Despite decades of talk radio hosts complaining about pointy-headed liberal academics, Republicans in 2010 were still pretty fond of higher education. Fifty-eight percent of them said colleges had a positive effect on the country, a number that ticked along in roughly that range in 2011 … 2012 … 2013 … 2014 … then, whoa. It started to go off the cliff, hitting a mere 36 percent in Pew’s most recent poll.
Looking at this poll, Philip Bump of The Washington Post blames this on the focus “by conservative media on tensions at universities.”
It’s the sort of theory that may sound plausible on first read, except … see the first sentence of this column. Conservatives in the media have been complaining about liberals in academia for a very long time – just about as long, in fact, as academia has been trending liberal. After all, William F. Buckley rose to fame, and midwifed the modern conservative movement, after writing “God and Man at Yale.” As the book’s title suggests, it complained that elite educational institutions were excessively secular, collectivist and disposed toward government intervention in the economy. It was first published in 1951.
And nonetheless, Republicans apparently kept right on loving their colleges until 2015.
What’s changed, I submit, is colleges have readily supplied conservatives with images of an institution that is not merely left-leaning, but actively hostile to conservatives, as conservative speech on campus has increasingly been threatened. It started with students pressing for speakers to be disinvited from graduation speeches – sometimes liberals, but often conservatives. Then angry minorities were allowed to shut down conservative speeches with increasingly raucous protests that eventually turned to violence. And when violence occurred, schools seemed noticeably uninterested in identifying or punishing the people who committed it.
Academia is a left-wing institution, and I suspect when the people in charge of it look at left-wing protesters, they see basically good-hearted kids who are overexuberant in their pursuit of the common good.
Whatever the reason this has been allowed to happen, the picture that emerges from these events is of an academia where orderly conservatives are unwelcome, but disorderly – even violent – leftists are tolerated.
Schools are going to have to adjust to the new realities of our panopticon world just as police departments have. They cannot defend the principle of free speech while winking at violations, because those violations are apt to become national events.
Even setting aside high-minded ideals, administrators should crack down out of simple self-interest. Their jobs almost all ultimately depend on government funding, either directly, from state legislatures, or indirectly, through subsidized student loans. They also depend on contributions from alumni who are, as a group, much more conservative than either the activists or the administrations. And finally, they depend on students, parents and employers to continue to think a degree from their institution is valuable.
If universities brand themselves as explicitly left-wing institutions that make no effort to be fair to conservative views … if they allow left-wing groups to appoint themselves as the thought police of what is theoretically a shared space … then they will open up gaping holes in their budgets and their enrollments, and the left’s fiefdom will fall to the enemy. It would behoove them to seek a binding peace now, one that offers both sides some living room. That could reverse the tanking public support for universities.
Megan McArdle is a Bloomberg View columnist.
