Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
"If They Can Find Time for Feminist Theory, They Can Find Time for Edmund
Burke":
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_06_07-2009_06_13.shtml#1244911301
Peter Berkowitz, a political philosopher who is a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution, has an excellent short opinion piece in the Wall
Street Journal, [1]"Conservatism and the University Curriculum," for
which the title of this post is the subtitle. Berkowitz is an
extraordinarily gifted thinker and writer, and this short piece is
well worth reading by academics of any political persuasion, in
thinking about the proper formation of the university curriculum:
Political science departments are generally divided into the
subfields of American politics, comparative politics, international
relations, and political theory. Conservative ideas are relevant in
all four, but the obvious areas within the political science
discipline to teach about the great tradition of conservative ideas
and thinkers are American politics and political theory. That
rarely happens today.
To be sure, a political science department may feature a course on
American political thought that includes a few papers from "The
Federalist" and some chapters from Alexis de Tocqueville's
"Democracy in America."
But most students will hear next to nothing about the conservative
tradition in American politics that stretches from John Adams to
Theodore Roosevelt to William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman to
Ronald Reagan. This tradition emphasizes moral and intellectual
excellence, worries that democratic practices and egalitarian norms
will threaten individual liberty, attends to the claims of religion
and the role it can play in educating citizens for liberty, and
provides both a vigorous defense of free-market capitalism and a
powerful critique of capitalism's relentless overturning of
established ways. It also recognized early that communism
represented an implacable enemy of freedom. And for 30 years it has
been animated by a fascinating quarrel between traditionalists,
libertarians and neoconservatives.
While ignoring the intricacies - no doubt not all of them debates for
the ages - of the debates within conservative and libertarian and
neoconservative thought, the academy has no difficulty accommodating
the intellectual interests and political commitments of its members on
the progressive side of the political spectrum:
While ignoring conservatism, the political theory subfield
regularly offers specialized courses in liberal theory and
democratic theory; African-American political thought and feminist
political theory; the social theory of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim,
Max Weber and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school; and numerous
versions of postmodern political theory.
But the most important point of this op-ed is Berkowitz's attack on
the natural, deeply instinctive response of the academy when pushed to
address the lack of attention to a deeply important intellectual
structure ... you conservatives must want some affirmative action of
your own, a few token conservatives who self-identify as
conservatives, some conservative identity politics to satisfy a
particular interest group constituency ... we know all about this, we
can negotiate something:
When progressives, who dominate the academy, confront arguments
about the need for the curriculum to give greater attention to
conservative ideas, they often hear them as a demand for
affirmative action. Usually they mishear. Certainly affirmative
action for conservatives is a terrible idea.
Political science departments should not seek out professors with
conservative political opinions. Nor should they lower scholarly
standards. That approach would embrace the very assumption that has
corrupted liberal education: that to study and teach particular
political ideas one's identity is more important than the breadth
and depth of one's knowledge and the rigor of one's thinking
One need not be a Puritan to study and teach colonial American
religious thought, an ancient Israelite to study and teach biblical
thought, or a conservative or Republican to study and teach
conservative ideas. Affirmative action in university hiring for
political conservatives should be firmly rejected, certainly by
conservatives and defenders of liberal education.
To be sure, if political science departments were compelled to hire
competent scholars to offer courses on conservative ideas and
conservative thinkers, the result would be more faculty positions
filled by political conservatives, since they and not progressives
tend to take an interest in studying conservative thought. But
there is no reason why scholars with progressive political opinions
and who belong to the Democratic Party can not, out of a desire to
understand American political history and modern political
philosophy, study and teach conservatism in accordance with high
intellectual standards. It would be good if they did.
I suppose I count as a libertarian conservative of some vague stripe.
It strikes me as a weird label, because only within the bowels of the
academy do I think my political views would be counted as
"conservative" in any real sense, or even libertarian. More to the
point, I am not especially political; I'm interested in policy and
ideas, and don't have much of a sense of politics, even while residing
in DC. The politicization of everyday life by the
socio-economic-professional-New Class I hang out with - the tendency,
for example, to twitter one's fleeting political thoughts twenty times
a day, or to Make Political Statements with status updates on Facebook
a couple of times a day - strikes me as somewhere between bizarre and
pathological. Or, worse, trivial - merely the identification of
professional sports. I understand it if it's sports; I don't
understand it at all if it's politics.
Yet within an academic institution, I find myself treated as
"conservative" - either to recoil from in faint horror, with a certain
advice to students, well, if you take him, you have to know what
you're getting, or with a certain faint institutional pride that we're
broad-minded enough to have someone like him, which is to say, there
is nothing an academic institution cannot praise itself for if it
tries hard enough. I've had conversations - earnest, well-intentioned
- that amounted to saying, "We're so glad you're our token
conservative."
There are institutions that have admirably managed to avoid either the
"affirmative action for conservatives" syndrome or the 'let's just
avoid them altogether' approach. Harvard Law School is one of them -
Elena Kagan had a deep understanding of what it takes to build a
genuinely eclectic intellectual community, and I am certain that
Martha Minow - mazeltov! - as the new Dean feels the same way. Harvard
is unusual that way, among top schools; it is not a club of the
like-minded, and among the top law schools where I have any personal
knowledge, it has a vibrant intellectual culture that does not receive
that accolades it deserves. But there's a reason why not - that kind
of vibrant culture that reaches widely across political and policy
views is not as much admired as one might have hoped. HLS doesn't
receive the praise for the variegation of its intellectual culture
that one might have anticipated because its peers don't necessarily
think HLS does well, or more precisely, does itself any good, to
promote it.
But across much of the rest of the academy, Berkowitz is right - and
right about the intellectual risk posed by the instinctive response of
an academic community defined by identity politics - "Oh, we get it,
we need to have one of those."
References
1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124484718091311321.html
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