Conservatives, Liberals, and the Public Intellectual

Conservatives have been complaining for years that there aren't enough conservatives in the college teaching ranks. My immediate response: be careful what you wish for.  I've never really thought of conservatives as being actively excluded from the academy; rather, the academy seems like a natural place for liberals. To take literature seriously and hold the life of the mind in some esteem while growing up in the Midwest is to place oneself immediately in opposition to the smug anti-intellectualism of the American heartland. The irony of being a bookish liberal in the Midwest is reading canonical writers--reading pretty much any novels except Stephen  King's--marks one as one part dangerous subversive to nine parts ridiculous nerd. I can still remember the taunts from conservative business and economics majors, "After you graduate you can come work in our factories."

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, says conservatives have been excluded from the academy because traditionally intellectuals have been distinterested, magisterially  removed from the economic and political interests of their times. To point out that this has never really been the case is to miss Bauerlein's point: conservatives have been successfully linked with power and money by liberal polemicists. Consequently, they've been excluded from teaching freshman composition for less than what a kindergarten teacher makes. Bauerlein's larger point is that conservative thought has a respectable intellectual pedigree that has nothing to do with the ranting of the Fox provocateurs.

Bauerlein is certainly right about the intellectual integrity of the conservative tradition. However, the disinterestedness part still needs some work. Bauerlein speaks in (mostly) admiring terms about Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. D'Souza starts his book off with Ann Coulter-like rhetorical fraudulence, blaming practically every Democrat who held office in the last 30 years for the terrorist attacks of  9/11. After this bit of red meat for the base, D'Souza moves on to what Bauerlein sees as the real value of the book. D'Souza claims that Muslims in the Middle East are offended by American popular culture and, as Bauerlein explains, "American culture is the expression of left-wing ethics, the prevailing whatever-floats-your-boat individualism." Of course, the prevailing whatever-fills-up-your-Tahoe economic individualism is OK, and certainly not to blame for anything that's going on in the Middle East. If D'Souza wants to ram through this hoary conservative tenet, then fine--he can be the one who tells News Corp they have to cancel American Idol.

It's interesting that Bauerlein choses to discuss D'Souza, a Hoover Institute fellow and known irritant to liberals, rather than a working conservative university professor quietly lecturing on de Tocqueville and Burke. Surely Bauerlein knows one. He takes Lewis Lapham--admittedly not the most balanced liberal commentator in the public sphere--to task for denouncing conservatives for setting up an alternative academy in think tanks and journals. Bauerlein's choice is interesting because Michael Bérubé, who Bauerlein cites as an example of a liberal with weak polemical skills, made his reputation as an advocate for a return of the public intellectual, that largely extinct figure who engaged in debate within the public sphere rather than the academy. Part of the defensiveness of liberal college professors is that conservatives dominate the public sphere. To a far more successful degree than liberal academics conservatives have reinvented the public intellectual. I could name a dozen professors wearily grading final exams right now who would trade their tenure for Dinesh D'Souza's book contract. Yes, more conservatives in the academy would balance out the political spectrum, but the academy shouldn't be the only forum for ideas.