April 2015
Every year at this
time I am privileged to appear as a guest lecturer for my friend Adam
Daifallah’s course on the history of conservative thought at McGill
University.Below are lightly edited excerpts from tonight’s lecture.
In his essay, “What
are universities for?” philosopher Leszek Kolakowski writes: “The greatest
danger is the invasion of an intellectual fashion which wants to abolish
cognitive criteria of knowledge and truth itself. The humanities and social
sciences have always succumbed to various fashions, and this seems inevitable.
But this is probably the first time that we are dealing with a fashion, or
rather fashions, according to which there are no generally valid intellectual
criteria.”
The counter-culture
of the 1960s drew a bright line between all past and present understanding of
what universities were for. Standing on one leg, one might say that in the past
universities felt it was their mission to teach students how to think, and in
doing so it was considered natural to use as a teaching guide, as the 19th
century cultural critic Mathew Arnold put it, “the best which has been thought
and said” in our culture. Arnold’s dictum governed my own university experience
in the golden age of university expansion between 1945 and 1960. My courses were
blessedly free of ideology, and devoted to cultivation of students’ critical
faculties through exposure to a variety of opinions.
Since the late
1960s, universities have considered it their mission to teach students whatrather
than how to think. Students soon internalize the catechism, summed up in
the Twitter hashtag #white privilege, meaning: Western civilization thrived on
white, Christian, Euro-centric aggression against Others; Western literature and
art are the patriarchy’s handmaidens; the university’s mission is to further a
just society and empower the wretched of the Earth; objective “knowledge” is a
tool for one dominant race, gender and sexuality to oppress the powerless;
reason is but one “way of knowing”; any opposition to identity politics and
multiculturalism is racism; there are no hierarchies in cultural values — in
matters of gender, art and family, all manifestations are equally valid; and
most insidiously, acknowledging and rewarding objective merit is considered an
“institutionalized form of racism and classism.”
Just as Gender
Studies considers all men to be “carriers” of the patriarchy, many progressives
consider conservatism to be so retrograde, so obsolete, so inherentlywrong
that indulging its proponents with a podium on campus is akin to countenancing
immorality. To illustrate, last year about this time I participated in a debate
on the state of free speech at Canadian universities. I argued it was
endangered. My opponent, a York University academic, did not deny freedom of
speech was tightly curtailed on our campuses. But his position was that
cultural, gender and racial diversity on campus, admittedly far more advanced
today than in my era, is more important than and —I inferred — even
incompatible with intellectual diversity. Which did not dismay him at all.
If, across Canada
every year, 20 or 30 politically incorrect speakers don’t get to speak on campus
because their views were offensive [to progressives], my opponent said, so what?
Times have changed, he explained; anyone can make their views known on the
Internet! And therefore campuses are not obliged to provide a soapbox for every
“crackpot.” His views shocked me (not least because I am one of those
“crackpots” that feminists tried to stop from speaking at McGill some years
ago). According to his curious strain of logic, if the Internet is a viable
ideas forum for students, why the need for anyspeakers on campus?
Obviously, the Internet is no such thing. But his casual dismissal of the need
for intellectual diversity is not unusual in academia; rather it is typical.
Strategies for
eliminating intellectual debate on campus are manifold. Amongst them:
disinviting guests, such as Brandeis’ 2014 commencement dis-invitation to the
heroic Ayaan Hirsi Ali because her views on Islam offend some Muslims, or
disrupting the speech of politically incorrect speakers (conservatives, pro-life
activists, advocates for men’s centres on campus and pro-Israel speakers often
need tough security on campuses, but never the other way around); eliminating
neutral survey courses, but sanctioning group identity courses designed to
promote activism; speech codes to punish “offensive” language to women and
minorities; and hiring according to ideology and group identity rather than
academic accreditation.
Ironically, the
marginalization of conservatism in the universities has produced a
counter-revolution amongst conservative thinkers. As former
leftist-turned-vehement conservative David Horowitz writes: “excluded
conservatives [in the universities] … are forced by the cultural dominance of
the left to be thoroughly familiar with the intellectual traditions and
arguments that sustain it. This is one reason for the vitality of contemporary
conservative thought outside the academy, and for the inability of progressives
to learn from the past.”
Conservative
thinkers in the fields of history, economics and sociology, knowing they cannot
do the research they want to on campus, have been migrating to think tanks,
supported by private individuals and companies. This is something Adam Daifallah
predicted and urged on in his 2005 book written with Tasha Kheiriddin,
Rescuing Canada’s Right. Look at the recent crop of new conservative
Canadian policy advocacy groups: The Manning Centre, The MacDonald-Laurier
Institute, the Frontier Centre, The Institute for Marriage and the Family, all
having sprung up in the last decade, all sponsoring intelligently provocative
work.
Interestingly, UCLA
Higher Education Research Institute data shows that self-identified conservative
students report higher levels of satisfaction with their university education
experience than self-identified moderate or liberal students, with the exception
of those in the humanities and social sciences. Not coincidentally, there are
fewer conservative students in the humanities and more in fields like political
science, political philosophy and economics. Indeed, conservative economists
have dominated the Nobel Prize
since its inception
in the
1970s.
In a June 2014
article in New Criterion magazine, journalist Steven F. Hayward addresses
the root cause of conservative students’ attraction to these disciplines, and
finds it in the fundamental difference of outlook between liberals and
conservatives. Chiefly, he says —and I concur —the answer resides in the
Left’s unrealistic tendency to demand utopian solutions and the realistic
conservative tendency to respect human and social limitations. “There is no
utopian right,” says Hayward. Thus, conservatives like subjects that are
concrete rather than abstract and in which objective evidence
is what leads
to conclusions,
rather than theories, ideology,
feelings or cultural narratives.
Abraham Lincoln
said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy
of government in the next.” The university is therefore our most important
cultural institution, and preserving its credibility and excellence —in this
case rescuing it from its present lack of credibility and excellence —our
highest civic duty.
National Post, March 11, 2015.
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