Conservatives and the university

Stanley Fish examines the research of several conservative scholars, who asked why it is that “the vast majority of academics in the humanities and social sciences self-identify as left-of-center (as they surely do),” and he summarizes their conclusions: “conservatives are not being kept out of the academy by a liberal power structure.” The American university’s ideological imbalance is probably intractable, because it is the result of “many factors not under conscious control.”

Fish is so well satisfied by this answer that he goes on to suggest that arguments for “intellectual diversity”—the scare quotes are his—are “less philosophical than strategic.” The only reason that anyone on the Right calls for a diversity of sources, ideas, theorems, concerns, inclinations, methods, and approaches is to hoist the Left on its own petard. Peter Wood, to whom Fish attributes this view, has already corrected its shallowness.

Even so, the question is a challenging one. Why should the American university be more ideologically balanced than it is now? The answer is not immediately obvious.

David Bernstein offers one reply. Namely: even though a Gallup survey in late October found that forty percent of the American people identify themselves as conservative, American academics are so ignorant of basic conservatism that they are unable to spot the phoniness of racist remarks ascribed to a famous conservative. Bernstein might have added that an even larger portion of the Western intellectual and literary tradition is soaked with conservative thought and expression. It is bad enough to assume without further inquiry that Rush Limbaugh praised slavery and Martin Luther King’s assassin. It is far worse to treat Milton, Dryden, Swift, Austen, Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Thackeray, Newman, James, Yeats, and Conrad—to name only a few English writers—as standing on the Left alongside thee and me.

Fish is right, though, that such an answer conceives the university as a representational institution, which it is not. In criticizing my mentor Gerald Graff’s ideas on education many years ago, I abused this conception, pointing out that ‘genuine arguments do not occur between representatives of a ‘view’ or ‘side.’ ”

But right there is the real point. Intellectual diversity—without the scare quotes—is a necessary precondition to genuine arguments. Lack of resistance and disagreement is a grave warning in scholarship, suggesting that conclusions are no longer the product of rational inquiry but have become merely common opinion, taken for granted as what “everyone knows.” (That’s an allusion to the first chapter of The Human Stain, by the way—the best dissection of political correctness in academe yet written.) Leftist academics should know their Kuhn well enough to recognize a paradigm when they see one, but when it comes to their own academic departments, they prefer to be surrounded by those who are bounded by the same tradition that binds them. When I was being considered for an appointment at Texas A&M, I submitted a paper on the New Historicism as a writing sample—precisely because the A&M department was known as a hotbed of the “new movement in Anglo-American literary scholarship.” Instead of welcoming the disagreement, however, many in the department opposed my appointment on the grounds of my opposition to their ideas. “Why should we hire someone who is against us?” a historicist asked one of my champions.

Perhaps it is true that conservatives are not being kept out of the academy by a liberal power structure. But it is equally true that their intellectual habits lead academic liberals to resist the resistance of conservatives, and to be careless with truth and satisfied with error to at least that degree.