Not content with their monopoly atop the perches of power, conservatives have let loose their dogs of war into America's universities to both root out liberal bogeymen and relieve their besieged comrades. Conservatives have been quick to frame their aims at academia as not an attempt to expand their political holdings, but as an effort to rectify a grave injustice. Conservatives claim that liberal bias in higher education is so widespread that it amounts to a vast left wing conspiracy. In other words, our universities are turning the winners of seven of the last ten presidential elections into helpless victims. Someone please, cue the violins.
In December, two national studies monitoring the voting preferences of professors were published. The results were predictable: On the high end, thirty times as many anthropologists and sociologists voted Democratic as voted Republican. On the low end were-you guessed it-economists! They favored Democrats by a mere three to one ratio. The national average among professors was a 15:1 Democratic advantage.
Conservatives howled with delight, citing these studies as evidence of institutional discrimination against their cohorts. They demanded action, equity, and above all, more professors in cowboy boots. Suddenly, the ideologues who oppose affirmative action for underprivileged minorities in colleges are demanding it for themselves.
To be sure, just by walking around the corridors of professor offices in Humanities you can see unflattering characterizations of the President hanging proudly on some doors. I can't imagine how off putting that could be for a devoutly conservative student. I had an eye doctor once who asked me if Jesus was my best friend; maybe it feels something like that. Some departments' departure into deep left field is partly to blame for the dearth of Republican-voting academics. But by no stretch of the imagination is it the whole problem. The study also shows that academics in the hard sciences voted for Democrats just as much their social studies colleagues. As Jonathon Chait observes, \Are we to believe that physics departments everywhere suppress conservative quantum theorists?""
If it's not liberal bias that is preventing professors from voting with the GOP, what is it? I must admit the devil in me wants to agree with Robert Brandon of Duke's philosophy department, who says ""We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.""
Hyperbole aside, maybe Brandon's on to something here. Consider the anti-intellectualism that has become a campaign hallmark for the GOP during the last decade. It's a standard GOP political ploy that has been utilized with great effect, especially against some long-winded Democrats. In 2000, Bush publicly ridiculed Al Gore for using both big words and numbers.
In 2004, when John Kerry stated that Bush was not recognizing all the intrinsic nuances of the Iraq war, Bush rebuked him with ""We don't nuance in Texas."" Irrespective of the larger question, this sentence at least illustrates why the majority of English departments voted for Kerry: They wanted complete sentences back in the White House.
In last week's issue of The New Republic, GOP congressmen and probable 2008 presidential candidate Tom Tancredo said that ""America needs saving from the cult of multi-culturalism."" How is a professor who studies other cultures supposed to endorse this mantra of governance?
Furthermore, the conservative voting bloc that is responsible for the Bush ascendancy has lost any connection with its once proud intellectual roots. Gone are the days when intellectual titans like Leo Strauss and William F. Buckley Jr. held sway over the American conservative movement. Today's GOP has abandoned the dialectic in favor of the theocratic dictates of ""family values."" In Ohio, a Republican state senator has introduced legislation that would monitor the curriculum of all Ohio's university courses. A Republican supporter of the bill recently explained why the bill was necessary: ""Parents were tired of paying taxes for education and then finding out their kids are being taught things that do not reflect their family values."" I'm sure intellectuals around the country will be thrilled to learn that the GOP will soon be replacing the liberal theories of John Locke and John Rawls with the cuddly conservatism of ""VeggieTales."" If this anti-intellectualism continues, in a few years any Republican who owns a thesaurus will qualify as an intellectual.
The blame for the lack of Republicans on college campuses does not lie at the feet of America's academic institutions, but rather the real culprit is the conservative movement itself. Consider the following: Last year Alabama state representative Gerald Allen introduced a bill to ""withhold taxpayer funding for books that promote homosexuality by featuring gay characters.""
So when a GOP leader suggested we take American classics like The Color Purple and ""dig a hole and dump them in it,"" were fellow conservatives outraged? No. In fact, he was invited to the White House to discuss with the President ways in which to ""defeat pro-homosexual propaganda."" This sums up the lack of conservative intellectuals pretty well. When liberals come across a book they don't agree with they prefer to read it. Conservatives, on the other hand, want it burned and buried. And conservatives wonder why they're not in our universities.
