This piece turned out well, even if some of the suggestions are terrible.
It is a dubious idea, admittedly, to address the dearth of conservatives in academia with a deliberately politicized hiring process. The best remedy to leftward drift or narrow academic bias in the academy surely isn’t the introduction of self-conscious conservative counter-programming, which would remain on the margins in any case. But it is tempting to paraphrase the axiom of that other Churchill (Winston) about democracy: that it’s the worst idea imaginable — except for all of the others that have ever been tried. So, with ever-accumulating evidence of bias against conservatives in academic hiring and advancement, perhaps an effort to introduce a conservative perspective in a high-profile way is an experiment that should be tried.
I insisted on one condition in accepting the appointment: that I be hosted by a regular academic department and teach departmental courses out of the catalogue, rather than be an ornament for an ad hoc or free-floating “conservative studies” program. Setting up a “conservative studies” program would ironically ratify the intellectual rot of the various “studies” departments that have sprung up over the years to appease the most radical, grievance-minded factions in academia. “Conservatism” is not a discrete subject, like biology or English literature; as with liberalism, it is a point of view or disposition that informs nearly all the traditional disciplines. And in any case, even a conservative professor who feels like a Soviet dissident on today’s campuses ought to uphold the traditional model of teaching by presenting a full spectrum of views in the classroom, rather than engage in counter-indoctrination.
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But these glimmers of reform are insufficient to the scale of the decay. Universities won’t begin to turn away from the intellectual corruption of radicalism until some kind of serious, organized opposition arises. A few isolated or token conservatives scattered in various departments, or visiting in a high-profile way, as I did at Boulder, won’t make much of a mark. To speak out alone against the relentless and insatiable demands of grievance leftism is to risk losing out on promotion and advancement, even if you already have tenure. Academic conservatives — along with disaffected moderates and liberals — need to emulate the campus Left and organize effective counter-programming, with their own centers and topical curricula, to contest the intellectual ground on campus. The thin ranks of academic conservatives need a campus rallying point, and a guerrilla mentality to match the determination of the Left. As Hemingway said of writers, conservative faculty ought to stick together like a pack of wolves.
The writer does a good job in explaining the current predicament of the university, although he’s probably too charitable to the sciences and engineering schools. We should expect academia to become even more radical as time goes on.
The best suggestion to the universities would be to figure out a way to terminate most of the faculty. The details of how that would be done aren’t really all that interesting to me. State governments can also gin up methods to deny funding to state universities. The Federal government is not that likely to back off from its commitments to continue inflating the student loan bubble until financial markets somehow force them to do so.
Considering the massive endowments of the most prestigious universities, not to mention the value of the real estate that they own, the faculty and bloated administration can be replaced or reformed. Most universities probably do not need to exist, and can be dismantled as quickly as they were thrown together over the last century.
Since the political side of things is unlikely to change without a financial shock, what parents should strongly consider is to choose alternatives to higher education, like apprenticeship, aggressive pursuit of demanding internships, freelancing, and other similar methods to help their sons to find meaningful work or a vocation without recourse to the university system.
Most university students and parents are not really interested in the academic life, and are instead looking for vocational preparation. The market there has to be un-muddled, so that the two groups of students stop mixing together as much as they have over the last century or so.
Parents that think that the Ivy League schools are major exceptions to the overall trends should audit some classes there and read the university newspaper every day for a year before fronting anything for tuition, room, & board.
American universities are unlikely to enjoy the international reputation that they currently have in the next 20 to 30 years. The catastrophe of the American university may be as long-lasting and devastating as the collapse of the German academic complex was during and after World War II. The problems are broadly understood, but no one in authority has the courage to do what is necessary to set these institutions on a more respectable path.
“The best suggestion to the universities would be to figure out a way to terminate most of the faculty. The details of how that would be done aren’t really all that interesting to me.”
That’s because you have no idea how to. That’s because it cannot be done.
Not without some sort of external shock, no.
Best way to reform academic research would be to bleed it dry.
This article seems to conflate “The University” with “good research.” The suggestion to massively defund universities and fire faculty would be terrible for The University. It would only be good for good scholarship, but obviously that isn’t the point. The University is mostly concerned about the manufacture of self-augmenting, self-perpetuating, multidirectional, insulated discourses. This isn’t really about good scholarship; it’s about simulating the feeling of intellectual accomplishment (a feeling that academics need in order to feed their brahmin impulses) by inventing contrived problems that can be met with contrived suggestions. Good, accomplished research doesn’t need The University’s structure — only its collective library. And if the content of its libraries is “set free,” like little animals at the zoo, then you can actually conceive the beginning of an alternative. I personally cannot see The University losing its reputation or power in the next 30 years unless America undergoes some sort of economic catastrophe that throws our understanding of the world into question. I’m not counting on that.
That activist dude who wanted to get all the JSTOR articles open-source was on the right track. If there were a group of people doing what he was doing, and they times’d it by 50, and every academic book was scanned and turned into a .pdf, then at least the tools could be there for a solid body of counter-scholarship that A) plays by all of their methodological rules and mines the gems of past research, and B) corrects or creates alternatives for its theoretical prejudices, blindsights, and shortcomings. If conservatives want to reclaim the life of the mind, then they need to get a bunch of moles into that system, and those moles need to drain it.
I’d say the most fertile ground for this sort of thing would be in the field of comparative literature. You can do a ton of comp lit research and find a whole bunch of stuff from disparate cultures that basically proves what all the HBD guys are saying. That’s ample evidence to buttress their claims right there, and no one’s using it.
Very interesting. I’ve been thinking lately that the private academy system, such as what predated mass public education in America, may experience a renaissance of sorts as increasing numbers of high-IQ people take their kids out of the mess that is “education,” both HS and university-level, in the US today. I’ve already decided to homeschool my kids rather than send them through the ~10 years of dreck that is public schooling, and I live in a pretty good county. Perhaps private schools are a good alternative, but from what I can tell they are mostly just public school curriculum plus the Bible (and of course better demographics).
I’m sure it won’t be practical for the foreseeable future, but I’d love to be able to send my children or grandchildren to a reactionary academy to receive an actual classical education. The demand for that will probably never be huge, but as the Reaction grows I think we’ll need some sort of educational apparatus separate from the current system to make sure it doesn’t die with us. Perhaps once we get a Reactionary billionaire we can build an academy or ten of our own.
I think the demand would be enormous, and it wouldn’t really cost that much money to set up.
I have always been surprised that alumni don’t just cut off donating to their alma maters, most of which have become akin to Stalinist reeducation camps. Do alumni not care? Do they not pay attention? Or are they mostly on the same page as their AMs?
Some do care.
Baby Boomers tend to have absorbed the cultural revolution in their bones, so they don’t really understand what has happened. Alumni groups in general will shame other alumni for *not* donating, so that part makes it harder. Alumni have an incentive to burnish the reputation of their alma mater, so they think that donating also benefits them, because they carry the degree, still.
The ones who are upset tend to believe that the revolution is either not all that serious or something that must be tolerated.
Getting rid of football would help. It’s remarkable what a role this stupid game plays in getting basically conservative people to support far-left institutions. Football played an enormous role in the creation of nonsense degrees in areas like “Black Studies” as well.
Title IX it to death, heh
I stopped donating to my AM (Columbia) years ago. “Mattress Girl” is hardly likely to make me want to start again.
Heh, I’ve heard things about what the campus is like these days. I suspect you will be far from alone. If they call to hit you up for cash, will you say “mattress girl” and hang up?
Har! That’s not a bad idea. Or maybe when I receive the appeal in the mail, I’ll return it with a little piece of a cut up mattress.
All I know is that these days I would probably be expelled for all the innocent shenanigans we all took part it back then. Nobody cared what others were doing. Now they all seem to be officious busybodies.
This is what Buckley recommended in ‘God And Man At Yale’.
He takes great care to justify this by making the argument that since the alumni are responsible for the administration at the university, and since the alumni are conservative so thus conservatives should be hired.
I’m not sure if the same arguments could be used today. I would hazard a guess that the majority of alumni are pretty left nowadays. In any event most people would probably say that governments or the staff of a university rather than alumni are responsible for the education provided there. And they are even more left-wing.
It’s hard to work out how the author of the NRO piece thinks that the policy of hiring conservatives by universities will arise. Who on earth does he think it will come from ? What exactly is the constituency for this ? Of course all alt-righters know the importance of the Gramscian takeover of the institutions, however among normal people this sort of stuff just sounds paranoid. (you may disagree – I am commenting from the perspective of an Australian who knows a fair bit about America and my comments are intended to apply in a general way to the Anglosphere – so I may be over-generalising and wrong).
Some sort of changing of the guard within the universities will never occur so the answer as stated above in the thread is delegitimisation.
This could happen. We all know the factors – student loans, distance education, bad students (tapping away on Facebook during class, bad teachers (the research/teaching disjunct) , the changing nature of work, government money shortages.
Above all the relentless disintermediation of the digital world. It rolls on like a tidal wave killing useless fat cats. How long till it hits the academics ?
By the way I can heartily recommend ‘God And Man’ (if you haven’t read it) really a nice little case study on the 40s conservative elite falling asleep and letting the lefties scalp them.
I haven’t read it, but feel as if I ought to.
Most Americans don’t have a BA, so only a fraction of a fraction know about the problem.
The alumni are SWPL even if they ID as conservative.
Sorry the top of my comment got chopped off –
It is a dubious idea, admittedly, to address the dearth of conservatives in academia with a deliberately politicized hiring process.
This is what Buckley recommended in ‘God And Man At Yale’.