By Nicholas Kristof
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Classic liberalism exalted tolerance, reflected in a line
often (and probably wrongly) attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you
say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
On university campuses, that is sometimes updated to: “I
disapprove of what you say, so shut up.”
In a column a few weeks ago, I offered “a confession of
liberal intolerance,” criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all
kinds of diversity on campuses — except ideological. I argued that universities
risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives,
and especially for evangelical Christians.
As I see it, we are hypocritical: We welcome people who
don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.
It’s rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement,
but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead
wrong.
“You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader
comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of
them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow-minded and are sure they have the
right answers.”
Finally, this one recommended by readers: “I am grossly
disappointed in you for this essay, Mr. Kristof. You have spent so much time in
troubled places seemingly calling out misogyny and bigotry. And yet here you
are, scolding and shaming progressives for not mindlessly accepting patriarchy,
misogyny, complementarianism, and hateful, hateful bigotry against the LGBTQ community
into the academy.”
Mixed in here are legitimate issues. I don’t think that a
university should hire a nincompoop who disputes evolution, or a racist who
preaches inequality. But as I see it, the bigger problem is not that
conservatives are infiltrating social science departments to spread hatred, but
rather that liberals have turned departments into enclaves of ideological
homogeneity.
Sure, there are dumb or dogmatic conservatives, just as
there are dumb and dogmatic liberals. So let’s avoid those who are dumb and
dogmatic, without using politics or faith as a shorthand for mental acuity.
On campuses at this point, illiberalism is led by
liberals. The knee-jerk impulse to protest campus speakers from the right has
grown so much that even Democrats like Madeleine Albright, the first female
secretary of state, have been targeted.
Obviously, the challenges faced by conservatives are not
the same as those faced by blacks, reflecting centuries of discrimination that
continues today. I’ve often written about unconscious bias and about how many
“whites just don’t get it.” But liberals claim to be champions of inclusiveness
— so why, in the academic turf that we control, aren’t we ourselves more
inclusive? If we are alert to bias in other domains, why don’t we tackle our
own liberal blind spot?
Frankly, the torrent of scorn for conservative
closed-mindedness confirmed my view that we on the left can be pretty
closed-minded ourselves.
As I see it, there are three good reasons for
universities to be more welcoming not just to women or blacks, but also to
conservatives.
First, stereotyping and discrimination are wrong, whether
against gays or Muslims, or against conservatives or evangelicals. We shouldn’t
define one as bigotry and the other as enlightenment.
When a survey finds that more than half of academics in
some fields would discriminate against a job seeker who they learned was an
evangelical, that feels to me like bigotry.
Second, there’s abundant evidence of the benefits of
diversity. Bringing in members of minorities is not an act of charity but a way
of strengthening an organization. Yet universities suffer a sickly sameness:
Four studies have found that at most only about one professor in 10 in the
humanities or social sciences is a Republican.
I’ve often denounced conservative fearmongering about
Muslims and refugees, and the liberal hostility toward evangelicals seems
rooted in a similar insularity. Surveys show that Americans have negative views
of Muslims when they don’t know any; I suspect many liberals disdain
evangelicals in part because they don’t have any evangelical friends.
Sure, achieving diversity is a frustrating process, but
it enriches organizations and improves decision-making. So let’s aim for
ideological as well as ethnic diversity.
Third, when scholars cluster on the left end of the
spectrum, they marginalize themselves. We desperately need academics like
sociologists and anthropologists influencing American public policy on issues
like poverty, yet when they are in an outer-left orbit, their wisdom often goes
untapped.
In contrast, economists remain influential. I wonder if
that isn’t partly because there is a critical mass of Republican economists who
battle the Democratic economists and thus tether the discipline to the American
mainstream.
I’ve had scores of earnest conversations with scholars on
these issues. Many make the point that there simply aren’t many conservative
social scientists available to hire. That’s true. The self-selection is also
understandable: If I were on the right, I’d be wary of pursuing an academic
career (conservatives repeatedly described to me being belittled on campuses
and suffering what in other contexts are called microaggressions).
To improve diversity, universities have tried to increase
the numbers of minority scholars in the pipeline, in part by being more
welcoming. Maybe a starting point to bolster ideological diversity would
likewise be to signal that conservatives are not second-class citizens on
campuses: We liberals should have the self-confidence to believe that our
values can triumph in a fair contest in the marketplace of ideas.
There are no quick solutions to the ideological
homogeneity on campuses, but shouldn’t we at least acknowledge that this is a
shortcoming, rather than celebrate our sameness?
Can’t we be a bit more self-aware when we dismiss
conservatives as so cocky and narrow-minded that they should be excluded from
large swaths of higher education?
Cocky? Narrow-minded? I suggest that we look in the
mirror.
No comments:
Post a Comment