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Conservatives in the Academy

Fascinating article in yesterday's Chronicle regarding the place of conservatives on campus. The piece was prompted by the fate of Robert Natelson, a professor at Montana's law school.

Natelson claimed that he was denied the opportunity to teach a course in constitutional law because he was a conservative; a mediator ruled that he was treated unfairly. His colleagues' justifications for Natelson's not being assigned to teach the course? "We put more of an emphasis on getting along," said one, and Natelson had a tendency to "rock the boat." Added another, "The problem lies in his ability to work and play well with others." One can just imagine what sort of students the school is producing if courses are assigned on the ability of professors to "work and play well with others." Could it just be possible that the other members of the University of Montana law faculty would have found Natelson more collegial if he agreed with their political views?

The article also discusses the case of John Yoo, a professor at Boalt Law School at Cal-Berkeley. (Yoo and I had the same undergraduate advisor, and I have admired his scholarship since the first article I read by him more than a decade ago.) One quarter of the graduating class last year at Berkeley demanded Yoo's resignation, to protest advisory opinions he had rendered while working in John Ashcroft's Justice Department. Berkeley's position (correctly, I think) is that students have a free speech right to take whatever position they want.

Imagine the opposite scenario, however: conservative students demanding the resignation of left-wing faculty members because of their opinions. Much more moderate reactions have already occurred recently in the academy, such as establishment of the website noindoctrination.org or the decision by College Republicans at the University of Texas to publicize the views of professors they considered excessively hostile to US foreign policy. Both moves had been denounced as a revival of "McCarthyism." I haven't seen any of those who leveled the charges in the Texas case or with noindoctrination.org defend Yoo. I wonder why?

The defenders of the status quo make arguments that strike me as, to put it mildly, less than persuasive. Carol Christ, president of Smith College and a 30-plus year veteran of academia, remarks that "There's much more diversity in the academy than the conservatives on the right represent there as being." Her evidence? She "knows professors who have a broad range of views on the economy, the Middle East, and the war in Iraq." So there is no problem if a college president with more than three decades of experience has met two or three professors in her career with differing views on the Middle East? According to Erwin Chemerinsky, a Duke Law professor, "At a time when the president is conservative, the Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative majority, when both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans, it's hard to see this as a time of liberal dominance." No one, as far as I know, claims that a leftist dominance in the academy has anything to do with contemporary political trends.

The real problem, of course, is with the exclusion of professors or topics because of a perception that they are "conservative." Articles like the Chronicle one are a step in the right direction in terms of exposing the issue.

Posted on Tuesday, September 21, 2004 at 6:55 PM | Comments (16) | Return

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