Indoctrination accusation: at Duke, conservative activist Horowitz railed against the "intellectual corruption" of American universities, while a cohort of dissenters made their own opinions known

Bernard Thomas/The Herald-Sun

"I feel alienated from campus atmospheres," says Brooks. "When I'm on campuses, people assume I know every other conservative, like we're a little club and we all think the same. My parents are academics, and I thought I would be an academic. But you just don't want to be the only conservative on campus. It just wouldn't be fun." The students he encounters on college campuses tend to look on their professors as "sort of charming eccentrics who have retreated from the real world," he says. That's a consequence, in part, of specialization. But it also reflects a sense that those professors are out of the mainstream, that the academic conversation is distant from the wider cultural conversation.

If there is such a gap, Brooks says, the implications are unfortunate for society and not just for the academy. Because of the dearth of ideas flowing from campuses, "The public debate has gotten a lot stupider," he says.

The relatively few conservatives on those campuses--notably Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield, a critic of political correctness, affirmative action, feminism, and grade inflation--"become incredibly aggressive in fighting back against this throng," Brooks says. "So smart people who may have wanted to become academics say, 'God, I don't want to be in that atmosphere.' "

For his part, Chandler, as a former college president, says the liberal skewing of the academy reflects the nature of the academic enterprise. "Arts and sciences faculties deal to a large extent with social institutions and social change. Their perspectives tend to be critical and questioning rather than affirming. This is particularly true of social scientists. And, of course, much of the great literature that interests scholars in the humanities also raises critical questions about social justice and social issues generally." It is likely that "a lot of self-selection is involved in decisions about where people gravitate professionally," he says. Bankers tend to be Republican and conservative; the military services tend to be Republican and conservative. Academics tend to be Democratic and liberal.

Brooks contends that it's "a crude stereotype" that identifies social critics with liberalism. "Social criticism can come in all forms," he says, pointing to Mansfield's Manliness, a book that argues for the traditional gender roles feminist thinkers would like to erase.

And he takes offense at suggestions that conservatives veer away from the academy in search of better-paying careers. A former Duke academic administrator has been quoted as saying that if salaries for professors rivaled salaries for CEOs, "we would see more Republicans teaching French." Says Brooks, "Frankly, that's the kind of self-righteous attitude you get among people who never meet Republicans. I think the number of Republicans who are ministers is very high, and ministers' salaries are much lower than academic salaries. The salary of a legislative assistant is much lower than an academic salary. And most of the jobs at a think tank are filled by people who wanted to be academics. I suspect they'd want campus jobs, if they thought that would be a place where they could feel at home."

Whether or not conservative professors feel at home at Duke, the latest controversy over ideology came to life in February of 2004, when the Duke Conservative Union published an advertisement in The Chronicle. The advertisement listed the number of registered Democrats and Republicans in eight humanities and social-science departments. All of the departments had more Democrats than Republicans; some had no registered Republicans at all.

Indoctrination accusation: at Duke, conservative activist Horowitz railed against the "intellectual corruption" of American universities, while a cohort of dissenters made their own opinions known

Bernard Thomas/The Herald-Sun

Shortly after the ad appeared, producing a flurry of letters in the paper, the Provost's Office sponsored a campus forum on academic freedom and partisanship. Peter Lange, the provost, led the discussion with a broad statement of principle: "Professors, no matter what their personal views, including but certainly not restricted to partisan ones on the topics under discussion in their classes, need to assure that students are exposed to a wide range of conflicting views on subjects for which that is appropriate." He added that "the development of active knowledge and intelligence requires the opportunity for contestation, for debate and disagreement."

The "neutral" or opinion-free classroom is "not the best environment for active learning," he said. "Instead it is the open classroom with high standards of debate and strong expectations that all will strive for those standards, regardless of the professor's, or the student's, viewpoint."

At the forum, the conservative-leaning political-science chair, Michael Munger, talked about attending a party for new faculty members. When it was time to sit down, he recalled, "We were all told, 'Since you've been hired at Duke, I'm sure that none of you is so foolish as to be conservative. So, please, spread yourselves liberally around the tables.'" He wasn't offended by the joke, he told the forum audience, but it illustrates the teaching climate on campus. "It's always unofficial; it's not a statement of policy. I don't think that there is any policy.... It's just an expectation. The policy is for openness. The actual expectation is that we'll generally hire liberals."

A year later, Lange was asked in the Academic Council, the faculty senate, about a student complaint concerning a Chinese-history class. The student had found it "insulting" and irrelevant that the professor had used class time to criticize the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Lange said the complaint was hard to address. "I can, for instance, certainly remember times when I was taking courses including Thucydides' The Peloponnesian Wars or de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and faculty members would 'digress' into discussions of contemporary events, digressions that both illuminated and brought to life the class material being presented and also helped me think more profoundly about life, politics, and the society around me."

Individual students' sensitivities vary substantially, Lange told the Academic Council, as do their expectations for their classes and for the roles of their professors in their overall learning experience. He said that excessive politeness or deference in how professors and students communicate with one another can be constraining; the more important goal is a climate of mutual respect.

The main sponsor of last spring's Horowitz event was the Duke chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, whose president is Stephen Miller, now a senior. "There are many courses that somehow incorporate Marxism or Marxist ideology or other left-wing doctrines," Miller says. That, in his view, reflects the tendency of professors to identify more readily with Marxism than conservatism. David Brooks makes a similar point, observing that there are certain intellectual areas, like diplomatic history and even the American Revolution, that are bound to attract conservatives but that are barely covered on campuses. Such fields "just aren't hot," he says, and their practitioners, unlike scholars steeped in race and gender themes, probably wouldn't draw the attention of hiring committees.

Demonstrably at Duke, the history department has seen a skewing toward social history--history from the vantage point of the non-elites--and the history of once-neglected regions. "The 1960s" looks at the civil-rights and women's-rights movements; "Freedom Stories" examines race and storytelling in the South. Other courses cover the Caribbean from the arrival of Columbus to the emergence of sugar and slavery, Africa before and since European encounters, ancient and early-modern Japan, and Islamic civilization. At the same time, the department teaches the writings of Adam Smith.

Such areas are being given wide exposure, professors say, because they're intellectually lively. The academy, as they see it, rewards fresh scholarship and not a particular line of thought.

"There is not a single class at Duke University that is devoted to the study of conservative thought," Miller says. "Not one single, solitary course." According to Munger, the political scientist, Miller is correct, strictly speaking. "There is not a course devoted exclusively to conservative thought. I can't imagine why you'd want one, though. I would hope we would teach students to think, not to think like liberals or conservatives." He says he doesn't see much liberal bias in the classroom. But, he adds, even if some faculty members consider it their role to create a leftist intelligentsia--as Duke literature professor Fredric Jameson once famously declared--"I would say, get rid of liberal bias rather than balance it with conservative bias." And an array of political-science course offerings this fall address the enduring themes of freedom and democracy: "Comparative Democratic Development," "Theory of Liberal Democracy," "The American Political System," "The Nature of Freedom," and "American Constitutional Development."