The grim reality is this: the biggest gains in educational achievement for minority students, especially African Americans, occurred in the 1970s. With the exception of a few years at the turn of the century, progress has stalled nearly everywhere, despite all the hope we’ve put in charter schools and in fads like a much-touted but now-discredited New York experiment (one of the more absurd manifestations of our faith in markets), offering cash incentives to families whose children regularly attend classes.

Why did the racial gap narrow so much in the ’70s—and why has it stalled since? It’s not because the ’70s was a period of great educational innovation. Instead, it was the one moment in recent American history when there was still political will to support educational integration. Around the country through the mid-’70s, school boards, state departments of education, and the federal government supported plans to desegregate schools.

Many of those plans were voluntary: some were court ordered. The road to integration was bumpy—I don’t need to recap the whole busing brouhaha here (except to remind you of Julian Bond’s famous reminder that white folks had no problem putting their kids on buses in all-white suburbs: “it’s not the bus, it’s us.”) Even if it wasn’t a panacea, when it was tried, integration worked. But it wasn’t tried for long.

Since the ’70s, support for integration, except rhetorically, has plummeted. Many black parents were (and are) rightly skeptical of the rhetoric of some integrationists—namely that mere exposure to whites would somehow magically uplift their children. And most whites tell pollsters and survey researchers that they support racial integration, until more than a handful of minority students show up, and then they bolt. The result is that school districts have resegregated. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased.

Choose the best answer to complete this sentence: According to the author of this passage, all but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow would be pleased because…

A) the achievement gap between black and white students hasn’t narrowed since the ’70s.
B) plummeting public support for integration has allowed some school districts to resegregate.
C) the idea that black children will be uplifted by mere exposure to white children strikes some black parents as racist.
D) the Supreme Court recently struck down school integration plans, even when they’re voluntary.

I hope the answer is obvious. But I took out the author’s second to last sentence (I also left out a parenthetical plug for the book The American Dream and the Public Schools). Here’s the full final paragraph:

Since the ’70s, support for integration, except rhetorically, has plummeted. Many black parents were (and are) rightly skeptical of the rhetoric of some integrationists—namely that mere exposure to whites would somehow magically uplift their children. And most whites tell pollsters and survey researchers that they support racial integration, until more than a handful of minority students show up, and then they bolt. The result is that school districts have resegregated. And more recently, the Roberts Court has struck down even voluntary school integration plans. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased.

Based on the redacted text, the answer to my pretend SAT question is B. Both A and C are vaguely plausible but misconstrue the overall thrust and D comes out of nowhere. D becomes a plausible answer when the sentence I took out is put back in. But is the author — University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue — singling out just the court decision for hypothetical praise? It seems to me that he isn’t, that what would please a bunch of moldy old segregationists would be the fact of continued segregation, which in Sugrue’s narrative is reinforced and extended by the court decision.

According to KC Johnson, though, Sugrue is actually “branding the Roberts Court with a Jim Crow brush.” Well, not a brush, exactly, because how do you brand with a brush? What Sugrue is really using is “extraordinarily charged rhetoric.” Johnson made the claim in a post last August on Minding the Campus, and he has no trouble backing it up — he just lifts the two sentences that make his point and ignores everything else (I’ve quoted about a third of Sugrue’s piece).

The core of Johnson’s argument, if you can call it that, is a piece of precision typecasting. He introduces Sugrue as a “serious scholar” who’s produced “first-class work on important topics” — he’s “hardly an academic crank.”

Nonetheless, two recent items from Sugrue have been, to put it mildly, striking. First was his participation in the “Crying Wolf” project, the scheme to pay graduate students and younger professors to produce “research” that conformed to the Wolfers’ political agenda.

Then came this assertion, at Ta-Neishi [sic] Coates’ Atlantic blog: “And more recently, the Roberts Court has struck down even voluntary school integration plans. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased.”

Though he didn’t link to the decision, Sugrue presumably was referring to Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, in which the Roberts Court struck down a Seattle school-assignment scheme…. […]

People of good faith can, and do, disagree on the merits of the Parents Involved decision. It was, after all, decided by a 5-4 vote…. But could any fair-minded observer seriously maintain that the decision would satisfy “all but the most hardcore advocates from the Brown v. Board days”?

Just as a matter of form I’d expect something like, Sugrue, guest blogging at the Atlantic, wrote a piece lamenting the declining fortunes of school integration. His focus is mainly the Obama administration and the public at large, but he takes one wild jab at the Supreme Court: “And more recently, the Roberts Court…” (I don’t actually think it’s a wild jab at the court, I’m just trying to get into the spirit of Johnson’s post). Coming from Johnson, though, the context-free attack quote is nothing new or surprising. In the closest parallel I know of from the lacrosse case, a nine-word quote is used to show one-sidedness when the message, in context, is exactly the opposite. The one distinctive piece of information Johnson mentions as he frames Sugrue’s quote is the name of the host blogger (it’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, though). Why, of all things, choose that?

Johnson treats the quote as if its meaning is self-evident (it’s not *) but to understand its significance you need to know about the author. You don’t need to know very much, though — just two things. On one hand, he’s a fine scholar who’s written, according to Johnson, “one of the three or four best books currently in print on 20th century American political culture.” On the other hand, his name recently appeared on the list of advisers to this highly questionable “Cry Wolf” project. The contradiction unmasks Sugrue as a particular campus character — the impeccable scholar who, after so much time in the mind-numbing bath of far-left groupthink, has no idea what counts as reasonable in the real world. Bill Chafe is probably the closest counterpart in Johnson’s Wonderland at Duke. But for an example of a professor whose critical intelligence goes out the window when he goes partisan, it’s hard to do better than Johnson himself.

Perhaps Johnson’s easy certainty that he’s ferreted out a cryptic campus radical is an honest reflection of his experience in academia, and it’s hard to argue with experience. Whatever the source of his convictions, though, what he’s articulating is the well-worn logic of a demagogue exposing dangerous subversives. Most of the work is done by the assumptions about the hypnotic effect of groupthink on the left-wing herd. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of milking a tell-tale quote for all it’s worth. It’s easiest to pull off if you believe, and it looks to me like Johnson is totally convinced that the couple of lines of Sugrue’s that reached out and grabbed him are deeply revealing and also completely disconnected from the text they’re embedded in.

The post about Sugrue seems to be an attempt to flesh out Johnson’s claim, in an earlier post, that the participation of scholars of Sugrue’s caliber in the Cry Wolf project “illuminates the depth of the corruption in the contemporary humanities.” The project got a flurry of attention early in the summer, when Andrew Breitbart got hold of an email requesting proposals (read it here). The goal outlined in the email is to build a library of “policy briefs” that could be used to construct counterarguments when conservatives try to shoot down progressive initiatives by “crying wolf.” Inside Higher Ed has a good overview of the flap, which was kind of hot for about a week and played out mostly on Breitbart’s Big Journalism and Minding the Campus (at least that’s what I’ve found of it).

When Patrick Courrielche broke the story, he called the email RFP “a rare look at how progressives and labor unions attempt to manipulate the national media narrative.” And he thought his readers might be surprised that there’s a cerebral side to the labor movement. Labor unions “have always been considered” (by “[m]any conservatives and libertarians,” that is) “the rough and rugged group that intimidate their opponents through the ‘persuasion of power’” — “a swarm of purple shirts, with the forearms of a lumberjack and a penchant for terrorizing teenagers.”

The next day, Kurt Schlichter outlined how the project would threaten the tax exempt status of the project leader’s institution. Like his Big colleague Courrielche, he also used his first paragraph to make it clear that he was dealing with wrong-headed people with an unsavory project.

The ‘Cry Wolf’ leader Professor Peter Dreier has a clear right to solicit all the biased, agenda-driven, fraudulent ‘research’ he desires under the First Amendment of the Constitution he and his pals have so little regard for.

This is just what you’d expect from a media conglomerate run by a man who “want[s] it to be in the history books that [he] took down the institutional left” — he’s no Arnold B. Truthington of Accuracy Lane, nor are his writers. That’s not to say that no legitimate issues were raised in the dozen-plus pieces Big Journalism ran about Cry Wolf — some of Schlichter’s points might have merit, for instance. But he and Courrielche are up front about their Big Bias, and I appreciate that — it saves me the trouble of trying to sort the truth from the fantasy and fabrication.

Big Journalism isn’t all slick polemic, though. There’s also room for a plain-speaking Tea Partier like Liberty Chick. And it turns out that the less you know about actual research at actual universities, the more clearly you can see how vastly catastrophic this thing is.

A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide. By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process.

In fact, these “so-called scholars… intend to ‘undermine the credibility and arguments’ of those who happen to hold opposing viewpoints to theirs” (**). Liberty Chick misses their even wilder claim, that they’ll do it with 2000 word “policy briefs” that are “well documented and scrupulously accurate.” Everybody knows that real Americans who love their country (and the First Amendment) undermine their opponents with poisonous rhetoric and brutally edited videotapes. These so-called scholars, it’s clear, must be stopped, or else.

The critics with university connections aren’t quite so scattershot, they’re a little smarter about context, and they raise some plausible issues on the margins. Basically, though, the two with the most to say were happy to cry wolf along with Breitbart. The way Erin O’Connor reads the Cry Wolf email, it’s asking researchers “to scramble the difference between disinterested scholarship and agenda-driven advocacy work.” For KC Johnson, the bottom line is that the project “imperils academic integrity” (or at least “little doubt exists” that it does — these things have to be properly hedged). It’s “faux scholarship” based on an “Alice-in-Wonderland conception of what constitutes academic research,” since the conclusion is preordained, and of course with these shifty leftists it’s always Wonderland one way or another.

Is it really so hard to tell the difference between original, peer-reviewed research in the social sciences and a policy brief that draws on that literature? Apparently these critics believe that it is. It’s hard to tell, though, because they never get real about what they expect the Cry Wolf briefs to look like and what sort of scholarship would be scrambled or undermined. Their case is strictly pie-in-the-sky — “disinterested scholarship,” “academic integrity,” “academic freedom” and the “search for truth.” Vocabulary notwithstanding, they’re either as starry-eyed as Liberty Chick or they’re playing dumb.

They also failed to get real about the intermixing of scholarship and partisanship, something that no writer on Minding the Campus can claim to be ignorant about. The site is a wing of the Manhattan Institute. According to a New York Times piece they proudly quote, the Manhattan Institute’s VERITAS project is in the business of “finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas….” (my favorite part is that they’re hoping to bring back “a triumphal interpretation of American history” — it’s not so much about the issues, I guess, as about the poor old boys’ battered egos). I’m not bringing VERITAS up because it’s equivalent to Cry Wolf — it’s not at all. Other conservative initiatives might be — Inside Higher Ed has a little about that. All I want to suggest is that if the institute really believes in “offering an engaged debate for readers concerned with the state of the modern university” and all that other high-minded stuff on the “About Us” page for Minding the Campus, they’d put the issues in context and they’d put their cards on the table. Most of the time, from what I’ve seen, the site is just a mild-mannered cousin to Fox and Breitbart, far more interested in rhetorical leverage than anything else.

On Cry Wolf, though, O’Connor was the main academic water carrier for Breitbart (she’s not on Minding the Campus but on her own blog). After about a day of following the story on Big Journalism she was wondering why all she heard from the rest of the academic world was “thunderous silence.” When were the institutions involved going to distance themselves from the “blatant political advocacy work” and “initiate disciplinary proceedings”? It was like she was taking her cues from Liberty Chick, who feared that the Wolfers “risked discrediting the entire educational sector as a respectable source for research.” All that for a mere $50K! That’s a lot of bang for the buck. VERITAS couldn’t even manage to buy triumphalism at Cornell for $50K.

* Who do you end up with when you take the “advocates of Jim Crow” and set aside “all but the most hardcore”? For me that calls up the folks who voted enthusiastically for the likes of Orville Faubus and George Wallace — a whole lot of very ordinary white southerners, including a number of my relatives — and excludes the ones who were willing to bomb a church. It seems to me that Sugrue’s “extraordinarily charged” rhetorical flourish is highlighting the irony of all that water under the bridge — four decades worth — and so little to show for it. Beyond that, all I see is the uncontroversial claim that segregationists would be pleased by segregation. (go back ^)

** Actually, the Cry Wolf organizers are more specific about whose credibility and arguments they hope to undermine. It’s not “those who happen to hold opposing viewpoints,” as Liberty Chick writes. That would be so mean, to pick on people for views they just happen to hold. It’s “the organizations and individuals who use such dire social and economic prognostications to thwart progressive reform” that they’re going after. (go back ^)

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.