Why not a professor of disco studies?

Those who promote a chair of conservative studies, as Crispin Sartwell does in his Op-Ed article, “The smog of academic consensus,” seem to misunderstand both academia and the meaning of the term “conservative studies.” They claim there is a problem with academia because most of the professors are liberal. They cite two proofs of this assertion: that the vast majority of professors vote for the Democratic Party and that some professors seem to let a kind of political groupthink guide their research and teaching.

Academia isn’t known for its straightforward or desirable culture. My wife worked as an administrative assistant to a number of professors at a prominent religious university and saw such undignified behavior as a professor commanding his teaching assistant to spend all her time spying on his nemesis. When someone on a university campus says, “Let’s throw a rally for gay illegal aliens,” what they probably are thinking is, “I am going to grind peanuts (to which you are violently allergic) in the burritos and will have your parking space by Monday.”

There are two reasons why liberalism -- as described above -- is directly expedient to a professor’s career. First, universities in the United States depend on government funding at least in the form of Pell grants. Democrats tend to expand such programs, and so professors support Democrats.

Second, universities run on the publish-or-perish system. This leaves two basic career strategies for professors. The first is to make a discovery, such as “bees’ wings are pieces of skin.” The other is where groupthink comes in -- to say the exact same thing as someone else did about a slightly different situation, for example, “wasps’ wings are made of skin.”

The vast majority of academic writing falls into the second category and is often not worth the paper it is written on. But much of what falls in the first category -- the breakthrough research in social sciences, even in such disciplines as gender studies -- has been conservative.

Even the pretense of liberalism is swiftly being swept away by the increased desperation of tenure candidates for ever-shrinking spots and by the increasing amount of research that is paid for by corporations instead of the government.

So if the threat of liberal bias is overblown, Sartwell’s proposed solution is positively batty. What exactly would a conservative chair teach? That is, what is conservatism? Ordinarily, it means highlighting the value of things as they are. But this is not what the proponents of a professorship of conservative studies have in mind. They are thinking of conservatism as the political and social movement that crystallized with Ronald Reagan’s presidency -- that is, a particular collection of religious, social, political and economic views that is almost completely unique to the post-1980s United States and might end in the foreseeable future. While women, gays, immigrants and African Americans have played crucial roles in this country’s history from the beginning and have been associated with various conflicting political moments, movement conservatism is a decidedly recent event. Even Barry Goldwater would have to be labeled proto-conservative. Where were the conservatives during the Revolution, the Civil War, the Whiskey Rebellion? And what side where they on? The conservative movement is certainly important and worthy of study within many disciplines. But given its short and geographically limited existence, giving it a professorship would be as absurd as giving a professorship to disco studies.

Robert Lee Hotchkiss Jr. is a computer science major at San Diego City College.

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