Fun quotation, but George Will – and the Wall Street Journal – have it wrong.
If you’ve followed life at the University of Colorado Boulder as closely as UD has over the years, you know it’s not the liberal village Will has in mind.
And you know, therefore, that the proposed endowed chair there in Conservative Thought and Policy — essentially an effort to import a high-profile conservative thinker — doesn’t represent an alien imposition on a quiet mountain monoculture.
The main reality of campus life at Boulder is a hard-drinking, right-leaning, anti-intellectual, and politically indifferent basketball and football culture dominated by dumb frat guys and an athletics department so corrupt it generated the largest national university sports scandal of them all not long ago.
You want to study a conservative in Boulder? Talk to a booster in a luxury box.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:03AM
We DO need to be fair. We can hardly call Colorado a basketball culture, since their basketball program is pretty bad. We should perhaps congratulate Colorado for selflessness, bringing in marginal students without caring about generating a winning program.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:00AM
Dear UD,
As a former student at the University of Colorado, I have some expertise on the culture in Boulder, Colorado.
First, it is extremely liberal, especially the faculty and administration. The professors there are more liberal than at any other school I have attended, and I have attended a few.
Second, the student body is broadly comprised of two types: 1) The liberal cause-types and 2) Frat-Sorority types that drink a lot. The latter as both students and alumni produce the "hard-drinking, right-leaning, anti-intellectual, and politically indifferent basketball and football culture dominated by dumb frat guys and an athletics department so corrupt it generated the largest national university sports scandal of them all not long ago." The liberal causeheads, along with the much of the faculty and administration, are strongly anti-football.
Granted, recent years have seen a swing toward football. However, there is a battle between ultraliberal students, faculty and alumni, and the pro-football, anti-intellectual, drinking-types. The university is almost schizophrenic because of this dichotomy.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:10AM
Dave: You’re right – it’s much more of a football culture. But more broadly it’s a sports-mad culture.
Fear and Loathing: I take your point about the two battling types that comprise the student body at Colorado — I should have made clear in my post that there’s a very strong liberal community there too. But that’s just my point about George Will and others: To characterize the place as a monoculture is ridiculous.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:28AM
Wow, what a confusing article! A conservative publication is mocking other conservatives for imposing what amounts to conservative affirmative action. As a liberal, for whom exactly should I be rooting?
May 13th, 2008 at 11:38AM
Who says that an expert in Conservative Thought and Policy has to be an advocate of Conservative Thought and Policy?
May 13th, 2008 at 9:03PM
I think to some extent UD and the WSJ may be at cross-purposes. When I hear people talk about colleges and universities being liberal then I think they are usually focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on the faculty, course offerings, etc., rather than the undergraduate culture. Even on those terms though, UD is surely right to say that UCBoulder isn’t a monoculture.
Plenty of schools have substantial amounts of "hard-drinking, right-leaning, anti-intellectual, and politically indifferent" students, but I would put the emphasis on the "anti-intellectual" and "politically indifferent" parts. Right-leaning or not, these aren’t people who have copies of God and Man at Yale on their bookshelves. And while they may exert a powerful influence on the tone of campus culture in many respects, most of them bad, the political culture is disproportionately affected by those students and faculty who, in Arthur Koestler’s phrase, suffer from an excess of political libido.
Stephen Karlson’s distinction is important, and in response to his question, I don’t see any reason why an expert in Conservative Thought and Policy has to be an advocate of Conservative Thought and Policy. According to the WSJ story, neither does Chancellor Peterson.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:17AM
I am thinking that since faux-Indian Ward Churchill has so brilliantly played that role, he would be a natural in this position. He can be an Indian activist MWF, a conservative policy wonk on TTh, and a smirking hypocrite laughing all the way to the bank on the weekends.
May 15th, 2008 at 7:28PM
Wandered in via "Minding the Campus."
I like Peter W.’s comment above a lot, but I think it is very safe to say that most state schools are a Left-leaning monoculture. Peter W. actually gives the reasoning needed to make this argument: If someone "right-leaning" can’t tell you who Ayn Rand or Hayek was, do they genuinely count as part of the university’s culture? They’re more like a primordial chaos that can be bent any which way by various forces.
This brings up a deeper problem: to what degree are Left and Right, even in their most intellectual manifestations, defined by the overtly corrupt "capitalism" driving the academy? There are plenty of liberal administrators and faculty who welcome corrupt college sports – I should know, I’m a Rutgers alumnus. If the almighty dollar is the fundamental reality defining even how we think, then strictly speaking there is no diversity. A true diversity is where we can debate about what is good, and have several distinct and complementary visions of the Good to that end. But this would require a bringing back of literature and philosophy that your more Leftist and radical colleagues have worked to reject, and that my more conservative colleagues cannot even conceive, given that they have indeed been alienated from the academy purposefully.