Jason has already linked to this column from the Washington Post by one Robert Maranto discussing life as a moderate Republican in academia. There is much here to chew on, but take a look at this part:
At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are "the third group," far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was "the right half of the left," while at Harvard he found himself "on the right half of the right."
I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I've been on the "far right" as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.
All these views -- commonplace in American society and among the political class -- are practically verboten in much of academia.
This gives one a fairly accurate picture of life on many (not all) college campuses today. The faculty is monolithically on the left, on the far left in some disciplines, and that makes anyone who is moderate to conservative seem outlandish. Thus a Democrat in good standing like Lawrence Summers, who was in the Clinton administration, becomes a "conservative" because he is a man of moderate politics.
Law professor Tom Smith reacts to Maranto's piece by speculating why the academy is so far left. He suggests that universities, with their unthinking, unexamined leftism, have become intellectually boring. Thus bright conservative students not only feel unwelcome in a pervasively liberal atmosphere but also are not intellectually stimulated by professors who relate left-wing tropes as if they are deep thoughts. For example, see Patrick Deneen's insightful discussion of the lazy "diversity" on campuses, a diversity which asks us to exaggerate our differences to the end of ignoring them. Not surprisingly this project fails, which leads to calls for ever more "diversity." This faux diversity, Deneen notes, may even work against actual intellectual diversity.
Deneen offers an explanation for the political/intellectual trends on campus. It's long, but worth reading. I have highlighted what I take to be the key phrases.
Maranto notes that people have a tendency to want to surround themselves with people who think like themselves, but he doesn't tell us how we reached a point we are now at. For that we would need a deeper analysis of the modern liberal project and especially the transformation of the idea of a university from a place in which certain kinds of knowledge was transmitted from one generation to the next, to one in which the university came to be an agent of human progress and advancement. We would further need better understanding of what this transformation does to the humanities - those very disciplines that were the conservators and transmittors of ancient learning, and which become superfluous in the new university. Left without a mission or an identity, their only recourse is to demonstrate their hostility to the very thing that they are supposed to teach: and hence, they become critics of past thinkers, of past ideas, and even of books. Each person is charged with making themselves anew, and no limits or ideas of what constitutes human good (or a good life in concert with natural limits and possibilities) can be posited or even intimated. Thoroughgoing human autonomy is the object and aim of the transformed university - and thus, the humanities become the intellectual handmaidens to the modern sciences and their quest to extend human mastery of the world.
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