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Dr. Brian Melton

Why Liberals Can Never
Lose Control of the Universities
August 30, 2008

"Most of our students come in as good Republicans, but that’s just because they’re ignorant. We change that.” – A distinguished professor of history

For the last decade or so, the general public has been regularly briefed on the fact that our universities, particularly the public ones, aren’t the places of balanced intellectual pursuit that they pretend to be. Yet study after study, report after report, and experience after experience argue the opposite: Intellectual "diversity” is often nothing more than variations on a liberal theme. Go too far away from the main leftist stream, and you aren’t being "professional” and aren’t a "serious” scholar. Therefore, university departments, schools, colleges, etc., feel justified in practicing what amounts to non-discriminatory discrimination. They won’t hire conservatives because, to paraphrase one chair of philosophy, "there are no intelligent conservatives to hire.”

It isn’t my purpose here to try to establish that liberals dominate the universities or to refute statements about all conservatives being stupid. The former has been handled elsewhere and with better depth, and the latter statement is too biased to argue with. I’m certainly not whining because I myself have personally faced discrimination. While other well qualified friends of mine have been turned down for jobs simply because a dean saw a degree from a religious school or a department chair visited a personal website containing conservative blogs, I have no first hand axe to grind (I received job offers before I had even completed my degree and have had no problem thus far getting published in my field). What I would like to do is take the argument—which I believe is supported by the numbers—a step further. I think there is a very clear reason (one, perhaps, of many) why the liberal movement in general must exclude other competing views from the universities: Liberalism is, in practical terms, a parasitic worldview, and the universities provide a perfect field of potential hosts.

Another simple and well established fact is that liberals, in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, are simply not having children. While the reason why not probably varies greatly, the end result is that conservatives have babies, liberals often do not. As Phillip Longman wrote in USA Today, what’s one difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? "In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.” This was in response to the perceived "fertility gap” that researcher Arthur C. Brooks identified in 2006. Conservative families showed a whopping 41% advantage over their liberal counterparts, and, as various news sites argued, since 80% of children eventually return to the views of their parents, this trend could indicate a very conservative future for the U.S.

These statistics also demonstrate a very real, more immediate reality: Since, for whatever reason (career choices, abortion, contraception, etc.), liberals are not reproducing, they are forced by default to prey upon the progeny of their more conservative colleagues. In short, since they have no children of their own to carry on the proverbial flame, they must somehow steal those belonging to others. In this sense, the conversion of unbelievers takes on new meaning. They are, in effect, a breed of intellectual parasite that, for all their bluster against other traditions, could not continue to exist without them.

One obvious place where this occurs (but certainly not the exclusive place, i.e., Hollywood) is within the educational system. A stranglehold on the universities allows liberals to the chance to influence students on two important levels. First, they have the opportunity to plant their ideas into the minds of the general university populace. Second, and perhaps more importantly, they have the chance to influence and control the teachers who will one day take over the classrooms of lower level schools. The best teachers often become surrogate intellectual parents to the students in their classrooms. This is especially true where, due to a society that has largely abdicated the role of parenting, teachers often spend more time with their students than parents do. So, the liberal movement has a vested interest in insuring that it retains a virtual monopoly on "educated” opinion: Without it, liberals have lost one sure way of large-scale propagation. Whether the issue is homosexual rights, abortion, neo-Darwinism, socialism, or what have you, if liberalism loses control of the universities, it will have lost one of its primary methods of propagating its worldview.
 

This is one of the reasons truly contrary opinions are not tolerated in the modern academy. The liberal worldview is often propagated through the use of the fallacies of argument ad nauseum and argument ad hominem. In the former, we repeat a weak argument over and over until, in the absence of competing theories, we bludgeon our readers into accepting our point of view (just look at the blogosphere, both conservative and liberal, for examples). In the latter, we attack the credibility of the person making the argument, and in so doing avoid having to answer the argument itself (the argument used by the philosophy chair mentioned above). The inclusion of alternative viewpoints negates both of these useful logical fallacies, particularly the ad hominem. It’s hard to demonize conservatives, independents, or Christians when students can see for themselves that they are none of the things they are accused of being.

One only need look at the Intelligent Design v/s Neo-Darwinian controversy. If Intelligent Design is so obviously self refuting, then in a truly open academic community, Darwinists would welcome its study, learn what they could from it, discard what was useless, and then move on. Instead, it becomes literally illegal to mention competing theories. In a politicized academy more concerned with propagating certain preferred view points than with finding truth and advancing science, competition cannot be allowed.

Now, let me add a few caveats. I don’t believe in some vast left-wing conspiracy to take over the nation’s youth. After all, the only people who are allowed to believe in conspiracies are liberals themselves. Nor do I believe that all college professors, let alone elementary or secondary school teachers, have some hidden agenda approaching the one of the distinguished professor quoted above. Still, for whatever reason, the practical result is the same.