Beware rationalizations for leaving universities as they are

Those paying attention over, say, the previous 40 years know that American colleges and universities long ago departed from their core mission, which is to provide undergraduates a liberal education and to foster scholarship driven by the disinterested pursuit of the truth. The public, however, has been inclined to downplay reports of faculty and administration misconduct: censorship; kangaroo courts for those accused of sexual misconduct; progressive indoctrination laced throughout the humanities and social sciences; and abandonment of basic courses in American ideas and institutions, Western civilization, and non-Western peoples and nations. For decades, parents, alumni, wealthy donors, the media, and government officials assured themselves that matters could not be as bad as critics, mostly conservatives, contended. Besides, a selective college or university degree conferred social status and provided access to the top echelons of law, medicine, finance, corporate management, the media, entertainment, and government.

Since Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel, university dysfunction has captured headlines. Countless videos displayed the lawlessness of pro-Hamas campus protestors threatening Jews while trespassing, erecting encampments, and taking over buildings. And House hearings exposed the public to university administrators’ indulgence of protestors’ intimidation and harassment of Jewish students. As the price of annual tuition, room, and board at selective schools approaches $100,000, reasonable people wonder whether the costs of elite education exceed the benefits.

The pro-Hamas protests also revealed that the sympathy for the jihadists’ heinous ambitions to wipe out the Jewish state stemmed from a toxic mix of antisemitism and anti-Americanism. The protesters’ frequent call to “globalize the Intifada” summoned the faithful to overturn the American political system as Hamas aims to eradicate Israel. In many protesters’ eyes, prominent among America’s numerous sins was support for Israel – the world’s only Jewish nation and, notwithstanding immense national-security challenges, the only rights-protecting democracy in the Middle East. With a population of approximately 10 million, the tiny Jewish state coexists in a volatile region with around 15 Muslim nations whose combined population is over 470 million.

Conservative critics of American universities saw the disgraceful post-Oct. 7 spectacle on campuses as egregious additional evidence – not that they thought the pre-Oct. 7 evidence was anything short of devastating – of higher education’s acute deformations. Among these, they had long maintained, were the well-documented dearth of conservatives among the faculty, and the less well-documented but more fundamental exclusion of conservative perspectives and opinions from the college curriculum.

To counteract the gross imbalance, conservatives, well before the post-Oct. 7 campus tumult, joined forces with the small and declining numbers of old-fashioned liberals in the professoriate to rally around “viewpoint diversity.” This was a matter of fairness – of overcoming the ill-informed stigma that campus majorities attached to conservatives and conservatism and removing obstacles faced by conservatives to graduate study, faculty appointment, and tenure.

But enhancing viewpoint diversity was about more than fairness to conservatives. It was also an imperative of liberal education.

Contrary to a widespread campus conceit, the left does not hold a monopoly on truth. The right safeguards its fair share of hard-won insights. And even if the left had a greater proportion of truth on its side, professional obligations would still compel universities to ensure that conservative thinking was amply represented. That’s because, as professors and administrators should have learned from John Stuart Mill but demonstrably have not, unless true opinions are constantly challenged, they will ossify into dogma, and those who hold them will lose sight of their true opinions’ assumptions, vulnerabilities, and implications. And who better to challenge progressive orthodoxy on campus than conservatives who disagree with it and who often devote their scholarly energies to studying alternatives?

Notwithstanding the claims of fairness and the imperatives of liberal education, University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor Jennifer M. Morton worried recently in a New York Times op-ed that universities would harm conservatives by hiring them. She should worry less about the hardships conservatives will incur if universities appoint them and consider more the benefits they would bring to campus intellectual life.

In “Why Hiring Professors With Conservative Views Could Backfire on Conservatives,” Morton rightly calls attention to the downsides of universities’ classifying students and faculty based on political orientation. But the flaws in her three main arguments underscore the need for universities to hire more conservative professors. Had Penn and the profession of academic philosophy provided her greater access to conservative thinking, she might have factored into her analysis crucial matters that conservatives tend to emphasize. These include empirical realities, tradeoffs, and the character of conservatism in general and American conservatism in particular.

First, Morton argues that “hiring more conservative professors and admitting more conservative students” will not remedy “liberal bias in American higher education.” More “engagement with conservative ideas on college campuses” is desirable, she acknowledges. “But a policy of hiring professors and admitting students because they have conservative views would actually endanger the open-minded intellectual environment that proponents of viewpoint diversity say they want,” Morton writes. “By creating incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions, such a policy would discourage curiosity and reward narrowness of thought.”

American universities, however, maintain closed-minded intellectual environments that encourage professors and students to espouse progressive orthodoxy and exact costs from those who don’t. In universities as they are, introducing conservatives into faculty ranks would inject into the intellectual mix on campus questions that the progressive majority routinely ignores or suppresses, and evidence that it often casually overlooks or brusquely dismisses.

Second, Morton, a self-proclaimed progressive, uses herself as an example of how properly to fight liberal bias. She explains that she challenges both “liberal” and “libertarian” students by including the late Harvard philosophy professor Robert Nozick’s “forceful case for a minimal state” in her classes on social contract theory. Noting that Nozick entered graduate school as a socialist, she stresses that his scholarly success stemmed from “his openness to intellectual engagement, not his ideological loyalty.” Like Nozick, she argues, professors should be hired for the quality of their work and not the orientation of their political opinions.

American universities, however, have for decades hired professors based in no small measure on their political opinions. The notorious diversity statements of recent years furnish a crude example of how universities root out and banish those who deviate from progressive pieties. In universities as they are, to refrain from seeding the elite academy with conservatives would preserve higher education as a progressive stronghold hostile to conservatives and ignorant of their opinions.

As for Nozick, he was indeed an outlier in academic philosophy. But he passed away in 2002. It is telling that the sole example that Morton provides of a philosophy professor who brings intellectual diversity to the discipline has been dead for more than a generation.

It is more instructive still that her lone instance of how conservatives can pull themselves up by their bootstraps involves a professor whom most conservatives would not consider much of a conservative. Nozick derives his radical individualism and minimal state from abstract assumptions, not from inherited beliefs, practices, and institutions, and he defends a form of government at odds in important respects from the United States Constitution. In contrast, most American conservatives defend limited government based on a blend of Lockean, classical, and biblical principles embedded in the American founding. And they recognize, contrary to Nozick’s extreme libertarianism, the federal government’s responsibility to provide public goods and, as the Constitution’s Preamble states, “promote the general welfare.”

Third, Morton argues that conservative criticisms of admitting students and hiring professors based on race and ethnicity apply to admitting students and hiring professors based on viewpoint diversity. Expecting Black or Latino students and professors to represent “the Black or Latino view” restricts their intellectual freedom by shackling their identity to fixed opinions. Similarly, argues Morton, choosing students and professors to espouse conservative political beliefs will oblige them “to defend certain views, regardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter.”

American universities, however, abound in identity politics. Whereas the left generally supposes that race and ethnicity determine political opinions, conservatives tend to reject the reduction of beliefs to fixed human characteristics. In universities as they are, hiring more conservatives would expose more students and faculty to arguments about the demeaning implications and stifling impact of the assumption that all authentic members of historically discriminated-against groups must hold progressive views.

In a better world, universities would hire with a view not to political convictions but rather to subject-matter expertise. But in the world in which we live, some attention to political sensibility is necessary to correct the all but monolithic progressive edifice that faculty and administration have built over many decades.

In hiring conservatives, no compromise should be made on intellectual excellence. However, such is the decline of the old-fashioned liberal spirit that many current faculty and administrators cannot help but embrace the self-serving equation of intellectual excellence with the affirmation of progressive opinions.

Consequently, reform of America’s universities depends on professors and administrators relearning – or learning for the first time – the meaning of liberal education.