This is my first post as a member of the Postmodern Conservative team. By way of debut, I want to raise an issue we’ve alluded to but haven’t taken on directly. That’s the status of intellectuals, especially academics, in American conservatism. As Ivan points out , many critics now argue that the “ideas have consequences” days are long past. Has the conservative movement completed its often predicted descent into know-nothingism?
Let’s not talk about Sarah Palin. Consider the suggestion of David French at Phibetacons . He argues: “…It is not the idea of education that repels heartland conservatives, it is the type of education that we know our elites receive.” The evidence: “We revere Churchill and Lincoln just as much as we ever did. The academy — and, consequently, our educated "elite" — do not.”
I assume French is talking about universities like Harvard. I’m not convinced "heartland conservatives" know what sort of education they provide.
French studied at Harvard Law, and lectured at Cornell, so he has some experience of the matter. So do I: for the last several years I’ve done graduate work and served as a teaching fellow there. The truth is that the undergraduates are exposed to traditional education, and can get more if they like it. Might a postmodern conservative submit that the postmodern university is a bit of a fantasy?
Here, for example, are some texts that every Government concentrator at Harvard is required to study: The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, Locke’s Second Treatise, The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Mill’s On Liberty, Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. The list was recently shortened to compress a year-long course into one term. But many of the same works remain.
Not every Harvard student concentrates in Government. And just a few of the courses each takes are required. But the education most students want and receive is far from a four-year seminar on “deconstruction”— an approach whose influence on the major disciplines is minimal . Silly classes are easy to find at any big school. But I noticed a lot more of them when I was an undergraduate at Rutgers.
In fact, most of the outrages promoted by the conservative media involve neither elite universities nor elite academics. They tend to occur at state colleges and universities below the flagship level, or at private liberal-arts colleges. Furthermore, the culprits are usually adjuncts and administrators. I don’t deny that there are big-time faculty members with principled objections to the American regime, capitalism, etc. But many of the so-called tenured radicals are serious scholars whose work is not without interest to conservatives.
What about the outcome? I submit that reverence for Churchill or Lincoln is a bad test of respect for education. In the first place, reverence is generally an obstacle to thinking. That’s one of the things college teaching should encourage. Second, political judgment is only one aspect of liberal education. Good political instincts are quite compatible with hostility to natural science, languages, literature, and the rest of what universities teach.
In addition to misconceiving what goes on in elite universities, conservative critiques of the academy are too often deformed by the assumption that politics is the criterion of successful study. That was wrong when it was asserted by the New Left. It’s wrong today. I suppose it’s possible that educated people increasingly reject conservatism , or at the least GOP, because they are taught to. More likely, there’s something about conservatism’s present form that limits its influence on serious education.
