IT'S NOT AS BAD AS SOME WOULD HAVE YOU BELIEVE.

Mallard Fillmore cartoon for 20 August 2006, recommended by The Torch.

There's something wrong in higher education, but the lack of viewpoint diversity is probably not a big part of it.

Retired professor Donald Lazere, in Rethinking the Culture Wars — I, takes up the traditional claim that Academic Freedom and Critical Thinking are TOO IMPORTANT for mere politicians, let alone trustees to interfere. But he then destroys some of his credibility by denouncing his students.

I have spent 30-some years in conservative communities and state universities, teaching lower-division English argumentative writing and literary history courses that are general education requirements for students in business or technological majors, many of whom would not have chosen to take any such courses and resent them as increasingly costly obstacles to the most direct path to a high-paying job. Most such students are conservative, not in any intellectual sense, but in the sense (which they admit) of fearfully conforming to the political and economic status quo, to the attitudes that will be expected of them as compliant employees, and to the necessity of looking out for number one in the “Survivor” sweepstakes of the global economy. Such students are not likely to welcome the cognitive dissonance forced on them by humanities courses demanding Socratic self-questioning of their sociopolitical or religious dogmas, and they are wont to express their resentment, if not in complaints to Horowitz, in the course evaluations that have been debased into consumer-satisfaction surveys in which the top-ranked teachers provide the fewest demands and the highest grades.

Translation: his courses have been strained through the race-class-gender filter and his charges properly resent his patronizing them as oppressed drudges that their betters at Berkeley or the Harvard Business School will put onto the 24/7 treadmill only to downsize them in the next paradigm shift. Is it not possible to help his charges develop their b.s. detectors and at the same time contemplate expanding their horizons? Or is his column an indirect admission that there's excess capacity in California's higher education system, and his former employer, California Polytechnic at San Luis Obispo, exists only to cool out a few marks or to do the work the high schools should have done?

That tone comes through in his essay.

This conception of liberal education as a minimal counter-force to the political and economic status quo, as well as to majority opinion, is fraught with difficulties and possible abuses, to be sure. Can we, or should we, avoid revealing our own moral or political sympathies in class? Should we, for example, teach Plato, Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau (or Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King) as inspirations for existential moral choices, or simply as subjects of neutral study, perhaps as representatives of a particular viewpoint or “bias,” always to be balanced against sources on “the other side,” including equal time for defenses of slavery and segregation? Moral judgments are of course less disputable in reference to such past conflicts than to present ones like the war in Iraq or affirmative action; neither conservative nor liberal polemicists have provided a clear road map for how teachers should deal with current moral disputes and public opinion about them.

I suspect we could find people who disagreed with each of those individuals on fundamentals of their world views, without necessarily defending slavery or segregation, and there is certainly room for consideration of the pre-industrial acceptance of slavery or serfdom as a necessary evil to support the inventors and thinkers of the time. (To do that, however, might compel the professor to see the legitimate achievements of capitalist development.) I also recall more than one source of advice for beginning professors suggesting that the most effective way to teach the New Deal (as an example) is to leave students unsure whether the professor thinks of Franklin D. Roosevelt as inspiring leader or as tyrant. (There is ample evidence on both sides of that disagreement.) The professor is part way there.

My impression is that the exhortations of NAS, ACTA, and other conservative educators for core liberal arts curriculum and more requirements in history — with which I happen to agree — fall short of outlining a coherent curriculum and pedagogy for critical citizenship. (On the flip side, many liberal advocates of multiculturalism and diversity have failed to delineate what kind of studies American students of all ethnic, gender, and social-class groups need for minimal common knowledge as citizens.) In such a curriculum and pedagogy, students would not merely be indoctrinated into American chauvinism and simplistic “virtues,” as some on the right advocate, but would be encouraged to think critically about competing ideological or moral viewpoints (in party politics, journalistic and entertainment media, as well as scholarly sources) about American and world history, as well as about the present world.

The pedagogical approach that I personally have developed over the years applies Gerald Graff’s principle of “teaching the conflicts,” in presenting students out front with the current debates on such issues and disclosing my own left-of-liberal viewpoint on them, as exactly that — one perhaps biased viewpoint among other possible ones, to be understood in relation to opposing ones and studied through the best conservative vs. liberal or leftist research sources that students can find, leaving it up to them to evaluate the opposing arguments, and grading them on their skill in researching and analyzing sources. I do not claim that mine is a foolproof approach, but most of my students have found it a fair one throughout the years, and I have heard few alternatives, especially from conservative educators.

I suspect he would have been more effective had he left his own preferences out of it. But if he is true to his words, students who take the time to express a conservative viewpoint will not be marked down for it.

Colby College professor Joseph Reisert offers a companion column, Rethinking the Culture Wars — II, that also rebuts Mallard Fillmore's presumption.

The first reaction I usually get when I tell people I’m a Republican and a college professor is bewilderment, followed by such questions as: “How is that possible?” (usually from someone on the left who assumes that to be smart and well educated is to be liberal) and “Do they allow that these days?” (from someone on the right who assumes that academic conservatives invariably suffer discrimination).

Although some vocal conservatives complain that liberal faculty members use their classrooms to indoctrinate students and to punish dissenting students by giving them poor grades, my own experience suggests that such incidents are quite rare. In my 20-plus years as a conservative student and teacher at three strongly left-leaning institutions (Princeton, Harvard, and Colby), I have never felt discriminated against.

The stereotype of liberal elitist dies hard, doesn't it? It's also likely that a lot of the poor grading of conservative arguments reflects sloppy thinking by the essayists, but there's a deeper problem if solid conservative arguments aren't on the reading list. But his essay reflects a deeper frustration with hyperspecialization breeding insularity among the professoriate.

That danger is the ever-increasing cultural marginalization of academe, which threatens intellectual impoverishment to all of us — professors, students, and ordinary citizens alike. There was a time, not that long ago, when leading figures in higher education served as public intellectuals, addressing the vital issues of their day and receiving a respectful hearing from political leaders and the public at large. These days, if a professor from any field outside the hard sciences is being quoted in the media, odds are good that it’s for the purpose of ridicule.

Academics are fond of lamenting the decline of the public intellectual, but we too often blame the public for having forsaken us without asking whether it is not we who have forsaken the public. The central problem with academe today is that we overwhelmingly speak professionally only to other academics, who share our sense of what questions are important and our wider range of values and commitments. Academe has continued to move ever further to the cultural and political left not through any overt discrimination against conservatives but through a decades-long process of self-selection.

Left-leaning professors tend to address questions that interest them, with the predictable though not intended consequence of inspiring their left-leaning students and leaving their more conservative students indifferent or disenchanted with academe. Is it any surprise that smart young liberals get Ph.D.’s and become liberal professors, while smart young conservatives tend to pursue careers in business or the other professions instead? I have no doubt that academe will never again become central to American cultural life as long as professors continue to represent such a narrow spectrum of political affiliations and religious beliefs. Nevertheless, our problems cannot be solved by party politics or by legislation and lawsuits.

True up to a point. I have always been fascinated by leftism in Physics. One would think that people who grasp conservation of matter and energy might appreciate laws of conservation in human interaction, such as my friend the Say Aggregation Principle. But the Physics department is a good place to find socialists, and I suspect that responsibility for containing nuclear weapons is a small part of it. I have also noted the tendency of academicians, including individuals so well-placed as to not be threatened by the success of others, to dismiss public intellectuals, whatever their persuasion, as "popularizers." That was the case, by the way, long before the conservative criticism of "eggheads" included the introduction of evidence of policy failures.