A natural place to look for guidance is “Liberal Education, Then and Now,” by Peter Berkowitz, the featured essay on the site’s “Must Reads” list. It’s a solid and constructive piece, but the lecture that it’s based on had a more accurate title—“John Stuart Mill’s Idea of a University, and Our Own.” The “Then” that Berkowitz contrasts with our degenerate “Now” isn’t a real place and time, it’s an ideal. It may well be that universities used to embody Mill’s ideal much better than they do now, but Berkowitz has nothing to say about that.

Another professor and public intellectual, D. G. Myers, appreciates Johnson’s vote of confidence for the conservative side in the battle of ideas but he’s not optimistic about those “intriguing possibilities” offered by Obama. The issues enumerated in Johnson’s essay are, for Myers, symptoms of a deeper problem—“the loss of the university principle altogether.”

The current principle animating university life in America is the social principle. The contemporary university is a little society, a self-contained and self-governing body of people living together, where one behaves oneself in accord with common rules so as not to disturb or offend any other residents of the community.

Hence collegiality, an irrelevant value in scholarship, becomes a minimum standard for participation in academic society. […]

Since university professors are social beings just like everyone else (ok, maybe not just like everyone else), it’s hard to imagine that this “social principle” wasn’t a factor until the last generation or so. The “principle animating university life” undoubtedly shifts over time, but in the picture Myers paints few things are a matter of degree.

Where the social principle animates the university, collegiality and the concern for other people’s feelings will be minimum standards. The highest standard, then, will be sophistication. […]

Sophistication is a social attainment. It is a class marker. You know the correct names, you use the correct pronunciation, you quote the correct books. You are not guileless and direct, but subtle and (if possible) ironic. Sophistication is the sworn enemy of truth, because truth can be rude and boisterous and may speak with an accent.

It seems to me that he’s eliding two kinds of sophistication. One is the kind that makes for a sophisticate—a person who’s fashionable and in the know. The other is the kind that, in my opinion but apparently not in his, is a hallmark of a lot of outstanding scholarship and criticism—the opposite of rudimentary and simplistic, not the opposite of “rude and boisterous.” I guess Myers is pointing out a recent twist in the long history of people valuing style over substance, a complacent habit that academics, of all people, should be able to resist. But in that department, the failures come from all over the political spectrum.

Before the current crop of social-thinking sophisticates, there was, according to Myers, the “old idea of the university as a common pursuit of truth.” The university has changed quite a bit over the past few generations, for sure. It seems to me that it’s no easy thing to get a fix on its true character and ethos at any given time, but I doubt it was ever much less “self-contained” and “self-governing,” and I doubt that professors in the olden days were a lot more disturbing and offensive (in my experience, plenty of them still have that effect on each other).

Alan Kors gives an evocative account of the “academic world [in the early 1960s] that won the heart of a kid from Jersey City’s hardscrabble Dickinson High School,” but he puts it in perspective with a forthright look at its dark side.

It was virtually impossible for the most qualified black applicants to gain admission to Princeton; there were exceptions, but they were few indeed. There was widespread, crude racial bigotry among students; there was contempt for the women imported into Princeton on weekends, with a sharp division made between those gentlewomen one might marry and those coeds to whom anything might be promised for favors (“Sweet Briar to wed; Trenton to bed” was one of the politer formulations); there was a vulgar, sadistically cruel, and, indeed, violent hatred of homosexuals there, with exceptions occasionally made for reasons of social class. There was an anti-intellectualism in the student body that astonished me, a lack of interest in all but the most famous speakers or performers, and—the terms truly were used—a contempt by those pleased by “gentlemen’s Cs” for those “grinds” who studied long hours or with enthusiasm. There was a social snobbery more reminiscent now of the 1920s than of anything more recent, and an emphasis on “seeming” over “being” that would have confirmed Rousseau for his later admirers. My freshman year was Princeton’s final year of mandatory chapel (of one’s choice, at least)—a requirement I found deeply intrusive, although they’d advertised it fairly enough—but if exposure to spirituality were meant in any way to replace coarseness with kindness and decency, mandatory chapel was without value. That Princeton also was a place of undergraduate political intolerance. In my junior year, the rooms of two quite thoughtful, warm, bright, and intellectual Marxist seniors were broken into, their “Little Lenin Library” ripped to shreds, and the sole copies of their applications to graduate schools ruined by bottles of ink. The perpetrators turned out to be some of the “biggest men” on campus, and they all were let off with barely a slap on the wrist. That was no golden age, and honest souls across the political spectrum never will talk realistically about the tragedy of higher education today without acknowledging that moral and historical reality.

That’s mostly a description of the students of the day, presented in contrast to the more cerebral faculty. But on the whole the two groups shared the same social values and prejudices, and the student body acted as a kind of buffer zone between the faculty and society at large. A “common pursuit of truth” was a lot easier when the academic world was smaller and more homogeneous. Factoring that in is the way to “acknowledg[e] that moral and historical reality” if you want to compare higher education then and now and keep it real. Otherwise the declensionist narrative is a way of tacitly pining for homogeneity, and for the rigid, irrational hierarchies that produced it.

[Myers responded to this post about a month after it went up, or at least he referred to it as an accusation that he was “pushing aside history and yearning for a Golden Age that never existed.” I guess my post was useful as a way for him to document the weight of misunderstanding that he suffers as he bucks the ill winds of change. He doesn’t bother to respond to the substance of my criticism, which is a shame—that might have been interesting. Instead he repeats the story line about a university that’s “transforming itself” from one thing to another (which means that he’s not just talking about “the idea of the university,” as he claims), and complains bitterly but impotently about how it’s become the wrong thing (and though he writes about transformation at one point, when he gets down to it there seems to be no middle ground).]

I’m not thinking about the ignorant ranters who are ready with a knee-jerk response on most any political topic. I’m thinking about people who work in or around academia, especially those who are inclined to translate their dissatisfaction into a program for reform, though a lot of the time the difference between these more informed critics and the random ranters is not all that clear. My theory is that what the reform movement stands for is more subtle and a lot less compelling than what it stands against—a litany of outrageous incidents involving scary, muddle-headed tenured radicals and the craven administrators who do their dirty work. Without the radicals to generate fear and loathing, the movement has little claim to public attention. The point man in pressing the lacrosse case into service for the cause is KC Johnson, but his crusade is larger than that one scandal and, as I’ve pointed out in the last two entries, he’s just as nonsensical and unprincipled when he’s pursuing other targets.

About a month ago the web site Minding the Campus ran an essay of his, “Obama And The Campus Left.” It’s a post-election look at the “intriguing possibilities” for “meaningful reform on the nation’s college campuses” under the new administration. It overlaps quite a bit with pieces of his that I’ve already written more than enough about. All I’m interested in this time is what the essay reveals about the reform movement.

Minding the Campus is brought to you by the Manhattan Institute. Where there’s an Institute, there’s an agenda, or better yet, many agendas, each with a Center devoted to it. The Center for the American University, for instance, which seeks to promote “diversity of thought” (aka “intellectual pluralism”) in higher education. One prong of their effort is the Veritas Fund, which is supposed to bolster “Western Civ” in university curricula. Minding the Campus is another prong, intended to “foster a new climate of opinion that favors civil and honest engagement of all sides, offering an engaged debate for readers concerned with the state of the modern university.” Or so they say. My assumption is that high-minded statements of purpose like that one are more or less disingenuous until proven otherwise. In this case the assumption is borne out by the content, which isn’t to say that the whole thing is a sham—on the scale of partisan web sites, it’s got some pretty respectable stuff. But there’s a paragraph of Johnson’s essay that gives a truer picture of the site’s premises and priorities.

I’m a Democrat who donated to Obama’s campaign in both the primary and general election. But only the most closed-minded ideologue would deny that conservatives have dominated the recent battle of ideas in higher education. No politician can publicly defend the current situation of professors operating in a groupthink atmosphere, to the detriment of the students they teach. While liberals have mostly ignored the problem, conservatives have helped expose the alarming decline in intellectual pluralism on today’s college campuses. They’ve also fought to uphold free speech on campus, advocated restoring merit and quality as the basic instruments for academic evaluation, and challenged the idea that diversity should form the preeminent goal in university personnel or admissions processes.

The sentence I highlighted stands out for its parochial bluster and for the battle metaphor, which I can’t help but read ironically. I guess we’re supposed to conclude that conservatives are winning the battle because they have better ideas, or maybe because they’re more persuasive. In a commentary from a few years ago arguing against “intellectual diversity,” Stanley Fish uses the same metaphor, but he identifies the war, as well (his mystification about a conventional horticultural metaphor is odd, though). Deciding “who won (or is winning) the culture wars in the academy… depends on what you mean by winning.” “The left may have won the curricular battle, but the right won the public-relations war.”

[I]f the palm is to be awarded to the party that persuaded the American public to adopt its characterization of the academy, the right wins hands down, for it is now generally believed that our colleges and universities are hotbeds (what is a “hotbed” anyway?) of radicalism and pedagogical irresponsibility where dollars are wasted, nonsense is propagated, students are indoctrinated, religion is disrespected, and patriotism is scorned.

Of the points on Johnson’s list of winning ideas, the one about free speech is the strongest. From what I’ve seen, the conservative challenge to speech codes has been reasonably principled, able to differentiate between the authoritarian manifestations of the Left’s ideology and the ideology itself. It takes an oversimplifying spin to make some of the other ideas sound like winners. Contrary to the implications, “merit and quality” are still “basic instruments for academic evaluation,” and diversity is not “the preeminent goal in university personnel or admissions processes.” To the extent that diversity is factored into those decisions, it complicates the process and arguably compromises the purely academic and intellectual standards that should drive it. It’s not an all-or-nothing tradeoff, and there shouldn’t be any need to short-circuit the argument by pretending it is if the case against diversity initiatives is so strong.

Neither “conservatives” nor “liberals” are of one mind about these issues (and I hope everyone is keeping in mind that an analysis reduced to these two broad categories is pretty crude). The conservative side is of two minds about one of them, in particular. They have generally challenged diversity initiatives, but not the one that’s designed to benefit conservatives—“intellectual diversity”—which some of them are busy promoting (“intellectual diversity” and “intellectual pluralism” are interchangeable terms, as far as I can tell). Maybe Fish is wrong and this is a kind of diversity that’s uniquely appropriate to the academy. But for David Horowitz, the lead promoter, it’s a matter of “[using] the language that the left has deployed so effectively in behalf of its own agendas.” To the extent he’s co-opting the idea as well as the language, then it’s a liberal idea that’s winning. If he’s just lifting the language to sell a fundamentally different idea, then he’s working in public relations.

I’ve collected plenty of reservations and gripes as a teacher, about all the priorities of institutions of higher education that have little to do with education, for instance, and about the lightweight and diffuse feeling of a lot of the curriculum. I can only imagine one of the four courses I’ve taught at Duke being offered at Reed College, back in my day (I like to think things there haven’t changed that much). The rest of my courses have been a little too fluffy. It’d be nice to have the opportunity to teach a more rigorous class now and then, but the fluffy classes have had their own charms, so I can’t complain. Naturally I’ve been aware for a long time of the conservative rhetoric about liberal bias in academia. Mostly I’ve dismissed it as a lot of noise. Not that I doubted that I was surrounded by liberals and those to their left—that’s obvious—but it wasn’t until the lacrosse case came along that I saw any reason to worry about it. The conservative reformists got my attention as a group that could potentially hold the campus orthodoxy that I’d been complacent about to a higher standard, and at the same time as a group with a completely uncritical attitude towards an intellectually disgraceful analysis that flattered their worldview.

My trail into and around this battle of ideas is recorded here in my blog. The lacrosse case led me to Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), which led me to FIRE and then to Alan Kors and the “sadness of higher education.” Where Kors was sad, Edward Glick was just whiny. A month or so ago I wrote about the Veritas fund’s foothold at Cornell and also summed up my impressions of “intellectual diversity.” I’ve read lots of other stuff here and there, but it still adds up to an idiosyncratic sample that doesn’t come close to covering all the angles. I think I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of how the battle is typically being fought, though.

Once upon a comment thread, Michael Bérubé suggested a shorthand for the routine critique of liberal bias—“Larry Summers and Duke lacrosse team Ward Churchill.” For conservatives, those three scandals are the sickness at the heart of academia made concrete. Concentrating on the extremists who are assumed to be commonplace in this Wonderland makes for easy and formulaic criticism. It’s fine for everyday grumbling but it seems like professors trying to make a serious point would aim higher. It was an odd experience when my post on Alan Kors was cast as the “contemptuous dismissal” of the “academic establishment,” if not the ranting of a “hard core, uninformed crank[]”—whatever its flaws, what I wrote is careful, detailed, and deeply ambivalent. The extremist fixation is death to perspective, which suits the anti-intellectual set just fine—perspective tends to drain outrage, which is a great source of energy and invective for them. It’s also how you tell the difference between mountains and molehills and all the things in between, and it’s a hallmark of meaningful, intelligent criticism.

If “Duke Lacrosse hoax” and “Ward Churchill” and “Bill Ayers” stand for pretense, prejudice, and witless groupthink, a critic disgusted with the situation ought to stand for something else. Writing broad-minded, well-reasoned, and undogmatic criticism would be a great way to do that, but conservatives assume, with some justification, that they’re in the minority and embattled, and apparently it’s a situation that calls for something more forceful. At times it seems like there’s a balancing reaction at work that’s almost Newtonian—bias answered by an equal and opposite counter-bias. Other times the assumption at work seems to be that careful consideration of the ideas of a commonplace campus radical would inevitably give them too much credit and insult the intelligence of decent, sensible readers. Staking a rhetorical claim to the intellectual high ground, to open-minded, rational examination of hard facts, for example, is a lot more motivating than an actual rational examination of hard facts, especially one that attempts to put the outrageous evidence in perspective. Alan Kors is generally more careful and thoughtful than other conservative critics I’ve read, but when he gets down to partisan business he treats the other side as an intellectual non-entity, and the result is melodramatic and uninsightful criticism. The less thoughtful writers come across as lightweights and demagogues. This is a problem for a community dedicated to the proposition that a healthy academy needs more people like themselves—the cure looks a lot like the disease, if not worse.

Intellectual diversity is overtly a matter of balance—one excess balancing out another, according to the Manhattan Institute’s David DeRosiers: “[t]he idea behind what we’re doing is to bring back triumphalism to moderate the excesses of gender and [diversity courses].” He was quoted in the context of the Institute’s debut at Cornell, but I think the comment applies more generally. It’s much more representative of the thinking behind Minding the Campus than the inspiring epigraph from Allan Bloom on their “About Us” page.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

That would look great chiseled in marble, wouldn’t it? It’s pure PR, though—I don’t see any signs on the site of special resistance to easy and preferred answers, or, for that matter, much evidence of minds deeply touched by “intellectual pluralism and the best traditions of liberal education.” The project, really, is to promulgate the r/Right set of easy and preferred answers, perhaps in order to strike a balance with the other side’s easy and preferred answers. If that’s what they have in mind, though, relativism must be another liberal idea that’s winning.

It’s a matter of faith in most of these conservative critiques that once upon a time, things were better, so reform is really a matter of revival. More on that in the next post.

If you google obama ayers khalidi, what comes up is mostly the ranting of people already certain about who to be more afraid of. It was in the interest of the Republican side to make the most of the two professors’ radicalism and their ties to Obama, and anyway, radical professors are a favorite specter of the Right. The academic world’s reflex to circle the wagons and shout “McCarthyism” is represented by the fulsome petition at supportbillayers.org, and the list of over 4000 names under it. But not all Obama supporters were sympathetic to Ayers and Khalidi, and the first line of defense from his camp was to downplay the connection.

I noticed one person conspicuously trying to play on both sides of the fence, to make the most of the radicalism but downplay the connection—KC Johnson. Inside Higher Ed tags him as someone who’s “frequently criticized academe for a lack of political diversity” when he’s dragged in for balance in an otherwise soft-headed article “In Defense of Ayers”. In fact he approached the controversy about Obama’s radical pals the same way he’s approached the Duke lacrosse case, not as a critic but as a crusader rooting out the extremists of the academic Left. As I’ve pointed out ad nauseum about his lacrosse-case stuff, his crusading mentality reduces people and issues to cartoonish black-and-white, and his reasoning, evidence, and rhetoric are all compromised. His defense of Obama shows how in the grip of it he is, because it’s not really a defense, it’s an attempt to capitalize on the controversy in order to promote the academic culture war as a Democratic party agenda.

Inside Higher Ed picked up Johnson’s take on the controversy from a post on Cliopatria, a group blog on the History News Network. I imagine that one reason the blog exists is to give academic historians a place to editorialize, but it’s a shame to see it used as a soapbox for misrepresentation and simple-minded polemics—my opinion hasn’t changed in the months since my testy exchange with Ralph Luker, the chief blogger over there. A premise of the site is that “history is complicated,” and behind this controversy are the complicated histories of several complicated people. Ayers went from being a fugitive militant radical to being a key player in Chicago school reform, apparently acceptable in that context to establishment figures from both parties. Khalidi was attractive to the International Republican Institute (chaired by John McCain) in the mid-90s because of his “coolness to the PLO” but a decade or so earlier was apparently, despite his denials, speaking for the PLO (I like this post by Ron Kampeas, Washington bureau chief for the Jewish news organization JTA, grappling with the ambiguity after being forced to back down from defending Khalidi against the PLO-spokesman charge). Johnson wants the two as poster boys for academic extremism—not exceptional but typical—so it served his purpose to leave intact the simplistic and superficial impressions that were already in circulation and contribute a little spin of his own to the caricature of Khalidi. All in all it does nothing for Obama but it’s a nice little gift to the Republican operative Johnson quotes who wants Obama to “own his friendships with individuals that are in some cases anti-American, anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist.”

A couple of days after it went up on Cliopatria, Johnson posted a modified version of the commentary on his lacrosse-case blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), and the rhetoric and agenda-driven reasoning are ramped up somewhat in the process. The same thing happens with another KC Johnson polemic that initially went up on Cliopatria, this one about a couple of Brooklyn College professors who’ve been petitioning on behalf of Syed Fahad Hashmi, a former student detained on terrorism charges. In that one, the crusading logic is even more obviously in the drivers seat, especially in the rewrite, which panders to DIW loyalists with cheap rhetoric that Johnson couldn’t get away with on Cliopatria (I hope). The funniest part is a line about statements made by Hashmi’s supporters that “read as if cribbed from a defense brief.” Has anyone covering a legal controversy ever written more “analysis” that sounds like a defense brief than Johnson?

[For more on the Hashmi case, read the next post. There’s a response to this paragraph from KC Johnson in the comments.]

The tribalism runs deep in DIW. Wherever you look over there, including at the legal teams and their arguments, one side seems to have cornered the market on whatever’s honest, decent, sensible, and worthwhile. Mike Nifong’s efforts were pathetic and dishonest enough that an unbalanced impression of the criminal investigation is probably unavoidable. But Johnson’s treatment of the ongoing lawsuits has the same cheerleading slant. The way he describes “The Duke Motion to Dismiss”, it’s cynical legal maneuvering, or else “(scarcely credible) p.r. spin” straight out of Creative Writing 101. The “powerful response” from the plaintiff’s attorney, on the other hand, is beyond reproach or even criticism—no legal maneuvering there. It may be that Duke’s position is so weak that it can’t do anything but grasp at straws. But it’s hard to believe that such a lopsided characterization is the result of serious analysis. I haven’t tried to size up the lawsuits, but on one point I happened to look up, both sets of plaintiffs offer pure spin.

Though it’s toned down, Johnson brings the same attitude to his support for Obama. During the primaries a major focus of his Cliopatria posts was the disingenuous and muddle-headed nature of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Among the variations on the theme, “Clinton’s Rhetoric and Reality” has her making absurd claims of sexism in her concession speech, “Clinton’s Constitutional Conundrum” has her pandering to Guam and Puerto Rico, and “The Clinton Dozen” details the “latest in [her] campaign’s effort to play the race card.” And then there’s the other Clinton, who, in “Bill Channels Wilentz,” “[advances the] bizarre thesis that Obama, not the Clintons, played the race card in the nominating process.” I expect that a lot of the criticism is fairly well founded, and it often comes with interesting historical tie-ins. But like the DIW account of the lacrosse lawsuits, the overall impression is that only one side is playing politics.

Johnson is very good at framing a controversy or dispute so that he can efficiently sort the good/right/true from the bad/wrong/false and play them off against each other, or just dwell on the bad, which is more typical. Things can get ugly if the frames overlap, though. A bad joke that a mutual reader tried to post to DIW shows how ugly: “just to rib [Johnson], I wrote ‘Can’t we all get along?’ and suggested that perhaps he and Crystal [Mangum (the accuser in the lacrosse case)] should get together to co-host a rally for Obama.” Plenty of crude humor makes it through Johnson’s “lightest of touch” comment moderation, but this time, somehow, it didn’t.

In his analysis of “Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks,” Johnson tries to play in both the culture-war and campaign frames and finesse the clash. It seems to have been an opportunity that was too good to pass up. His argument, in a nutshell, is that Ayers and Khalidi are so unexceptional and integrated in the “groupthink academic environment” that Obama couldn’t be expected to avoid them. In other words, the depth of the problem turns out, somehow, to be his candidate’s excuse. Oh, and by the way, the Democratic party better get with the program, because it was their “poor record in promoting diversity of thought and pedagogical approach on the nation’s college campuses” that made Obama vulnerable in the first place. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

On DIW it’s “The Lacrosse Case & the Khalidi/Ayers Controversy.” Here’s Johnson letting Obama off the hook—text removed from the Cliopatria post is overstruck, text added for DIW is bracketed.

For the GOP attack to work, Ayers and Khalidi have to be viewed as exceptional figures[—wholly unlike nearly all other professors]. Obama’s judgment can hardly be questioned if his “buddies” were not marginal characters but instead people who are like [resemble] lots of other academics, especially since Obama lived in an academic neighborhood (Hyde Park) and spent several years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School.

Yet the truth of the matter is that the basic [pedagogical and academic] approaches of Ayers and Khalidi fit well within the academic mainstream. Ayers is, after all, a prestigious professor of education (hardly a field known for its intellectual diversity, of course [as I have explored elsewhere]). Khalidi was of such standing that Columbia hired him away from the U of C, and named him to chair its Middle East Studies Department. From that perch, [he presided over a wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum, even as] he informed readers of New York that students of Arab descent—and only such students—knew the “truth” about Middle Eastern affairs.

I lived in Hyde Park for six years, and I can’t tell you how many of my friends turned out to be unrepentant terrorists. Or, well, maybe I could… but I don’t have any political ambitions, so never mind. The DIW commentariat was no more more impressed than I am by Johnson’s clumsy sleight-of-hand, which insults not only the reader’s intelligence but the candidate’s as well. It would be understandable if it took a while before Obama realized that the Education professor putting together that big grant was once wanted for planting bombs in federal buildings—even in academia, believe it or not, that’s a singular bio. But Khalidi’s involvement with the Palestinian cause was ongoing and obvious, and over time it was the basis for conversations that included, by Obama’s account, “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

My impression is that Johnson’s fans mostly brushed the lame excuse aside. Rantburg sums up the real message of the post:

Prof. Johnson is certainly correct about the American academy: once you venture away from the hard sciences, you encounter a world in which people like William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, Ward Churchill and others like them are not just ordinary and common-place, but both accepted and powerful.

David Thompson thumps the same drum but at least has a little more imagination in conjuring up outrageous academic villains—after all, his banner promises comic books, and what could be more entertaining than vanquishing “far left fantasists” intent on “‘groom[ing]’ youngsters with the ‘correct’ political outlook”? (it’s a lot more fun than the actual research, that’s for sure).

The bone Johnson throws to DIW readers in the passage I quoted is the comment about Columbia’s “wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum.” Elsewhere, the revised version is sprinkled with references to Duke’s all-purpose band of extremist stick figures, the so-called “Group of 88.” Khalidi is, in Johnson’s account, not only overvalued and hostile to America’s true friend in the Middle East but also ready to pass dismissive and self-serving judgment on the students he’s supposed to be teaching. If that sounds a lot like the “Group” profile, well, lo and behold, a few paragraphs later Johnson reads his tea leaves and declares that “[i]f Khalidi or Ayres were employed at Duke, doubtless they would have joined the Group of 88.”

Johnson doesn’t give a link to that New York magazine article, but when I tracked it down I found that Khalidi’s comments are not nearly so clear-cut. True to form, Johnson whittled them down to just the bullshit that suits his agenda.

“Most kids who come to Columbia come from environments where almost everything they’ve ever thought was shared by everybody around them,” [Khalidi] says. “And this is not true, incidentally, of Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they know to be true. Whereas kids from, I don’t know, Teaneck. Or Scarsdale. Or Levittown. Or Long Island City. Many of them have never been exposed to a dissonant idea, a different idea, as far as the Middle East is concerned. And so you have a situation where it’s going to be problematic.”

Whatever this is, it’s absolutely not a blanket claim that one group owns the “truth” and the other doesn’t. The essence of it is that one has experienced more dissonance than the other, which doesn’t seem like such a controversial claim. Are the Jewish-American kids who go to Columbia more likely than the Arab-Americans to come from a relatively homogeneous community in which they’re well integrated? I believe they are. And are the students of Arab extraction more likely than the Jewish ones to encounter views on the Middle East that clash with their own views? Yes—public and political opinion in the US is overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Now just because Khalidi’s basic claim is plausible doesn’t mean it’s right, and even if it is right the differences between the groups might not be as stark or as significant, in practice, as Khalidi seems to think—that’s where my skepticism really kicks in. But there are all sorts of ways to object to this passage without misrepresenting it.

The article is about the controversy over the classroom behavior of professors in Columbia’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC). It’s well worth reading—the reporter, Jennifer Senior, gives a good account of both sides. Khalidi is quoted extensively. He’s “passionately invested in the future of Mideast studies,” and therefore on the defensive, since he sees the charges against his department as a “huge club” that’s being used to attack the field as a whole. But he doesn’t dismiss the charges, which date from when he was still in Hyde Park palling around with Obama.

“You know,” he concludes, “it could be the case that there are students who have serious grievances and it’s the case that threats to our academic freedom have developed over the last two years. This is a situation where you have to assume it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Johnson’s analysis of “Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks” was a daredevil attempt to walk and chew gum at the same time. He failed miserably—not a surprise, since his heart wasn’t really in it in the first place. His talents run in the opposite direction, towards mind-numbing moralistic either/ors, and in that department the differences between him and Sarah Palin are mostly a matter of vocabulary and accent.

…the rise of what I call “postmodern conservatism”—how an almost poststructuralist embrace of diversity and criticism of universal values informs the wars against “objectivity” and the mainstream media, the dominance of evolution and the call to teach intelligent design (ID) in public schools, and David Horowitz’s struggle for a student bill of rights in higher education.

The idea of “intellectual diversity” is a classic of postmodern conservatism (for those who don’t like their conservatism quite so postmodernized, it’s “intellectual pluralism”). It’s a slippery concept that’s inspired plenty of heated and arcane debates—to get a feel for them, go Fish. Based on what I’ve seen—a fairly haphazard sample—“intellectual diversity” is mostly used as a pretentious euphemism for “political diversity,” something that’s a lot like cultural diversity. If smart, educated, and decent people can come from a wide range of races and cultures, then it seems reasonable to say they can come from the different political persuasions as well. I’m not sure how many people really believe that, in their heart of hearts, and the relativism is sure ironic coming from the conservative side. But there’s some merit in the idea, I think. Cloistered orthodoxy and petty intolerance are endemic to academia, and the tendencies are only encouraged by too much homogeneity. A while back I pointed out a couple of professors whose contributions are tied to the way they stand out as conservatives against a background that’s largely liberal.

Positive examples are especially illuminating because intellectual diversity is usually promoted by highlighting the negatives its supposed to fix—the outrages of liberal bias and political correctness. In fact, it seems to me that one of the better arguments against intellectual diversity as a reform agenda is the poor quality of the polemics launched by some of its promoters and fans. When high-minded ideals are coupled with low-minded rhetoric and feeble, agenda-driven reasoning, it’s the practice that reveals the intentions and integrity of the critic far more than the preaching. David Thompson is a peripheral example, KC Johnson a more central one. What the practice suggests is that an ideologically balanced campus would be like one of those TV shows where liberal and conservative pundits try to shout each other down. It’s a mindset that offers nothing of value to academia’s pool of intellectual diversity.

In his column in the Cornell Daily Sun, Gabriel Arana criticises conservatives on his campus for dwelling on denounciation and symbolic resistance to what they see as the dominant culture instead of offering intellectually engaged alternatives. (hat tip)

In this sense The Cornell Review and the conservative discourse it represents owe more to Ann Coulter than William F. Buckley; the discourse is polemical, a tired repetition of conservative mantras attacking a liberal campus culture. If the Veritas grant does anything, I hope it will be to invigorate conservative discourse that has—at least during my time here—failed to really engage the intellectual community here, to bring to light new opinions that do not simply recapitulate conservative pundits’ talking points. Perhaps it can start by refraining from attacking our faculty and students and propose something to talk about.

The editorial was in response to the announcement of a $50k grant from the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to help launch Cornell’s new Program on Freedom and Free Societies. Arana’s objections aren’t with the program, they’re with the rhetoric coming from the Fund’s executive director, David DeRosiers. And he isn’t alone—even the Program’s point man on campus, Prof. Barry Strauss, distanced himself from DeRosiers’ rhetoric (“…I wish they had consulted me about their summer update. I would have told them that I respectfully disagree with much of what they say.”). Here’s a sample:

Veritas identified Cornell as one such university that prides itself on diversity, but lacks the intellectual kind, stating in its update, “most new courses of the last several decades have focused entirely on race, gender, or postmodernism.” Cornell, over the last forty years, has neglected traditional learning offerings such as Western society, thought and economics, according to the statement.

“The idea behind what we’re doing is to bring back triumphalism to moderate the excesses of gender and [diversity courses],” said DeRosiers. “To teach courses that have gone out of style. They have had a focus on race, gender, class—and in doing so, students have been given a partial view of reality with America as the force of many evils. It’s more to the fact that they’re only receiving a diet of such things—they’re being malnourished.”

According to Arana, the sweeping claims about the curriculum are easily rebutted by Cornell’s course catalog. That’s small potatoes, though, compared to the apparent determination to fight excess with excess by “bring[ing] back triumphalism.” Triumphalism? I can’t imagine a self-respecting humanities professor promoting the idea—maybe that just shows how deep the grooves of liberal bias are in my brain. But if triumphalism is seriously part of the program, it seems like a shame to put the West back in it’s rightful position at the apex of history and just stop there. Might as well put mankind back in his rightful place at the apex of creation, too—“intelligent design” is ready and waiting. And with science out the window, why not go whole hog and bring back geocentrism, too? That would be some potent triumphalism—America at the center of God’s universe. With a little of that in the curriculum you might just moderate all those America-hating zealots of oppression studies right out of existence.

Thompson writes as if he knows about higher education and he’s building a case against its liberal elements. Like anyone who’s been to school and can read a paper, he knows something about it. The problem is that his case depends as much on not knowing things as it does on knowing them. It’s a problem for me, I should say—I may be coming at it with the wrong standard. If the blog is meant as nothing more than entertainment with a political slant, then I guess he has a pretty good formula. The post I’m looking at probably wrote itself once he had the quotes, and like-minded readers get a nice little buzz off the righteous indignation. To have that impact there has to be an appearance of reasoning. A lot of actual reasoning with real-life complexities and ambiguities would be counterproductive, though—more effort for less effect. Thompson’s not an academic decision-maker, so I suppose he might as well write whatever he wants. Still, his criticism is supposed to sound smart but it makes a virtue of ignorance, and that really bugs me.

The theme of the post is “classroom political advocacy.” Thompson starts by invoking a scene from the documentary Indoctrinate U. about a professor who faced “a campaign of harassment by left-leaning colleagues.” That sounds like a matter of professional intolerance, not classroom advocacy, but it makes the point that bad things are happening to good people in the halls of learning. Cut to “[a] recent post on classroom advocacy at Crooked Timber, a site popular among left-leaning academics….” Thompson picks out three passages from the comments, arranged from ridiculous to reasonable. The first is from a person who thinks the world as we know it will end if McCain is elected, and since the other side doesn’t play fair why should his side? The comment starts with a disclaimer: “I’m not an academic nor a purist.” But never mind that—the site is still popular with left-leaning academics. And that’s the basic strategy: Pick up statements from here and there, brush off the reservations and qualifications and clarifications, then post them under a banner that says “leftist academic.”

The context for the next pair of quotes—the ones from Johnson’s editorial—is “Grover Furr of Monclair State’s English department,” and “Rhonda Garelick, an associate professor of French and Italian at Connecticut College.” In other words, left-wing professor from a certain kind of department—neither seems to have a public reputation, so the names are irrelevant. In effect it’s about the same as “popular with left-leaning academics,” though less a matter of guilt by association, and it adds a gender and a department. [After posting I see that Furr is somewhat notorious, though not with anything like the name recognition of, say, Ward Churchill.]

The problem isn’t that the quotes are taken out of their textual context, it’s that all context beyond that it’s from the pen of Dr. Lefty is treated as irrelevant. Readers are free to follow the links and soak up all the context they want, and it seems to me that anyone who’s curious or who wants to understand the problems that Thompson is exercised about would want to do just that. Garelick and Furr are both articulate people writing from personal experience (especially Garelick—Furr’s discussion-group post is pretty dry), so whether you’re pro or con there’s more to be gleaned from their writing than how outrageously wrong they are. But to really understand what they’re trying to communicate would require careful reading with the judgmental filters turned off, and I don’t want to be responsible for any harm caused by unprotected exposure to dangerous and offensive ideas. We are, after all, talking about an unreconstructed feminist and a man who disdains conservatives in favor of Marxists. Some plain old realism wouldn’t be so much to ask, though—a vaguely realistic model of college instruction that puts the political issues into perspective, some scepticism towards friendly sources like Indoctrinate U., and a better model of the relationship between what’s thought, said, or written and what’s done.

Garelick turns out to be the richest target, especially after Thompson spices her up to suit his taste. In his view, she “loftily dismissed students who objected to her use of French lessons to express at length her opposition to the war in Iraq.” I’m not sure what makes her dismissal lofty—maybe any opinion printed in the New York Times is by definition lofty. It’s a tone that’s more from his imagination than from the page, in any case. A purer figment of his imagination is the idea she went on “at length.” He returns to it a couple of times in the comments—first referring to French lessons “interrupted with lengthy screeds on the alleged evils of capitalism, ‘imperialism,’ ‘hegemony,’ etc.” and later to the “agitprop monologues” of French professors who “indulge their own political vanities at enormous length.” This is probably just a fact of life—left-wing professors drone on and on when they’ve got the indoctrination bug. She might have done just that, for sure, but all she says is that she “broached the topic of Iraq.”

What business does a professor of French have setting aside her syllabus to critique the war? I’m inclined to doubt that she has any business doing it. It’s a good question, anyway, and I don’t blame anyone for finding her presumption annoying or even offensive. The essay as a whole is grounds to wonder what goes on in her classes, where her priorities are, but it’s not grounds for any conclusions about those things. If, when she says she wants to “teach[] ‘wakeful’ political literacy: the skills needed to interrogate all cultural messages,” she’s sincere about the “all,” willing and able to take up feminist orthodoxy as critically as war-on-terror orthodoxy, that would make a big difference. If she’s at least ready to listen to her students as she is to lecture then, that would also make a big difference. The overall impression I get is of an attentive and responsible teacher. It’s not something I’d bet a lot of money on, but the clues are there and they clearly didn’t make a dent in Thompson’s armor of preconceptions. He found what he wanted to find—a stand-in liberal blowhard.

Thompson’s commenters take him up on the implicit invitation to sound smart sounding off, comfortable that even if they know very little, they know all that really matters. The setup is about the same as on Durham-in-Wonderland, where the posts often give the stamp of approval (Harvard PhD-certified) to irate ignorance, and the comments follow suit (with a vengeance). I saw the same sad dynamic on the Volokh Conspiracy, again engineered by a professor. Thompson chimes in in the middle of his comment thread with an opinion about the cost of liberal bias: because students are being “spared serious and thoughtful contact with opposing arguments, their own views can easily become lazy, reflexive and glib.” He and his crew do a superb job of modeling the problem.

Overall the comment thread has a clubhouse atmosphere—the reactions are not as vehement as on DIW, I guess because the evildoers are more generic and their offenses are not so fresh and outrageous. The tone is also not as vindictive as DIW tends to be, though several commenters relish the thought of suing the pants off that inexcusable professor of French (can you say faux juridicalism?). The prevailing sentiment at its most tasteless and overwrought comes from the clever fellow who’s about to send his kids “down the “large intestine of the university system” where they “may be exposed to this gibberish from incompetents who would be more benefit to society if they were waiting tables.” That’s not to say the comments are uniformly ridiculous and uniformed—they aren’t. What’s most notable, anyway, is what’s missing—there’s no inclination to either look into a mirror or take on more challenging targets than the inflatable monsters in the kiddie pool.

When I finally clicked over to Crooked Timber I was surprised to find a deliberative post questioning the ethics of devoting 45 seconds as students were gathering before class to encourage them to register to vote. That’s some perspective right there, and if you set this post and its comments next to Thompson’s, the idea that our universities need more conservatives to moderate the feckless liberal ideologues doesn’t come out looking so good. On Crooked Timber, Brian poses a real-life moral dilemma, elaborates some arguments on either side, and opens the floor. Mixed in with the usual comment-forum posturing and chatter are positions pro and con that are more reasoning that rhetoric—it’s almost like an honest-to-goodness debate. Thompson and company, on the other hand, prop up some stick figures and then bowl them down. It’s just a random comparison that, in the big picture, proves nothing. But it’s hard to take criticism seriously if the people pushing it (often pretty smugly) can tolerate that much dissonance between their rhetoric and the example they’re setting.

Thompson’s thoughts about students being spared from opposing arguments was a response to one of the few readers’ opinions with straightforward real-life implications:

I have three kids in college. In every case they have encountered a stereotypical liberal professor who indulged in the type of teaching I like to call “regurgitative learning”. They like to hear THEIR ideas, THEIR opinions and THEIR political views written down as mantra by their students. Opposing views are not acceptable and can be cause for failure.

In the same vein, another commenter with a kid in college says that “[she] told [her daughter] to lie, if necessary, to get through classes. Just give them what they want to hear…. [Her friends] all routinely lie on exams or papers, just to please their profs.” The fact that she thinks of lying as an option shows that something is seriously wrong (including her signature, “hermeneutics,” which, incidentally, is why I’ve arbitrarily made the person a “her”). Exams and papers are about knowing things and being able to reason and write—if the student has to take a position on some issue, it should be completely irrelevant whether it’s their actual opinion. Lying or not is beside the point (or at least should be). I don’t doubt that some professors are confused about this, but if it’s typical or even common where “hermeneutics” sent her daughter, then she chose the wrong school. Grades given to writing that backs up an opinion depend on overall impressions that can’t be quantified. That leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding. I suspect, though, that the more clueless and indifferent students—the ones who don’t really understand or care what it means to line up an argument in support of a conclusion—are the ones most likely to imagine that the trick is to just regurgitate. Anyway, what I’m most likely to conclude from a paper that parrots my opinion is that the student can’t think for herself, and that’s the practical problem with that parent’s advice—it might work well with a few bad professors, but the others might decide her daughter is a dimwit. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone who gives a damn about education would give such advice to their child.

I do believe that there are preachy liberal professors out there. Based on the bitter and sarcastic comments I’ve come across, it seems that they leave a lasting and bad impression. As a student I never experienced any overt campaigns of indoctrination in the classroom, and it could be that I’m unfairly downplaying the complaint because of that. But anyone who’s more interested in taking full advantage of the better professors than in fooling the bad ones should read Chris Goff’s no-nonsense effort to “dispense some advice for students who want to remain true to themselves while turning in rigorous academic work.”

“We try to hire the best, smartest people available,” Brandon said of his philosophy hires. “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.


“Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”

From the comments posted after the article you can get a pretty good sense of how that went over, or google “Robert Brandon” Duke stupid for a broader sample. Reflecting on the remark after “two days of venomous, hate filled e-mails from self-described ‘conservatives,’” Brandon said, “In my response to The Chronicle reporter I gave a quote from John Stuart Mill that I thought was quite funny. I now see that the humor is not much appreciated in this context.” In writing, at least, the remark strikes me as arrogant and not very funny, and I’m not sure that even sympathetic readers picked up much humor. But as a smoking gun in the crime of liberal bias the remark was very much appreciated—the Google search above calls up a little feeding frenzy of critics who were, on the whole, remarkably uncritical and opportunistic in their approach to such a useful quote. Recently it’s cropped up again as part of a minor farce.

[Here’s more about Mill’s theory of conservatives.]

It seems pretty obvious (to me, at least) that Brandon’s comment is just a pretentious version of the kind of reflexive, snarky put-down that each side of the political spectrum is constant throwing at the other. It takes a pretty shallow or self-serving perspective to assume that it’s deeply revealing of how he approaches decisions or interactions involving conservative students or faculty. That’s the sort of spin you’d expect from a partisan rag, and sure enough Rachel Zabarkes Friedman, writing for the National Review, put Brandon’s remark on her list of “five of the most outrageous campus incidents of the last academic year.” Her paragraph about it ends with a little idle speculation: “So why aren’t there more Republicans in academia? Maybe it’s because even the capable ones have been kept out, by the likes of Robert Brandon.” Unless she did a whole lot more investigating than it seems, she’s in no position to make generalizations about “the likes of Robert Brandon.” She has an uppity liberal-professor sock puppet who can mouth the words, though, and that suits the National Review just fine. But here’s one from a professor, Erin O’Connor, and she doesn’t do much better: “It says something about a department—if not the university as a whole—when its leader will come right out and say that the reason there aren’t more conservatives teaching college is that conservatives are stupid.” The claim about his department is especially empty. Other than the emphasis on philosophy of biology it looks like a pretty traditional philosophy department. It’s not clear how you’d find out if the chair’s comment about stupid conservatives really says something about them. It would definitely take some work, so why not just say it?

It’s a tedious and often disingenuous habit to treat attempts at humor, even those that bomb, as revelations of the real beliefs that the joker would otherwise deny or keep under wraps. All the conservative tut-tutting about Brandon’s remarks suggests that feminists aren’t the only ones who can’t take a joke (I’ll hand that off to the fabulous Nellie McKay at the end of the post). Joke or not, a quote relayed by a reporter is not the same as a first-person written statement. If Brandon had written the bit about Mill and stupid conservatives in an op-ed, presumably he would have made sure that his meaning came across in print, and it would make sense to treat it as a serious opinion. He may well be arrogantly clubby about the predominance of liberals in the humanities faculty, or he may be inclined to bullshit when he gets a question that he hasn’t thought much about, or he may have been blowing off steam after reading the ravings of some fringe professor pushing “Intelligent Design” as science. There are plenty more possibilities—I don’t know Prof. Brandon so I’m not suggesting any particular interpretation. My point is that the quote got the play that it did because it was useful—it’s actual significance is uncertain but was probably vastly overstated by his critics. It doesn’t say much for the seriousness of the cause of “intellectual diversity” that a glib remark to a campus newspaper has to be overinterpreted and oversold to make the case for it.

When it comes to using quotes for impact, with little regard for either their significance or their context, KC Johnson is hard to beat. About a year and a half after Brandon made his infamous comment, Johnson used it in an editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Education, a critical look at the explanations and justifications given by the “academic Establishment” for its leftwards imbalance. In retrospect it reads like a warmup for the anti-academic crusade he piggybacked on the lacrosse case—the narrowly-framed issues and boilerplate rhetoric were ready and waiting for the “listening” statement to come along. The editorial is a mix-and-match of quotes framed as evidence of bias but otherwise largely unanalyzed—The Cigarette Smoking Blog (!) has a handy list of some of them. I haven’t checked to see whether there’s any of the misrepresentation that he indulged in while writing about the lacrosse case. But even without digging through his sources it’s clear that he makes no meaningful distinction between George Lakoff speaking to the New York Times, Brandon joking to a student reporter, and some random professor blogging about who’s “f-ing smarter.” They’re treated as equally significant and representative—a fair sign, I think, that Johnson’s main interest is in what sounds good and makes points for his side.

Brandon’s quip about conservatives being stupid is circulating again because of a little farce that Inside Higher Ed recounts in a recent article—“In Culture Wars or Duke-Bashing, Do Facts Matter?” They didn’t to Edward Bernard Glick, an emeritus professor of political science at Temple University, when he wrote an editorial that ran in the Jerusalem Post and, with a somewhat different ending, on the website American Thinker. It’s an especially cranky and slapdash version of the formulaic rant about how everything’s going to hell (aka the academic declensionist narrative). Evil Bender goes into the gory details of Glick’s “logical fallacies, lack of evidence, lack of proper attribution, and… burning desire to pin all of society’s ills on the academy.” What I find interesting is that what drives the reasoning (such as it is) is assumptions about the people responsible for the decline.

He brings the anonymous bad guys on stage as protesters at the ‘68 Democratic national convention in Chicago. “[W]hat did these Marxist demonstrators and their cohorts elsewhere do next? They stayed in college. They sought out the easiest professors and the easiest courses.” Safe from the draft, they whiled away the Vietnam war lowering academic standards, and when the war was over they had nothing better to do than get tenure and transform the university into “the most postmodernist, know-nothing, anti-American, anti-military, anti-capitalist, Marxist institution in our society.”

Thanks to this takeover by ignorants, college graduates these days are “well trained, but badly educated”—they’ve been trained “to feel sad, angry or guilty about their country and its past” in an intolerant atmosphere in which “politically-correct feelings are now more important than knowledge,… logic, and critical thinking.” When it comes to Darfur, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “Muslim hatred,” gas prices and the energy supply, they have everything completely wrong. The professors responsible for all this miseducating don’t make much money but they get “huge psychological incomes in the form of power.” They “shape the minds of their students” and control hiring, promotion, tenure, etc., so naturally they pack the faculty with like-minded comrades. (Facetiously, I think, John K. Wilson flips the point about income on its head—it’s the liberals who are stupid for going into such a low-paying profession).

Duke University is a case in point. Some time ago, a department chairman* was asked in an interview on NPR if his department hired Republicans. He answered (I paraphrase from memory): “No. We don’t knowingly hire them because they are stupid and we are not.”


If I were a in his field, Duke would never hire me, for I am a Republican, and a Jewish one at that. Moreover, when I was an active academic during and after the Vietnam War, I audaciously taught politically-incorrect courses: civil-military relations and the politics of national defense.


*Correction: The author initially identified the speaker as the chairman of Duke’s psychology department. This was an error of memory. The author and American Thinker apologize to the chairman in question and to readers for this error.

That’s the end of the article, and he really outdoes himself—not only casually misremembering Brandon’s remark but also slipping in a gratuitous suggestion of anti-semitism, a pat on his own back for bravely carrying the torch for some very conventional subjects, and a wonderfully inadequate correction. If that’s any indication of the quality of his work, it wouldn’t be his politics that kept Duke from hiring him.

[July 18: I pulled the above quote about a week ago—between July 11 and 14, I’m guessing. As of a day or two ago, American Thinker had lopped off the ending and expanded the correction. Today it’s reverted to what I quoted. Gotta wonder what’s up with that.]

Glick’s editorial reads like a feeble parody of Alan Kors’ much more articulate meditation “On the sadness of higher education” from a couple of months ago. Kors gives an especially eloquent account of the academic values he first encountered as an undergraduate, while Glick honors what’s been lost only in strident negatives. But both of them pin the decline on a bunch of ideologues who apparently have nothing to say for themselves that’s worth listening to. For Glick, it’s wild-eyed, wooly-headed “Marxists.” For Kors, it’s “careerist” administrators who have “given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics.” In both cases it’s an intellectual cop-out—dismissive characterization in place of an argument. Johnson has given himself the space to take a more creative approach—misrepresenting, exaggerating, and “perfecting” the “race/class/gender extremists” on the Duke faculty to suit his self-righteous crusade. It’s as if, after playing the same video game for two years, he’s still perfectly content on level one, where he can effortlessly mow down the gangs of slow-moving evildoers.

I don’t dismiss concerns about intellectual diversity on campus (“ideological diversity” would be a more accurate term, though). The self-appointed conservative advocates of it—the ones I’ve been coming across—seem to be much more intent on discrediting and denouncing the left/liberal Establishment than on making a case that they represent valuable diversity. They suggest the opposite, in fact, with their willingness to cut corners intellectually. But I know of two professors who, by example, make good cases for the conservative contribution to intellectual diversity. The first is Michael Gustafson, an engineering professor at Duke who, during the lacrosse scandal, managed to be a voice of moderation while also speaking up for the lacrosse players and questioning the judgment of some of his colleagues. He seems to have been among the first to notice Glick’s sloppiness, and there’s a series of posts on his blog that traces his investigation. When he calls it “another unfortunate case of distortion being touted as fact in order to oversell a point…,” I’m guessing he’s looking back to the self-serving distortions that have been a staple of lacrosse-case debate (it’s all too easy to find the same thing elsewhere, of course).

Farther from home, there’s Matthew Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy at Penn State and the subject, along with his wife and professional collaborator, April Kelly-Woessner, of an engaging profile published in The Chronicle of Higher Education early this year. With respect to the debates about intellectual diversity, what sets both conservative husband and liberal wife apart is their committed empiricism—they don’t just debate their disagreements, they go out and do a study. One of their studies documented an effect, generally negative, of professors’ overt politics on students’ engagement and appreciation. Another found that differences in interests and personal values seemed to go a long ways towards explaining why liberals are more likely to pursue PhD studies than conservatives. That doesn’t settle the issue, but it’s a refreshing change from dogma and tribalistic rhetoric.

Woessner also defies the conventional wisdom from the Right that surfaces, for instance, in most any comment thread where academic political bias is in play. For instance: “I was a university faculty member for 14 years and I can absolutely confirm what happens to faculty when they have a difference of opinion with the prevailing groupthink.” I don’t doubt that some people are effectively drummed out of academia for not toeing the liberal line. It’s sure not Woessner’s experience, though—he says “he never confronted intolerance in the classroom. Even some of his most liberal professors went out of their way to solicit his views.” That may not be typical or even common—I really don’t know. I do know that some of us are thrilled to have students who are willing and able to articulate a perspective that contrasts or conflicts with our own.

Gustafson and Woessner show in practice how valuable conservative voices can be to a left-leaning university faculty. But what they bring to the table is more than a party affiliation. There’s a willingness to engage with and respect the other side, and a real commitment to honest, constructive debate. To some extent it probably comes down to personality, and I don’t want to suggest that the only good conservative academics are the ones who make nice. Looking at the opposite extreme, though, Glick’s article is neither constructive nor very honest. If that’s what conservatives have to offer—more right-wing noise trying to drown out the prevailing left-wing noise—it’s not much use as diversity (I should note that it’s not an issue Glick takes up). It seems to me that many of the advocates of intellectual diversity are much closer to Glick than Gustafson, too ready to engage in all-out rhetorical warfare, letting the ends justify the means. A little more leading by example might be nice.

Speaking of people who can’t take a joke, Nellie McKay has something to say…

It’s not surprising that DIW plays well to the anti-intellectual crowd, since Johnson is telling them exactly what they want to hear. I don’t understand how anyone who’s pro-intellectual can swallow the academic-culture side of DIW. It’s especially disconcerting that conservative academics—an embattled minority, or so they say, but presumably still pro-intellectual—are so pleased by Johnson’s dogged prosecution of the “loopy left” that they don’t care how many corners he cuts or how much he caters to ignorance to do it. As long as he’s nailing the guilt-presuming purveyors of bias and relativism, there seems to be no expectation that he should rise to a higher intellectual standard himself.

I’ve been browsing the academic blogosphere trying to understand this disconnect. A link from DIW led me to Erin O’Connor’s blog Critical Mass, where it seemed I might find a more reflective version of Johnson’s general perspective on academia. Her tone is less strident and her interests are more flexible. On the other hand, she describes her blog as “a running chronicle of cant on American campuses,” so the focus is not on what’s typical or representative, it’s on what’s outrageously or pathologically extreme (like the Aliza Shvarts scandal at Yale, which was her main topic during the latter half of April). Even if the targets are chosen from across the political spectrum, it’s a focus that’s good at generating horror and scorn but not so good at fostering understanding. And as far as I can tell, O’Connor’s radar is consistently aimed to the left—maybe she thinks that’s where cant always comes from. DIW is chock-full of right-wing cant, though it’s easy to be oblivious to it if you’re energized by the rhetoric or fooled by the smoke screens (this can’t be a right-wing blog, I support Obama!).

O’Connor posted a long excerpt of Kors’ article, adding a little commentary that highlights his role as co-founder, with Harvey Silverglate, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). It’s an organization that seems to have a lot of credibility, and not just with the conservative set. I’m sympathetic to their stated cause, and as far as I can tell they’re above-board and effective in pursuing it. But I’m not impressed by the one-sided attention to the lacrosse case on their web site or by Silverglate’s pontification on the subject. I left a comment on O’Connor’s post wondering about some of this and suggesting that for Kors and Silverglate, as for Johnson, ideological considerations trump intellectual standards. The responses were pretty routine, though J.A. DeLater gets some brownie points for metaphorically linking career academics to cockroaches because “[they] can tolerate much higher levels of toxic radiation than humans.”

I tried to post a follow-up comment but apparently the dog ate it. For the record, I’ve attached it to the end of this post. I had the same experience with DIW a few weeks ago. I can’t see any good reason for rejecting either comment—it seems most likely that Johnson and then O’Connor decided that it was easiest to duck the challenge (but I would think that, wouldn’t I?). Given his laissez-faire comment policy and the trivializing insinuation he’d put into my mouth, it was especially questionable coming from Johnson. But nobody owes it to me to post my comments, and it’s possible one or the other was lost through an error or a glitch. [O’Connor’s explanation, which I have no trouble accepting, is that it was knocked out by her spam filter]

When I read all of Kors’ article, it seemed like the product of a split personality, and that O’Connor’s quote only represented one side. In the first part of the article, he looks back at his formative years as a scholar, gracefully evoking the atmosphere of committed intellectualism that drew him in.

The academic world that I first encountered was one of both intellectual beauty and profound flaws. I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term “the Sixties” began. Most of my professors were probably men of the Left—that’s what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil’s advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question. In retrospect, professors who must have disagreed fundamentally with works such as David Donald’s Lincoln Reconsidered (with its celebrated explanation of the abolitionists’ contempt for Lincoln in terms of the loss of status of their fathers’ once-privileged social group) assigned them for our open-minded academic consideration. My professor of Tudor-Stuart history, emerging from the bitter Oxbridge debates over explanations of the English Civil War in terms of class conflict, assigned Jack Hexter’s stunning Reappraisals in Social History to us. When I opined to him somewhat apprehensively that Hexter appeared to have exposed the tendentious use of statistics in my professor’s own prior work, he replied, “You’re absolutely correct.” These were not uncommon experiences in Princeton’s classrooms, and I knew, then and there, that I wanted both to do history and to teach.

In grad school at Harvard, while a few dates left in the midst of dinner on discovering my free- market and hawkish politics, and while I did get thrown out of a party for opposing, when asked, Eugene McCarthy’s view of Vietnam (this should have been a warning), the classroom remained open and, by design, intellectually pluralistic. In our graduate colloquium, we read the major historiographical debates, in works theoretical and monographic, and critical acumen was acknowledged in the force of an argument, not in its political provenance…. In the midst of the “cultural revolution” of the early 1970s, I co-founded a College House and lived warmly with students who mostly ranged from liberal Democrats to true believers of the New Left. They loved to discuss everything, and they did so in good faith and (almost) always ad rem. My students, whom I still meet frequently outside of class, still love to discuss everything, and they still do so in good faith and without ad hominem distractions from real conversation and debate. Critics of higher education who blame students for today’s catastrophes are categorically wrong about agency. It is the faculties (both the minority of zealots and the majority of cowards) and the administrations (both the minority of ideologues and the majority of careerists with double standards) who are to blame.

The academic world I so loved revealed itself best in an undergraduate course I’d taken on the history of Europe in the twentieth century. When the professor, a distinguished intellectual of the Left, returned the midterms to the hundred plus or so of us who were in his course, he said that we’d saddened and embarrassed him. “I gave you readings that allowed you to reach such diverse conclusions,” he explained, “but you all told me what you thought I wanted to hear.” He informed us that he would add a major section to the final exam: “I’m going to assign the book I disagree with most about the twentieth century. I’m not going to ask you to criticize it, but, instead, to re-create its arguments with intellectual empathy, demonstrating that you understand the perspectives from which he understands and analyzes the world.” I was moved by that. The work was Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and it changed the course of my intellectual and moral life. It also showed me immediately how I wanted to teach as an intellectual historian. Each year, I teach thinkers as diverse as Pascal and Spinoza, Hobbes and Butler, Wesley and Diderot. I offer courses on intellectual history, and the goal of my teaching is to make certain that my students understand the perspectives and rich debates that have shaped the dialogue of the West. I don’t want disciples of my worldview. I want students who know how to read deeply, how to analyze, how to locate the essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers, and, indeed, how to understand, with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought. I know that I am not alone, but I also know, alas, that I am in a distinct minority in my pedagogical goals in the humanities and the so-called social sciences.

Even with his admirable determination not to treat those times as a golden era—he acknowledges and deplores the racism, sexism, snobbery, and intolerance—there’s still some rose-coloring. If I wrote about my time at Reed College in the early 80s it would probably be colored in much the same way. I remember it as high-minded time and place, with some fine, challenging, dedicated teachers. What I see around me and what happens in my own classes never seems to rise to quite the same level.

Johnson has worked hard to portray a contingent of Duke professors as threats not only to students but to the integrity of the university. Those associated with African & African American Studies (AAAS) and Women’s Studies, especially, have been criticized for sacrificing academic standards to their extremist political agendas. I take the concern seriously, if not the rhetoric—it’s intellectual poison for professors to get into the business of indoctrination. Reading DIW did get me thinking about the issue, but I’ve waded through plenty of the alarmist rhetoric Johnson’s thrown at it and come up with virtually nothing of substance that’s either constructive or insightful. In three paragraphs that evoke a free-ranging dialog of ideas—an intellectual climate that’s not simply tolerant but actively seeks out challenging alternatives—Kors conveys more about the fundamental academic values at stake than Johnson has managed to fit into a few hundred thousand agenda-driven words.

When Johnson talks about the ideals of his profession, he seems to be referring to respect for due process and adherence to the faculty handbook—he doesn’t show any particular interest in the values that Kors highlights, so I probably shouldn’t expect his criticism to be guided by them. It’s harder to fathom why Kors lovingly wraps his souvenir only to toss the package out the window in order to grind his culture-war axe. He’s editorializing, not bouncing ideas around in a seminar, so it’s true that in the end scholarly neutrality has to take a back seat. But where is the spirit behind “read[ing] deeply,… locating essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers,… [and] understand[ing], with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought”? If that’s the attitude that best serves students in the classroom, how is it that the readers of the New Criterion are best served by ditching it?

Turning to the contemporary university, Kors finds what seems to be an entirely new species of professor—careerists who mean no harm but are at the mercy of a reflexive ideology:

To understand why and to understand one of the few vulnerabilities of universities to actual accountability and reform, one must understand the hierarchy that predicts academic institutional behavior: sexuality (in their language, “sexual preference”) trumps neutrality; race properly conceived easily trumps sexuality; sex properly conceived (or, in their language, “gender”) easily trumps race; and careerism categorically trumps everything. From that perspective, the careerists who run our campuses have made a Faustian bargain (though they differ on which is the devil’s portion)….. From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences, and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case—the professoriate and the curriculum—it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias, and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

One thing Kors and Silverglate have in common is ready access to the pathos of the decline and fall of the academy. Kors’ “profoundly sad” conclusion echos a remark Silverglate made about Duke chemistry professor Steven Baldwin—that it was “unbearably sad” that Baldwin ended up apologizing for the scathing criticism of Duke’s administration and some of its faculty in his October 2006 op-ed.

Kors’ facile reduction of a large segment of the university to a simplistic ideology brings the Baldwin incident to mind in other ways. According to Johnson and Silverglate, what happened after Baldwin’s op-ed was published was that left-wing ideologues—the group Kors is lamenting—ganging up on him because he dared to buck their agenda. That may or may not be what happened, as far as I can tell. What’s striking to me is that those who take Baldwin’s side are determined to reduce the incident to that one single thing, no matter what. They’re horrified by Robyn Weigman’s charge that Baldwin used “the language of lynching,” but they can’t seem to imagine any legitimate objections to Baldwin’s suggestion that certain (unnamed) colleagues should be tarred and feathered and then run out of the academy on a rail. That starts looking a lot like a self-serving delusion when you realize that the only trace of this onslaught against Baldwin that’s come to light is two letters—Weigman’s published response and Kerrie Haynie’s personal email—and the latter doesn’t fit the narrative of shrill pc outrage at all.

No professor at Duke was a more outspoken advocate of the university in loco parentis than Baldwin. Personally, I’m almost as bothered by his paternalistic certainty that we should all be treating our students as “our kids” as I am by his enthusiasm for summary justice. The parental overtones of the op-ed don’t seem to have been much on Silverglate’s mind, but it’s still ironic that he seems to find the philosophy laudable—he certainly doesn’t make any object to it—while Kors finds it deplorable.

It would be pretty fruitless to try to refute Kors’ sweeping conclusions, especially since they’re drawn from personal experience. I’ll pull up a few texts associated with the lacrosse case, though, to suggest that he’s chosen to face down a flock of cardboard cutouts instead of taking up the other side’s perspective as a challenge.

In the Social Text article that figured in my last two posts, Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt have quite a bit to say about the university in loco parentis. They see the university before the revolutions of the 60’s as an analogue of the patriarchal family. The student revolutions forced an end to that paternalism, but according to the authors the parental model has made a comeback in a somewhat different guise, serving the business interests of the institution, not the political interests of any of its faculty.

As various historians of the U.S. university have noted, the reemergence of parental logics in the aftermath of student revolts has been accomplished primarily by legal, not moral or ethical, debate. Kinship obligations manage the imaginary realm in which the university’s need to protect its students from mental health problems, addictive behaviors, and violence to the self or others arises from its need to protect itself from its students and their increasingly litigious parents. It’s a complicated negotiation: the cultivation of students as “our kids” functions in order to safeguard the university from the violence and abuse that our kids might do to themselves and to others, with the specter of lawsuits constantly looming in the background. …

The good parents of today’s university live in the student service sector. It functions as the relay between demands for the university to address the students’ needs as members of specific groups (whether gender, racial, ethnic, national, or sexual) and the institution’s investment in the renewed cultivation of the parental model. Under the auspices of student services, the new publics that accompanied student revolt can be corralled back into the cultivation of the student as the institution’s child and as its future donor. … To say, then, that student services becomes the means to acknowledge the importance of race and gender in the form of consigning them to the realm of student life is to mark the way that the force of student rebellions has been managed, in much the same way that the primary discourse mobilized by these agencies—of social justice, fairness, and equity—has been reproduced in the service of empowering those who were once its targets.

In this context, it is important to note how the early historical ties between student centers and the intellectual projects of race and gender studies have been disarticulated in this process. On many campuses, in fact, there is growing antagonism between the two entities. In the relation between women’s studies and women’s centers, for instance, it is often the stance toward sex and sex publics that generates a rift, especially when scholars who work in queer studies, human rights, and sex trafficking do not follow the reigning discourses of women’s empowerment that so closely analogize sex and oppression. University administrations have found a certain relief in the constituency languages that student services provides, in part because these languages displace the problem of attending to the knowledge challenges that rigorous attention to the study of gender and racial formation raises.

The only way I could really evaluate this analysis would be to work through some examples, taking into account the practical problems of managing a community of thousands of post-adolescents who are making their first steps into adulthood and independence. Right now all I want to point out is that what Kors portrays as a unit with a common purpose—the professors of “oppression studies” and the parental administrative apparatus—looks from the other side like two distinct things that are more and more at odds, despite their common roots.

The distinction between the corporate interests of the university and the political and intellectual interests of its faculty is an important one. History professor Claire Potter (aka Tenured Radical) sums it up well—she clearly isn’t a fan of the university’s “‘rights free’ zone.”

Johnson may have been correct that Duke did not handle the lacrosse case well… but this was not a symptom of the university’s liberalism as an institution—quite the reverse, in fact. It is the flip side of a university governance process, almost ubiquitously shared among institutions of higher education, that more or less declares the campus a “rights-free” zone. This elimination of civil rights in university processes is neither a liberal nor a conservative issue: it is a question of whether the private sphere—whether that be Walmart or Harvard—can make its own rules to protect its own interests as an institution. The law says they can, and they do.

Potter’s analysis is emphatically borne out by Elliott Wolf’s “Dude, where’s my rights…” series in the Duke Chronicle (there are annotated versions of the articles on his home page). Wolf documents eight years of steady erosion in respect for due process in the Duke Judicial Code. It’s first-rate student journalism that picks up on an issue central to the lacrosse case but without getting mired in lacrosse-case tunnel vision. He sums up his findings in the Coupe de Grace (his term):

Since 1999, the Office of Judicial Affairs has watered down or eliminated
every major due process right afforded students facing adjudication; it has so broadened
its policies and procedures that almost any student could be summarily subjected to
judicial action for any reason; it has eliminated all representative student involvement in
making and enforcing undergraduate policy; and lastly, it has begun colluding with local
law enforcement in ways that arguably undermine students’ basic constitutional rights.

Wolf’s last piece for the Chronicle, a covert look at the Student Affairs-Industrial Complex, meshes nicely with Wiegman, Lubiano, and Hardt’s observations about the “student services sector.” The overall impression I get from Wolf’s coverage is that student affairs (judicial or otherwise) is its own little fiefdom, largely independent of the faculty.

Kors works himself up to a fever pitch with a string of rhetorical questions about the “almost insoluble problem of time” faced by professors intent on indoctrination: “How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity, and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society?” etc., etc. He follows that a couple of paragraphs later with the statement of purpose that, in his opinion, would constitute “truth in advertising” for the leftist “academic enterprises” that have a grip on higher education:

Let colleges and universities have the courage, if they truly believe what they say privately to themselves and to me, to put it on page one of their catalogues, fundraising letters, and appeals to the State assembly: “This University believes that your sons and daughters are the racist, sexist, homophobic, Eurocentric progeny or victims of an oppressive society from which most of them receive unjust privilege. In return for tuition and massive taxpayer subsidy, we shall assign rights on a compensatory basis and undertake by coercion their moral and political enlightenment.”

I’ve come across this idea before—near the end of one of the earliest comments I got on a lacrosse-case post, for instance:

Why should I increase my law practice dramatically to earn more income to support the salaries of faculty members who think the constitution does not apply to their students? I don’t like that it comes down to money but it is a consideration. I understand the faculty believes I have raised a racist and sexist child who desperately needs their education.

The person who wrote that is too articulate and thoughtful for me to dismiss, and I can see how someone who’s remote from university life could end up with the impression. It’s nutty stuff coming from a professor, though. Kors’ dire portrait goes far beyond reasonable concern about the cumulative effect of subtle, unconscious bias combined with the apparent willingness of a few professors to flirt with the line between education and indoctrination, and perhaps cross it. That may be a real problem, but in the context of the whole array of social and intellectual influences the students are navigating, it doesn’t justify the hyperbole. And if Kors is right about what an honest mission statement would look like, Duke is doing a miserable job of it.

It could be that I missed the memo laying out this brave new world of undergraduate education—I’ve never really been in the loop. But for what it’s worth, I’ll outline a few of the ways that Kors’ story clashes with my own experience. I’ve taught traditional music theory classes—thoroughly Eurocentric, if we have to use the word. I also taught Introduction to Jazz, a class that was cross-listed under AAAS. I’ve never imagined that I could arrange, much less coerce, any moral or political enlightenment from the students in my classes. I’m sure it would backfire if I tried, and I’d feel completely ridiculous in the process. If a student of mine has ever felt that they were being judged on some kind of political correctness it was either a misunderstanding or a failure on my part to live up to my professional commitments. I’ve never gotten an overt or covert message that I should teach to an approved ideology. In fact I’ve had closer to the opposite experience—in five semesters teaching Introduction to Jazz, which is a fairly large survey course, I never heard a thing from AAAS about what I should teach, or, for that matter, about anything else. From my experience if there’s a problem it’s the hands-off attitude, not pressure to conform.

As for as my own priorities, I can’t imagine wasting time and energy on indoctrination when I could be digging into the artistic and historical feast of, say, Louis Armstrong’s Dinah (check out the video!), Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy, or Charlie Parker’s Ko-Ko, or guiding a class through the quasi-mathematical discipline of sixteenth-century counterpoint. I can’t imagine talking about Beethoven in order to dismiss him as a dead white male any more than I can imagine talking about the blues in order to trivialize it as salacious and primitive. I would hope to challenge students with either attitude to reconsider (last year I put up some thoughts about teaching classical music and the blues as well as a long post about my experience with Introduction to Jazz). I’ve never felt that I was out of step with my colleagues about any of this.

That’s just me, and I’m not denying that there’s a basis for Kors’ complaints. There’s no shortage of anti-Western sentiment in the humanities—some but not all of it is thoughtless and reflexive (it’s not too much for the edifice of Western civilization to bear, as far as I can tell). The clash of values has been heated in music departments—professors are great at turning big ideas and ideologies into a pretext for a turf war, so there’s been pettiness on both sides. But for many of us, if there’s a problem with today’s more inclusive concept of what music is worth studying, it’s that we’ve ended up with an embarrassment of riches.

Kors says, “I fight for intellectual pluralism, for legal equality, and for fairness simply because it is my duty to bear witness to the values I cherish, with no expectation of success.” It would be nice if he didn’t just bear witness but actually put those precious values into practice for the general public to see, instead of insulting them in order to fire up the anti-intellectual enemies of his enemy.

[O’Connor has now responded to this post, or at least complained about it. Her counterargument, if you can call it that, boils down to the observation that Kors is the kind of person that sensible people believe and all I’ve done is throw sour grapes at him. Natually I had to write a followup, too.]

The comment of mine that wasn’t cleared on was rejected by the spam filter on Critical Mass:

DeLater’s impression of present-day academia, even more than Kors’, seems like a comic-book version of reality as I see it. It’s great for nursing grudges and fruitless to argue with.

I read all of Kors’ article after posting my comment. The earlier part, which I liked, is a description of an intellectual climate in which professors fostered intellectualism over ideology and valued independent thought on the part of their students, even encouraged students to follow lines of reasoning that challenged their professor’s political convictions. So it seems that his ideal for the university is very close to mine. I was thinking about that kind of intellectual openness when I commented (tongue in cheek, more or less) about my own relativism.

It’s exactly those values that I can’t reconcile with Johnson’s criticism. His argument is often circular and serious challenges are studiously avoided. And it thrives on false choices like the one implicit in TG’s challenge—to criticize it is not necessarily to make a “pro-Duke 88 argument.” This comment thread isn’t the place to spell the issues out in detail. If you’re interested in the basis for my opinion, go here. But don’t bother if you’ve got the controversy neatly packaged up and you want to keep it that way.