Once More Unto the Breach

By Michael J. Ellis | Friday, April 8, 2005

It goes almost without saying that the student bodies, faculties, and administrations of the nation's colleges and universities lean heavily to the left. Since the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, the intellectual atmosphere of the academy has become increasingly ideologically charged, with liberals decisively in the majority. Nevertheless, those who point out this self-evident factare often met derisively and treated as if they were reporting on the proverbial dog biting a man.

Recent events, however, have made it necessary to revisit the impact of ideology in academia. Most notably, perhaps, long-haired and pseudo-Indian University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill derided the victims of the 9/11 attacks as "little Eichmanns." More recently, Harvard President Larry Summers faced a media maelstrom after he had the gall to suggest to perhaps the sexes' brains may function in different ways. Here at Dartmouth, Todd Zywicki '88 and Peter Robinson '79 have faced an establishment backlash, in the form a dubious and malicious website against their petition-driven attempts to become Trustees.

A number of recent studies, moreover, have offered quantitative evidence to back up the anecdotes of liberal bias. A team of professors from George Mason University, Smith College, and the University of Toronto found that 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges identify themselves as liberal, while just 15 percent call themselves conservatives. Given that the general population has roughly twice as many conservatives as it does liberals, something is wrong with this picture. Daniel Klein, a professor of economics at Santa Clara University who spoke on campus on Wednesday, has found similar results at Stanford and UC-Berkeley. Speaking of Berkeley, research after the 2004 election found that employees of the Cal system and Harvard were the top two contributors to John Kerry's campaign, more than any Hollywood studio or personal injury law firm. As Alana Finley notes on page six, The Review's own research of professors here shows that the Hanover Plain is no exception to the rule.

Is this a problem? There are certainly many who think so, including David Horowitz, founder of the ambitiously-named Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Barnstorming across the nation's campuses and occasionally its legislatures, Horowitz and others trumpet these statistics as if they were proof that the liberal academy is brainwashing America's youth, as if, when Angela Lansbury flips over a Queen of Hearts, students across the county will simultaneously recite Marx and switch their majors to Queer Studies.

The situation, however, is not so clear-cut. Some of the most unabashedly liberal professors at Dartmouth are also some of its best, and some professors who might be more doctrinally acceptable to Mr. Horowitz are some of the worst teachers. One of the chief missions of the university (or the College, as the case may be) is to challenge its students intellectually, to make them reconsider their long-held assumptions, and to create stronger thinkers from the process. Professors have a duty to inject some degree of controversy in to the classroom, if for no other reason but to stimulate a healthy intellectual debate. If I wanted to be surrounded by those who agreed with me I would have attended a college like Hillsdale, Hampden-Sydney, or, were I of different faith, Grove City. Or, as Mark Bauerlein argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "being the lone dissenter in a colloquy, one learns to acquire sure facts, crisp arguments, and a thick skin."

If Horowitz were to have his way, conservatives would be the next group to join the list of those victimized and oppressed by the campus status quo, the very type of fragmentation and fractionalizing that destroys a common experience. This "solution," while appealing on its face, would set us on the road towards admissions preferences for students from Utah, a special major in conservative studies, and, to ensure that we never have to leave our comfort zones, separate conservative housing (no doubt strewn with National Reviews and empty bourbon bottles).

What is truly concerning is that the disproportionate percentage of professors who subscribe to liberal or "progressive" ideologies leaves many students comfortably complacent about their views. As J. Stethers White notes on page ten, it is liberal students who are unwittingly injured the most by faculty homogeneity. Your average freshman, the scion of upper-middle class parents, hails from a socially acceptable blue area (Manhattan or the right suburb of Boston is preferable, but New Jersey or Long Island will do in a pinch), and will likely never encounter a conservative professor throughout their Dartmouth career. Such was the experience of Dan Knecht '05, who wrote in a recent Daily Dartmouth editorial that "I am sure they roam the halls of Silsby and Carpenter, but they either remain shamefully quiet or teeter on the verge of extinction" (1/26/05). While fellow students (and, hopefully, The Review itself) may take on the faculty's proper role by challenging the long-held assumptions of Knecht and his peers, the College is failing in its mission.

If Horowitz's call to the barricades is the wrong approach to fight the problem of liberal bias, what is correct? Let me suggest as a parallel the growth of the conservative movement itself in the lonely days after 1964's electoral debacle. Funding by philanthropic foundations spurred the emergence of a number of think-tanks, including the Heritage Foundation (founded 1973) and the Cato Institute (founded 1977). Instead of merely lamenting the lack of conservative policy initiatives at the highest levels, the think-tanks provided the apparatus necessary to create original ideas and research. Only recently have left-leaning groups caught up and started to build their own infrastructure of think-tanks to complement academia, the more traditional liberal bastion. Here at Dartmouth, they have awarded thousands of dollars to a leftist rag. Now is the time for conservatives to fight back, by adding our voices to the fray in academia just as we did in the public sector a generation ago.

Yes, there are countless stories of promising conservative doctoral candidates driven away by the Shelby Granthams and Marysa Navarros of the world. But to restore an intellectual atmosphere where different viewpoints are encouraged rather than stifled, where Larry Summers and Todd Zywicki are free to speak their minds without retribution, it will be necessary for more conservatives to enter academia. Fields like economics and engineering have always been more hospitable towards conservatives, but more are needed in biology to teach the ethics that must accompany scientific research, more are need in English classes to teach the great books, and more are needed in history to teach the roots of Western civilization. It will only be after conservatives are no longer bizarre oddities on campuses that stories on ideological bias in academia can become as newsworthy as the man biting the dog.

Once More Unto the Breach

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