The closing of the collegiate mind

In 1995 I participated in a campus debate on affirmative action that drew so much student interest it had to be rerouted to Harvard’s largest auditorium. This year I was asked by a student group to participate in a debate on modern feminism. Though I am not hotly engaged in the subject, I agreed and waited for confirmation, thinking it might be fun to consider a women’s movement that has never graduated from sisterhood to motherhood. There followed several emails apologizing for the delay and finally a message acknowledging that no one could be found to take the pro-feminist side. Evidently, one of those asked had responded: “What is there to debate?” No wonder those who admit no legitimate opposition to their ideas feel duty-bound to shut down unwelcome speakers.

Because conservative students do not take over buildings or drown others out with their shouting, instructors feel free to mock conservatives in the classroom, and administrators pay scant attention when their posters are torn down or their sensibilities offended. As a tenured professor who does not decline the label “conservative,” I benefit from this imbalance by getting to know some of the feistiest students on campus.

But these students need and deserve every encouragement from outside their closed and claustrophobic environs. As one of them put it to me, “There’s more faculty interest in climate control than in the Western canon.” Multiculturalism guarantees that courses on Islam highlight all the good that can be said of Muhammad and the Quran, but there is no comparable academic commitment to reinvigorating the foundational teachings of American liberal democracy or to strengthening the legacy bequeathed to us by “dead white males.”