Republicans Need to Start Asking Questions about Higher Ed

Martin Knight of the RedState Blog proposes that Republican state legislators should probe the hiring practices, curriculum, faculty, and extra-curricular programs of colleges that receive public funds.  I agree. 

Knight is right that institutions of higher learning will frame an attempt to deflect this effort in the language of academic freedom.  However such institutions have not objected to and have enthusiastically supported Democratic Party attacks on academic freedom, especially associated with Title IX.  

Conservative monitoring of left wing subversion of universities has a long history.  Prior to the 1950s elected officials routinely intervened in the politically extremist, intolerant tendencies of higher education. McCarthyism went overboard, and the result was a subsequent reluctance by conservatives to question the ideology posing as research and the junk social science that has evolved in universities since the 1960s. The aim should not be the silencing of leftists but rather ensuring that their views do not dominate discourse. 

With the lifting of the right wing intolerance in the 1960s, equally or more intolerant left wing academics such as Herbert Marcuse began to advocate a McCarthyism of the left. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 offered a set of tools to left-wing extremists because, indeed, it prohibits certain, albeit limited, forms of speech. The task for the left was to expand the scope of the Civil Rights Act to incorporate any and all speech under the strictures of the Civil Rights Act.  The right should have been quick to draw the line on limitations on speech, research, and hiring. Instead, Republican officials dropped the ball, leaving the field to leftists. 

The result of conservative reluctance to manage badly run universities is documented in books like Lee Jussim et al.’s Politics of Social Psychology  and George Yancey’s Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education.    

As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt show in their recently published Coddling of the American Mind , excessive coddling of youngsters led to further attempts to prevent speech with which the left disagrees. 

The end result is a university that is more intolerant than was McCarthyism. As well, universities have discriminated against conservatives and harmed more conservative careers by an order of magnitude than McCarthyism harmed left-wing careers.   

The concept of academic freedom is ideologically rooted and is a left-wing pretense.  To most academics, McCarthyism is unfair because it silences leftists, but political correctness is fair because it silences libertarians and conservatives. 

Republican officials need to reconsider the place of the university in American life and the harm done by indoctrination in both K-12 and higher education.  I have in the past proposed rationalization of hiring practices using validation and orthodox human resource management methods, but the publications in the higher education field have refused to publish such ideas.