CONSERVATIVES -UNIVERSITIES- CONSTITUENTS : OPINION ESSAY

THREE weeks ago - The Wall Street Journal reported that Harvard University - searching after greater ideological diversity - is considering creating some kind of institute with a mandate to hire faculty members with nonprogressive perspectives on the world.

Around the same time the novelist Joyce Carol Oates published a post making sport of these sort of efforts, whose argument I will reproduce in full :

most universities & colleges surely have faculty members who are contrarians? liberals & progressives are always quarreling with one another; “the left eats its own”; hiring conservatives per se will result in very lopsided résumés especially in the sciences. really, research universities should hire physicists who disbelieve in modern physics? anthropologists who believe that “Aryans” are the master race? poets who believe in Rhyming? philosophers who are staunch Thomists, or believe in the Creation? historians who don’t acknowledge slavery in the US? what a clown show, a sort of campus “Book of Mormon.”

I love, indeed adore, the idea that '' poets who believe in Rhyming '' and students of Thomas Aquinas -two categories distinguished by their unusual rigor ; in my experience - are from the Oatesian perspective the equivalent of Aryan supremacists and some imagined set of '' historians who don't acknowledge slavery.''

But the first part of the post asks a question that deserves a serious response. Why don't academic contrarianism and the quarrelsomeness alone suffice to reintroduce students to diverse perspectives on the world?

Why can't we just rely on the intelligence and curiosity of good professors, even if almost all of them happen to lean leftward, to deliver a complete portrait of intellectual debate?

The simplest answer is that contrarianism is quite unnatural to human beings, and only slightly less unnatural among people theoretically trained in rigorous intellectual work.

Indeed sometimes a life spent on intellectual can make conformity seem more natural. After all, if everyone around you is a professional scholar and everyone tends to agree about certain crucial questions, shouldn't you be deferential to this shared expertise?

The Publishing of this Master Opinion continues to Part [ 2 ]. The World Students Society thanks Ross Douthat.