RUTH WISSE: WELCOME TO FRESHMEN DISORIENTATION ****
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358404577607610201699468.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Student opinion at elite schools is showing ‘diversity.’ The faculty is another matter.
“Thus, the current Guide to the First Year at Harvard alerts incoming students to orientation programs in diversity designed to build connections within and across “nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, physical ability, and religion.” Characteristically and tellingly absent from the list is political or intellectual diversity.”
Four years ago at the beginning of Harvard’s school term, I was going over an assignment with a freshman when she confessed that she was feeling guilty—because she was working for the Obama campaign. I assumed she meant that her campaign work was taking too much time from her studies, but she corrected me: She was feeling guilty because she supported John McCain.
So why, I asked, was she working for his opponent? She answered: “Because I wanted so badly to get along with my roommates and with everyone else.”
Few of us survive adolescence without some conflict of the kind experienced by this freshman and dramatized by Tom Wolfe in his novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (2004): the conflict between the demands of new surroundings and the moral beliefs and values one brings from home. Every environment dispenses its conventional wisdom, and swimming against the current is always hard. But our freshman’s predicament was driven by an exaggerated impression of “everyone else.”
In fact, student opinion at elite schools has lately been growing more varied. Conservatives in particular have become more outspoken. Harvard’s Republican Club includes libertarians, fiscal conservatives, and social conservatives, who sometimes find common cause and sometimes don’t. The Right to Life caucus is a natural ally, though not all Republicans support its views on abortion.
Then there is the True Love Revolution, a Harvard group formed last year “to give students a moral and political option in issues relating to sex and marriage.” Its members believe that liberationist attitudes toward sex, sexuality, and relationships damage students’ health and well-being.
At Yale, where the Party of the Right has been a conservative and libertarian redoubt since the 1950s, feisty undergraduates have founded a new group to promote “genuine intellectual diversity” in the face of excessive ideological uniformity. Named for one of Yale’s most famous mavericks, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program takes its motto from the mission statement of Buckley’s magazine, National Review, standing against “the conformity of the intellectual cliques,” and supporting “excellence (rather than ‘newness’)” and “honest intellectual combat.”
In brief, political independence is alive and well, at least among students.
Nowadays, the pressure for conformism comes more from the faculty, which tips Democratic like the Titanic in its final throes. Programs that once upheld the value if not the practice of intellectual diversity tend to function more like unions, trying to keep their membership in line. Some professors make a habit of insulting Republican candidates and conservative ideas with the smirking assurance of talk-show hosts, unaware that their laugh lines reap from some students the contempt that they sow.
The increased political conformism at universities may be traced in part to the redefinition of diversity that accompanied the introduction of group preferences, aka “affirmative action.” Schools instituting this policy never acknowledged that it conflicted with competing commitments to equal consideration “irrespective of race, religion, or gender,” or that at least half the country questioned its wisdom.
In part the policy has become a joke, with claimants to 1/32nd Cherokee heritage gaining preferential treatment as minority hires. What is not a joke is that the meaning of “diversity” has shifted from the intellectual to the racial-ethnic sphere, foreclosing discussion of certain subjects like affirmative action, gender differences and everything considered politically incorrect.
Thus, the current Guide to the First Year at Harvard alerts incoming students to orientation programs in diversity designed to build connections within and across “nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, physical ability, and religion.” Characteristically and tellingly absent from the list is political or intellectual diversity.
Those who established higher education in this country knew that constitutional democracy was not biologically transmitted, but would have to be painstakingly nurtured in every new cohort of students. When schools dropped requirements for compulsory attendance at religious services and subjected all certainties to critical scrutiny, the schools may have assumed that faculty would find more creative ways of teaching the foundational texts and of rehearsing the debates inspired by those texts. Conservative students—and not they alone—long for exposure to the ideational diversity of Jefferson and Hamilton, Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor, Marx and Hayek, liberal and conservative. They want a campus where a professor who says he votes Republican isn’t considered either courageous or crazy.
The pity is that, so far, students who desire such a campus will have to work for its transformation on their own.
Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of “Jews and Power” (Schocken, 2007).
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