Welcome to Freshman Disorientation
27th August 2012
Four years ago at the beginning of Harvard’s school term, I was going over an assignment with a freshman when she confessed that she was feeling guilty—because she was working for the Obama campaign. I assumed she meant that her campaign work was taking too much time from her studies, but she corrected me: She was feeling guilty because she supported John McCain.
So why, I asked, was she working for his opponent? She answered: “Because I wanted so badly to get along with my roommates and with everyone else.”
I know the feeling well. But I strangled it at birth.
At Yale, where the Party of the Right has been a conservative and libertarian redoubt since the 1950s, feisty undergraduates have founded a new group to promote “genuine intellectual diversity” in the face of excessive ideological uniformity. Named for one of Yale’s most famous mavericks, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program takes its motto from the mission statement of Buckley’s magazine, National Review, standing against “the conformity of the intellectual cliques,” and supporting “excellence (rather than ‘newness’)” and “honest intellectual combat.”
We are the champions.
Nowadays, the pressure for conformism comes more from the faculty, which tips Democratic like the Titanic in its final throes. Programs that once upheld the value if not the practice of intellectual diversity tend to function more like unions, trying to keep their membership in line. Some professors make a habit of insulting Republican candidates and conservative ideas with the smirking assurance of talk-show hosts, unaware that their laugh lines reap from some students the contempt that they sow.
The increased political conformism at universities may be traced in part to the redefinition of diversity that accompanied the introduction of group preferences, aka “affirmative action.” Schools instituting this policy never acknowledged that it conflicted with competing commitments to equal consideration “irrespective of race, religion, or gender,” or that at least half the country questioned its wisdom.
And if a Harvard Professor says it, are we not obliged to believe it?