Calf-Empty: Why Conservatives Hate Universities

​To say conservatives have been critiquing colleges for a long time is an understatement. It’s kind of been their thing at least since Buckley’s God and Man at Yale in 1951. But the Nazis were doing it with Cultural Bolshevism in the 1920’s, and before anyone claims the Nazis weren’t conservative, just contrast the term with Cultural Marxism of the 1990’s and it’s resurgence with the Alt-right in the 2010’s.
 
You’ve got four main lines of attack, going after each element of what is essentially viewed as an assault on Western Civilization: naive students, corrupting teachers, coddling administrators, and shoddily researched and fallaciously theorized content. The critique hasn’t really changed in a century. The Frankfurt school just turned into Ethnic Studies, which seeped out into every other field, until you finally had things like “woke” math and little Jenny was adding and subtracting Trans pineapples.
 
One might note the profound social changes that occurred over this time period. Labor rights. Civil rights. Feminism. Disability rights. Gay rights. Trans rights. And the incredible amount of research and theorizing that went on in academia across every field. Sure, ethnic studies often led the way in specifically looking at power relations and functional contextualism between systems and institutions of power and marginalized groups, but they drew from sociology, history, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, law, the arts – all splayed out upon the altar of liberal epistemology. The tools of higher order cognitive processes such as comparative analysis, relative framing and synthesis were used in service of perspective-taking and deconstruction. The highest liberal values of critical thought, self-reflection and egalitarianism were turned not outwards against other societies in a tradition of superiority, but inwards towards our own society to ‘lift up’ the previously unseen, unheard and marginalized groups who have always been here but exploited, oppressed and disenfranchised.
 
So what were conservatives doing during all this time, as the decades went on and on? Fighting all of it.  Participating in none of it.  Sure, maybe decades later, when they couldn’t take the social opprobrium anymore – or they simply died off, they finally accepted where new social lines were being drawn.  But they didn’t do any of the research or study, or theorizing.  They maybe took an undergraduate class, argued rigidly and dogmatically with the teacher, and dined out on the aggrieved experience for the rest of their career. Or the conservative professor, a specialist in philosophy, classics or economics maybe, ensconced in their spartan office with their brandy and their photographs of Edmund Burke and Churchill, congratulating himself for his grit in reading the classics in Latin but demonstrating utter sloth in failing to keep up with the rich body of scholarship developing new ways of thinking about its context, his position in reading it, its meaning as a ‘great’ text, etc. 
 
Conservatives don’t really believe in liberal education, one that is so totally committed to liberal values and ways of thought that it is able to question the authority of traditional social hierarchies and dogmas. It is not that they don’t want the students to be naïve (fat chance changing that), or that the professors are teaching them content that isn’t true, and that the administrators are facilitating it. It is that they are being allowed to question and subvert dominant paradigms.  They are asking the uncomfortable questions.  For this they are labeled ‘activists’.
 
We could take conservatives more seriously if they had any project of their own to apply liberal values and thought to traditional social dogmas. It isn’t as if they have already done the work – completed the research, taken the data, developed the theories, collaborated across disciplines, and come to the conclusion that the traditional dogmas were actually correct all along. No, just as is usually the case with religion or any other dogma one is usually born into and accepts without diligently going out and testing against all other dogmas, using multiple methods of analysis, from empiricism to qualitive inference to artistic intuition, it is just assumed to be correct.
 
And they will flat out tell you when pressed, “It’s common sense”. “It’s the natural order of things”. “Everyone knows it to be true.” Etc.
 
A conservative’s role in academia, to the extent we are talking about conservatism, and not just the head-down, work-a-day task of facially field-specific and apolitical study, is to propagandize, perform apologetics, and harbor grievance for conservatism. It is as if someone were to march in to a quiet, peaceful library holding a giant, illiberal golden calf, and proceed to parade around shouting about their own oppression for a hundred years – hoping, of course, to distract as many patrons as possible from their studies so as to keep them from as much power and agency as possible.

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