"Conservatives Ought to Appreciate Academia, Because It’s a Vicious Market System"

Via Economist's View, a rather brilliant piece by a Senior in English at Columbia:


Here at Columbia, as at most top universities, we enjoy belittling conservative beliefs. Even the professors are in on it, and conservatives often find their beliefs directly challenged by academic trickery, like thinking about things, and facts. But shouldn’t good pedagogy incorporate all sides of an issue? No, it should not. If conservativism is absent from the University, it’s because it hasn’t earned its way in.

The fundamental problem here is that good intellectual exercise of any kind doesn’t mean including all the viewpoints available; it means including the good viewpoints. When I get a headache, I don’t equally weigh the taking aspirin option with the putting leeches on my head option even though many people, including several major founding fathers, have been adamantly pro head-leech. Similarly, when a news program has scientists on to talk about global warming, it doesn’t make sense to invite one who believes in it and one who doesn’t. It makes sense to invite two good scientists, even though they will probably agree. I don’t care about “unbiased” reporting; I want accurate reporting. I also want good scholarship, whether or not it has a balanced political perspective. If your idea gets left out, it’s your fault for having a dumb idea.

The obvious question, of course, is who decides which opinions are good. It’s a tricky issue that requires a lot of thought, but one place to start might be with people who know what they’re talking about. We all know this on some level, but we’re bad at applying it to politics. If you want to know what’s wrong with your car, for example, you don’t poll your neighbors; you ask a mechanic. If most of your neighbors disagree with the mechanic, you ignore them, even if they quote the Bible. For the same reason, it doesn’t really matter what most of the country thinks about global warming or evolution, because the people who know actual facts about those things have pretty much formed a consensus. Yes, you can dig up a scientist who disagrees, just like the tobacco industry has found doctors who think Marlboros make fun Halloween treats, but consensus among experts is really what matters here.

Of course, the experts can be wrong. For example, the New York Times recently reported that scientists in general have basically been wrong about what makes a healthy diet for about a half century. But at least with science there’s a correction mechanism of some kind, namely other science. Unlike, say, conservativism, science doesn’t exist to endorse past beliefs. If scientists could prove that the Earth has secretly been flat all these years, they would, and the other scientists, instead of taking it as a personal affront, would probably give them a Nobel prize.

The same holds for academia. A sociology professor isn’t going to get ahead just by finding a way to blame America first. She’s going to have to do some sociology stuff, which will probably be judged on the quality of the scholarship rather than the viewpoint espoused. Just as there is no organization called Science that holds secret meetings to determine which part of Christianity is going down next, there is no cabal of academics trying to keep campuses liberal, as in, “You barely seem to grasp the difference between supply and demand, but you say you ‘really like Marx,’ so you’re our new economics professor.”

In reality, conservatives ought to appreciate academia, because it’s a vicious market system. Professors have absurdly specific training in tiny career fields. A guy who spends years writing a dissertation on the importance of beads to indigenous tribes in Brazil really wants the world’s other bead expert to fail. If he doesn’t get tenure, there’s a good chance he won’t find a decent job anywhere else ever. He doesn’t care whether bead-man number two is a Republican; he could be left of Castro and the first guy would still spend days writing scathing articles blasting his shoddy bead analysis.

. . . more

including

"The American Right is all about rolling back The Enlightenment. Well sorry I think I will stick with Jefferson and Franklin on this one. And with the smug kid from Columbia. You got your Truth, you got your Truthiness, I like mine unqualified."

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/11/that-just-sound.html#c89450204

What's being described here (quite cleverly) is the way rational people decide what is good and right, something that's been going on for centuries. Now, thanks to endless media yammering by agenda-ridden, well-paid scolds the above described processes have to be defended to mouth-breathing morans who imagine they know better.

market add-ons.

It's not very obvious at the undergrad level. It's marginally obvious in the physical and biological sciences.

http://www.cccu.org/about/members.asp

They are graduating scholars who get into grad school and become profs. Their numbers are smaller, but that's because most of those colleges are much younger.

Hubby and I went to Mount Vernon Nazarene, and he got into Case Western's med school (he was the first from our college to get in). I'm taking grad-level lit classes for fun at Western Michigan University and doing better than I'd thought I would with my classical background at the Naz. Many of our friends have gone to grad school and done just fine.

Liberty isn't the only one is all I'm saying. There are many of us around. Then again, most of the people I know from the Naz who went on to grad school became more liberal (not because we were brainwashed but instead because we started thinking more critically about our faith and its application).

If conservativism is absent from the University, it’s because it hasn’t earned its way in.

Unfortunately that's not true. Recently I received a textbook for evaluation in a college writing course and it had a number of conservative pieces in it. I read them and while doing so, realized they were a total waste of time. They don't even hold up under scrutiny of the basic logical fallacies.

I'm talking about pieces by David Brooks, Linda Chavez, and Charles Krauthammer.

Honestly? I cannot even see wasting a college freshman's time on such "thinking."




Cher

are getting paid for these days?

And how students shouldn't believe famous pundits just "because" . . .