Is It Time For Conservative Studies?

Your Neighborhood Sociologist has an idea that can appease both educators and conservatives disgruntled with academia

A common political narrative is that college campuses are hostile to conservative students and ideas.

Consider the website Professor Watchlist. On that website, you can search a database of professors labeled radical. Consider the entry for Dr. Anna Kirkland, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Dr. Kirkland is pro-abortion and pro-vaccine. Her views are described on the Watchlist website, and then the reader is given the contact information of the department where she works (presumably so conservatives can express their concern). Or consider the entry for Dr. Elaine Parker-Gills, an adjunct professor at Antioch College in Los Angeles. Dr. Parker-Gills is on the watchlist because she teaches a course entitled The Rise of Black Power Movement & the Black Panther Party.

One may want to dismiss The Watchlist as so much conservative propaganda, especially since it was the brainchild of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk is known for his extremist and inflammatory comments. Most recently, Kirk called the deranged attacker of Nancy Pelosi’s husband a “patriot.”

But respectable academics and public intellectuals have also expressed concern. A noteworthy example is the organization Heterodox Academy. Heterodox Academy was started by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and has a mission to “improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.”

My experiences speak to the need for a Heterodox Academy. I’ve seen in my classes how students can respond with hostility to someone expressing a conservative opinion. I’ve noticed a pattern when I teach my grad class on racial inequality - a class predicated on students reading material and communicating their critiques verbally. I’ve seen white students with conservative (or moderate) views self-censor.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt speaking at a Heterodox Academy event. Heterodox Academy advocates for more viewpoint diversity on campus.

One year, an older white female student chose not to self-censor. She expressed sentiments that ran counter to the black and brown students in the class. She articulated that racism is minimal in society today and black people can reduce the differences between them and whites by changing their values and habits. These comments were usually met with enmity. At some point during that semester, some black students told me she was what they called “low-key racist” because of her views. I did not see her or her comments as “low-key racist” in any way. They just didn’t fit the preferred perspective of the progressive black and brown students in that class.

My views on this event are somewhat complicated. I could not defend the substance of that white student’s comments - fealty to the community of scholars to which I belong compels me to relay the collective wisdom from my discipline and elevate that wisdom over lay theories. Her ideas didn’t have that much empirical support, and I couldn’t rubber-stamp them for the sake of viewpoint diversity. But I could push back against those students labeling her as “low-key racist” simply for expressing a viewpoint, and so I did.

I believe that white female student is not unique in being called racist for expressing views outside the acceptable domain of thought on college campuses. So when folks say that college campuses are hostile to conservative ideas, I believe them.

The answer from conservatives and organizations like Heterodox Academy is to argue for something called “viewpoint diversity” - an openness to different (read: conservative) ideas.

I think the disorder has been properly diagnosed. Conservative ideas are indeed met with derision. But the cure proposed - pushing viewpoint diversity, is not an answer.

Viewpoint diversity is the wrong viewpoint.

Calls for viewpoint diversity are misguided for two reasons.

First, viewpoint diversity would disrupt quality teaching. Students should be able to say what they want in a classroom discussion - like my white female student should be able to express her views about black culture. But the professor would not be doing their job effectively if they didn’t relay the insights from their discipline and inform students when their opinions diverge from this insight.

Let me illustrate this with an example.

Faryha Salim is on Campus Reform’s Professor Watchlist. Salim was an adjunct professor at Cypress College in California. She was recorded clashing with a student over policing. The student described police as heroes. This is a view common across the American population but certainly more often expressed in conservative spaces. Professor Salim countered by claiming that American policing grew out of slave patrols and that police have committed atrocious acts toward citizens and gotten away with it. They are not, as a group, heroes, was her implied claim.

After re-watching the video, I believe Salim’s hostility towards the student is uncalled for. Students should be able to express their viewpoints and be treated with respect, regardless of how misguided they were.

Salim’s tone with that student was out of line, but the claims she makes are widely accepted within the discipline. The assertion that modern US policing grew out of slave patrols is, at this point, well understood. It is a standard claim in criminology. She’s also right that police have done horrible things to citizens and gotten away with it. The notion that people of color are in more danger in the presence of police is a bit hyperbolic for my taste, but she’s hardly alone in making that assertion, with studies demonstrating over-aggressive policing and police misconduct so common as to be not worth mentioning anymore (although I will give a plug to Dr. Alex Vitale’s masterful book The End of Policing. Vitale is also on the Professor WatchList).

The point here is that Salim was doing her job correctly by relaying the conclusions of her discipline. If Salim had acknowledged the student’s comments without pushback, she would be on the right side of viewpoint diversity but the wrong side of her discipline.

There is a second reason calls for viewpoint diversity are misguided. Academic disciplines are not organized around whatever the political parties at the time argue over. Calling for more conservative perspectives makes no sense. Here I can speak about my discipline, sociology. When students take an introduction to sociology course, they are usually taught three broad perspectives for analyzing most phenomena:

• Functionalism - a focus on how the institutions, norms, and laws work together to produce a functioning society.

• Conflict - a focus on the power relations between groups in society and how institutions benefit some groups and disadvantage others

• Symbolic Interactionism - a focus on individual actions in day-to-day life and how people experience their world.

To see an example of how this is applied, look here at the theoretical perspectives on aging. To me, this is a form of viewpoint diversity.

And it gets more diverse.

Within these broad perspectives are many different theories. There is the “subculture of aging” theory. There is the “selective optimization with compensation” theory. There is the theory of “gerotranscendence,” and so on.

Where does conservative or liberal fit in theories of aging?

It doesn’t.

Arguing for viewpoint diversity in the way conservatives describe it would suggest that scholars must find or manufacture some conservative theory about aging that they can then use to produce research that is amenable to the interests of the modern Republican Party. I don’t know how that would even work.

So the question might be: “If these perspectives and theories are apolitical, and scholars are still coming to conclusions that support a liberal worldview, isn’t this an example of bias in research?”

Yes and no.

If “biased” connotes a certain direction in the output of scholarship - then yes. Academics choose topics that are of interest to them. And if you are liberal, then you may want to focus on racism, sexism, and transphobia - issues that are not of concern for conservatives. The number of liberals in academia most definitely impacts the direction of research.

If “biased” connotes defective or flawed, then no, absolutely not. The scholar who happens to pull the lever for Democrats in the voting booth is not all of a sudden so ideologically blind that they cannot do quality research. By and large, academics are conscientious people who will closely follow the rules of scientific inquiry and come to conclusions that they believe are warranted, given the evidence they have. I don’t suspect the rates of cheating in academia (of course, this happens) are higher than in other professions. More to the point, I don’t think whatever academic malfeasance occurs is because someone is a liberal.

So far, I’ve agreed with people who have claimed academia is hostile towards conservatives and conservative ideas. I even drew on my own lived experiences to support that claim. But then I turned around and said that calls for viewpoint diversity are misguided. Academics are doing their jobs properly when they correct students expressing ideas that are not consonant with the conclusions of their discipline. Moreover, the research professors do is not lower in quality because they and their colleagues are liberal.

I think the solution is for donors, lawmakers, and advocacy groups to push for conservative studies programs in American colleges and universities.

Black folk showing conservatives how it’s done.

Let’s go back to 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were shot. Anti-war demonstrations were being held all across the country. In more positive news, the Beatles released their White Album. NASA had completed their Apollo 7 and 8 missions - significant steps towards the Apollo 11 mission the following year, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

Also in 1968, San Francisco State College (now University) was the site of the first “studies” department in the country. A group of students and faculty at San Francisco State, led by that college’s black student union, demanded and received a Black Studies program. A copy of the original curriculum is housed at the university.

Black Studies Curriculum 1968

Now we have numerous such programs - ethnic studies (Asian, African-American, Latino), sex and gender studies (Women, Gay and Lesbian, Queer), and topic-focused studies (Terrorism, Media, Cybersecurity).

While each “studies” program will be different in history and purpose, they all share a common theme of bringing scholars together from different disciplines to research and teach about a topic.

In some cases, academia may have ignored the topic. Maybe a collection of Hispanic students and faculty at a university says to themselves: “There is not enough viewpoint diversity on this campus. No one is doing research on the questions of interest to Hispanics.” That would be a strong rationale for a Hispanic studies department and recruiting faculty willing to ask and answer questions of relevance to the Hispanic condition.

In other cases, the topic may be of social interest to major stakeholders. At my university, we have a Cybersecurity program. The program started because there was an identifiable need for graduates trained in cybersecurity. We are in southern Virginia. Washington, DC, about 3 - 4 hours away, is loaded with federal agencies and large data companies that could use our graduates. And so, the university started what is essentially a “studies” program, cobbling together computer scientists, engineers, and even social scientists (myself included) and tasked them with doing teaching and research on cybersecurity.

The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has a Hmong Studies Department

The answer to the lack of conservative ideas on campus is to develop and grow conservative studies programs. Conservatives face similar issues to those black students at San Francisco State 50 years ago. Black students probably got the side-eye when they brought up certain ideas. They were probably hesitant to mention racial issues in a class that had a white professor and white students (which meant, at that time, just about all classes.) They knew that because the professors at universities were white, they wouldn’t be as interested in researching the issues they cared about.

Black folk showed the way. Today, scholarship by and for black people is thriving. The professors who either got their PhDs in black studies programs, took a course during their formative academic years in black studies, or are currently employed in a black studies department have produced valuable research on the black experience in the United States and globally. Their research and insight are a part of the zeitgeist of modern academia, informing discussions in classrooms and dorm rooms. Although I cannot establish an empirical link, I believe the growth in critical race theory and terms such as white privilege and systemic racism is linked to the growth of “studies” programs. From my perspective as a black person and scholar, I welcome these ideas because they help explain phenomena I have lived with every day.

Conservative studies programs can do for people with a conservative identity what black studies programs did for people with a black identity.

Towards Conservative Studies

A conservative studies program would be composed of historians, social scientists, writers-in-residence, and public figures with deep knowledge of the conservative tradition working together to explore American conservatism. They would offer courses such as “The Conservative Tradition in the American South” or “Artistic Expressions of the American Right.” They may collaborate on empirical studies that ask questions conservatives want answered, such as “What are the benefits of the traditional family?” or “What are the links between small government and entrepreneurship?” I firmly believe that if you build it, they will come.

I can anticipate someone saying that many organizations and people are producing this kind of work already, and academics ignore it. Why would a conservative studies program in a new university change that?

Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute indeed produce scholarship from a conservative viewpoint. Many people with academic backgrounds work for these organizations and produce thought-provoking research. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution is a good example of this.

I call the scholarship from think tanks and people employed in them “para-academic,” meaning that they resemble academic work, even performing similar functions, but are not required to have the same standards or rules (para-academic here is similar to paramilitary).

Para-academic scholarship does not participate in the collective enterprise of knowledge-building. Para-academic work is not presented at conferences for critique. It is not submitted to journals for peer review. It does not integrate prior scholarship into its conclusions or have a dialogue with that scholarship. Para-academic scholarship tends to gain currency amongst laypersons looking for evidence to confirm their priors but never gains traction within academia. Again, Thomas Sowell is a good example. Because para-academic scholarship does not participate in the collective process of knowledge building, you won’t find Sowell in many textbooks.

This is what a conservative studies program, peopled with scholars willing to participate in that collective process, can remedy.

Remember that white student in my class who was called “low-key racist?” All I could do for that student was defend her on what amounted to grounds of decency. Slandering someone because they have a different opinion is simply wrong. But in an academic setting, telling others to respect a person’s claims even though they are mistaken is a bit patronizing.

But what if that student could refer to research done by scholars in conservative studies programs - scholars actively participating in the academic community, using the theories, methods, and standards other academics respect? That is a completely different dynamic. That is how conservative ideas can become a part of academia.