AcaDemocrats

Equal rights, tolerance, justice—when will today's professoriate abandon this radical agenda?

By Lawrence Douglas & Alexander George

A national survey cited in the New York Times last November reveals that “Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences.” These numbers, astonishing as they may seem, simply confirm what many of us in the academy have long known: that the ivory tower is tinged blue. With thirty years of experience between us teaching at one of the nation’s most elite institutions, we have long deplored the dominance of the liberal arts in higher education. This ideological bias has left our institutions of higher education grossly out of touch with mainstream American values. As one Ivy League president confided to us, “These days it’s almost impossible to get hired, much less tenured, unless you espouse a belief in justice, equality, human rights, personal dignity, tolerance, open dialogue, and mutual respect for multiple points of view. Disagree with any of this and we’ll deep six you.”

The situation is of course at its most flagrant in disciplines such as philosophy or sociology, where the mere mention of Allan Bloom or Charles Murray will cause most academics to reach for their sharpened stakes. But the problem is not limited just to the humanities and the social sciences. We find it telling that in the last fifty years, not a single Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to a creationist.

In fact, not one of the leading graduate departments in molecular biology offers a degree in intelligent design. A conservative paleontologist at a major research university was recently denied tenure after writing a book that explained how Brachiosaurus, along with other large dinosaurs, could have fit on Noah’s Ark. (“He chose the adolescents.”) The situation is not much better in physics or chemistry. “The atomic theory of matter is treated as orthodoxy,” complained one researcher at a small university in Texas. “If you so much as allude to angels, they’ll smoke you out before anyone can say Ockham’s razor!”

While many have bemoaned this imbalance, few have suggested practical reforms. We believe that President Bush’s bona fide electoral victory has given him a sweeping mandate to use the power of his office to make sure that not only our judges, but also our astrophysicists and literary theorists represent mainstream American values. Change should begin with the Department of Education, which, for example, could be folded into the Department of Commerce, and with the Library of Congress, which would operate nicely under the auspices of Homeland Security.

Our own experience suggests that many professors are painfully out of touch with the real world. Most of them have never hunted or played polo. They have never flown on a private jet or used a Liechtenstein tax shelter. We cannot in good conscience expect such people to educate our future leaders. More to the point, we would increase the likelihood of luring Republicans into careers in higher education by introducing market-based incentives into academia, such as extravagant compensation packages for professors who run an efficient classroom (including stock options in their institutions, which, we believe, should all be publicly floated).

As a next step, we urge Congress to establish national tenure standards that would require truly balanced teaching concerning matters of public importance. It strikes us as nothing short of outrageous that so many colleges offer courses on “FDR and the New Deal” but virtually none on “The Golden Age of Coolidge.” For all their talk of inclusiveness, liberals scream bloody murder at the idea of balancing courses devoted to John Stuart Mill with those devoted to Ann Coulter. In addition, we need to rethink assumptions about what constitutes proper pedagogical techniques and materials: why shouldn’t a course on U.S. foreign policy teach both George F. Kennan and the Book of Revelations? Furthermore, all candidates for tenure should have completed some “real-world” experience, such as a stint in the family business or a round of military service. Such reforms would make real the liberal academy’s commitment to diversity.

That said, we openly acknowledge that our fellow conservatives must also work to make our dedication to inclusiveness more meaningful. Too many friends of the GOP continue to believe that most professors are secular, homosexual, vegetarian pacifists. While there is much truth to this perception, we have to do a better job of convincing even this demographic that the right has more to offer it than internment at Guantanamo. Once we do, we believe we’ll start seeing converts to the conservative cause. We may never win over all our Nation-reading, Subaru-driving, tofu-dog-eating colleagues, but we can do better.

Finally, we believe that all efforts at reform will fail unless conservatives—from the lowliest would-be graduate student to the president and his top aides—are prepared to address directly the most controversial explanation for the high concen-tration of liberals on campus: the claim that Republicans are simply more “intellectually challenged” than Democrats. Controversy aside, there is some evidence to support this assertion. Demographics indicate that the sixteen states with the highest per capita IQ all went for John Kerry in last year’s national election. Moreover, Kerry significantly outscored President Bush on the quantitative section of the SAT. (It is difficult to compare their verbals as the president’s scores can no longer be located.)

Granted, this theory assumes that academics tend to be intelligent, and our experience suggests that the jury is still out on that one. But instead of challenging these findings, we believe that conservatives should embrace them—and indeed be proud of them. After all, as the Democrats have proven time and again, sometimes you can be so smart you’re dumb. And if book smarts and sheer brain power are not the only things we look for in our political leaders, why should we fetishize them in the academy? Maybe it’s time we freed professors from the tyranny of reason itself.

Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George teach at Amherst College, and they are the authors of the recently published Sense and Nonsensibility: Lampoons of Learning and Literature. Their Web site is http://www.nonsensibility.com.

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