On The Right In The Land Of The Tenured Left

[Richard]

Something to consider when thinking about venturing into the labyrinthine corridors of the often nebulous world of higher education.

Richard's $.02

Part 1 of 2.

On The Right In The Land Of The Tenured Left
Harry Stein, Minding The Campus, 27 May 2009

What acid rain is to our irreplaceable forests, lakes and streams, leftist dogma is to American higher education. In every corner of the land, it has turned once-flourishing departments of English and history into barren wastelands where only the academic equivalent of cockroaches can thrive. Its corrosive poison - infantile anti-Americanism, hatred of capitalism, scorn for ideological pluralism - spreads far beyond the narrow confines of its source, polluting popular culture, public education, the very laws under which we live. Absorbed in sufficiently high doses, it is morally and intellectually fatal.

While the mind-boggling damage done to higher education by multicultural activists, diversity-mongers, and all-around leftist jerks is a subject very much on the minds of conservatives, liberals seem truly not to care. More precisely, they actually regard it as progress. Shakespeare elbowed aside by Maya Angelou? Hey, education's got to change with the times, just like the Constitution. Mandatory sensitivity training for incoming freshmen to instill appreciation of transgendered persons? What kind of monster has a problem with sensitivity? Conservative students getting charged with hate speech for daring to take on affirmative action or women's studies zealots? Exactly - that kind of monster. Even the occasional report in the mainstream press of epidemic ideological conformity on the nation's campuses fails to elicit a reaction. So what if, as the Washington Post reports, 80 percent of faculty in America's English literature, philosophy, and political science departments describe themselves as liberal and a mere 5 percent as conservative - with ratios of eighteen to one at Brown, twenty-six to one at Cornell, and sixteen to one at UCLA - or that a study after the 2004 election showed that the Harvard faculty gave John Kerry thirty-one dollars for every dollar donated to George Bush, with the ratios rising to forty-three to one at MIT and three hundred to one at Princeton? (And you think when someone gets around to a comprehensive analysis of the 2008 campaign donations, that will be any less lopsided?) For liberals, the only important question remains what it's always been: How can I get my kid into one of those places?


Frankly, it beats me why anyone would opt for this world of punishment. But they seem to have their reasons. Take my friend Garry Apgar. I met him in the late Seventies, while working on an English-language newspaper in Paris. Garry was a Vietnam vet studying art history at the Sorbonne under the G.I. Bill. His goal in life was to teach art history at the college level, and in 1980 he returned to the States to pursue it. He went to Yale, got his Ph.D. Things seemed to be going splendidly. Yet somehow his academic career never panned out. He never landed a full-time academic post. Eventually, the financial stress threatened his marriage, and he ended up teaching high school French.

What happened? A few things - but very high on the list is the fact that, though the opposite of combative, Garry is a conservative, and makes no attempt to hide the fact. "I was always a conservative - ab ovo, from the egg," Garry says, "and at first I really didn't think it would be a problem." Indeed, his dissertation, on a little-known eighteenth-century Swiss artist
named Jean Hubert - he'd been drawn to the subject by his interest in Hubert's neighbor and most frequent subject, Voltaire - won him a coveted Kress Fellowship; it was subsequently published, in French, in a handsome and amply illustrated edition. Garry received particular notice for his original research on the project, unearthing long-forgotten letters and other archival material, drawing hitherto unknown connections between people, "all the stuff that's now pooh poohed by cutting-edge scholars concerned with deconstructionism and all that."

In brief, he appeared well launched. Out of Yale, he got a job teaching at a small northeastern college. (He asks I not use the name because he's "still got friends there, and it's not a great school; if you had a pulse and money to pay, you got in.") After a year, he was up for an open tenure-track position. But then... the job was offered to someone else, a woman less credentialed and clearly less qualified. It turned out that he'd had the misfortune of breaking into the field just as things were turning dramatically worse for people of the wrong gender (male), hue (white), and sexual orientation (what, until a few years earlier, would have almost everywhere have been categorized as "normal").

For his part, all Garry knew was that what had happened was not remotely fair. So, after thinking it over, he did the unthinkable: He complained. All these years later, he can only shake his head at his naivete. "The corruption argument never gets you anywhere. Either they're so ideological they genuinely don't see it, or they're so cynical they don't care. It's like thinking you're going to embarrass Claude Rains in Casablanca. Not that he hadn't been warned.

His old advisor from Yale, herself a committed feminist, "yelled at me on the phone. 'Don't contest this,' she said. 'If you know what's good for you, you'll just withdraw and walk away.' I mean, there was this implied Mafioso threat. But she was right. I got a reputation as a troublemaker." He pauses. "The fact is, if I'd been a woman and lodged such an accusation, it would've scared them to death. Even if I'd been totally wrong, they'd have either given me the job or a fat settlement. But as a white male, and a known conservative, I was dead." Nor, obviously, was he helped by his choice of specialty, eighteenth-century European art. "It's not exactly trendy. There's not much room there to get in gay theory." He laughs. "Though I suppose there are those who would try."

After that, there were a string of one-year visiting professorships - at the University of Delaware, Brown, and Princeton, plus a year in Lyon, teaching in French - but never another tenure track job. "I kept applying," he says, "but I kept getting aced out by a woman or a minority. The system is medieval, a culture of powerful, interwoven alliances - gays and lesbians and straight Marxists and feminists - and they do the recruiting and hiring. They'll find a zillion excuses to obscure the real reasons: 'the scholarship's a little flimsy,' 'it's not a good fit,' or whatever they want. There's no alliance of straight conservatives, or even old-fashioned, open-minded liberals."

Along the way, he saw fools and incompetents getting ahead by the boatload, and cronyism that would have embarrassed Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall, as well as more fear than he saw as a Marine back in Vietnam. "In my field, in particular, there was open contempt for straight people - they'd be off handedly referred to as 'breeders.' This is the milieu you're in as a conservative - or just as a reasonable person. It was like being in the old Soviet Union. You had to be constantly vigilant about what you said and to whom you said it. The only way to express yourself honestly was by samizdat."

So why did he put himself through it for so long? "What can I tell you?" he offers rather sheepishly. "I love teaching, even if doing it means climbing into a playpen full of angry, infantile narcissists."

(cont'd)