Conservatives in the Academy

The Academy is biased against them.  So conservatives often say.  They frequently complain that they are not fairly or proportionately represented in the academic world—that is, in the formal institutions of knowledge and higher learning.  This is where the research is done, the learned consensus formed, the next generation of leaders and thinkers molded and taught.  This is where the elite of the well-educated practice their critical thinking skills and gain capacity to challenge publicly-accepted norms.  This is where journalists are trained in their craft, where scientists learn their method, where business leaders hone their competitive instincts, where educators are taught to guide developing minds.  The social stakes could hardly be higher.  If the Academy is charged with shaping public knowledge and training the next generation of knowledge-seekers, yet saturated with bias against conservatives, then conservatism itself will be undermined from the start and imperiled for decades to come.  Surely, then, the Academy constitutes a conspiracy of well-placed elites to overthrow the heartfelt and long-worn values of plain, honest folk.  They have deliberately organized and conspired to deny entry to prospective academics who prefer to respect and represent more traditional values in the public realm.

Is the charge just?  Can academia be fairly characterized as an organized campaign against the traditional values and beliefs of the majority?  The answer is yes and no.

No, in that whatever absence of overt conservatism may be apparent in the Academy is not a deliberate or insidious political conspiracy against traditional values.  Academics may be skilled in many esoteric fields of knowledge, but the dark arts of conspiracy are not among them.  Members of the academic species tend to be obsessed with narrow territories of knowledge and are generally uninterested in political campaigns or social accomplishments.  (Otherwise, they would be much wealthier.)  Journalists likewise are not so extravagantly paid or respected that they can be accused of misleading the public for their personal gain.  If they were trying to advance propaganda for their own benefit, they would undoubtedly choose more popular themes and better rhetorical strategies than they tend to do.  Academics and legitimate journalists (those bound by professional codes of ethics, whatever their personal political beliefs) are mostly determined to find out things that they did not previously know.  Such an approach is seldom socially advantageous or productive of monetary rewards.  Its results are always uncertain, often unwelcome.  Perhaps this is exactly what makes these folk suspicious to conservative objectors.  Sincere academic inquiry and critical journalism are alike in that they do not pretend to know what they will find at the end of their investigative processes.  The results of open-ended investigation may or may not support the opinions, values and beliefs that society already holds.  No politician who desired public office would ever embark on such a process, nor any businessman bent on profit.  They would rather have a sure thing, or nearly so.  They need to know what their audience (that is, voters and customers) want from them, what they must say or do to win them over.  They will not challenge the values and views of their audience, no matter how ill-founded or misguided.  The Academy does not care about established or popular views.  It does not want to be loved or win over voters.  That is its unforgiveable sin.

So, yes, the Academy may be fundamentally (though not deliberately) indifferent, even unreceptive, to conservative beliefs.  Conservative beliefs are by definition the beliefs we already hold, the values we commonly cherish, the views of the world we are presently comfortable with.  But these may or may not match the world as is can be objectively measured or observed to be.  Politicians are not interested in finding out whether beliefs match reality (only whether they match opinion).  Academics, on the other hand, are by profession committed to investigating the world as it is—measuring, demonstrating, debunking.  What things exactly?  Anything that can be so investigated.  They cannot get to all questions and claims at once, so choose a few things that can be manageably probed, at least as seems to them in the moment.  If they were only working alone, according to their own perceptions, their investigations might be suspect.  But by investigating in tandem with others, they can explore many more questions and check one another’s methods and conclusions.  They conspire, yes, but only in the procedures they agree to use, not in the conclusions they provisionally reach.  Journalists are a little different, in that they are more likely to investigate matters of public interest (and so popular concerns), though professionally motivated not to accept easy answers—the ones that the subjects of their investigations would prefer them to accept and disseminate.  They will prefer to investigate the activities and claims of those who hold power, wealth and position, since those are the ones most likely to impact the public good.  Such holders of power, wealth and position are themselves often conservative, since they have an interest in conserving the prevailing order of things—which benefits them more than most—and can be counted on to use their outsized influence to perpetuate and sustain that advantageous order.  They are more likely than most to lose advantage from whatever journalists or investigators might uncover.  Better to tarnish the entire profession than risk the results of unpredictable inquiry.  After all, public opinion has already been shaped by the disproportionate influence of such elites—what we call the establishment.  Any changes to public opinion are unlikely to improve their advantage.  So conservatives instinctively dislike critical or challenging ideas, whatever they may be.  Better to tarnish the whole attempt as wokeness.  They are very sure they don’t want their kids to catch it.

So education will be among the chief things contested between the conservative establishment and those who would investigate the claims and preferred beliefs of the establishment, wherever those investigations may lead.  Education (private or public) has an unavoidably political aspect.  It is certainly propagandistic by nature.  It has to be.  It is about knowledge, yet, but more fundamentally about the means by which members of the public acquire, receive and frame their knowledge.  Education is really about the design and psychology of learning more than the content.  It is social authority that is being communicated rather than specific lessons.  Members of the public realm, apart from immigrants, enter that realm by way of childhood.  Children do not yet know how to investigate and compare possible beliefs, but are persuadable and engagingly open to whatever they may encounter.  Conservatives understandably want their children’s beliefs and values firmly locked down before they encounter unfamiliar or unpredictable methods of gaining knowledge.  Conservatives assume that values must be taught—that is, received by a pupil exactly as delivered by an authoritative instructor.  Academics, by contrast, are not as directly concerned with values.  Values may be by-products of a robust method of gathering testable information about the observable world.  But the values will prove of little use unless the information itself is reliable.  Values, in this model, are discovered rather than taught.  But it is the specific, verifiable information that matters most.  Conservatives are sure that this gets the whole thing backward.

It is not the purpose of the Academy to confirm what society-at-large thinks it already knows about the world.  Its purpose is to bring together methodological specialists to test the very things that society thinks it knows, then interrogate one another about their proposed investigations and results.  The members of the Academy are trained in their specialized methodological tasks, but not instructed in what they should find.  They don’t share a political agenda, or a uniform view of the world.  They don’t possess a common set of values, other than a shared commitment to rigorous and objective investigation.  This is really the only requirement for entering into the work of the Academy.  The members are sociable in their way, but not a group inclined to be agreeable or mindful of authority.  They are often an odd bunch—combative, obsessive, awkward, generally less concerned with social rewards.  They have formidable egos, but would prefer to be right than popular.  They are unlikely to be natural politicians.  If the Academy is to produce knowledge that is genuinely new or valuable for society-at-large, it is likely not to be conservative.  Whatever new knowledge is produced (to justify the trouble and expense) will necessarily be different from the knowledge that society already possessed at the time the Academy began its work.  And it will remain a true Academy only so long as it continues to depart from established beliefs and avoids becoming a safe and socially-advantageous establishment of its own.  Its very value to the society which underwrites it is to produce uncommon, untraditional and unpopular insights and conclusions.  In that sense, a properly-founded Academy is a profoundly anti-conservative sort of institution—whatever views and commitments the individual members of the Academy may adhere to in their private lives.  Its very purpose is to test common prejudices, and the premises upon which they are founded.  The knowledge its members seek is not already known and cannot be predicted in advance.  This knowledge will have to be followed wherever it leads.  The conclusions may be surprising, discomfiting, even incompatible with the knowledge that society-at-large thinks it already has comfortably in hand.  For the brave few who dedicate themselves to pursuing knowledge in this way, conservative thinking is more likely than not to be an obstacle.

If the conservative beliefs found in society-at-large were faithfully represented in the assumptions and work of the Academy, then it would do little more than reflect the unrefined, untested views of that society.  It would mirror the popular prejudices of its time and place.  And the Academy would have no other purpose than to justify the popular mythologies and propaganda of the wider society—which is admittedly the case in many comfortable or authoritarian societies.  Journalists would be unnecessary—pastors and corporate spokesmen would fulfill the role just as successfully.  After all, what president, elected office-holder, or corporate CEO would not prefer that journalists simply wrote down and published whatever their appointed press secretary dictated from the podium?  But authentic journalists insist on asking awkward questions.  Dedicated academics continue to publish papers that sometimes point out politically-inconvenient facts and conclusions.  Independent laboratories that run rigorous double-blind studies frequently produce results that the drug companies (and their shareholders) would prefer did not see the light of day.  So it is inherently unlikely that conservatives can expect to be represented in the halls of learning in proportion to their supposed analogues in society-at-large.  The pulpit and the political soapbox will remain the closest simulacra of learned respectability and thoughtfulness to the unexamined opinions of citizens at large.

Conservatives—those who prefer not to have their established opinions about the world threatened or challenged—can draw some small comfort from all this.  The student-apprentices who are now being trained to overturn the present learned consensus and then take up roles in the Academy will eventually discover that they are just as human as the rest.  Most of them will become conservatives of their own kind, ensconced in comfortable and well-funded lecture halls, laboratories and offices.  They will jealously guard and preserve the knowledge that they have discovered, and the honor and the tenure they think they have justly earned.  They will defend their hard-won privileges against outside critics and upstarts within.  Most of all they will defend their right to teach and publish their hard-won innovations of knowledge with authority.  And they too will have to be overthrown by a new and ambitious generation of consensus-disturbers.  That is how academia progresses and knowledge becomes more accurate and useful.  But until that happens, they will be just one more lot of privileged, conservative insiders who can be successfully wrangled and subdued.