Time to Put Our Intellectual House in Order

And on May 28, David Forsythe, a freshman here, drew out some of the implications of this situation when he lamented the absence of ideological balance and choice that confronts the student: “A student seeking a balanced education simply does not have the chance to get opinions from each point on the political spectrum. A subtle leftward tendency persists throughout the liberal arts graduate years.”

It is scandalous, of course, and an indictment of an administration and a faculty that a student should be driven to write what Forsythe has had to write. That he points to a very real and very ugly fact about contemporary higher education, however, is beyond dispute. The ideological drift of our university faculties, which has accelerated over the past 20 years of warfare, has been documented many times over. (See, for example, The Divided Academy, written in 1975 by Everett Ladd, Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, and updated in the January 16, 1978 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.)

In their discussions of this phenomenon, however, and in particular in their attempts to explain it, I am afraid that Forsythe and Clark have somewhat skewed the issue — perhaps out of their own senses of fairness — and as a result have been more charitable than I believe the situation warrants. Forsythe, for example, writes that academics “can afford to be idealistic theoreticians; their job is to publish their thoughts, not to do a practical job solving a practical problem.” And although he points to envy, to guilt, and to a “mean-spirited animosity,” Clark too speaks of Marxism flourishing “more where ideas matter than where matter does.” These writers are suggesting, in sum, that it is ideas and even idealism that help to explain the current ideological complexion of the academy.

Undoubtedly these factors do play their part. But this line of argument has the unfortunate implication, or at least can be understood to imply, that those of us who stand opposed to the Marxists — classical liberals, libertarians, and conservatives — are not ourselves concerned with ideas, much less with ideals. Of this we, no less than the left, has a corner on the profound. Indeed, the case for the opposite is altogether plausible.

The task, then, is to explain why those who subscribe to the ideas and ideals of the right are so disproportionately underrepresented in the academy, as their counterparts on the left are so disproportionately overrepresented, and to do so without pointing to some mistaken contrast between the views that has one in and the other unfit for university residency.

Here, I submit, the explanation is closer at hand — and more sinister — than Forsythe and Clark have supposed. Quite simply, there is, notwithstanding the rationalizations that insulate us from it, an appalling amount of ideological discrimination at work in the matter, as anyone who has countenanced a will attest. It is a discrimination no less pernicious than any other form of discrimination; if anything, in fact, it is more pernicious, for the academy, as its denizens are fond of repeating, is the very bastion of freedom of inquiry, the enclave wherein the pursuit of truth is more cherished even than the truth itself.

Yet ideological discrimination there is, and a long train of discrimination at that, appearing occasionally in admissions and grading, manifesting in the awarding of fellowships and grants and in publishing, and reaching full bloom in the hiring and retention of faculty.

As with most cases of discrimination, however, the evidence is often circumstantial or otherwise difficult to discover. There are comments in the margins of student papers, of course. There are conversations with trusted colleagues, and occasionally a candid letter revealing the sordid details of a faculty meeting at which a “critical mass” was reached. But this is not often the stuff of ineluctable proof. It is rather the occasional item that lends credence to the view that it is not by some invisible hand alone that the ideological demographics of the academy have come to be skewed as they are.

Now as a matter of strict principle, I submit that the private institution has a perfect right to order its internal affairs in any way it chooses, to include or exclude on whatever grounds it deems important, and hence to be as broad or as provincial, as excellent or as mediocre as it wishes. This, after all, is what privacy and freedom are all about. And the case of the private university would be no exception — were it not that in this regard it finds itself hoisted on its own, albeit noble, petard.

In their public pronouncements, that is, most of our universities aspire to the worthy and oft-proclaimed standards mentioned above; they purport to be temples of free thought, centers of open inquiry — above, quite often emaciations, of the world of the interests and the passions. The data, then, with which even our students are now embarrassing us, together with the hard and soft evidence with which we on the inside are all familiar, point unmistakably to the measure of hypocrisy in all of this, which is never very pretty, especially when exhibited by those who should know better.

But let us be clear here. It is not really the Marxists of whom I speak, for they are behaving precisely as their dogma directs, notwithstanding their commitment to the academy. I speak rather of and to those who cling, however uncertainly, to the liberalism that has ever been the mark of the Western tradition. It is you who have too often succumbed to the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle pressures from the ideologues in your midst. Whether from naivete, from intellectual error, from a mistaken sense of fairness, or from fashion and career, you have permitted the emergence of an academic climate that mocks and defiles your intellectual heritage.

When we have to be reminded of this by our students it is time to put our intellectual house back in order. The open university is, after all, what we promised our students — and indeed, what at one time we promised ourselves.