Should Conservatives Abandon the University?
Why some think this way — and why they are wrong
A few weeks ago, British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton dropped an atom bomb, claiming there is no place left in western universities for anyone who espouses conservative views. Scruton argues that the time has come to choose one of two options: establish specifically conservative universities — Frederick M. Hess and Brendan Bell offer a similar proposal for America in National Affairs — or end all support for universities, thus ending the injustice of forcing conservatives to pay for the privilege of being mocked, derided, and excluded.
Scruton is not just any scholar. He is one of the leading conservative thinkers of our time, having published an corpus of material laying out the conservative worldview at the highest level. Disagree with any of his views if you will — and I do regarding many — but it’s time to take heed of what he says, if for no other reason than many on the right feel the same way.
Indeed, it’s hard to view the last few decades of conservative efforts to influence university culture as anything but a series of crushing defeats punctuated by temporary and fleeting victories.
William F. Buckley complained about ideological diversity and neutrality at Yale in the 1940s. Today, that concept is under withering attack. Conservatives once railed against the progressive insistence on seeing everything through the lens of race, class, and gender. Today, everyone speaks that language. Stories of professors getting fired or silenced and lecturers heckled and deplatformed are now commonplace. Western civ and core curricula used to be commonplace. Today, they constantly need to justify their existence.
Against this, the libertarian right and the conservative right have both despaired of the university since at least the mid-2000s. The former due to exorbitant costs and promises of erudition and skills that rarely hold up, the latter because of a seemingly relentless assault on everything they consider sacred heritage to be cultivated and passed down the generations.
There was a time when the right made common cause with moderate or at least humanistic liberals to try and keep this tendency in check, which Jonathan Marks called the Buckley-Bloom alliance launched by the latter’s book The Closing of the American Mind. But looking back on that period — with fewer moderate and conservative professors and administrators, an increasing number of openly radical scholars, and more — it’s clear this was just another temporary setback for complete liberal/left domination.
There are, of course, some nuances. Fields like economics, law, and STEM tend to be, if not right-wing dominated, then at least neutral enough or occupied by enough conservatives that there is good reason to keep maintaining that dialogue and those fields. But in the humanities and social sciences — those repositories of knowledge of humans qua humans that conservatives of previous generations once cherished — the past few decades have been nothing short of a rout.
Some fault professors. Others blame the students, who tend to be overwhelmingly liberal (for a variety of reasons). Some, like Heterodox Academy, lament this monoculture and fight for inclusion. And some progressives crow that this is the victory of progress, and vindication for obviously correct left-wing views against evil backward reactionaries.
Whichever line you take, it’s hard not to feel that Scruton is right. Conservative interests in the university have been crushed. It’s time to admit defeat and stop being chumps who get into the ring just to get knocked out again.
It’s time to stop heeding appeals for gen ed courses and humanities funding, which, as Phil Magness noted in Cracks in the Ivory Tower, are more of a jobs program for radical professors than a contribution to erudition or civilization. Let the left sort itself out now that it rules the roost, we have no stake in the matter and nothing to gain from either side winning. Let the wealthier and increasingly blue crowd pay full tuition for the privilege of supporting their views. We have better things to do with our time and money — such as helping rebuild communities where the majority does not have a college degree, which actually vote for conservatives.
Don’t Lose Hope
It’s a tempting thought. Maybe I’m constitutionally drawn to hope despite it all, but I can’t support this. I have no illusions about the challenges involved, but I think abandoning this cause rather than adjusting our efforts towards realistic goals — as I recommended for conservative student groups — would mean we lose even more than we have already.
For starters, abandoning the universities wholesale (or at least the softer sciences and humanities) means abandoning that which we claimed was vital to understand the human condition. If we truly believe that it is, then it matters not whether Rome has actually fallen or provinces have been conquered. Wherever and whenever we can keep the flame alive, we should.
And there are many places where we can do that. Gut public subsidy and the elite colleges and universities where much of the trouble happens will probably be fine. But the state schools, the community colleges, the regional centers of education for folks who aren’t rich or upper middle class will suffer for it. In a horrible twist, we will have helped perpetuate the very caste structure both populists and conservatives now deride.
Furthermore, there are many teachers and researchers who still adhere to that original humanistic and spirit of open inquiry — whether they identify as liberal, conservative, or something else — and many of them publish important work conservatives can use or learn from. Let the radicals do what they will, so long as we have allies, or at least people to work with.
There’s an underlying and not very pleasant undertone to these discussions, according to which only white students would be able to appreciate what conservatives have to offer on campus. We see this with the sort of people TPUSA attracts, for instance. And too many on the right assume that every student who belongs to a minority of some kind must also be an identitarian hellbent on destroying what should be the shared heritage of anyone living in the West, thus ironically agreeing with student radicals.
But is this really true? Consider how many if not most students go to university to make a better living, often marrying and maintaining stable families at much higher rates than those without a college degree. Or the many minority groups devoted to virtue and business success on various campuses. Even if only a minority or a silent majority, the idea that all these students are deaf to at least some of the ideas we believe in is a hypothesis to be proven, not an axiom to accept unquestioned.
To bastardize Bastiat, we need to pay less attention to the seen radical madness and much, much more attention to the unseen potential and interest that’s out there. Might we still lose, yet again? Sure we could. But I’d like to see a much more serious, sustained effort; a focus on what’s gained, not just what’s lost; and an approach that recognizes conservatives have a stake in the health of academia rather than a conditional and highly tenuous commitment not to burn it down.
It’s not an easy time to be conservative. Conservative parties are being crushed all over the globe by populists, while it feels that everyone on the left wants to see us gone or take the kill shot themselves.
But we stand for what’s eternal, what’s been true and will continue to be true long after we are gone and this storm has passed. To ensure people know of it, we need to relearn what it means to believe and have hope in what we stand for.
