Why has modern high-profile academia moved so far to the left? By now, you've probably heard all the usual reasons: bias in hiring practices, incompatibility of conservative interests with selected curriculums, liberal attraction to public service and acceptance of lower wages. And yet, something is off in all these rationales. There has to be a better reason why, even at Hopkins, which has garnered a right-of-center reputation thanks to the neo-cons at SAIS, students vote along the same lines as the residents of Massachusetts.
Nothing could be better for academia at this point than a shock to the liberalism that is alternately a source of pride and a running joke among top-tier schools. It should be pretty clear to anyone who has followed my columns that I am no friend of contemporary conservatism. But there are few things more challenging (or more rewarding) than the kind of intellectual political debate that is all but dead at the nation's best universities. As Jered Ede, president of the Hopkins College Republicans, noted, "College is often the time we focus ourselves on what we will fight for the rest of our lives: our ideology." To him, teaching in a partial, "editorialized fashion, leads to a misinformed youth." Imagine that: a fiercely anti-Bush moderate like me seeing eye-to-eye with the head of the Hopkins GOP.
The problem, though, is that conservatives have yet to propose a compelling solution to academia's ideological one-sidedness or to even fully diagnose the problem. Calls for ideological diversity are admirable, but every solution shies away from the hard questions. Instead of looking for pragmatic new means of conversation, the conservative movement has brought out excuse after excuse, while refusing to realize that hard political realities have partially spurred its isolation.
My personal favorite is the idea that, as New York Times columnist John Tierny put it, faculty hiring practices amount to "cronyism" and that Republican professors are victims of a liberal group mentality. Fine, but then where are the lawsuits? If there is an explicit bias against hiring conservative faculty members, surely it is no less tangible than the equally ignoble practice of cutting qualified applicants based on race or gender.
Also, even if this trend were valid, why would politics supersede competence in humanities or science departments? I contacted Provost Stephen Knapp about this matter. Unable to recall a single instance in which political affiliations had affected the hiring process, Knapp stated that "to ask a job candidate about his or her political affiliation would be highly inappropriate and unprofessional." Even keeping tabs on party alignments or voting statistics would be seen as "an invasion of privacy and a potential threat to academic freedom."
So if it isn't hiring bias, then what is it? Wage arguments assume that conservatives would sacrifice intellectual achievement for profit -- a convenient ideological simplification that has been contradicted a million times over. Perhaps a more irritating clich8e, which I have often heard, is that liberalism is a result of better education. This theory falls apart when you consider that key Democratic constituencies, such as Hispanics and African Americans, have regrettably gone through worse school systems and are consequently outstripped on standardized tests by their white counterparts.
With university liberalism in full swing, it might be tempting for conservatives to look for an escape route. There has been some thought of late that think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute are an academia substitute -- same rigor, same precision, but a friendlier bias. Nice idea, except that such organizations, whatever their biases, are spawning pools for the supine groupthink that should be reviled on top campuses. And if you still think that conservative think tanks are intellectual powerhouses, remember that all the ideas they have recently marketed -- Middle East democratization on the cheap, tax cuts that only created deficits, bureaucracy-ridden Social Security privatization -- have either backfired or died at birth, despite a favorable political environment.
After watching a Republican Congress cut the National Science Foundation budget for the first time in over a decade, and after witnessing massive, Republican-era decreases in the National Endowment for the Arts, academia's preference for liberal professors should not really surprise anyone. But these issues, along with Republican opposition to stem cell research and attacks on civil liberties, are only recent phenomena and are insufficient to describe the entrenchment of left-leaning professionals. For all the upheavals that have driven America's political hemispheres farther apart, what academia needs is a challenge to liberal assumptions that will electrify thought on both sides of the aisle.
So why are conservatives excluded from academia? I still have a few more misconceptions to clear in my next column, but here, as with most aspects of our current political dystopia, the real explanation lies in the stereotypes that are staples of American mass media. Even in the smartest enclaves on earth, students and professors are playing into the 21st century's dumbest expectations, turning academic debate into the latest casualty in the culture wars.
--Patrick Kennedy is a sophomore physics and writing seminars major from Watchung, N.J.
