Universities encourage critical analysis of all doctrines. People who engage in that practice are just more likely to be liberals -- after all, almost by definition conservatives are more will to accept existing doctrine. There is a second point, likely related, and that is university professors tend to have higher innate intelligence then the population at large and as is well established liberals also tend to be smarter than conservatives.

Whoah, let me put in a word for serious conservative scholarship here. In his book What Are Intellectuals Good For?, George Scialabba, whose work in The Nation, Agni, and other publications is admired by many TPM readers (go to www.georgescialabba.com) and who is sometimes to the left of Noam Chomsky, has more than a few good things to say about certain conservatives philosophers and social historians such as John Gray, and with good reason. They are intellectually scrupulous and honorable; they have something to say as the classical liberals that many of them in fact are; and they are certainly invaluable in poking holes in a lot of unthinking, institutionalized liberal cant.

Claims posted above that "conservatives are more willing to accept existing doctrine" and that they don't become scholars because they're in it for the money could easily be lobbed against certain stars of the academic left, not to mention against more than a few "liberals" and neo-liberals. But a more substantial objection to these arguments would ask the commenters, or others who'll come in, to distinguish among different kinds of conservatives. My Chronicle contribution (which I hope readers will click on and read) challenges the inclusion of conservative "movement" and "market" operatives in teaching, not the inclusion of serious conservative scholars, who are often quite capable of bouncing their "doctrines" off against "liberal" ones, to the benefit of both.

...that America "houses its radical lunatics ... in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated."

Well, sure. But what else would one expect? The life of scholarship generally attracts a certain kind of individual. Only people with a distinctive type of temperament are inclined to spend most of their time reflecting on the world - observing it, studying it, writing about it and analyzing it - rather than participating easily in the world with undetached and comfortable engagement.

Scholars are always going to be the more alienated folks among us. If people are happy, adjusted, and quite satisfied with the general structure of their societies, then they are probably likely to spend most of their time selling widgets and soap, making money and having various kinds guilt-free fun. They are going to be more disposed toward materially productive action than intellectual reflection, and aren't going to want to curl up on the sidelines of the world and immerse themselves in books, scholarship an representation. They will employ their intelligence mainly as a practical tool for effective action, rather than a discursive tool for generating theory and abstraction.

But one needs to be comfortable with detachment and distance to generate scholarly output. If you are not somewhat alienated from the social objects of your study, you will be too immersed in them, and passionately attached to them, to study them with objective distance and produce volumes of words on them. Do you think a person who is entirely at home and at peace in the contemporary scene, in love with our customary forms and fulfilled by our common and established social life, will be able to spend hour upon hour upon hour dwelling in the vanished domains of the Ottoman Empire, the microworlds of elementary particles, the dreamworlds of Spencer and Dante or the abstract realms of fundamental ontology?

I met my share of radical left lunatics in academia. I also met some rather bizarre conservative lunatics. However, the political extremes tend to be clustered in the more free-lance humanities departments and new areas of identity-based special studies. Most of the folks in the natural sciences, for example, stuck me as pretty normal and middle-of-the-road. I have also met people in the "real" world whose politics are absolutely bonkers, toward both the right and the left, but whose nutty and extreme views tend to be hidden by the fact that they don't talk about their views as much as the professional thinkers and talkers in academia.

Conservatives, as such, are never going to be happy with academics. The word "conservative" means many things in our time. But one of the things it signifies is a general fondness for, and attachment to, what is established and traditional. It is to be expected, then, that the people whose vocation consists in expanding the frontiers of knowledge, and whose job consists in discovering what is inadequate about our current view of the world, and improving upon it, are always going to be irksome to those who are devoted to traditional beliefs across the board, and who are made uncomfortable by most any ideas that upset the intellectual apple-cart, or disturb the cozy intellectual nests that we have woven around and into our identities.

Anyway, the ideas that contemporary conservatives are so attached to, and which they believe are vitally in need of defense, were at one time in the past heretical innovations that had to struggle for their lives against the punishing attacks of the conservatives of that past era. It was no different even in 13th-century medieval universities, where the clerical and political authorities sometimes came down hard on scholars who were discovering the sophisticated thinking of Aristotle and his commentators, and were remaking Christian theology in the light of the new knowledge, just as Jewish and Islamic scholars had done a few centuries earlier. Eventually, of course, Aristotle became synonymous with Catholic tradition and "scholasticism", and was himself the target of criticism among later generations of bold and innovative thinkers.

All this said, and with due weight given to the role and need for innovation in scholarship, a great deal of what most contemporary academics actually do most of the time consists in preserving what is already valuable in our traditions, and passing the capacity for an appreciation of those values on to the next generation. And often, indeed, the "radical" or "liberal" views that contemporary conservatives most deride are informed by a reading of Lucretius, or Plato, or Chaucer, or Aquinas, or Ockham, or Erasmus, or Montaigne, or Shakespeare, or Hume, or Blake - as opposed to such latter-day radical libertarian thinkers as, say, Hayek or Friedman.

However, most of the day-to-day tradition-preserving stuff in academia makes no news, and passes beneath the notice of the FOX commissars. If 95 professors of philosophy take the view that infanticide is wrong; or that some canons of logic and method are objectively superior to others; or that the history of their country is a mixed bag of good and bad; they aren't going to attract the same amount of attention as the loud and attention-seeking scholar who takes extreme and shocking positions on these subjects.

Gaye Tuchman, as sociologist at the University of Connecticut, recently published an ethnography on the corporatization of higher education. She notes some of the institutionalized trends among the nation's research universities that foster the development of fewer and fewer critical thinking citizens and greater and greater obedient workers. Nowadays, many major research univesities are run like businesses, with a focus on efficency and how to satisfy their customers (i.e., students and the parents who often pay their constantly rising tuition). If this trend is true (and is appear to be) then critical dialog that forces students to think outside the status quo will inevitably suffer. The same phenomenon happens as these research universities stress grant funded research, as such funding seldom seeks to address critical questions on such things as inequalities, power and control.

Chris Hedges also wrote an interesting piece related to this on the blog truthdig about a year ago.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=342121

The main reason I wrote this post at this time was to call attention to a Chronicle of Higher Education forum that includes a letter there from me that makes the arguments about markets and the academy that commenters are making here. You can read it at

http://chronicle.com/article/Intellectual-Diversity/48799/

Conservatives' problem is that they can't reconcile their yearning for an ordered, almost sacred liberty with their obeisance to every whim and riptide of a corporate capitalism that would have horrified Adam Smith and that is disrupting an degrading the very virtues and communities they claim to cherish. But that is a good reason to read Adam Smith, John Gray, and other conservative thinkers who have been frank about this.

It's also a good reason to recognize that neo-liberals, who are far more numerous in the academy, have this same dilemma but like Tom "The World is Flat" Friedman, are less frank about its problems.

One simply has to distinguish between conservatives who are frank about it, and conservative-movement types who are not. Please read the Chronicle symposium, One purpose of this post was to alert you to it.

Back to extreme basics: You do mean Wile E. Coyote, not Wiley E. Coyote. I may not know much, but I know my Coyotes. :-}

You know, like Will E. Make it?
Betty Wont.
Seymour Butts.

There is a difference between "process conservatives" like Burke and "movement conservatives" that you see on the TV all the time. Process conservatives respect tradition, legitimacy and longstanding institutions, and caution against attempts to "reform" or remake society according to some abstract ideal. Academia NEEDS more process conservative scholars who doubt the various idealistic frameworks for reworking our society, economy, foreign policy and government. That kind of skepticism is essential and teaches appropriate critical thinking skills - needed to apply to theorists of the left as to the right.

Movement conservatives are a different animal. They are as agenda-driven as any "tenured radical." They hope to undo nearly a century of welfare-state capitalism while rolling back social trends to some mythic earlier era. They can certainly have a place and a voice - just as much as idealistic left wingers should. But the academy is not necessarily enriched by them (as it isn't by hard left theory either).

Unfortunately, what the Horowitz crowd wants is more movement conservatives to incubate young "scholars" to advance a pretty radical agenda - exactly what they accuse the left of doing.

Give us more skeptical process conservatives and academia will be much improved. Movement conservatives have already found a home in the non-university think tank circle of AEI, Heritage, etc. As ideologues, they have more influence there than they would in the classroom anyway (where most undergrads are apathetic in the first place).

Elrod makes a useful and important distinction between movement and process conservatives. We need to understand that the label "conservative" in the US has been successfully misappropriated over the past 50 or so years by people who are actually radical reactionaries. (It's hardly surprising that they should have sought to do so; "conservative" is a venerable term, practically synonymous with "moderate," and they don't want to admit to being radicals.) For reasons of political expediency, these "conservatives" have adopted an anti-scientific and hence anti-intellectual stance, so it's natural that the university is not a particularly congenial place for them. Are there any real conservative intellectuals in the US today, in or out of academe, in the tradition Jim Sleeper is citing? There must be, but I can't think of any offhand.

An interesting set of questions that leave one thinking, a "plague on both your houses..."

There can be little doubt that many American universities became bastions of left wing fascism in the late 1960s and that the emergence of many departments within the Humanities, were outposts of "progress" with the aim of seeking academic retribution against recently ousted reactionaries who had held increasingly ossified sway for decades and who, foolishly, made common cause with multiple branches of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex...

and got, pretty much what they deserved...

But, while many leftists continue to control lit-crit-theory classes,etc, most departments suffer from the great social disease of our time; a disease that infects right and left equally:

Ignorance...

Take, for example, a "prestigious" university in Baltimore...(please...)

The average student, by which I mean the majority,is a functional illiterate...who is being used by an utterly unrepentant corrupt political machine that is the largest employer in Maryland...

as the dean of one program said to the teachers:

You haven't received a pay raise in ten years and you will not receive one in another ten years...your program exists because it is a cash cow for the school and by letting no-talent hacks with no future into the school, and by selling them the school's name because it still carry s weight when job-hunting, we can pay for utterly dead programs, like 19th century German Literature, which no one cares about but which allow us to keep our accreditation...

and just remember; if you don't like it here, we have 300 applicants for every one opening...so, like the bosses used to say in company towns a hundred years ago...we own you ass...

In the meantime, the Sun, about which the university and the city orbit - the Medical-Research school - continues to suck in resources like a drunk sailor at a five dollar whore house; the school continues to own property in Europe, and still has the nerve to charge students to not only take classes but then to charge them to fly to Europe, charge them for accommodations, and then, offer them absolutely zero post-graduate professional help...it continues to deny scholarships and, as the chair of another department in the Humanities said to someone I know: well, if anyone wants to be honest about it, there are no jobs for people with degrees in the humanities...(but two years here will still cost you 100,000 clams...and sorry, we'd love to talk but were throwing yet another party for our alumni...and no, you're not invited...)

Can you smell that?

It's money being burned...

The dilemma facing America's universities is no longer exactly a left vs right divide but a sclerotic top-down corrupt economic system that is offering anyone with a pulse an "education" while at the same time allowing the (warning: incoming cliche)proverbial Wall Street Fat Cats, to crash and burn the market...rendering the BA utterly useless and the MA/Humanities almost as useless...

But the universities (and certainly the one in Baltimore) have zero interest in cutting themselves off from their pipeline of young morons, or the heroin of free tax-payer money that they get from the G.

Increasingly, "higher education" in America is starting to sound like "education" in third world countries where millions of men with "degrees" sit in cafes playing backgammon and chuffing on hookahs...like characters in a Mafouz novel...because there is nothing for them to do...no jobs...no hope...no future...

So it goes...

Academia and government are symbiotic. The government was dominated by liberals for 50 years, so the universities filled up with liberals. Now the conservatives have more or less had the upper hand for 30, so they are starting to trickle in, as the old liberals retire. No surprises here.

I do not find conservative scholars to be scrupulous and careful in their reasoning. Their hallmark is, rather, a kind of 'fudging' that asserts a position -- Brooks does this often -- then plays off of that without ever really establishing that such position exists.

RE: lit-crit-theory, as a professor of this stuff, I can assure you there is not much that is liberal-left in this area. There are some PC types, but for my money, PC is what led the way for the neo-conservatives, as a policing of language for 'good causes' yielded the pouncing on a word here or a phrase there that is now the very substance of talk radio and Fox news programming. That is not good practice, even or especially in literary-critical studies, but it has entered the university as a kind of 5th column that should be rejected.

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