Are Universities Too Liberal to Provide a Real Education? Sounds Like Conservative Sour Grapes to Me

Over at Narratively, Natalie Axton reports on a theory promoted by many conservative thinkers, both inside and outside of academia, that says that liberalism dominates academia to such an extent that these schools can no longer provide a real education, since they can't provide the kind of balance necessary to produce real debate. The the article makes the straightforward and convincing case that the best critics of specific policies of academic institutions will come out of the Right (self-proclaimed outsiders generally do), but the more sweeping argument falters, and the broader it gets, the more utterly it fails. She even cites unschool advocates who promote traveling and a lot of self-selected reading as worthy replacements for a college education. I could rant for hours about the flaws in the philosophical underpinnings of unschooling (it's not scalable, people who truly want to learn should read things they didn't pick out themselves, classroom discussion can't be replicated in any other setting, etc.), but I'm most irritated by a particularly tired argument repeated in the piece.

The conservatives Axton quotes lost me when they trotted out one of their more tired criticisms, the old trope that liberals are hypocrites for advocating tolerance and then being intolerant of conservative ideas. I've heard this line of argument many times before, and I always find it unpersuasive; it denotes an understanding of tolerance that is so limited it's downright deceptive. Tolerance doesn't mean an idea will be adopted. It just means it will be studied and weighed. Liberals in academia, in my experience, are more than willing to tolerate conservative ideas. They just don't buy into them. Liberals can tolerate the study of monarchy, too. You don't hear a lot of people going around claiming liberals are intolerant of monarchic ideas. In my experience, the only reason conservatives complain that liberals are intolerant of conservatism is that they feel conservatism is fundamentally correct, and that anyone giving it a fair hearing would ultimately conclude the same. It's a kind of rhetorical trap; either you will prove you are tolerant by agreeing with me, or I will call you a hypocrite for being intolerant. The third option, that conservative ideas, especially on social policies like gay marriage and women's reproductive rights, have been weighed carefully and found to be objectionable or outdated by the majority of the general public, is not considered. Certainly liberals share the same notion that their ideas are so correct that anyone who hears them should share them. When liberals even hint at this, they're derided for being snooty and condescending. But the conservative version is equally condescending and more than a little juvenile due to its "gotcha'" quality. While the assumption that one's own ideas are correct is completely understandable (as Wittgenstien pointed out when he wrote, “If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely,' it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.”) but liberal tolerance does not dictate a conservative education. It just demands that ideas get a fair hearing. It doesn't even mean that the ideas which rise to the surface will be True with a capital T. The implicit assumption is that liberal tolerance will produce ideas which are popular. Combined with the notion that people are essentialy decent, this should produce a positive outcome. If, on the other hand, one holds that people are "fallen" or essentially rotten in some way, then it should also come as no surprise to conservatives that liberal ideas are more popular at universities; from a conservative perspective,  the fallen people have made the evil, liberal ideas into the popular ideas. 

Not that liberalism holds the universal sway over academia that the article seems to imply. In fact, libertarianism is alive and well on college campuses. I'll bet Ron Paul would have defeated Mitt Romney at a lot of schools, and I'd also guess that libertarian ideas about legalizing marijuana would defeat liberal compromise positions or a more progressive limited-legalization-with-taxation scheme at most ostensibly "liberal" universities. I was particularly struck by this quote: "Part of the argument at Minding the Campus is that political ideology in the form of race, sex, and gender studies has captured the humanities and social sciences and that as a consequence, American students spend their time practicing identity politics instead of learning history, philosophy and literature." I would argue that the best defense of the study of Western culture, and of Western culture itself, involves learning the role identity politics has always played in history, philosophy, and literature. It wasn't called "identity politics" two hundred or two thousand years ago. If some student escapes from a university without knowing the roles race, sex, gender (and, I'd add, class and sexual identity) played in history, philosophy, and literature, he cannot count himself an educated person, and stands as a testament to the persistence of white, male, straight, upper-class privilege. I understand and share the opinion that there's a lot about Western culture that deserves to be protected (though I may disagree with conservatives, and even with libertarians, about what deserves that protection). Any attempt to excise the study of race, sex, and gender from the studies of history, philosophy, and literature will not defend Western culture any more than building a base consisting solely of white, Christian males will defend the Republican Party. Complaining about the intolerance of a changing world is just petulance. A higher education has to tolerate a recognition of a changing reality.

What Ron Paul's Libertarianism Really Means

Over the next few days, and for too many days afterward, especially if he wins the Iowa caucuses, you may hear a lot about Ron Paul's crazier views. You will probably learn more about the racism in his newsletters (newsletters he now disavows, but used to brag about), his belief that there is a secret U.N. conspiracy to take over the United States, and maybe even his statement that the U.S. shouldn't have intervened to stop the holocaust. What you might not hear about are his most fundamental libertarian views. They are less dramatic, but, in a way, they are far more important, and not just because they clearly disqualify him for the presidency; so do all those other bright-hot-embers of crazy. But start paying attention to his particular breed of libertarianism, known by some within his own movement as paleolibertrianism or paleoconservatism. Here's an example that jumps out at me. Listen to what Ron Paul says about education:



Here's where the rubber meets the road: In one way, he's correct. If we're talking about natural rights, education and healthcare do not qualify. Animals in the wild do not get any public education. The government does not need to provide education in order to be preserving the basic rights of life, liberty, and property that a government must defend in order to be legitimate. But rights should not be limited in that way. Rights can also be conferred upon individuals by a society because the society recognizes these are not only in the best interest of the individual (privileges) but also in the best interest of every other individual in the society. Rights, like language, are social constructs, and we are human beings. We do not need to limit ourselves to the same list of rights protected by chieftains in caves. We can choose to do better.

Paul's example is a perfect illustration of this faulty reasoning by paleolibertarians. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he seems to be saying one of two things. Either government intervention has driven the inflation in the cost of education which now makes medical school inaccessible for "poor" people (i.e. all but the wealthiest few), and if we just got government out, the price would return to the manageable $300 a semester Paul mentions. Or he recognizes that the cost would still stay out of reach for "poor" people (just about everybody), but that the notion that an IRS agent would take away your hard-earned cash is such an unbearable injustice that it must be done away with, no matter the consequences.

Now, I don't for a minute believe that the cost of medical school would ever return to $300 a semester (or even something similar but adjusted for standard inflation) just because the government stopped giving loans. Sure, medical schools might have to close their doors, but they couldn't prepare people to be real, modern doctors for a few thousand dollars. But even if that were possible in the long run, for a period of indeterminate time (perhaps a generation?) the 99% of us who don't have the quarter million dollars medical school costs on top of the 100k a private undergraduate education costs would simply not be able to become doctors.

So, imagine Ron Paul's America: the (horror of horrors) IRS would not be able to take your tax money and give it to some poor kid who would use it, in the form of subsidized loans, to go through college and medical school and become your doctor. Yea! You've saved some money, and you haven't participated in the historic evil known as taxation. How grand. But then, when you need some surgery, you go to your local hospital and find out that there simply aren't enough doctors to keep up with the workload. Uh-oh. This isn't pleasant. Still, you have all that extra tax money you saved. Go home and enjoy that while the tumor metastasizes. But when you finally get through the waiting list, guess what? The guy who will be performing the surgery on your brain? Well, he's just not as good as you would want him to be. You see, there were ten people who could have been better, but they didn't get the necessary education because there were no federally subsidized loans to get them through school. This guy, on the other hand, had multimillionaire parents who could pay the tuition out of pocket. So you get a neurosurgeon who, in a pre-Ron Paul world, would have been the tenth best in the hospital, and now he's cutting into your brain.

Education is not a natural right, and you don't have a natural right to a decent doctor, either. But if we have the right to self-government, then that means we have the right to make choices about what we want for our own society. And if that should include creating a meritocracy capable of producing the absolute best doctors we can so that when we need them we have access to the best of the best, then we have the right to make that country for ourselves. In Ron Paul's world, a certain kind of liberty was maximized for the man on the slab in the basement. He's dead young and unnecessarily, but he wasn't forced to give money to the IRS. That is not the world you and I want to live in (and die young in).

Ron Paul, despite his most incendiary beliefs, is doing our nation a service by forcing us to have a conversation about the amount of liberty we're willing to give up in order to improve our society. This is a vital debate to have, because there is always the danger that we can go to far, or go in the wrong direction, creating a police state in order to feel safe or a control economy in order to know we'll be provided for. We should talk about how to make the best possible decisions to maximize liberty while not creating a nightmare world; all liberty and no community. But don't let any paleolibertarian or paleoconservative fool you into believing this debate is simple black and white. Don't let them tell you what the government doesn't have the right to do.

This is a democracy, or at least it should be. As long as we still have power to influence our government, we get to decide how much we want it to intrude into our lives, and how much the benefits of that intrusion outweigh the inconvenience. Our government has the rights we give it, and no more. We have the right to choose the nature of our society. All rights, even the natural ones, are rights we've had to earn back from unjust governments. They are our social constructs.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that every child has a right to a free and appropriate education, regardless of their race, disabilities, home language, or citizenship. Ron Paul can disagree with the court. That's his right, too. What Ron Paul can't do is unilaterally decide what your rights are or the government's rights are. He can tell you what he thinks they should be (and I think he should have the right to say so). But remember, when he says something isn't a right, what he's really saying is that he doesn't think our society should have that thing in abundance. So if you, like me, are in the bottom 99%, he's really saying things like education and high quality medical care shouldn't be available to you. Once you know how to read through the veil of political philosophy, he really sounds more like this guy:

No healthcare for YOU!

No education for YOU!