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Thursday, November 18, 2004
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THIS JUST IN
Whenever the latest reports come out revealing yet again how overwhelmingly liberal rather than conservative the American university is, UD is reminded of a conversation Paul Monette relates between himself and a gay ex-monk. So how many priests and monks are gay? I’d ask, to needle him. What did he think the percentages were? He’d flutter his pudgy hands, spotted with the scars of bee stings and covered with rings like a gypsy. “Oh my dear, who can say? A hundred and ten percent.” So let’s say that the ratio of liberals to conservatives at American universities today is seven trillion to one. Et puis? Most liberals and most conservatives at American universities are pretty mainstream people who don’t go about pounding their ideologies into their students’ heads. Yes, liberalism is most professors’ default position and always has been, but it’s dumb for professors to argue, as that guy at Duke did, that professors are liberals because liberals are smarter than conservatives, or that they’re liberals because, as a Berkeley professor says in today’s New York Times, “Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice.” It’s not intellectual or moral superiority that distinguishes professors as a class - it’s niceness, and a very … slow … deliberative … style, and those things don’t imply any particular politics. Sure, the niceness tips you toward things like welfare states, but in a largely sentimental way. How much do you, as a professor, really care? What you care about is Turkish epigraphy and British epistolary novels and Arctic weather patterns. The interesting political divide on campus is between liberals and radicals, and the dynamic whereby radicals have disproportionate power in some departments because they appeal to the guilt (also sentimental) of the liberals. But that’s a whole other story. So UD differs with Mark Bauerlein when he writes, in his intriguing Chronicle essay on the subject, that “academics have an acute sense of how much their views clash with the majority of Americans.” UD doesn’t think academics, as a class, have an acute sense of very much outside of their field and their family. They’re academics because they care desperately about a narrow realm. |