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No kidding. You mean people go
to college, take classes and read books for four years or
more, and when they’re done, they don’t think exactly the
way they did when they went in? Come on, that’s just crazy!
There ought to be a law!
Actually, there may soon be.
The new favorite target of conservative opinion-makers across
the nation is academia. Universities, they say, are overwhelmingly
populated with liberals and "ultra-liberals" of
every stripe from pink to red. Conservative voices are marginalized,
excoriated, and hopelessly outnumbered, helplessly watching
as another generation of students is indoctrinated by the
loony left.
Leading the charge against the
elbow-pad Bolsheviks is David Horowitz of Students for Academic
Freedom, which seeks, basically, to curtail the academic freedom
of professors whose views do not mesh with those of Horowitz.
Currently, his "Academic Bill of Rights" is being
pushed as legislation in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and
a few other states.
Horowitz and his brethren are
the modern equivalent of McCarthyites, and the same kind of
people who gave Socrates his hemlock. Certain fringe left
professors have been singled out, especially the difficult-to-defend
Ward Churchill of Colorado, by high-profile telepundits like
Bill O’Reilly and Joe Scarborough, and held up to the scorn
of a right wing that likes nothing better than an easy target.
When they tire of Churchill, Horowitz has a list of other
names to be the next suspect. It’ll be fun, sort of like a
book burning without all the smoke. But why the sudden campaign
against goateed ex-hippies and their tenure?
Well, they are right about being
outnumbered on University campuses. It’s true. The data is
spotty, but anyone who’s been to college knows that humanities
professors are almost all liberals. Even math and science
professors show a somewhat lesser, but still disproportionate
ratio of liberals to conservatives. But it simply doesn’t
follow that there is some kind of conspiracy to keep right
wing ideologies out of the classroom, or that some kind of
partisan form of affirmative action is needed to correct the
so-called imbalance.
The so-called bias cuts both
ways, after all: liberals are, unsurprisingly, vastly outnumbered
in the military at every level. Nobody seems to be bitching
about that, because the reasons are fairly easy to deduce.
Conservatives are, in general, more pro-war, while liberals
usually oppose it. Simple enough. But the explanation for
the preponderance of lefties in college faculties is, I think,
equally simple.
This is going to piss some people
off, but I’m going to say it anyway, because it’s just true:
College professors are generally liberal for two main reasons:
for one, they don’t make a lot of money. As far as I’m concerned,
the one respectable reason to be a Republican today is that
you’re filthy rich and you don’t give a crap about anyone
else. Tenured professors don’t starve, but most of them aren’t
exactly shopping around for Lear jets either.
But the reason that needs to
be considered right now, and the one which will no doubt earn
me some much appreciated hate mail, is reason number two:
professors, at least in theory, actually know what they’re
talking about. They are educated. They went to school. They
learned about history, other cultures, other religions. They
learned about science, about nature, about evolution. They
learned, essentially, to consider the facts before forming
opinions, and that the truth is often not whatever their parents,
priests, friends, or prejudices tell them it is, but something
entirely different.
I’m being a little generous here,
of course. A hell of a lot of people graduate college without
having strained their minds very much, and I have certainly
met a lot of liberals who don’t spend a whole lot of time
soberly considering the positions of their counterparts on
the right. But the academic setting, on the whole, encourages
reasoned debate and objective learning, and these are anathema
to the conservative ideology in its predominant current form.
Fascists and totalitarians of
every description have always despised intellectuals, and
vice versa, as long as each has existed. Like schoolyard bullies
who love to beat on the smart kids, they are compelled to
fear and attack whoever and whatever they cannot understand.
Anything that threatens the narrow, delusional mindset of
a Christian conservative—or a militant Muslim, for that matter—is
considered evil, because that mindset is a house of cards
which can only be preserved through constant, vigilant defense
against reality. Any avenue of debate which may edge them
closer to cognitive dissonance is perceived as an attack on
the very core of their being. And so, in our anti-intellectual
media climate, criticism of the pope is anti-Catholic, debate
about America’s treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
is anti-Semitic, rejection of attempts to dismantle our social
safety net is communist, and any examination of whether our
actions in the Middle East may have contributed to 9/11 is
pro-terrorism. In essence, reasoned examination of the facts
is to be discouraged at every turn. I think it’s reasonable
to say that this could be, in part, why a lot conservatives
aren’t hanging out in the faculty lounge at Oberlin.
There are polls to back me up.
It has been shown that the less you know about the war in
Iraq, and the lower your level of education, the more likely
you are to support it. So the strategy of each side becomes
obvious: those against the war should work to better educate
people, and those for it must work against that education.
The dumber we all are, and the more afraid of alternate viewpoints,
the better for Bush.
And there we find the motivation
for the newly invigorated anti-intellectual push, because
the real agenda of any teacher worth a damn is to open the
minds of his students, to encourage them to think for themselves.
That’s the real reason for the witch-hunt, because a curious
mind seeks cognitive dissonance; it is always attempting
to surprise itself with new information. If the facts don’t
fit its current opinion, it wants to know, because
its objective is to get as close to the truth as possible,
not just to cherry-pick whatever facts and philosophies happen
to support its current ideological paradigm. The opened mind
can change, adapting to its changing understanding
of the truth.
But the truth is just a bump
in the road to those who would deceive you into enslaving
yourself. It hinders their work, weakens their efforts to
consolidate power and control public opinion. Open minds are
the enemy. And so, therefore, is an open, free academic environment.
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