Should academics be more conservative?

[Allan D’Arcangelo, “Side View Mirror” (detail)]

If that’s what we mean by conservatism, then yes, says Maya Krishnan, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, in a recent essay at The Chronicle of Higher Education: academics should be more conservative, especially about the academy.

“The present moment for universities is a dangerous one,” says professor Krishnan, owing to commercial, technological, and political threats. But contributing to the vulnerability of universities to these threats is that academics are good at finding problems, academics skew left, and, she says, “the standard idiom of leftist critique makes it hard to explicitly name anything flawed as good.” So “it sometimes seems as if we think that rehearsing condemnations and self-condemnations is equivalent to virtue, and that having anything good to say about the university counts as selling out.”

She herself has felt this:

For a long time, it was hard for me to say anything good about academe, even while I was preparing to dedicate my life to it. That’s because when I was in graduate school at Oxford, I ended up filing a sexual-harassment case. For my trouble I was sent a sarcastic letter by one of Oxford’s senior proctors, a theology don known for his cruel wit, which he put to effective use in dismissing my case….

The university is the power structure. The university is the Man. That’s how I felt in those days when, at philosophy-department receptions, I would hold a paper plate laden with soggy baby carrots and pretend to focus on talking to my fellow students, while monitoring the distance between me and certain men. But no matter how cynical I became about the university, it never occurred to me to leave. Why not? Because when I sat in classrooms and heard my Kant professor talk about self-consciousness in the first Critique and my Aristotle professor lecture on the vision of the good in Metaphysics Lambda, I felt that I was in the presence of something valuable. This value was beyond my grasp, but I might be able to access it with enough time and patience.

A couple of sexual harassers and sarcastic dons could not stand up to Aristotle and Kant.

So I stayed. But when younger philosophy students came to me for advice, I struggled to say anything about this mysterious value. The language of social justice was on the rise, and its syntax set the fragments of my naïveté into a new order: I was now a “BIPOC woman,” albeit one living a rather fortunate life. This latter incongruity only intensified my obligation to speak out against the system, to side with the disadvantaged. Students wanted to talk with me about their reading lists stocked with white men, or about having men talk over them in class. Telling them what I still found good about academe would be a way of selling them out….

[S]howing solidarity with whoever was having the worst time… meant only calling out what was bad, what was dysfunctional. What was the alternative—responding to my students’ concerns about sexism and racism by waxing lyrical about the first Critique?

So I didn’t tell the following story. When I was an undergraduate, I wasn’t sexually harassed. I had a painfully obvious crush on one of my philosophy teachers. Of course he knew. And nothing happened. He had the decency to recognize that, in classic Platonic fashion, my desire for him and my desire to be him were mixed up, and he did his job: He pretended to know nothing of my infatuation, and he taught me how to philosophize. What strikes me about his judgment and tact, in retrospect, is how ordinary they were. He was a professor doing his job and doing it well. In graduate school at Oxford, I stopped crushing on my teachers but found the same decency; the proctor’s nastiness caught me off guard precisely because his behavior was an exception. I became a philosopher because my teachers treated me like one.

Why tell the story now?

Krishnan’s point seems to be that academics have made a mistake by letting the problems of universities eclipse our view of their value, and then expressing our dissatisfactions with how universities look to us. For this is risky in today’s context: “The university is not dead, but it is in trouble. We need to be willing to explain what is good about our imperfect institutions.”

You can read the whole piece here.

I agree with Krishnan that we need to do a better job of articulating the value of universities and of the work done within them. That said, it’s much more difficult than Krishnan lets on to accurately assess whether academics have been too critical of their institutions. It’s not just that some (not all) of her descriptions of such critique seem like caricature (for example, it has never been “taboo” for an academic to admit there is “much to love” about the contemporary university). Nor is it just that we know more retrospectively than we do prospectively.

Rather, it’s that social progress itself is an enduring and widespread human practice. So the same kind of conservative attitude that Krishnan thinks should lead us to better appreciate the value of universities, despite their flaws, should lead us to appreciate the value of social progress, despite its flaws. And one crucial element of social progress is institutional critique, so it, too, should be appreciated, despite its flaws.

This means that telling us about the downsides to how academics have critiqued their universities can only do so much. It can color in the details of a sketch we ought to already recognize: one of valuable, if flawed, human activity. But it doesn’t draw us a picture of what we should have done instead.

* Yes I realize this characterization of conservatism may not comfortably fit many people who today call themselves conservative, but it does capture an important strand of the conservative intellectual tradition.

See also: “Why are Liberal Professors More Conservative on Campus?“