On Saturday, Peter Berkowitz had an excellent article, “Conservatism and the University Curriculum,” published in the Wall Street Journal. In it, he laments that few American undergrads ever hear anything (except perhaps off-the-cuff ridicule) of thinkers who dissent from the notion that expanding governmental power is necessarily good.

I have just sent this letter to the editor in reply:

Peter Berkowitz makes a good point. Few American students in political science departments are apt to hear anything but snide remarks and disparaging caricatures of thinkers who take issue with the conventional wisdom that the growth of government is necessarily beneficial.
He’s right that when pressured on this great omission, professors are apt to dodge the issue by remarking on how strange it is for conservatives to be seeking “affirmative action.” Another red herring sometimes used is to say that demands for curricular changes from outsiders amounts to an attack on the academic freedom of the faculty, which has arrogated to itself plenary control over the curriculum.
Those are weak excuses for the unwillingness of most professors to get out of their academic niches and learn something that’s new (to them) and possibly unsettling. The hallmark of the academic world these days is hyper-specialization, with professors teaching narrow courses that reflect their own research interests. Few professors who have made a career out of the alleged need for a politics of redistribution, for example, are interested in taking the time to digest any work arguing the contrary case, such as Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty.
Despite the lip service they usually pay to intellectual inquiry, many professors prefer to live in tiny but familiar academic cocoons. The education of college students suffers as a result.
George C. Leef
Director of Research
Pope Center for Higher Education Policy
Raleigh, NC