You can't out-Left the Left

It's always news when someone talks sense about the higher education culture wars, but there are two especially noteworthy things about this post from Duke music professor Robert Zimmerman. (I would make a joke, but I bet he gets them all the time.)

The first is the phrase "academic declensionist narrative," referring to the portentous articles which I'm sure are being put out five-a-day by a machine somewhere. The second is this revealing caveat (emphasis mine):

Gustafson and Woessner show in practice how valuable conservative voices can be to a left-leaning university faculty. But what they bring to the table is more than a party affiliation. There’s a willingness to engage with and respect the other side, and a real commitment to honest, constructive debate. To some extent it probably comes down to personality, and I don’t want to suggest that the only good conservative academics are the ones who make nice. Looking at the opposite extreme, though, Glick’s article is neither constructive nor very honest. If that’s what conservatives have to offer–more right-wing noise trying to drown out the prevailing left-wing noise–it’s not much use as diversity (I should note that it’s not an issue Glick takes up).

Zimmerman points out that conservatives are quick on the trigger when it comes to pointing out left-wing bias in academia, and, insofar as this prevents them from being sympathetic readers of liberal one-liners, it prevents serious people from being sympathetic readers of them.

On the other hand, Zimmerman is clearly aware that a liberal who will only tolerate a domesticated conservative isn't much better than one who won't tolerate any. At Yale (among students rather than professors, I admit), my own conservatism was in constant danger of becoming a charming idiosyncrasy. Conservatives and their ideas are tolerated in intellectual conversation, but only after the conservative has proven himself to be one of the okay ones. I am not worried that right-wing academics will lose jobs over their politics, but I am concerned that conservative intellectuals will try to satisfy the liberal gatekeepers of respectability by developing a self-conscious tokenism. It wouldn't be the apocalypse that KC Johnson envisions, but it might be so bad as David Brooks times fifty. As much as I enjoy Brooks, I don't want him to set intellectual discourse's right bound.

I won't deny that there are plenty of hacks fighting the culture war, but the kind of bias that only accepts conservatives who "make nice" is difficult to nail down in any kind of helpfully embarrassing way, and so, while offhand comments and bad jokes certainly aren't official statements, they ought to be within bounds for someone trying to make a case against academy liberalism.

For more on self-conscious tokenism and "staying to the right of the Left," see Robert Stacy McCain's advice to Ross Douthat. If I had to choose sides in the un-flame war, it would be his. (As my grandfather always told me, "Stick with the ones who are too lazy to be evil.") Luckily, I see Andrew Sullivan for the provocateur he is, so I don't think I have to pick.