are rare."

And then suddenly ... one pops up in the Forum, to provide a perfect illustration of what we have been talking about -- someone who appears to have majored in "Whiteness studies" and utters every cliche he has been told in Critical Theory seminars.

Hmmm .... Too good to be true, too conveniently timed.

It makes you wonder.

>I say this because here in the Political Conservatives Group we normally get some pretty sharp liberals, who back up their arguments with facts, and who are a long way from the ridiculous caricatures put about by Ann Coulter.

Yet your posts seem not so far from the polemic that Coulter passes off as political thought. You do a lot of talking about nutjobs, insane asylums, etc. How about something substantive rather than perjorative for once. And what say we leave aside the cute rhetorical tricks like framing threads or arguments around a specific case such as a NYT article...

>Yet here we conservatives have been yelling about how the universities have become strongholds of race-gender-class fanatics, who indoctrinate but do not educate their students. We claim that these people cannot advance genuine arguments, but just say over and over: racism, racism, racism, racism, racism, racism.

It's an interesting point coming from someone who says that the purpose of education is to inculcate the proper ideas in people, Doug. Inculcate? Indoctrinate? Who the hell's keeping track? Did you ever wonder if maybe the reason that people in the academy have a liberal bias (if this is indeed the case) might just be the fact that they're intelligent?

I'm just saying is all. As a possibility, even...

Jesse: You have selective memory. How about I'll give you five dollars for every book you have referenced in your posts, to support your arguments, if you give me a dollar for every one that I have.

If you want a serious argument, make one yourself.

There are plenty of conservatives here who can take it on. But you must distinguish between half-baked prejudices and serious ideas. And I don't think you have read many posts here, and I don't think you have read Ann Coulter.

But you do raise on interesting point: what should the purpose of a liberal education be?

Should we be indifferent to the world-view our young people take with them out of college?

Is there a tension between wanting to help young people think critically, on the one hand, and wanting them to get a deep appreciation of "the best that has been thought and said" on the other?

After all, who are we (that favorite liberal phrase) to decide just what is "the best," especially since so much of it has been produced in societies that were very far from models of justice and equal opportunity and in which access to high culture was closed to all but a tiny elite.

I myself think ... whoops, got to go. Just got another directive from the Grand Wizard to my Klavern ... it seems the new racist strategy of praising Black intellectuals considered mediocre by Lefty airheads is being elaborated in new ways. I don't think the good ole boys are going to be too happy about this. A report will follow.

Well, an interesting mix of responses. I'm the case who said both that conservatives have an anemic intellectual tradition, and that they had more options basides academia that were often more appealing to them. Rather than try to respond piecemeal, let me add a bit of flesh to those bones from my perspective.

Note I didn't say there was no academic tradition, merely an anemic one. For liberals, it is relatively easy to identify a continuous intellectual tradition from the founders forward; the Jeffersonians prevail; Whitman and his crew of free-thinking abolitionists prosper; liberal ideas form the basis for the New Deal; and an astonishing overall portion of cultural and intellectual figures in America embrace some version of the more liberal strains of American thought. Even in the political heydey of conservatism, the Gilded Age, liberals manage to produce the intellectual giants, such as Justice Holmes, to lead them on. Conservatives have a different tradition - federalism is shattered; the next significant conservative intellectual movement, that of conservative protestantism, dissipates (I'll let others try to claim it for American fundamentalism - I think there is a significant historical disconnect betweent he two); the iconic cultural figures produced by conservatism in the early 20th century, such as Eliot and Pound, are disconcertingly anti-political and anti-American (in Pound case, disasterously so); and in general the conservative intellectual tradition in America becomes one of discontinuity. There is no ongoing conservative polity or social formation to embrace the way Europeans had monarchies, aristocracies, and established long-standing social institutions. Not to disparge any one conservative thinker - there are a number of great ones sitting, isolated, and often not listened to - there is simply not the kind of tradition and continuity of thought that liberals have.

I'll go a step farther - liberal scholarship has made a point of resurrecting thin strands of intellectual history (for example, women's studies has successfully resurrected an ongoing string of women writers from Elizabethan times forward - and managed to claim them as part of their intellectual inheritance even when the writers are fiercely Christian and monarchist), creating a wonderfully rich source of phD theses, while conservatives struggle to maintain such problematic but significant intellectual voices as John Adams.

It's not that there aren't conservative intellectuals in America, it's just that it is hard for a current conservative intellectual to find a profoundly American and continuous heritage without embracing some figures that have little resonation in America today - someone mentions John Edwards, and he is a good example of someone it is generally difficult to get high school and college students terribly excited about. Compare him to Whitman in terms of appeal.

My other point, that there are more choices open to conservatives than academe, seems to rub many the wrong way - the word "greedy" gets used a couple of times in response. I posit this is a simple free-market process. Look at it from the flip side of the conservatives: If you are a 21 year old Marxist, what are you going to do besides academe? Go to work for the post office and hope to play a role in our most significant state-owned industry? Become a stock-broker? The labor unions have little interest in hiring Marxists.

Liberals, Marxists and Conservatives in a free market will gravitate different places - just as you will find conservatives gravitating disproportionately to business school, whether out of interest or greed, you will find Marxists heading for history programs. In that supply and demand process, conservatives are naturally underrepresented in Academe.

Now, as to the person who suggested my argument was akin to telling blacks not to rely on affirmative action but to focus on their own culture - that argument has, of course, been advanced by many serious conservative intellectuals, ranging from Senator/Professor Moynihan to Clarence Thomas (generally in more serious and sophisticated terms than the perjorative put out here). There are also a number on the radical left for whom the argument has traction (such as Louis Farakhan). Are you saying that argument is bankrupt, and should be rejected?

(Added: by the way, I note someone indicated that this wasn't really whining, just conservatives talking among themselves - and, that's fine, I have weighed in and indeed may have even taken over your conversation for a bit here, and frankly I agree it will be a more interesting conversation if given back to the conservatives to have among themselves. And, if you don't think it was a bit whining, well, just go ahead and go back to whatever it was you were doing).

A_Musing: Excellent response.

I think you are probably right on both counts.

Although the word "conservatism" has meaning (or meanings), it doesn't really denote an unbroken line of thought and practice going back to Edmund Burke.

Ask most conservatives who their intellectual and political forebears are, and they will name Burke, the Founding Fathers, DeTocqueville, Lincoln ... and there the trail pretty much goes cold, until we get to the mid-1950s.

Yes, there are small tendencies within conservatism that can trace more continuity: the Southern Agrarians are claimed by one tendency, the Taft Republicans and anti-New Deal forces by another, the libertarians have some rather obscure people they like, but by and large, the reading lists stop in 1865 and don't start again until 1950.

Intellectual history is not my field, and I am not sure why this is.

My guess would be: American capitalism, red in tooth and claw, was so obviously triumphant up until 1929, that it didn't need intellectual defenders.

And then the triumph of the New Deal was so complete, that conservatives today just don't feel any connection with the anti-New Dealers -- either that, or they are embarrassed by them.

Yes, many conservatives will claim to be for laissez-faire capitalism, abolishing all branches of the Federal Government except for the FBI and the military, but it's just feel-good nostalgia, like "Next Year in Jerusalem".

There is a small libertarian tendency that truly believes, now apparently allying with the nostalgics of SDS, of all things, but they are just a curiosity within the conservative movement
.
As for the free-market effect. Your emphasis on the other side of the argument -- lefties find the academic environment congenial in a way that righties do not -- is probably true.

However, I know from personal experience that there are some people who are really, truly drawn to the academic life. They actually love to do research, and the idea that they will be paid to sit in a library for most of their lives and try to trace the influence of Machievelli on Locke, or whatever, is very appealing to them.

Now, although I know that liberals find this hard to believe, some of these people are conservatives. And I know that some of the young conservatives I read -- in H-NET discussion lists, for example -- believe that their poltical orientation is a definite handicap in today's political atmosphere on many American campuses.

I put their testimony together with other bits of evidence, such as the cases I have refrenced in previous posts, and my own personal experience of the Hard Left mentality, to arrive at my position.

I also think that the best strategy for American conservatives is to try to energize the genuine liberals on campus to fight the totalitarian mentality of the Hard Left there, and to accept that our real hope for the transformation of American campuses should be to see a return to the pre-1960s situation, when genuine liberals, people who appreciated Western civilization, believed in the concept of Truth, and wanted to extend its benefits to the shut-out masses, ruled.

Why am I not surprised you would think our real hope for the transformation of American campuses should be to see a return to the pre-1960s situation which was also pre-Civil Rights?

Whose concept of Truth are you advocating doug?

Ha ha.

Is this your reference to your assertion that I "don't want to be forced to work with Blacks"? No, it can't be, because you made that assertion (a complete lie, by the way), before I made that post.

So, what earlier post of mine were you referring to?

In any case, by your logic, my desire for a return to the campus situation before the Cultural Revolution of the '60s, when Western civilization was respected and transmitted by the (largely liberal) faculty, means I want a return to every other aspect of the campus at that time: no computers, no cell phones, no CD players ...

Conservative non-interventionists who say they want to return to the principles of no entangling alliances of the early Republic are also saying that they want to return to slavery?

Liberals who say they want to return to the pre-Reagan New Deal consensus about the Federal Government's role in social welfare are also saying that they want to see the return of the Communist bloc?

If this is how you learned to argue in college, you too would benefit from a return to the wicked old days. (Unless, of course, you are some wicked conservative's sock-puppet, in which case, I say to the person behind the scenes: shame on you. Of course we must fight the Left, but not like this. Let them speak in their own words, rather than making them look like empty-headed slogan-mouthers.)

I`m going to break with the habit of a lifetime and jump to Doug`s defence here - I take only a passing interest in these threads, but on the basis of his past postings on a variety of topics, I couldn`t say he harks nostalgically back to the pre-Civil Rights era as such.

Actually, I was more intrigued by the lack of response to his posting #5, in which he clearly implies that academics are not sufficiently mature to work alongside peers who hold different political beliefs to themselves, and that those who supervise them are too ineffectual to risk appointing anyone who takes a different slant on things to the majority, apparently for fear of bitchiness in the common room.

I`ve been waiting for all you academics to defend yourselves from the inferrence, but so far nothing. Come on, chaps (and chapesses), show a bit of character !

I know the thread kind of left this behind before I could get to it, but there is an excellent book out that addresses the abdication of Fundamentalist Protestant Christianity in the life of the mind after having provided much of the intellectual backbone of the 18th and 19th centuries in America.

Everyone here would benefit by reading The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll. It's primarily about this "conservative protestantism, dissipates" situation mentioned by A_musing.

Yes, Evangelical Christianity founded many of our most venerated universities, but when the modernist project began to leave God out of their equations, or at least move God to a position of no effect, Evangelical Christianity, rather than attempting to find God in the new science and the new humanities, circled the wagons and swore an oath to The Fundamentals (this is where today's term Fundamentalist Christian comes from. Had you called either Increase or Cotton Mather Fundamentalists, or Jonathan Edwards, they would have asked what you meant). From the early twentieth century onward Fundamental Christianity has placed great emphasis on the need to dismiss common sense as a tool of the devil sent by God to test the depth of ones faith.

Nick: I have noticed a pattern: conservatives will refer to some PC Thoughtcrime scandal on campus, even provide links to it. Liberals will just ignore them.

What's going on?

I reckon their (your?) thinking is similar to mine, when liberals and Lefties bring up war crimes or bad behavior by American soldiers. I've analyzed my thinking in these painful cases, and it goes something like this:

Phase I is, basically, denial: "Well, it's probably exaggerated. But of course these things do occasionally happen. Probably an isolated incident. I don't know the full facts anyway, and I am certainly not going to trust peole who are the enemies of freedom to tell me the truth. Of course we are against this sort of thing. The perpetrators will no doubt be punished. Why drag it out by talking about it, and give aid and comfort to the enemy, who would do far worse if he were in power? Anyhow, what can I do about it?"

This works for a while.

Eventually, the weight of evidence, or possible evidence, grows so great, that the topic becomes impossible to avoid, for one's own self-respect.

Phase II is to frankly admit to oneself that there is a problem, -- which is very painful to do -- that the proper authorities are not dealing with it adequately, and to then try to think of what one can do to address the issue without jumping on the anti-military Leftist bandwagon.

I'm in Phase II at the moment. I hope some liberals are in a similar state with respect to campus PC. I don't expect them to embrace David Horowitz, but I do hope they are thinking about what they can do in their own circles.

(For any demagogues looking for a cheap shot: ensuring honorable behavior by the American Armed Forces is a far more important problem than breaking the stanglehold of the Leftist Thought Police in academia.)

Gene: Here is an interesting symposium on that book which took place about twelve years ago.

Doug

We may be just slightly at cross-purposes, though it`s no big deal.

My thinking was, if anyone implied that I was unable to work harmoniously alongside others of differing beliefs (say, because they were conservatives), I would be mortally offended and would have dashed off a rebuttal at the speed of light.

If I read you correctly, you did make a similar statement re: progressive academics, yet no-one has rushed forward to contradict you, as I certainly would have done in their shoes.

I know little of campus life, but yes, I do read something into that.

My closing para was really just poking fun at the recipients of your comments, not intended to `rally the troops`.

As regards your Phase II comments, on a purely human level, I commend your honesty.

`Scuse hasty response, and hope that clarifies it.

#89 Re progressive academics:

Again, i think it all comes back down to temperament. If one is the sort that approaches politics like a dog with a bone, then you'll probably be attracted to more extreme elements (on the left or right). If it is in people's nature to be confrontational and aggressive then they probably would not be comfortable with those who don't share their beliefs.

However, from what i've seen, most in academia don't share this temperament. There are far more PhD's churned out that academia can possibly absorb and, it is naturally a very competitive place. i've seen weak thought demolished by peer review. However, that's very different than trying to impose one's way of thinking on other people because you think your way of thinking is better and more enlightened.

Earlier i cited the close friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. They come from very different positions on the political spectrum and yet seek each other out and genuinely enjoy each other's company as they share jokes, walks, etc.

i've found close, congenial relationships like this to be the norm rather than the exception.

Nick: Not able to work harmoniously along side non-conservatives? What??? Where did I ever say, or imply, that?

I've worked alongside non-conservatives for decades.

I implied that, were I in America, applying for a job in academia, say in history or social science, that I would try to conceal my political beliefs, because the hiring might be influenced by people who would not want to work alongside me. That's a very different proposition.

No, our little friend claimed "In another post you shared your horror at the very thought of being forced to work with black people."

I challenged him to produce this post, but, for some reason, he has not gotten around to it yet.

Nor will he ever get around to it.

In fact, I predict he will vanish, because he's some misguided rightwinger's false flag operation to discredit the Left.

Thank you for your kind comment re "Phase II".

If you look at the history even of just the last hundred years, you are struck by how many otherwise intelligent, well-meaning people got things so horribly wrong. The whole French intellectual class sang the praises of the gulags.

We're not any better than they were, so, obviously, it is extremely easy to entertain error in our thinking. One of the mechanisms which facilitates this is giving in to the psychologically-comforting avoidance of cognitive dissonance.

It's so easy not to think about the disconfirming evidence which we encounter in daily life which seems to undermine our cherished beliefs . But it's a bad idea.

So we have to cultivate the habit of seeking out the apparently disconfirming evidence and embracing it.

That's why I faithfully read a chapter of Noam Chomsky every night before I go to sleep.

A_musing,

I have thought a bit about your assertion re: the intellectual history of liberals and conservatives during my lulls today and I am not sure that I agree with your conclusions. However, It is a new thought to me, and I think slowly, so let me give a couple of thoughts and chew some more.

I think the idea that I most disagreed with was the idea that Jeffersonian thought triumphed over Federalist thought. I again concede that the Jeffersonians trounced the Federalists in elections and basically into the woodwork as a party. But the intellectual tradition that emanated from those times comes in the form of the Federalist Papers, which were principally authored by Hamilton, even though the next highest total comes from an eventual anti-federalist, Madison. The Federalist Papers are the most important thought to come out of the post-revolutionary period and completely trounced the ideas of the anti-federalists, where Jefferson and Madison later came to stand.

John Marshall carried on the tradition of Federalism in his forceful defense of the Constitution and the Federalist Papers from the bench of the Supreme Court.

The Federalists wanted to align the American government with the tradition of Great Britain, even though we were at war (undeclared, but soon to resume) with them at the time. Jefferson wanted to align the future of America with the liberal ideas of the French Revolution. Even though we stayed at political odds with Britain for more than 40 years, we still ingested their ideas and those conservative ideals formed the basis of the American government and American thought well into the 20th Century.

Even Jefferson, a liberal who was almost anarchistic, ended up presiding more in the tradition of Federalism than in the ideas of the French Revolution that he loved so dearly. Though his intellect embraced the ideas, they proved impractical for daily use.

As far as a continuous thread of unbroken liberal thought, I think even your post betrays the idea. (I am not sure that I even agree that this is possible, but c'est la vie) You mention that there is no unbroken conservative tradition, but in the same breath, talk of resurrecting thin strands of other traditions to be claimed within liberalism's umbrella, capturing the ideas from writers of other traditions, the ebb of liberalism to lone voices, etc. It smacks of forcing narrative upon history.

I will agree that there has been an ebb and flow to conservative thought over the 220 years of American history. But I would argue that the foundational ideas of America are conservative, and that liberalism is the insurgent, the inroads that brought about social change, both the good and bad.

Perhaps your idea of "claiming" from other traditions has some merit. The impetus to create higher education was almost exclusively conservative. But liberalism has successfully "claimed" some of those traditions and institutions for themselves.

I haven't thought enough to have written this much. I shall quit before I make more a fool of myself than I may have already.

"Are you saying that argument is bankrupt, and should be rejected?"

Are you saying that argument has merit, and should be accepted?

Interesting that you would tell black people to stop whining.

:)

Mark, I find myself irresistably drawn back in by your post - I was going to sit back and let you guys talk about the issues, but you raised too many direct questions for me for me to resist.

If you're interested in the source for my statement on the paucity of the conservative intellectual tradition, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Age of Jackson is where I believe I first encountered the concept (that's a remembered cite, not a checked one, so I hope it's right). Its one of those statements I filed away in my mind years ago and keep checking against readings I encounter, measuring and remeasuring. While I think the general thesis needs a series of qualificaitons and exceptions, I generally believe there is something to it.

I think your response relies on several things: (i) your characterization of Jefferson could be drawn from a 1799 campaign speech by one of the Federalists (or, alternatively, from McCullough's Adams, which is not much different); you've limited the Jeffersonian inheritance, focusing on the "French" disputes and ignoring the importance of positions developed from the Declaration of Independence to the Adams/Jefferson letters - still, I think conservatives need to either minimize Jefferson or claim him for their own if they're going to get to a conservative originalism; you've chosen the one I myself think is more viable from a conservative perspective; (ii) you've claimed the federalists of the federalist papers for the conservative cause, rather than the federalists of the federalist party - as you rightly point out, Madison is a prominent federalist at the time of the federalist papers, and, indeed, many later members of the anti-federal and democratic-republican party were federalists in the sense of supporting the enactment of the constitution; I think you're stretching this, and that there is as much claim that the federalist papers fit within a more liberal tradition; since this is a book site, I'll push Saul Cornell's The Other Founders as a good discussion of some of these issues; it is the federalists of the federalist party who truly define early American conservatism, and who, but for Marshall, quickly go extinct; (iii) you have highlighted Marshall, who I do think is the dominant conservative voice of the 19th century - but because Marshall was a champion of a strong central government and an activist judiciary, he is often deeply problematic for modern conservatives; it may be that it is easier in Bush's America than it was in Reagan's to claim this heritage; and (iv) you've claimed American education's formation for conservativism, which I view as a massive overstatement. It's been made before, and it is true that many of the colleges founded in the period of 1820 through 1850 in the so-called "College Movement" were founded by evangelical protestant denominations whom conservatives may well find to be worthy intellectual predecessors - BUT Colleges were founded by many people for many reasons, and among the most prominent founders was Jefferson himself; Colleges also were often formed explicitly in response to the dominance of Unitarians and Deists at the established universities (for example, Amherst and Williams College were each founded by persons who tired of Harvard's Unitarianism. This reading lands you in a situation where the liberals were responsible for the Universities and the Conservatives the small schools, though that likely understates the diversity of each set of institutions. Finally, my impression is that many of the so-called conservative denominations founding schools in the period were conservative only in hindsight - they move to the conservative ranks more heavily in the late 19th century, but during the second great awakening had a real diversity of thought, and gave rise just as much to, for example, suffragism as to the conservative evangelical protestism of the later 19th century (thus, many women's colleges are founded in the period). But I'll admit needing more reading on this particular aspect of the period.

(By the way, my reference to the thin strands being recaptured specifically related to women's writing in Elizabethan England - the strands aren't so thin when dealing with the founders or the early republic). OK, I've undoubtedly now written enough to give others some fodder to refute me. Have at it.

At the end of the day, I'll let conservatives figure out their own traditions and who they claim as intellectual forebears - I'm pretty secure in my liberal tradition and have little problem with it, and have the benefit of massive amounts of scholarship confirming my comfort level (all those liberal academics need something to do!). All this came up to address the question of why conservatives are so underrepresented in academe - I do think conservatives need more attention to their 19th century American tradition in particular, beyond the big figures of Marshall and Lincoln. By the way, why don't conservatives more heavily embrace Lincoln? Why are many of the most prominent things we read about him from liberals like Carl Sandburg and Doris Kearns Goodwin (David Herbert Donald aside)?

Oh, and as to enthymeme, I thank you for demonstrating the anti-intellectual tendancy within conservatism - I really didn't expect to encounter it here.

Spell 'tendency' right and I'll take your purported intellectualism seriously.

What's amusing is your discomfiture with the question posited to you - a question that is the converse of the question you asked to begin with.

Recall that you claimed that conservatives should stop whining about discrimination, and should focus instead on the deficits of "conservative thought and values" if they wanted greater representation in academia. The same argument applies to the black community, it seems. I merely hoisted you on your own petard, pointing out that the argument applies mutatis mutandis to the minority beneficiaries of affirmative action.

In which case they should stop whining, according to you.

Apparently this anti-intellectualism is now unpalatable, because it stemmed from you to begin with. Laughable.

Enthymeme -

You're assuming facts not in evidence.

As it happens, I'm of a view that when faced with a hurdle, the appropriate response is to leap over it or crash through it. If you must, go around it. You can spend a long time waiting and pleading for some nice person to remove it. Even if removing it would be the right thing to do.

While there are plenty of differences between racial discrimination and discrimination against conservative academics, whining really solves very little. And the nice liberals are unlikely to come along and remove the barriers for either blacks or conservatives - even though they may try.

I assumed you were consistent. Admittedly that was presumptuous of me.

Never again.

Enthymeme- You forgot to write Q.E.D. at the end of your response!

But seriously, for all the hot air coming from Mr. Musing, it seems like he is relying on the assumption that American conservatives comprise some monolithic group. I said this much several posts earlier.

This is a completely unwarranted assumption because it sloppily demarcates the parameters of what could conceivably count as conservatism or conservative influence.

Example: When I look at Lincoln I don't see a conservative ancestor I see the iron hand of the state quashing all rebellion. This is obviously not the case for all conservatives. Now, I do include among my intellectual forbears folks like Adam Smith and David Hume, even though I disagree with many of their ideas in the end (I realize the latter are not American, but that's not the point I'm making).

Until you specify just who you are talking about little of what you say is going to appear on point. Are you talking about the mainstream Republican party voter circa 2007? In that case you might be correct in some of your assertions. But you need to specify this!

>While there are plenty of differences between racial discrimination and discrimination against conservative academics, whining really solves very little. And the nice liberals are unlikely to come along and remove the barriers for either blacks or conservatives - even though they may try.

Like the little fact that being conservative is a choice?

Jesse: "Like the little fact that being conservative is a choice?"

...and the difference, whether by choice or not, means what exactly Jesse? How is this essential to the thread topic? I'm just curious.

#91 - Doug - I expressed myself badly there, I didn`t mean to imply that you would be unable to work harmoniously alongside others of different beliefs.

Unlike others, I do my LTing either before I start the working day, or after it ends, so am normally only half-awake when posting - probably doesn`t lend itself to accurate self-expression.

I very much agree that one should not avoid facing incovenient facts/opinions in life. Myself, I`m not one who has to be surrounded by the like-minded all the time, would find it too dull.

A_musing,

I think I will stick with my original characterization (after a lot of thought). I believe that what you are suggesting about liberal vs. conservative academic tradition is forcing narrative upon history, when history is much messier than that. I will agree that academics need to do something, and it is human nature to try to look backward and discern the thread of logic that we followed.

Here is my problem: No one knew where this would end up, i.e. Democratic or Republican voters' attitudes circa 2007, as referenced above. There was no goal, just the evolution of thought as we encounter history and try to better our lives. As I went over the history of Conservative thought, and my own transformation into a conservative, I realized that I pulled from many (sometimes contradictory) sources. The rope that I am holding onto is the intertwining of a lot of strands of thought, people who would argue for hours, but fit in my mind in 2007. And I think I hear echoes of that in your previous posts.

I would also argue that conservatism was the basic impulse behind all education and thus became virtually invisible as compared to the luminousness of the counter-cultural heroes that you cite as your intellectual forbears. It is only the consistent background of conservatism that makes their arguments stand out as different. And so you see your teachers as meteors streaking across the night sky. I see mine in the velvety consistency of every class that read Shakespeare, inculcated the constitutional balance of powers, took ethics seriously, went to church on Sunday and said Amen.

I add one final bit of thought to try to buttress my argument. As I looked back over the history of conservative thought, I realized how I had drawn and my sources had drawn from thinkers that I disagreed with as much as I agreed with. Conservatism has such varied influences as Burke, Chesterton, Kristol, Nebit, Kirk, Reagan, Hamilton, John Adams, Henry Clay, Sowell, Lincoln, Thatcher, C.S. Lewis, etc. As an acid test: Do you agree with all of of the ideas of your forbears? Or, as I suspect, have certain ideas drawn you while others repulsed you? For example, I imagine that you could feel strong sympathy for the ideas promulgated in The Rights of Man but a little queasy about how the Jacobins worked out those ideas.

I would like to discuss the Jeffersonian ideas in the next post, to prevent it looking like I am writing a novel. (Which I am, of course.)

A_musing,

As you have guessed, I am a great detractor of Mr. Jefferson. Of course, I am (mostly) a Hamiltonian, but he could run to excess and as much needed a Washington around to stymie his impulses.

I would argue that the only real contribution to current American political thought that Jefferson made was the Declaration of Independence. Of course, it is suspected, though very far from certain, that Jefferson may have lifted language directly from the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Even if not, he simply put into (extraordinary) language the ideas that had been discussed for decades before he arrived. He was not a great debater of these ideas, simply an artist who said them, perhaps better than anyone else could've in history.

However, his real political ideas, the ones he defended against Hamilton and the Federalists (I think the separation of the Federalist Papers and the Federalist Party is an artificial one, since the main writer of the Papers was the de facto head of the Party) have been swallowed up by history almost in its entirety. He was a much better politician than Hamilton (who was about politically astute as Rosie O'Donnell), but Hamilton's ideas formed the basis for the current American economy and culture, while the economy and culture that Jefferson espoused have disappeared from the North American continent.

Hamilton foresaw America as an industrial giant with a strong monetary system backing the economy. His work as Secretary of the Treasury, done in just a few months, set the basis for modern America. Jefferson fought the Hamiltonian plan tooth and nail, opting for an agrarian economy, de-centralized government (read: states rights), and the dismantling of the evil of the Hamilton banking policy. (In fact, Jefferson disciple Andrew Jackson tried to do just that. It is even more interesting that Jefferson himself didn't do it as President) Jefferson was fighting for a culture that was dying. He could not keep the bills paid on his own plantation, because the whole idea was a house of cards. In fact, almost every Southern plantation operated in continuous debt to the English money men, which made Jefferson hate the banking system all the more. (Washington is an interesting exception to this rule. But then he invested in real estate and manufacturing.)

Today, America has the strong central government, the strong monetary system, and a production based economy that Hamilton prepared her for in the 1790's. Jefferson's vision of America, really more libertarian than liberal, has ceased to even be a possibility. Of course, Hamilton's version of America is now under threat with the transition from a manufacturing based economy to a service/information based one. The jury is still out to see if the structure Hamilton built will survive.

When you look at the Adams/Jefferson letters, it is my impression that Adams laid out the script and Jefferson rather meekly defended his points. (Of course, that was his modus operandi. He preferred to have lieutenants do his work and he stay behind the scenes and out of public criticism.) Adams wrote about 2 letters to each one from Jefferson, and Jefferson was rarely as forceful as Adams in defending his beliefs. (Of course, few people were as forceful as Adams. Except Hamilton, who had a really big mouth.)

I'll save my defense of Marshall for another post later. As far as the whole "massive overstatement" about education, I trust that you get my drift from the post above, with my flowery language about the blackness of the night sky.

Thanks for giving me a chance to talk about how little I like Thomas Jefferson.

Mark,

A question - Reagan was quite fond of Jefferson, and around Reagan and the "small government" conservatives of the 80s there were a considerable number who claimed a Jeffersonian mantle.

Are conservatives today less comfortable with that mantle, and happier to see it fall on/claimed by the Democrats? If so, why the intellectual shift of gravity?

I guess that I am not a classic conservative. But I think a better answer, as far as Reagan was concerned, was that he loved Jefferson's ability with rhetoric. The ideas written in the Declaration are incredible. It was, as Jefferson and Adams argued, the direction the country took after the Revolution that divided the Founding Fathers.

I am with Reagan on small government. But I think that his version of a small government and Jefferson's version were vastly different. Reagan was Mr. Military. Jefferson was against a standing army. That is the reason that he feared some of Hamilton's maneuvers. He thought that Hamilton had absolutist tendencies. So did Adams. Of course Adams thought we should have a navy instead (at that time) and was obviously right.

As far as the Jeffersonian mantle, I am afraid that neither party can really claim it. He really belongs to the libertarians, or even anarchists. I think Jefferson would be aghast at our income tax and vast social spending. His rhetoric belongs to the Democrats as far as the "rights of man", and to the Republicans with the whole "standing up to tyranny". But that is the point. He was so hard to pin down. Where Adams and Hamilton produced great volumes of policy papers, Jefferson had a relative paucity. You have to dig more, and then find strange inconsistencies.

One more point on the political triumph of Jeffersonian Republicanism over the Hamiltonian Federalists. (Excuse me while I beat a dead horse.)

The South was particularly empowered in Presidential elections by the 3/5ths clause in the Constitution. Each slave was counted as 3/5 of a person in terms of representation even though they were denied suffrage (or freedom, for that matter.) Since the President is actually elected by the Electoral College, it gave Southern states a huge advantage beyond their actual population. Post-revolutionary South Carolina actually had more slaves than freemen. Four of the first five Presidents were from Virginia.

What would American have been like without this clause? Political power would've swung toward the rapidly developing industrial North much quicker. The seat of abolitionism resided in the Northern States. Would slavery have been destroyed much earlier? More to the point of our conversation, would Federalism have triumphed over Jeffersonian ideals politically?

Of course, the point could be raised that the Constitution would not have been ratified without the 3/5ths clause.

The North should have required all animals used in labor be counted as 3/5 of a person. It would have evened things out.

Very few of our founding fathers had the courage to stand up to the social order of the day and denounce slavery or make a personal change. Hamilton did. It is one of the reasons I admire him despite his obvious flaws.

As I recall there is some question whether or not Hamilton would have passed the 1/16 test for ancestry.

As well as being on the right side of the issue, he may have had his own agenda in opposing slavery.

geneg,

I am afraid that you are repeating ancient slurs. There is not a shred of evidence for that. Now, Hamilton was quite mortified that his past should be found out, since he was an illegitimate child in a patriarchal society. But he grew up around slavery in the Virgin islands and was a lifelong abolitionist.

The rumor also went around that he was the illegitimate child of George Washington, but the dates and locations don't line up. Post-revolutionary mud-slinging, just to see what will stick.

Maybe, I'm just remembering something Tom Jefferson told me.

Funny. Really funny. But he would've had Benjamin Franklin Bache do it for him.

>I am afraid that you are repeating ancient slurs.

I'm failing to understand why calling someone partially black would be considered a slur.

i was kinda grappling with that one too. Mark?

It was a slur used against him at the time to try to gain political advantage. If you are trying to practice some sort of political correctness policing on me, for the record, I have no problem with inter-racial marriage and progeny. However, the sum of my remarks above would've told you that I am not a bigot.

That is why conservatives often deride political correctness policing. You are looking for problems where none obviously exist, if you would take the time to consider the context. Since you did not, we tend to question your motives. Perhaps you are looking for political advantage by casting slurs such as "racist".

Just a note that undoubtedly the suggestion would have been viewed as a slur by most of the Virginian crowd of whom many of us are quite fond.

As I recall there is some question whether or not Hamilton would have passed the 1/16 test for ancestry.

I am afraid that you are repeating ancient slurs. There is not a shred of evidence for that.

Calm down -- it was just a question, based on the above. One question invoked a list of impassioned accusations:

* practicing some sort of political correctness policing

* looking for problems where none obviously exist

* not taking the time to consider the context

* questioning of motives

* looking for political advantage

* casting slurs such as "racist"

Quite a protest.

>That is why conservatives often deride political correctness policing. You are looking for problems where none obviously exist, if you would take the time to consider the context. Since you did not, we tend to question your motives. Perhaps you are looking for political advantage by casting slurs such as "racist".

I believe that the original implication was meant as racist. And to call the implication a slur is to imply that it is something to be ashamed of.

As to whether or not the idea that Hamilton had black blood has any validity, that's an entirely different question...

I guess I'd just say that there's a difference between stating that the original implication was meant as a slur given the context of the times and has no basis in fact is different than saying that one is repeating an ancient slur.

There's an old quote that I'll have to paraphrase that states something along the lines of "Precision in language is analogous to aim of a gun."

Jesse,

If precision in language is akin to aiming a gun to you, then I am guessing that I am in your sights. And it offends me, to put it inelegantly. (NativeRoses, I am now including your reply, since I am guessing that you are suggesting that I "doth protest too much".)

As you do not know me, I am really trying to hold my self in check. I don't mind having my ideas dissected, my intelligence challenged, or even bearing base insults, as I have in other threads. But to charge me with racism outside of the clear context of my remarks is unmannerly and provocative. You are not talking about my ideas, you are talking about my character.

I am supposed to trot out how I have black friends at this point, right? That is the typical response that you expect out of us Southern, white, religious bigots, correct? I'll tell you why it makes me mad...because your charges have the capability of undermining every thing that I have worked for to integrate my church over the past three years. I have fought it in my family, in the work place, and in the church for years because I hate racism and I hate how we reduce others to less than us because they don't look/act/earn like we do. Why? Because of your racial profiling, the same racial profiling that you would decry in the airport you use on me. He's white, Southern, religious, and conservative. Got to be a bigot. Because you are unwilling to look at the clear meaning of a man's words so that you might make scurrilous charges to score your points.

Several words that I am loathe to use keep coming up on the screen, so I shall quit.

>If precision in language is akin to aiming a gun to you, then I am guessing that I am in your sights. And it offends me, to put it inelegantly.

Mayhap an apology is in order, then... By questioning your original phrasing, I was not meaning to say that you were racist, Mark. But I was trying to alert you to a possible misreading of your post, albeit in what obviously ended up coming off as heavy-handed and inelegant.

By pointing out that this was a possible reading, I was merely trying to offer you the chance to clarify the statement.

As per the discussion of the canon, language and words may have greater impact than most of us realise. Which is why it is best to be as precise as possible when speaking. My apologies again.

Jesse,

Thank you, and I apologize for my outburst. After the first post, I was willing to accept it as a little good-natured needling, though I am quite sensitive to the charges. I could've disassociated myself from the use of the word "slur" more directly, should've in my response post, but my sensitivity made me angry that you took it out of context.

I really enjoy these conversations, especially with those who do not agree with me, but I am quite opposed to charges against character. The internet has plenty of that without our threads jumping in.

Again, thank you.

Not a problem. It seems that even I could use a bit of my own advice. Go figure.

Well, I'm going to try to get back to the earlier discussion, or some semblance of it.

It strikes me that when you look at American liberalism and conservatism, there is a common heritage in the first federalists - the supporters of the consitition, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Adams and others. These thinkers were ALL radicals as far as European society of the time and all shared a common rationalistic framework. If you look at Jefferson's and Adam's library, they read the same thing - a lot of classics, a lot of 18th century French and English philosophy, and a smattering of history, but very little literature other than the classics, very little in translation (they read the French or the Latin), and very little theology. The conservative liberal split occurs after the founding.

But, the part of the equation that America left out included much of the strong religious component of European conservativism - post-revolution, there were few advocates of an American state that rested its legitimacy on its role as a protector of the Church, and the Christian Right of Europe spoke a completely different language. Of course we had strong religious revivals and cultures, but not entwined with the state as did the Europeans. Similarly, the right in the US was never the protector of the aristocracy - it found the free market sooner than the European right and embraced it more completely.

Was American conservatism impoverished because it did not have the natural strength and alliances of European conservatism, which was supported by both a more defined social order and a close alliance with various national churches?

A_Musing has raised in the previous post, and in earlier ones in this thread, a set of extremely interesting questions which really ought to have a thread of their own. He started me thinking about the respective political traditions in the US which one must choose between.

There are obviously serious differences between self-proclaimed liberals, and self-proclaimed conservatives in the US today, as there have been for decades. These differences must reflect something more fundamental than merely different takes on political questions -- how best to fix Social Security, etc.

And yet it's not easy to pin the underlying sources of these differences down.

Here are some loosely-connected thoughts:

(1) American exceptionalism. It was recognized about a century ago that the United States was signficantly different from the European capitalist nations: not only did we never have to deal with a landed aristocracy and associated church and monarchy, but our working class did not develop a consciousness of itself as a class, unlike its European counterparts. (Of course, these two facts are related.)

American conservatism and liberalism are very roughly related to their European Right and Left counterparts, but the lack of correspondences of both is startling. There are few European counterparts to conservatism and liberalism as we find them in the US.

(2) If we provisionally define liberalism as concern for the underdog, and define conservatism negatively as not this, but rather concern for the orderly progression of society, then the following fact emerges: everywhere else in the world, those people who were seriously concerned about the underdog became Marxists -- as did many of the underdogs themselves.

Now Marxism provides a fairly complete theory of the world: you get a theory of history, an analysis of society, and prescriptions for political action. The Marxist lives in a world which makes sense. He knows how it got to where it is today, and he has a good general idea of where it is going.

And the anti-Marxists in this situation also have, or had, a theory: it's generally a religious one, which sees everything as part of God's plan. Those anti-Marxists who are not religious are quite consciously cautious pragmatists, except in situations of great social upheaval, when they become fascists.

Thus the European model, also followed to a large degree in Latin America. Of course, every country was/is different -- the national question intervenes in some of them, the middle classes play some role, their past histories constrained their particular choices.

Not so in America! Here, both conservatism and liberalism were conditioned by the lack of fear of imminent social revolution, or of foreign conquest. Even more fundamentally they were conditioned by the amazing good fortune with which our nation has been blessed.

One consequence of this is that American liberalism doesn't have much in the way of theories of history or society. Neither does American conservatism, although it pays more attention to historic forebearers than liberalism does. But neither of them can trace an unbroken tradition back to the Founders. Both really begin in the 20th Century.

Modern liberalism begins with the New Deal, and modern conservatism begins with the Cold War. Both are highly pragmatic responses to existing reality.

(3) Because neither liberals nor conservatives are given to deep theorizing about history and society, we have been flying blind since the end of the Cold War.

World reality is changing rapidly. All of the weaknesses of both traditions are being exposed.

Example: Liberals are uncomfortable with American military power. But our military power will decide our fate. Conservatives don't like the idea that those pesky brown people in the Third World may have genuine grievances which will need profound social and political upheavals to sort out. We don't do social upheavals, or, when we try to, we do them so clumsily that the result is worse than than the original situation. But these upheavals are coming, whether we like it or not. (This same attitude made conservatives mere observers, and ungracious ones at that, of the most exciting and heartening developments in 20th Century America, the emancipation of Blacks and women.)

Both liberals and conservatives, as good Americans, are deeply, unthinkingly, optimistic. This reflects our inheritance as citizens of the most powerful nation on earth, dripping with wealth, where the calvary always arrives in time. We'll muddle through.

But what if we, as part of the world, are entering a new phase of world history, where wrong actions on our part, including inaction, could have very grave consequences?

Our pragmatic attitude, which underlies both liberalism and conservatism, may prove to be woefully inadequate to our tasks.

I apologize for the non-coherence of this train of midnight thinking. But I would still be interested in any responses.

Mark, i also apologize for causing you any personal distress. You're right that i don't know you. While it's your right to claim you were profiled as a white / southern / religious / conservative / bigot, those charges are erroneous and received with a smile. All i can see of you is how you portray yourself in words on a screen.

Your later words indicate genuine distress, and i apologize for causing some of it. i hope you are not feeling any lingering discomfort and that you have a peaceful evening.

(* usual clarity edits)

Doug - for a useful comparison to the United States, look to a much larger Democracy in the world - India. Relatively few Indian Marxists, a high level of diverse religious views and religious freedom, and a majority religion that doesn't lend itself well to allignment with the state. There is a background of aristocracy, though it broke down relatively quickly (starting much later) compared to Europe. I'd suggest that Australia has similar traits as well, though I know much less about Australia. Perhaps there are ways in which the Europeans are exceptionalists.

Also, historically, liberals have wielded military power quite successfully. Both World Wars had liberal Presidents to guide the country. It may be that the military is best used with care, reluctance, and the broad national backing that comes from using it with care and reluctance.

A_Musing: I bear only diminished responsibility for my Night Thoughts.

For one thing, I neglected to say exactly what I thought was interesting to conservatives in your original posts, which was your observation that American conservatism has shallow intellectual roots. (I don't think that this is the main reason for its relative under-representation in academia, because it shares this characteristic with liberalism. But it is an interesting observation.)

A fuller exposition of my ideas would have distinguished a number of stages of evolution in the thought of both American conservatives and American liberals.

Both "movements" are today substantially different from what they were say, fifty years ago.

Ever since the end of WWII, conservatives have been tormented by the issue of the state. Before WWII, it would have been hard to find a self-described conservative who was in favor of a big powerful state. Conservatism was isolationist, reflecting the situation of America in the world.

After WWII, we had the problem, as we saw it anyway (not being Cold War Revisionists) of dealing with the Soviet Union and an international communist movement, which could not be done without an enormous expansion of the military-industrial complex. This we accepted, most of us, with greater or lesser degrees of reluctance.

Today you find strands of conservatism that have wholly shed our intitial suspicion of the state -- so called "Great Nation Conservatism" -- and other strands that have thrown away the distinction between patriotism and aggressive nationalism. Yet other strands are trying to reclaim the pre-WWII conservative heritage.

American iberalism too, it seems to me, has mutated a fair amount in the 20th Century, and for some of the same reasons conservatism has.

I won't go into detail here, but just observe that the pre-WWII liberalism which saw Stalin's Russia as a hopeful social experiment was very different from the Cold War "corporate liberalism" reviled by the 1960s New Left, which was in turn very different from the liberalism that was colonized by that New Left a decade later. (Thus how many liberals would today endorse the war-making of past liberal presidents, especially if you include Truman and Kennedy. From the popularity of Noam Chomsky among liberal mileu, and the frequency with which liberals assign Howard Zinn's Peoples History of the United States to their students, I would say not so many.)

And, of course, for both liberalism and conservatism, things are made more complicated by the fact that neither is directly represented by a political party which speaks directly for it.

Doug,

What's "American iberalism"? *snicker*

American Iberalism is a that wing of American Imperialism which wishes to conquer that peninsula of Europe on which are situated Portugal and Spain. The motivation for this is to pre-empt its re-occupation by the forces of militant Islam. Also we -- for I am one of them -- believe that there are Weapons of Mass Destruction hidden there. (And we want them for ourselves.)