Joanne Jacobs cites a piece from the Chronicles of Higher Education by Max Bauerlein on the paucity of intellectual discourse among some faculty on American university campuses. The article confirms the widely held suspicion that many university professors aren't really interested in either thinking or truth but simply in promoting their prejudices. Jacobs writes:
Groupthink in college faculties is anti-intellectual, writes Max Bauerlein, an Emory English professor, in Chronicle of Higher Education. Politics is embedded in some disciplines.
"Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies."
Many academics don't read conservative texts or talk to conservative thinkers, writes Bauerlein. They think the conservative intelligentsia is represented by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, "not von Hayek, Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, Thomas Sowell, Robert Nozick, or Gertrude Himmelfarb."
"The ordinary evolution of opinion -- expounding your beliefs in conversation, testing them in debate, reading books that confirm or refute them -- is lacking, and what should remain arguable settles into surety."
Liberal professors assume all thinking people agree with them. Those who disagree must be stupid; their ideas aren't worthy of consideration. Academics don't realize they've lost "all sense of the range of legitimate opinion," Bauerlein writes.
"The problem is that the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they've reached an opinion through reasoned debate -- instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants left the enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to the beliefs of others."
"...Panels on issues like Iraq, racism, imperialism, and terrorism that stack the dais provide lots of passion, but little excitement. Syllabi that include the same roster of voices make learning ever more desultory. Add a few rightists, and the debate picks up. Perhaps that is the most persuasive internal case for infusing conservatism into academic discourse and activities. Without genuine dissent in the classroom and the committee room, academic life is simply boring."
Bauerlein doesn't want affirmative action for conservatives on campus, Jacobs tells us. His goal is to prod professors to think about the ways they exclude and ignore dissenting opinions.
Excluding and ignoring dissenting opinions is a symptom of intellectual insecurity. It's the preferred tactic of those who realize, if only subliminally, that their ideas simply can't withstand the challenge of open debate. Leftist ideas can only survive on campus if they are insulated from scrutiny and immunized from criticism. Many of our universitites have long ago ceased to be part of the marketplace of ideas. Today they are ideological monocultures, heavily laced with a wide variety of politically correct herbicides employed to kill off any unapproved idea which might otherwise take root in this intellectually sterile soil.
