A couple of libertarian readers have missed the point of what my recent piece, “Rick Santorum Was Right” had to say about the University of Chicago. My point is that the university as a whole, the law school included, is getting less conservative–especially when it comes to social conservatism. Sure, libertarian conservatism is well represented at Chicago’s law school, and elsewhere at the university. But social conservatives are growing more scarce. Too many hear that U. Chicago is home to “conservatives,” and assume that this includes a healthy share of social conservatives. That is misleading. When it comes to social issues, Chicago’s law school and the university as a whole are now largely liberal. The Committee on Social Thought is less of a home to social conservatives than it used to be. Sunstein and Nussbaum at the law school are now leading influences on political theory in the university as a whole. The great days of Allan Bloom are gone. Chicago’s humanities and social sciences look more and more like any other left-leaning university. The faculty has succeeded in gutting the Western Civ. requirement. The school’s distinctive character is slipping away. Yet Chicago still relies on it’s reputation with conservatives for special support. That is misleading.

This matters because, at the moment, there are virtually no other places for conservatives to go. Social conservatism in particular has been excluded from the contemporary academy. Without Chicago, there is virtually no serious alternative. There is a crisis of conservative reproduction at America’s universities, social conservatism most of all. Conservatives need to know about that–and the decline of Chicago very much a part of the problem. The public remains conservative on a broad spectrum of issues, but it’s not clear where the next generation of conservative intellectuals will come from.

My focusing for the moment on social conservatism is not to say that Chicago is balanced on issues like the war or Middle East Studies. It isn’t–although outside of MES, Chicago is more balanced on military and foreign policy issues than some other major research universities (which isn’t saying much). The real advantage for a conservative student at Chicago is other conservative students–many of them attracted by the school’s traditional reputation. Sheer numbers help conservative students get respect. But the increasingly leftward tilt of the faculty is a real and growing phenomenon. It’s great to have smart libertarians at Chicago, but that does not address the central problem.