Maybe there’s nothing more pathetic than whining in the mode of identity politics about the plight of being a conservative professor on campus these days

I’m mean, what’s the worst thing that can happen to a conservative professor? He or she might not get tenure! And be stuck with having to get a real job.

Our conservative professors certainly don’t fear the fate of Socrates. Nobody’s going to bother to kill them for their beliefs. Or even the fate of the dissident Solzhenitsyn, who was thrown into the Gulag and then out of his country for speaking dangerously subversive truth to those who were ruling through terror and ideological lies. Our philosopher-novelist Walker Percy said that American dissident writers actually have Solzhenitsyn envy. Those in power in our country don’t take the truth seriously enough to persecute those who speak it. All words are so equally weightless or used up in our relativistic time — the one that sacrifices controversy to public relations — that nothing a philosopher or theologian or novelist says can make any real difference.

It’s worth noting of course that the world’s greatest truth-tellers, such as Socrates, Jesus, Solzhenitsyn, and Percy (not to mention the Flannery O’Connor, who just stayed home) didn’t spend their lives behind the walls of so-called institutions of higher learning.

All that said, why shouldn’t the cruel suffering of dissident or genuinely countercultural professors not get a hearing in our highly sensitive time? And the serious side of their case is that our colleges and universities offer students every kind of diversity but “viewpoint diversity,” or exposure to untimely, truthful ideas that are too readily dismissed as on the wrong side of history. Our campuses, especially our elite campuses, are bubbles full of free thinkers who think exactly the same way — with nobody else allowed.

And I’m not talking mainly about complacently liberal or trendy professors in the social sciences and humanities, although they rarely allow those not of their kind into their herds. It’s our administrators — far more than our faculty — who sacrifice controversy to public relations on campus, who turn college into a huge safe space for those in their bubble. The real issue is that the deep, perennial questions of personal significance — about being born to know, love, and die, to be open to God and the good — have no place in campus life these days. And the dissident professors who rebel against the emptiness of our campus spaces don’t always vote Republican.

Let me call your attention to indispensable resources for understanding the situation of the conservative professor on campus. One is the relentlessly empirical and highly intelligent account in Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, by my friends Jon Shields and Josh Dunn. They show that individual conservative professors have developed effective strategies for sticking to their principles and keeping their jobs. This book compares the situation of the conservative today with the gay or lesbian faculty member not so long ago. You can, for example, be a lot louder and prouder about who you are after you get tenure, but even then you can’t throw caution to the wind without being ostracisized or even run off altogether.

This comparison breaks down in a number of ways. For one thing, the situation of gay and lesbian faculty was steadily improving, and now sexual orientation is no impediment at all to academic success. The situation of conservative faculty will probably get worse in the era of Trump, who will turn out to be the biggest stimulus package political correctness on campus has every received.

Another problem, as my friend Brad Watson highlights in his indispensably challenging review of Passing in the new issue of The Claremont Review, is that the success of a few particular conservative individuals is no evidence against the declining influence of dissident or countercultural thought on our curricula and in campus life in general. The dominant trend is standardization based on the twin imperatives of competency and diversity, a trend that’s squeezing out most remnants of liberal education, the genuinely conservative cause. It’s still possible to find and cherish pockets of genuine diversity on our campuses, but Jon and Josh aren’t as worried as they should be about even their future. On this front, let me shamelessly recommend again my American Heresies and Higher Education.