Benjamin Storey and Jon Shields offer a helpful recommendation to American university leaders.
Political polarization tempts all of us to collectivize our enemies, blinding us to distinctions among those we consider opponents. Conflict over the university has not been immune to this tendency. Conservative proponents of viewpoint diversity sometimes describe humanities professors as an undifferentiated mass of illiberal bullies. Some on the left return the favor. Johns Hopkins professor Lisa Siraganian’s widely-read essays in Academe and the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, describe the campaign for viewpoint diversity as “a MAGA plot.” By her lights, viewpoint diversity is the duplicitous rhetorical strategy of a conspiracy of politicians, plutocrats, and far-right professors determined to burn the university down.
To be sure, some on the right do want to burn the university down. But critics like Siraganian fail to distinguish between scorched earth right-wing culture warriors and the broad, politically ecumenical group of scholars—including some of her own colleagues —who want to bring more conservative perspectives into the curriculum in order to build the university up. This group isn’t carrying water for the Trump administration or trying to undermine academic freedom. They recognize, instead, that the quality of university teaching and research has suffered because of the neglect of conservative ideas, and are working to reintroduce such ideas to campus while respecting the best traditions of the university.
We consider ourselves members of this group, and have started an initiative to bring more conservative thought into college classrooms without imposing anything on anyone. Last spring, the two of us—a professor at a liberal arts college, Claremont McKenna, and a fellow at a center-right think tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)—partnered to invite a politically mixed band of professors and think-tank scholars who teach courses on conservatism to help interested academics develop their own courses on conservative thought.
