Conservatism and The University

​A 2018 Pew research poll showed 73% of Republicans feel colleges are moving in the wrong direction, and 79% say professors bringing their political views into the classroom are a major reason for this[1].   This is nothing new; the political right has long disdained college education as being too liberal.  In the 1950’s Joseph McCarthy targeted liberal faculty members for supposed ties to communism[2], and The California Board of Regents began threatening to fire professors who didn’t sign loyalty oaths.[3]
 
It is true that today colleges are overwhelmingly liberal.  A 2016 study showed Democrats were represented in college faculty 11:1 over Republicans.[4]  A study in 2010 concluded that greater numbers of liberal than conservative professors was accounted for by career-path selection.[5]  However, while the right believes universities are indoctrinating students, a 2008 study, showed there was no evidence faculty ideology was associated with changed is student ideological orientation.[6]
 
But do conservatives value university education at all?  As long as it aligns with their worldview, yes.  Literature and the arts are acceptable as long as they privilege the Western Canon.  “Multiculturalism” – perspectives from non-European or non-white sources – has been derided for decades.  Art movements that do not express traditional realism are discounted.  History that strays into questioning narratives of western and US exceptionalism is deemed subversive.  The notion that traditionally dominant and powerful groups or ideas ought to be critically examined and not assumed as correct are to be avoided.  Sociology must not examine social hierarchies and systems that perpetuate inequality.  Entire fields of study such as ethnic or gender studies are dismissed as “activist” and illegitimate.  Economics, long a bastion of conservative thought, must assume that capitalism is the superior model and inquiries into its flaws or the exploration of alternative systems are inappropriate. 
 
Since its inception in the second half of the 20th century, one of the conservative movement’s founding causes has been to critique the leftward slant of the university.  Books like Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind have been popularizing, catalyzing forces in this line of thought.  Leo Strauss, a far right “founding father” of American conservatism, in his 1941 lecture on German Nihilism, argued that the rise of Nazism was due in no large part to the failures of a professoriate, caught up in liberal thought and attitudes, to teach the classics and thus provide disillusioned young German men a social vision that would inspire faith in social institutions so that they might have avoided the nihilism of Nazi rhetoric.
 
However, while Strauss explicitly rejected much of Nazi ideology, he was obviously sympathetic to many of its grievances about modern, progressive Germany.  He too, wanted to Make Germany Great Again, just not through war and racial cleansing so much as the privileging of traditional social hierarchies.
 
It is in conservative DNA to oppose what it views as the excesses of progress.  In its own telling, this doesn’t mean inquiry and reason per say, but rather the “right kind of” inquiry and reason.  As Buckley famously spoke of standing before history and yelling stop, shades of conservative thought range from complete rejection of modernity (a populist Retvrn to blood and soil, homogenous nationalism, with the salt-of-the earth farmer making everything by hand), to selective rejection of modernity with its “big government” social engineering programs and emphasis on the marginalized and oppressed.  Echoes of this instinct take us back at least as far as the French Revolution and its violent and messy guillotining of the monarchy.  (Modern far right figures such as Curtis Yarvin explicitly call for a return to Monarchy, albeit in a modern form with corporate boards and CEOs overseeing society through technocratic investments instead of an actual king, queen and their lords).  The French went too far, and wrought the unintended consequences of progressivism – a dismantling of traditional hierarchies that were central to the proper functioning of society. 
 
Post WWII, with the rise of the Soviet Union and its communist satellites around the globe, conservatism had a large and obvious foe in totalitarianism.  But while gulags, secret police and central planning were ripe targets for opposition, the underlying premise of communism - a Marxist critique of capitalism’s exploitative and oppressive nature - was more complex and nuanced, and likely a more difficult case to argue against.  Yet while Marxist or not (more often not), what was going on in universities was a project of deconstructing the very systems of power that communism had originally been designed to address.  By lashing the obvious critiques of 20th century communist totalitarianism to the critical analysis of traditional hierarchies and social structures going on in universities, conservatives were able to build a popular case against progressivism in all its forms. 
 
In the 21st century, with the ascendance of the far right in the US, it is not uncommon to hear the terms progressivism and even liberalism used interchangeably with communist or Marxist, despite multiple decades having passed since the fall of the Soviet Union.  However, even as old references are made to the realities of any communist state, only a dwindling percentage of the population will have any clear association with, the modern far right has been able to whip up new and generally fanciful fears and anxieties in the public. Cosmopolitan crime, border invasions, gay menaces and dark Democratic plots to take away American guns have become fruitful substitutions.
 
Yet beneath each of these political and social phantasms lies the same core impulse, that of weakening traditional hegemony.  The supremacy of the patriarchal, Christian, heterosexual and white ethnicity is under threat.  In this, conservatism is correct.  For more than two centuries, since at least the enlightenment, a vision of human rights has generally been ascendant.  From the overthrow of monarchism, to the abolition of slavery, to female suffrage, up through the civil rights era and gay liberation, traditional hierarchies have been under assault, and in the popular imagination, with generally favorable results.  The idea that an individual should have the right to an equal footing not determined by birth or body makes moral sense in a way that is hard to argue against when presented clearly and free from distractions and mendacious associations.
 
While tireless organizing and individual and community action have been instrumental in the success of this progress, academia has played a crucial role not only in providing the research, data and theory giving empirical support to moral consideration.  However, in a more abstracted yet maybe just as important way, the notion of academic inquiry itself has given us a posture in which we are able to objectively understand and communicate what it is we value in society.  Through countless hours of painstaking observation and analysis, universities have been the place where hundreds of thousands of humans have performed the work of holding up a mirror to society, allowing us to see more clearly not only what we do, but why we do it.  By rigorous examination, our systems of social organization are deconstructed, reconstructed and deconstructed again and again. 
 
And yet this process is the antithesis of the central conservative impulse to maintain tradition because it elevates authority to that which can be proven, not merely that which has existed.  In other words, there is no idea that is beyond critique, nothing is sacred but knowledge and truth.  This process is not linear, clean or obvious.  It requires patient debate and humility.  It requires an openness to having old ideas overturned.  It requires the courage to face the possibility that the truths we uncover may be ugly or uncomfortable, or require new moral obligations.  It is nothing so simple as opening a book and having the answers laid out in black and white.  It is fundamentally liberal and progressive, and while often conservative in practice, it is its opposite in spirit.


[1] The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education, Pew, 8/19/2019

[2] "Sarah Lawrence Under Fire: The Attacks on Academic Freedom During the McCarthy Era". Sarah Lawrence College Archives

[3] Radin, Max. (1950). Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (1915–1955)

[4] Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology, 2019, Econ Journal Watch

[5] "Five myths about liberal academia", Matthew Woessner, April Kelly-Woessner and Stanley Rothman Friday, February 25, 2011 Washington Post

[6] Yancey, George. "Recalibrating Academic Bias." Academic Questions 25, no. 2 (2012): 267–78.