October 24, 2003
Having read some
of the stories from the trenches at Erin OConnors site, I continue
to feel some of the same ambivalence I experienced in reading David Brooks
original lament about the lack of conservatives in academia.
All the qualifications
that a months worth of online conversation have produced still strike
me as important: there are institutional variations and disciplinary variations,
universities and forms of inquiry that are much more open to or even dominated
by conservatism. There is a looseness even in Brooks original piece about
what is meant by conservatism that clearly needs to be picked apart: the ideas
of the religious right are much less welcome in most academic circles than libertarianism
or big-business Republicanism, and possibly for much more legitimate reasons,
due to deep incompatibilities between the bedrock premises of the modern university
and religious fundamentalism.
I would also re-emphasize my original thoughts in response to the stream of unhappy people writing to OConnor, that thinking about this in terms of conservatism is thinking too small, that what we are seeing here is just one small piece of a much larger pattern of intolerance and narrowness within academic life.
At the same time,
I would hold to my original feeling that it's pretty fair to say that conservatives
in the humanities and most of the social sciences are rare and tend to be targets
of abuse at most institutions when they do exist.
However, like Baraita,
I remember being struck
by one of OConnors correspondents, who complained of liberal
intolerance that was particularly directed at his choice to teach the history
of the Renaissance through primary materials. This story really baffled me,
and made me worry about how the general story of persecution of conservatives
(or any other outlier persuasion within academic life) is told through anecdote,
and how any given anecdote, looked at closely, may raise more questions than
Taking the case
of OConnors correspondent, it is totally incomprehensible to me
how practicing historians could find general fault, let alone ideologically
malicious fault, with a course syllabus built largely or exclusively around
primary materials. Ive built syllabi like that, and I have colleagues
here whove done it. Id go so far as to say its a standard
pedagogical strategy for historians everywhere, though certainly less common
than syllabi built largely around secondary materials. So at least on the surface,
theres a simpler explanation for the mistreatment this writer described:
he had the misfortune to be in a department of exceptional idiots.
Appealing as that
explanation might be, I began to wonder whether there wasnt more to the
story. Why did OConnors correspondent regard this tale as evidence
that his conservatism was the source of the animus towards his syllabus? Theres
nothing intrinsically conservative about the pedagogical idea behind it: radical,
liberal and politically indifferent historians use the same approach at times.
For me, what I
wonder is whether the syllabus was perceived as conservative because it was
announced as such, that the logic behind its design was not a pedagogical one
(teach primary texts because its an interesting way to teach history)
but a polemical one (teach primary texts because the bulk of scholarship is
judged to be politically or intellectually bad, trendy, leftist, etc.). O'Connor's
correspondent said he didn't frame his syllabus as such, but he also says that
his colleagues trooped down to the bookstore and divined somehow from his texts
that he was in fact a conservative, which just seems surreal to me. Let's suppose
he said that he was doing things this way because he flatly rejected the current
state of things in the historiography on the Renaissance and didn't want to
use that scholarship in his classroom. I do feel there were other self-declared
conservative voices who spoke up during the Internet-wide debate over Brooks'
article who more or less have said things of this sort. Certainly some conservative
jeremiads against the academy, most notably the Young
America Foundation's surveys of college curricula, pretty much amount to
this sort of argument.
If that were the case, I would have a problem with OConnors correspondent, though I hope Id be polite about it if I were his colleague. At that point, Id judge him to be an academic who was not living up to an important professional standard. I consider it my obligation to know what is going on in the scholarship in the fields I teach: its irresponsible to allow yourself to fall into a know-nothing posture in which you refuse categorically to read or engage prominent, common or normative modes of scholarship, however much you might disagree with their premises, themes, methodologies or arguments.
Thats a venal
sin by comparison to doing the same thing in the classroom. Refusing to teach
a text to your students merely because you disagree with its scholarly approach
is an act of pedagogical malpractice, and to my mind, a pretty serious one at
that. Its one thing to judge a work so shoddy or weak that its not
worth teaching, or to come to the conclusion that an important book in your
own field wont make good grist for the mill in the classroom because its
too arcane, difficult, embedded in a scholarly debate or something else of the
sort. Its another thing to say, Im going to teach only primary
texts because I categorically reject what passes for the state of knowledge
in my field. Youre entitled to feel that way (if youve done
your homework) for yourself. Youre not entitled to inflict that belief
on your students if theyre coming to you to learn about the subject matter
as a whole.
In one class or
another, I have taught Edward Saids Orientalism even though I ultimately
have enormous problems with both its central argument and its evidentiary logics.
I have taught Gann and Duignans Burden of Empire even though I
find it painfully disinterested in the harmful impact of European colonialism
at many points. I have taught Cheikh Anta Diops work, even though I categorically,
emphatically disagree with Diops vision of African history. I teach scholarship
I like and scholarship I dont like, if it is scholarship that many others
rely on and regard as important, or that provides an important point-of-view.
I may even teach scholarship I find actively reprehensible in some way. Sometimes
I say so, sometimes I dont, depending on the drift of the classroom discussion.
But I teach it because the students are entitled to know about it. If I teach
from primary texts, its because I think thats a pedagogically exciting,
useful thing to do, not because Im trying to prevent my students from
seeing a body of scholarship I disdain.
I partially endorsed Brooks original cri dcoeur about conservatives in academic life because I think these minimum professional obligations go unmet by many academics, in fact, more often by the academic left. However, I recoil from any conservative expression of dissatisfaction with contemporary academe that simply seems to want to invert the orthodoxies and expel its enemies from the syllabi and the departments, that indulges itself in know-nothingism, in blanket raving against the texts and pedagogies of others. The obligation to cast a wide net has to fall equally on everyone. That's good intellectual practice overall, but it's especially important in the classroom, where you have a sacred obligation to expose your students to the tensions and contours of debate within a given area of knowledge.