The Conscience of a Campus Conservative

Ever since the change of administration in Washington, campus conservatives have been snared in a novel predicament. Once academe’s outcasts and eccentrics, those on the right now elicit suspicion and rage. Our cries against the left’s capture of the humanities have risen to the ears of the White House, and the Department of Education has put an ultimatum to the universities: acquiesce to state interference in curriculum, hiring, and internal governance, or lose billions in federal funding.

No strangers to the tragic, academic conservatives have the misfortune to be pinioned between this administration’s nihilistic reactionaries — who have turned our critiques of higher education into a battering ram against civil society — and the ivory tower’s left ultras, whose ethos of resistance distracts from their inciting role in the present crisis. Escaping this impasse — and protecting the university’s vital function in American life — requires us to rearticulate our gripes with the humanities and social sciences, and to distinguish those gripes from the destructive enterprise of the authoritarian right. We must continue to encourage our institutions to engage in a process of introspection and internal reform.

Washington’s war on higher education did not come out of the ether. The left’s vise grip on the humanities and social sciences is not a figment of the conservative imagination. The monopoly among humanities faculty can be adduced from partisan donations, opinion polls, public events calendars, and publication records. The agenda of diversity, equity, and inclusion — the imperative to be “race-conscious,” to propose a Manichaean opposition of victims and perpetrators, to insert pronouns and land acknowledgements into one’s email signature — is presented as a shared moral baseline rather than as a political viewpoint. Such an orthodoxy is no less coercive for being enforced through social pressure and professional consequences rather than via state intervention. Denouncing the external, right-wing danger to freedom of inquiry posed by this administration while ignoring the internal, left-wing peril of cultural hegemony is incoherent at best.

As the campus’s internal exiles, conservatives have developed a constellation of groups to advance our view of the humanities and the university. Outfits like the National Association of Scholars, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have advocated for the preservation of classic, humanistic education, the maintenance of courses in Western civilization, and the need for academe to include a range of perspectives. Right now, academic conservatives have the chance and the duty to set off our critique from the plaints of nihilistic reactionaries.

The academic conservative defends the value of anthropology, sociology, and literature, but deplores their capture by a left faction that imposes its interpretive frameworks to the exclusion of others. Some of American conservatism’s foremost intellectuals arose in these disciplines — the sociologist Nathan Glazer laid bare the shortcomings of the Great Society; the University of Chicago classicist Allan Bloom penned The Closing of the American Mind; and Richard Pipes, a great historian of Russia, advised Reagan on foreign policy. Conservatives rightly express profound reservations about treatments of identity, which often foreclose the possibility for empathy and comprehension across the bounds of race or sex. But the reactionary arsonists attacking education policy now are wont to wave off all questions about race, sex, and sexuality as “woke.”

A conservative humanist cannot deny that phenomena like race, sex, and sexuality structure human experience and deserve examination in our respective fields. There is no abstract human shorn of particularities and peculiarities. Removing The Color Purple from the library of the U.S. Naval Academy because it deals with race ought to inspire in us a deep revulsion.

What Will Trump’s Presidency Mean For Higher Ed?

Keep up to date on the latest news and information, and contact our journalists covering this ongoing story.

Here is a concrete example to illustrate the distinctions between the academic conservative and the nihilistic reactionary. Imagine two classes, both of them titled “Introduction to Lesbian Poetry.” The first explores the theme of same-sex desire from Sappho to Sylvia Plath, with secondary readings drawn from a range of disciplines and dispositions; the second examines several obscure poets on the margins of the radical movements of the ’60s, with secondary readings coming almost exclusively from gender and queer theory. A conservative academic critique defends the former, while pointing out the parochial nature of the latter. He does not clamor for the elimination of the latter course, but he does demand that the department in question expand its offerings. The nihilistic reactionary mocks both as exercises in indoctrination.

If the academic community assumes the mantle of “the resistance” and depicts itself as blameless victims, it has learned the wrong lessons from this time of crisis. Not only is such behavior detached from reality, it is not fit for the purpose. The academic community ought to engage with the conservative critique of the humanities and social sciences. Doing so could help stave off the predations of nihilistic reactionaries. Conservative humanists, in turn, must oppose a siege on higher education undertaken in our name. On right and left, for strategic and idealistic reasons, the humanities should aspire to be a broad church, not a sectarian chapel. The university might then cut a path out of friend-vs.-enemy politics — for our institutions and for our country.