1,180 words
Last month, The New York Times published an op-ed by Emma Camp, a student at the University of Virginia (UVA), describing the ideological conformity among her classmates and the social challenges faced by dissenting students. The article was swiftly met with mockery and derision among the blue-check set.
On Friday, a student at UVA responded to her op-ed in an article entitled “The Myth of Self-Censorship” (I encountered this blog via Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution, whose son is a contributor). He articulates the most common response to conservative complaints about conformity on college campuses that I’ve seen from Left-leaning intellectuals:
Even though liberal professors outnumber conservative ones, this is largely due to self-selection. It’s just like how conservatives outnumber liberals in the financial sector — no need for a national emergency. . . . Self-censorship does occur, but it happens just like it does across the country. People change what they say depending on their audience. This isn’t a rights violation — it’s a basic fact of life.
The consensus is that Right-wing students and professors should simply suck it up and adapt to their environment. One criticism of Camp’s op-ed came from an African philosophy professor at Georgetown who likened conservative students to immigrants adjusting to a new country. They must learn to blend in with the locals and become fluent in their etiquette and cultural norms. (Of course, liberals would never actually exhort immigrants to do this.) I am reminded of the Hindu custom of taking one’s shoes off before entering a temple. Right-wingers must leave their dirty opinions at the door; to do otherwise would be blasphemous and disrespectful.
This sentiment was echoed in a viral tweet by a podcast host associated with Jewish Currents. He framed self-censorship as having good manners and being considerate of one’s audience. The obvious implication is that conservatives should keep their opinions to themselves lest they traumatize poor people of color and LGBTQ+ folx.
It seems to have escaped everyone that universities are not finishing schools or religious spaces. Academia is supposed to be a refuge from the dizzying social rules that dictate everyday life. It is meant to be a place where scholars can freely debate each other and embark on the pursuit of truth without feeling like they are tiptoeing through a field of landmines. Some conservatives lambast academia as a hub of “ivory tower” intellectuals, but if anything most people in academia are too plugged into current trends and aren’t that interested in abstract ideas and truth.
One problem with mandating politeness is that it is unsustainable. You cannot forcibly alter people’s opinions, and dissimulation creates a buildup of hidden resentment and anger. The only ways to avoid an unpleasant outcome are to exile Right-wingers from academia or actually change their minds. Rank-and-file Leftists are uncomfortable with the latter option because it would necessitate open, honest debate, and the weaknesses of their arguments would be exposed. Whether they admit it or not, most of them would like to see Right-wingers removed from the academy.
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Academia’s liberal bias is to be expected given the correlation between IQ and openness to experience, which is correlated with liberalism, but the climate of conformity is now worse than it has ever been. The main reason for this is that universities have been admitting unqualified, non-white, and female students in unprecedented numbers thanks to affirmative action and the mainstreaming of post-secondary education.
A study published in 2020 found that IQ is correlated with support for free speech among all political groups, even among those one dislikes. IQ is a greater predictor of one’s tolerance for opposing views than education, ideology, and even openness. This corroborates my own anecdotal observations. It makes sense; smart people are more willing to entertain ideas of all stripes, and because they can craft articulate rebuttals, they are less likely to express disagreement via angry outbursts. Additionally, many intelligent people are familiar with the experience of being out of step with the majority and are thus well aware that they could be targeted by the mob.
Freedom of speech is also a very white concept. I cannot think of one non-European civilization where it emerged independent of Western influence. The influx of students from Asia likely contributes to the ideological homogeneity of universities, since Asian students are accustomed to going with the flow and avoiding controversy.
The feminization of academia is arguably the biggest culprit, however. This certainly isn’t news to anyone. Women’s preoccupation with harmony and consensus has a stifling effect. Most women aren’t borderline personality disorder-ridden hysterics who have meltdowns when confronted with “hate speech” (these disturbed souls are a loud minority), but normal women cave to their ultra-neurotic peers’ demands because they want to assuage their hurt feelings. They are also obviously more socially sensitive and generally conform to evade social ostracism.
The UVA student responding to Camp claims that since most college students are merely moderate liberals, conservative fears about the suppression of dissent by extremists are unfounded. This is a particularly stupid argument. Sure, most students are garden-variety Clinton voters, but they still subscribe to the dominant paradigm, and the substantial cohort of students with more militant views sets the tone.
Numerous people have pointed out that liberals also self-censor. This is funny, because liberals self-censor not because they face ideological suppression from the Right, but because they are notoriously terrified of accidentally saying the wrong thing (hence why they often open with a ritualistic confession of their privilege when they voice their opinions). Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if liberals self-censor more than Right-wing students for this reason.
Camp is not a great representative for the cause of free speech. She is a self-identified liberal whose anodyne views have not incurred that much blowback, and it’s hard not to cringe when she calls herself “brave.” Losing a friend or two is not the same as being exiled from mainstream society. This sort of posturing makes it hard for many people to take free speech activists seriously. Camp made a large sign displaying the First Amendment’s text to protest the university’s policy on the permitted size of signs on dorm room doors, which is all rather goofy. I doubt she would be willing to state that the increase in average-IQ, non-white, and female students is why free speech has become such a contentious issue in the first place.
Nonetheless, the phenomena she describes are very real. Saying that the only reason why conservatives in academia self-censor is simply that they are in the minority is highly disingenuous. It is like saying that the only reason Jews are powerful is that they are smart. There is clearly a culture of intimidation and conformity in academia, and anyone who denies this is either oblivious or dishonest.
Some people on the Right have embraced the idea that the Left’s grip on academia is natural and inevitable. I reject this pessimistic view. It’s reasonable to expect that academia will never be a bastion of conservatism, but if it were dominated by intelligent white men, objectivity and truth-seeking would once again become the standard.
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9 comments
Academia used to be much more ideologically balanced. Then the left began an effort to colonize it, as they did with other opinion-forming institutions. This began long ago, and it took quite a while before anyone noticed what they had been doing.
When are you talking about? I can testify that already by the early 80s, the American university system was totally leftist. If there is a difference with today, it is that being a non-leftist on campus has gotten astronomically harder, although even in my day you had to be careful wrt the liberal Holy Trinity of race/gender/sexual orientation. I’d had a queer prof in sophomore year, and he begged me personally a couple of years later to take a senior seminar he was going to be teaching. He praised me repeatedly and to the hilt, often in front of others (I don’t know if he “liked” me, but I’m positive he knew I was hetero, as I had a campus girlfriend, and he never did actually ‘hit’ on me). I had confirmed with him that he would be one of my recommenders for grad school.
I took a year off after college, just part time working and general bumming – along with studying for the GRE and preparing my grad school apps. I sent some prof rec forms to this queer, as we’d agreed before I’d graduated. He then sent them back to me, attaching a letter of explanation in which he stated that he couldn’t recommend me due to my “well-known beliefs that blacks, Oriental immigrants and Jews were posing a mortal threat to Western Civilization.” This is very close to exactly what he said (in my stupid, stupid, stupid!! youthful arrogance and impetuosity, I simply threw it away at the time, nearly 40 years ago; I’d frame the letter if I still had it today).
This response was telling. For one thing, what did my Occidentalist patriotism have to do with my classroom performance and fitness for grad school? For another, I don’t recall ever particularly singling out Oriental immigrants. I was well-known for opposing all nonwhite immigration; I never to my recollection made ‘invidious’ distinctions between immigrant groups. Much more significantly, I never made any negative comments about Jews in my years in college. More than one quarter of my school was Jewish (this was already standard at most of the Ivies, I believe). Moreover, one of my best friends at college was a Jew; my parents had several close Jewish friends, who were also the only Jews I knew pre-college (I grew up in a Christian home and attended Christian schools with no Jewish classmates); and I was simply very ignorant about the JQ and Jews generally. If someone back then had called me a racist, I either would have laughed, flipped them off, or gently disputed them (depending on my mood). But if someone had called me an antisemite, I would have vigorously argued against and denounced them.
It’s interesting how this (non-Jewish) queer prof reached for the antisemite label – as though, according to the sick liberal mind, one cannot recognize the whiteness of the West and wish to preserve it unless one is also a secret Nazi. That’s a huge part of our problem right there.
In fairness, I must state that others among my profs, who also knew I was a fierce rightwinger, nevertheless had enough old-fashioned integrity to exhibit no reluctance in penning grad school recs for me (to be accurate, many of my profs may not have known my precise racial views: race per se was simply not as much of an issue back then in light of the totality of political issues discussions, in or out of the classroom, which mainly revolved around the Cold War, the economy [liberty/free marketism vs Big Government/Keynesianism], and, to some extent, feminism, which was still slightly novel, and its implications; even many of my fellow campus Republicans – already a small and somewhat persecuted group, though again, nothing like today – thought I was a bit bizarre the way I was always harping on the dangers of nonwhite immigration).
Perhaps this is what you mean by “more ideologically balanced”. I read a study somewhere that said that already by the 30s, a substantial majority of US professors supported the New Deal. That’s not the same as CRT, but it shows that the left-bias of academia goes back very far, and has merely intensified over time: from liberal to leftist to “politically correct” to woke/persecutionist towards anyone in disagreement.
It’s time to “Defund the Colleges”, and start over.
The Frankfurt School came nearly 90 years ago. These were the original cultural Marxists who began a lot of key trends. Much like them, the Institute of International Education also shipped in probably a couple thousand professors who were in political hot water. (That by itself is quite an interesting story of its own. I’m tempted to write it up one of these days.) Chances are that some of them were doing ideological proselytizing too. Before all that was Franz Boas and his crew. They pretty much invented cultural anthropology, with all of its leftist baggage.
By the 1960s, there already was a pronounced leftward tilt. This was just in time to receive a friendly audience, Boomer draft dodgers on academic deferment. In turn, some of them became the next professors of our generation.
Just call them Communists. They don’t have to look like Soviet “tankies” to fit the label. Nowadays the Commies usually sport green or blue hair, tatts and piercings, boldly state their preferred “pronouns,” and ritually apologize on behalf of their colleagues for building their institution upon sacred indigenous ground somehow. The Augean stables need a big cleaning.
🙂
I figure that the pinkos of the Brezhnev administration were superior in many ways to today’s limp-noodled, face-pierced squidlings.
Lord Shang, what did you go to graduate school for, in what subject? I sent in the money for your membership to counter currents about a week or so ago.
Wow! I am flattened and flattered. Thank you so much. That saves me a huge amount of trouble in terms of finding totally anonymous gift cards. Now I just have to set up a totally anonymous email, and I can get my paywall password, and then I’m one of the cool kids. I’m in a bit of a rough patch medically right now, so this is a real lift to my spirits. Very kind of you.
As for my grad school, it was in history, specifically intellectual history (with a special focus on political philosophy, particularly the conservative/libertarian debate, which was a bigger deal back in those days). Any type of racial nationalism was already strictly out of the question by the mid-80s (maybe/probably earlier), but you could still study classic conservatives (the natural law and Burkean traditions) and libertarians (Mill, Nozick, Rothbard) without too much faculty hassle. I was known to be a rightwinger in grad school (as in college) (although no one knew my real views …), but only one of my professors really tried to screw me over because of politics. The others, despite most (but, unlike today, not all) being liberals or leftists, were actually pretty fair to me. But I went where I did in part because they had some well-known conservatives (not by our standards here at CC, but at least a couple of Reaganite Republicans, as well as a serious Christian moral-conservative philosopher) among the faculty. Even in the 80s, in other words, my experience could have been much worse, and in the 2020s probably no program as tolerant of non-leftists as mine was still exists.
I used deception when I was in grad school. I would put my hand to my brow and lament “Oh, if only they had education!” “Oh, if only whites weren’t so racist!” The Jboys ate it up, I got my degree, and look at me now!
Yes, and it is not just the public funding either. The University system itself, aka the New American University model, is increasingly developing “innovative” ways to fund itself via incestuous partnerships with the global corporatocracy.
There are many routes for accomplishing this, but most of them essentially involve passing the private costs of doing business onto the public sector in some backhanded way. And the University system is very happy to facilitate.
For one thing, multinational corporations always need cheap labor trained cheaply ─ so they love foreign students, who after training at the U will begin their indentured servitude, sometimes also in America. Or maybe, if they are lucky, the pupil will be sent home to manage something in the overseas silicon chip factory or whatever.
Investing in those cherrypicked from the “huddled masses yearning to be free” will have ultimately been lower in cost for the firm, and those plebes will have gotten some good experience with the American system and the embedded markets that will be exploited in the process of serving one’s multinational corporate masters.
The medical-industrial-complex is another example. A local White kid will either have to be filthy rich or have a strong legacy mentor to ever think of becoming a medical doctor, and that plan probably started at age 6 with a rigid and conformist path. No matter how many good primary care providers are needed, it is not a sustainable education and career path otherwise.
Strangely, ever stop to notice how many Eastern Indians are practicing medicine now in every hospital and clinic nowadays? Why exactly is that?
🙂
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