The Truth About Conservative Colleges

Academic conservatives say what they want is a depoliticized academy. What they really want is a right-wing politicized academy. The left-wing politicized academy is a popular right-wing meme. Blogs, such as Erin O’Connor’s “Critical Mass” devote themselves to tracking what they consider to be leftist outrages in the academy.

David Horowitz set up Students for Academic Freedom as a forum for students to report abuses by left-wing instructors. I have observed for a long time that, far from being bastions of white-hotradicalism, colleges and universities are instead, very timid institutions. The right has
found a pressure point that does not take pain well and buckles easily. They’re pressing for all it’s worth.

How can I say this? The right has left a paper trail. I would ask people to consider to consider three important points for my case, that for the intellectual right, “Academic Freedom” means the freedom to be conservative in the academy.Here’s my first piece of evidence as given by no less an academic right-wing icon than Stephen Balch, of the National Association of Scholars. In a 2004 piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Balch floated a proposal for helping to assure that right-wing academic catchword, “Academic Diversity.” Balch said that departments of
flagship institutions should be subdivided up according to the political views of its members. To wit:

Within a single large institution, departments could be subdivided into semiautonomous programs, each exemplifying a distinct outlook. Alternatively, special interdisciplinary programs could be set up outside regular departments for the purpose of harboring a significant perspective that is underrepresented across the institutional board.

In other words, incoming scholars would have to come into these balkanized institutions and swear their fealty to the political creed of whatever sub-divisions they would wish to become a member. This would not depoliticize institutions. Rather, this would set updepartments into warring political camps. That is my first piece of evidence.

My second piece of evidence is what I call the “conservative college” movement. This is a movement to make colleges set up by conservatives into ideological vanguard facilities. This movement is helmed by such legacy institutions as Grove City College and Hillsdale College. While these are expressly politically conservative institutions andcater to such, they really can’t match the new breed for devotion to being expressly ideological Patrick Henry College and Tom Monaghan’s Ave Maria College. These institutions have had very serious academic freedom issues and yet we here not a peep about them on websites and blogs devoted to the issue. To its credit, the National Association of Scholars criticized former president George Roche III for expelling a student named Mike Nehls, for publishing an independent newspaper. But only the
supposedly left-wing AAUP covered the dismissal of distinguished assistant history professor Warren Treadgold for publicly disagreeing with the dean of women. We neverhear about these incidents on the right-wing blogs. Several academics quit Patrick Henry College, because they felt that college’s required “Statement of Faith” put strictures on the types of matter that they could address in the classroom. We heard not a peep on this, from the conservative defenders of academic freedom (As an aside, am I the only one who finds it ironic that the name of this college is an obvious homage to theconservative, yet atheistic Ayn Rand, as Patrick Henry College was the alma mater of John Galt?). I’m sure they would argue that these are private colleges and can do what they will. Frontpage Magazine, has however, criticized such private colleges as DePaul
for alleged violations of academic freedom.

Conservatives are also trying to buy courses of study and institutions of research to place on college campuses. The George H.W. Bush library, which will be placed on the Southern Methodist University campus, has as its mission, promoting research favorable to the legacy of the soon-to-be-retired president. The BB&T foundation, a charitable arm of a financial holding company has endowed a course of Marshall University that requires that Atlas Shrugged be taught in a college course. This is the“gold standard” at its finest. He who has the gold sets the standards.

These three pieces of evidence taken together provide irrefutable evidence. Conservatives don’t want a depoliticized academy. They want an academy politicized intheir favor. If they want to leave and only be among their own kind, I suggest we let them.