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Are Colleges Too Liberal?
First of all, a disclaimer: I tend toward the liberal more often than the conservative. Having said that, I don't generally read liberal commentators, but almost always read George F. Will, a highly-respected conservative editorialist.
First of all, a disclaimer: I tend toward the liberal more often than the conservative. Having said that, I don’t generally read liberal commentators, but almost always read George F. Will, a highly-respected conservative editorialist.
Fact is, I like Will’s logic and deliberative style, even though I don’t always agree with his starting points. Regardless of how I feel about his conclusions, there is a rational consistency there.
Overshadowing that, however, Mr. Will may be conservative, but he is not an automaton. He regularly disagrees with other conservatives, and conservative elected officials. Critical thinking is, well, critical: if someone always toes the party line, then it seems unlikely that she is thinking for herself.
But currently Mr. Will is contending that our colleges and universities are dominated by liberals, and that this is cause for alarm. I must take exception to his comments.
First, the Pentagon absorbs the largest share of the US Budget; if you consider that VA is part of our military budget, then the military budget is even a larger behemoth than we normally consider it. Not surprisingly, the military and the industrial lobbyists that support it have tremendous sway over our government. And this highly influential military-industrial complex is overwhelmingly conservative. But Will doesn’t object to that.
Likewise, huge conglomerates exert great influence over us, and they are almost uniformly conservative. They sell their wares-- and their lifestyle-- in the constant advertisements that surround us. In recent years, large corporations have also bought out much of our media, and so our news has also slipped to the right. That life-long educational input easily overwhelms the brief years of college, but conservative pundits are not so concerned about that partisan influence as they are about liberal college professors.
And then there is the Church. The Religious Right says it all: serious church-goers are dominated by conservatives, who call on The Almighty Himself to counter the liberal universities. How could our institutions of higher learning ever expect to stand up to that? But partisan leanings in our churches don’t appear to bother conservatives.
So we have to ask Mr. Will if his concern about an influential part of American becoming too partisan? Or is he just worried that it aligns with the other party?
With that, we need to consider analytical thinking, critical to America, but also to the doctrine of Free Will. If teenagers and young adults only experience conservative concepts then have we circumvented their Free Will? If our students are not exposed to liberal ideas, have we extinguished the student’s ability to think objectively, in order to serve contemporary (and possibly transitory) political ideas?
That’s an important point. Before and after college, corporate advertising and corporate news will be the main sources of information for our citizens. So if our young people aren’t exposed to liberal ideas in college, when will they consider them? When else will they get an opportunity to truly reflect on different ideologies and decide-- decide for THEMSELVES-- what they believe?
George Will cannot argue that we should deny students the same democratic freedoms, and the same religious freedoms, that he exercises.
It would be hard to argue that this liberal collegiate exposure has been detrimental to the conservative movement. To the contrary: despite many decades of dominance by liberal thinkers in our citadels of learning, in the past decade we elected the first unipartisan government since WW II-- and it was conservative. This strongly suggests that neither the corporation nor the university dominate the mind of the citizen; her mind is her own. The citizen is exposed to diverse viewpoints, and this exposure strengthens the democracy, rather than weakens it.
As a final consideration, we need to ask what role our centers of higher learning play in our way of life. If conservatives “conserve“-- defend traditional practices, values and ideologies; and if research institutions research, then the two must disagree. Universities are expected to question and prod what we believe, in an attempt to approach the essence of what is true, and valuable. Universities have always challenged conservative approaches; neither side is always right, but the debate leads to progress. Universities are liberal, because that is exactly what we expect them to be.
Which means that a good university will always be liberal.
So with all respect for George Will’s independence and incisiveness, he may wish to reconsider his stance on universities and their liberal ways. If they were otherwise, America would not be the country it is.