Monday, December 17, 2007

Paths Of Least (Ideological) Resistence

I always like it when I come across something that frames an issue in a different way:

But more interesting to me are the surprising consequences of the ideological bias of our universities. The bias has done a great deal to help staff the think tanks of the Right. Sinecures of academia unavailable, a conservative intellectual is practically forced to find a public voice. The same holds for students. A liberal student is on ideological welfare. The entire university is set up to support his or her causes. The conservatively-minded students must be entrepreneurial. If they don’t start their own organizations, then their positions go unheard.

Thus the law of unintended consequences. It seems rather obvious to me that the vibrant organizational and intellectual potency of contemporary conservatism is largely due to the transparent and relentless Leftism of the academy. Deny a podium to smart, motivated folks who hold positions consistently preferred by more than 50% of American voters, and they will find other outlets. And furthermore, removed from the relative insularity and softening wealth of the contemporary university, those same conservative intellectuals will need to be nimble, articulate, and energetic in order to survive.

It does seem to me that students of a left leaning persuasion are increasingly unable to articulate their positions well. That may be precisely because they are so unchallenged in the university environment. I would no longer dare to forcefully take on a leftist student's predisposed notions because they lack the tools to defend themselves and I would just come across as a bully. I fall back on my ability to cajole even though I realize that that comes across as a lack of seriousness. My hope is I can get to know some students well enough that I can be more forthright and direct with them.

It's quite sad when you think about it. As a result I try not to.

1 comment:

Tully said...

It does seem to me that students of a left leaning persuasion are increasingly unable to articulate their positions well....I would no longer dare to forcefully take on a leftist student's predisposed notions because they lack the tools to defend themselves and I would just come across as a bully.

Back when I was a grad student there was also some of that in reverse. Conservative (or just plain non-liberal) students would often challenge the fuzzy thinking of liberal grad instructors who attempted to inject "progressive" agendas into classes where they didn't belong. Especially the older "non-traditional" students, who were often older than the instructors. And the instructors were simply unable to articulate their reasoning, falling back onto social and emotional justifications rather than any kind of logic. They were locked into their indoctrination and could not think outside of it.

Conversely as a grad instructor myself I often used applied financial and economic analysis to debunk truly bad (and often dishonest) public policy arguments, and force students to come up with out-of-the-box approaches. Expensive ADA retrofitting of campus buildings was a favorite applied example--the requirements of ADA were inflexible, and prevented more useful and flexible and much less expensive accomodations that made better sense in particular applications.

I'm sure some of those students left thinking I was a heartless bastard. But most of them caught on that the point was to adapt the social policies in a financially efficient manner, while still delivering the social goods in full. We had one campus building where the department offices were in the basement, with no elevator, tiny bathrooms, and a wheelchair-bound department head. ADA required that we totally rebuild the department offices, install an ADA-compliant elevator, and add ADA-compliant restrooms in the basement. But the building was old, and scheduled for replacement in the next decade...and the price tag was a MAJOR budget-buster.

The chair-bound dept. head himself had the correct solution. He simply moved the dept. offices up to the already-compliant first floor. Instead of a $3M+ price tag, it cost maybe $100K tops in remodeling, and some student volunteerism in moving things. And much of that price was for non-ADA office upgrades.

Anyway, the point I made over and over was that while many policies were both socially desirable and "just," that didn't mean there was a magic money tree to pay for them. Reality demanded both prioritization and flexibility in application to maintain other priorities. Had that dept had to spend the $$$$ for the ADA-type plan, there would not have been a dept., and the ADA retrofit would have been pointless, killing off the very thing it was trying to provide access to.