Taking Back the Academy
How Bush can kill PC.

By Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute
February 9, 2001 12:10 p.m.

emember how a certain mental titan was gonna wipe the floor with that dummy George Bush during the presidential debates? No, not that George Bush. I'm talking about George I.

I remember when campus scuttlebutt, the brilliant Michael Dukakis, was gonna clean George Bush's clock during the debates. Bush the Elder had been a congressman, U.N. ambassador, head of the CIA, and vice president. But hey, he was a Republican, so when push came to shove, he had to be a dummy, right? Wrong. Bush won the debates. Of course that didn't stop the press from concocting ludicrous caricatures of Bush's running mate, Dan Quayle. If anything, it made such caricatures more necessary. And shall we talk of Ronald Reagan? It's taken the publication of his writings, on his 90th birthday, to finally overcome Reagan's reputation as a simpleton. Even today the Democrats are being blindsided by yet another very clever George Bush, for whom they've foolishly lowered the public's — and their own — expectations.

The irrepressible tendency to label Republicans stupid, is, well…stupid. Although it destroyed Dan Quayle's political hopes, it can sometimes work in Republicans' favor. But I promise you, this perennial slander is not worth sustaining. It's the symptom of a deeper and deadlier disease. One must always remember that the elite liberals who control the Democratic party, the media, and much of our culture, graduated from colleges where they never encountered a single intelligent conservative argument, let alone an intelligent conservative professor. Instead of engaging in genuine debate with living, breathing opponents, the intellectual mentors of today's cultural elite made a sport out of cartooning conservatives. No wonder their charges grew up thinking of Republicans as brainless. Conservatives may deride the academy's leftist posturing as silly, but the truth is, the Left's control of our colleges and universities has already unleashed untold havoc on the country. It's the reason we're losing the culture war.

Fifteen years ago, a radical feminist like Catherine MacKinnon would have been dismissed, even in the New York Times, as a leftist loon. Now, having packed the law schools and women's studies programs with her acolytes, MacKinnon writes the nation's sexual harassment laws. Almost every cultural movement that conservatives fear and abhor finds its power base in the academy. It's no accident that many of the key strategy meetings to scuttle the Ashcroft nomination were held in the offices of the American Association of University Women.

If the Bush administration hopes to impart a lasting cultural legacy, it's going to have to bite the bullet and do something serious to take back the academy. How so? Admittedly, the prospects for recapture look bleak. That's because the radical Left now has tenure. And it's only going to get worse. Today's tenured radicals were hired by old-fashioned liberals bent on giving people with a different perspective a break. Then, having got their collective foot in the door, the radicals systematically went about reproducing themselves and quashing their opposition. Even so, for all the changes in the past couple of decades, the leftist usurpation of the academy has never been complete. That's because the previous generation of old-fashioned liberals (with a few conservatives sprinkled among them) had tenure too. Most of these older professors — the ones originally hired to teach the huge baby boom cohort of the sixties — are nearing retirement. That spells doom. The Left will lord over the academy, unchallenged, for decades.

Or will it? It's just possible that the near-total vice-lock the Left now has on the academy could slacken. Here's one plausible scenario as to how that might happen — and how the Bush administration can help it along.

Step one is to use the bully pulpit to highlight and de-legitimize the academy's prejudices. This was William Bennett's old job as Ronald Reagan's secretary of education. Bush's education secretary, Roderick Page, is preoccupied with primary schooling. But whomever Bush picks to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities could take on the academy. That's how Lynn Cheney got famous, after all. If there's one place where the Bushies need to forgo their preference for experienced administrators over intellectuals, this is it. The NEH doesn't need a manager at the helm. It needs to be headed by a respected public intellectual, not a fire-breather, but someone able to muster a credible case for restoring ideological balance to the universities.

But, you say, President Bush has promised to be a "uniter, not a divider." Won't a culture war over the academy get in the way of Bush's positive message? Not if it's done right. The extremism of the academic Left is our ally here. All a savvy head of the NEH needs to ask for is fair representation for all points of view. If we can have conservatives and liberals duking it out on every talk show in America, why can't we have a reasoned debate between the best thinkers from both political perspectives inside our colleges and universities? Who could be against that? Or, shall we say, who could admit to being against that? This is one cultural battle that can only be a political windfall for Bush — especially if the Left is silly enough to openly parade its claims that our traditions of fair representation are just a cover for white, male, heterosexist power. Unlike the Ashcroft nomination, which raised issues on which the country is narrowly split, it's easy to find a popular majority to laugh at egregious examples of campus nuttery.

Even if a spirited campaign for campus fairness ends up changing nothing in our universities, it would still be a political winner for Bush. Better to frame the debate over Bush's cultural policy around calls for campus fairness than around which Cabinet secretaries read Southern Partisan.

But there may be more than a mere political victory at stake. Students are bored with PC group-think, deeply resentful about having to grub for grades by knuckling under to their professor's ideology, and are yearning for honest debate. If we can't drive the tenured radicals out of the academy, perhaps we can use their students' restiveness to propel a new intellectual coterie.

These days, many fine colleges offer "great books" style programs that are entirely voluntary. Unlike the old mandatory programs at Stanford and Columbia, these demanding core curriculum programs don't spur protest, principally because they're not forced on anyone. In fact, they radiate prestige and the best students often flock to them. Such programs could easily be tweaked so that, somewhere along the way, students are encouraged to juxtapose the very best traditional and contemporary writings of both the Left and the Right. Sure, let them indulge in Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, but also allow them to study Edmund Burke and Allan Bloom. Given the current curriculum, this would be a revolutionary change.

It's critical that new staff be hired for such programs, on the premise that experts in conservative thought would be every bit as needed as experts in the usual academic disciplines. With a new and more balanced faculty, and with a program exciting enough to draw in large numbers of the very best students, competing schools might soon wish to replicate this kind of curriculum.

Programs such as these could be supported by the Bush NEH and Department of Education. True, it would be better if our universities employed large numbers of thoughtful conservatives and non-partisan empiricists alongside leftist ideologues. But that's not going to happen anytime soon. An achievable first step is a program structured around fair consideration of the best in both liberal and conservative thinking.

Recall that political correctness arose for a reason. More powerful than any argument is the simple exclusion of your opponent from reasoned debate. Nothing does more to telegraph to students the presumed idiocy or evil of conservative ideas than the fact that the usual academic arguments don't even take conservatism into account. That's what creates the palpable sense that John Ashcroft may be vicious or Ronald Reagan may be dumb. An NEH chairman that calls colleges on their bias, combined with some measure of intellectual equanimity on campus, could achieve more than you might think. By piercing the veil of silence, by challenging the monopoly of ideas, we might finally snap the long spell of political correctness. It's worth a try.