Hey You, Are You Listening, Are You Thinking?
Mark Moyar, A Conservative Professor on Academe’s Political Conformity: Decades of ideological homogeneity have hurt everyone, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2024:
In fact, no mobs materialized to bar my path. No leftists showed up to jeer my remarks on the finer points of history and politics. My hosts explained that the opposing side never showed up to hear conservative speakers. Prior interactions had led the young rightists to conclude that their left-leaning counterparts were so certain of their rectitude that they had no interest in contrary viewpoints. The Harvard conservatives also acknowledged, ruefully, that conservative students responded to this treatment by tuning liberal students out. No one was listening to, or conversing with, the other side.
Surely the herd instincts and general overconfidence of the human species are in part to blame for this sad state of affairs. So is the media segregation that allows individuals to avoid contact with contrary viewpoints, and the coddling of youth by elite parents and culture. But colleges themselves deserve much of the blame.
Moyer is speaking in the American context of Harvard, but in my over-30 years experience in Australian universities, ten as a higher education policy researcher at The University of Melbourne, I am telling YOU that the same inability to listen and think is happening in our own institutions. Will you listen and think?
Moyar goes on to provide the same argument that I do; but who listens to me? In both United States and Australia, we lost in our universities the teaching and paid research for intellectual history fields:
In times past, Harvard undergraduates all took the same courses in Western civilization and American history. They absorbed common course material like the Nicomachean Ethics and the Federalist Papers, which they discussed together. But in the second half of the 20th century, Harvard and most of the nation’s other colleges and universities cut those weighty anchors away.
Today’s Harvard students are required to take no specific courses. They are united only by shared belief in their pre-existing virtue and in an awareness of which opinions are career-enhancing and which are career-destroying. In the absence of knowledge about the United States, Western civilization, or Christianity, students can form whatever opinions about those subjects suit their prejudices.
Thirty years ago, conservatives thought that the campus was already in an advanced state of decline. In hindsight, however, Harvard was in much better shape then than it is now. The senior faculty members at that time had a genuine interest in the general education of the undergraduate student body, along with a tolerance for political and cultural ideas other than their own.
By the early 1990s, mandatory courses in Western civilization and American history had already been dropped, but professors still offered broad surveys in those subjects that satisfied general-education requirements. Although a large majority of the faculty leaned left, students could take courses from a variety of professors on the right, such as Harvey Mansfield, James Hankins, Stephen Peter Rosen, and Stephan Thernstrom.
The seeds of our current morass were, nevertheless, already being sown. At this point, boomers in their 40s were starting to become full professors and senior news editors. In their evolution from college students denouncing the American “system” to high-salaried elites controlling that same system, the boomers had become more refined and subtle in their conduct, but they had lost neither their supreme confidence in their own goodness nor their intolerance of dissent.
The fools at this point of the reading, if they get to this point of the reading, would think I must be a conservative to support Moyar’s position. In Fact, I am a Liberal-Radical Thinker in my positioning. As Moyar argues, “decades of ideological homogeneity have hurt everyone,” and as my points:
- Stupidity is encouraged in the public marketplace because there are no heard corrections from the lost fields of intellectual history;
- Researchers who can make the corrections are impoverished and forced out of the universities:
- Policy decision-makers marched, and matched, blindly forward not understanding the stupidity in the spiral historiography,
[Acoustic Guitar Intro]
[Verse 1: David Gilmour]
Hey, you, out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old
Can you feel me?
Hey, you, standing in the aisles with itchy feet and fading smiles
Can you feel me?
Hey, you
Don’t help them to bury the light
Don’t give in without a fight
[Verse 2: David Gilmour]
Hey, you, out there on your own, sitting naked by the phone
Would you touch me?
Hey, you with your ear against the wall, waiting for someone to call out
Would you touch me?
Hey you
Would you help me to carry the stone?
Open your heart, I’m coming home
[Guitar Solo]
[Bridge: Roger Waters]
But it was only fantasy
The wall was too high, as you can see
No matter how he tried, he could not break free
And the worms ate into his brain
See upcoming rock shows
Get tickets for your favorite artists
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[Breakdown]
[Verse 3: Roger Waters]
Hey, you, out there on the road, always doing what you’re told
Can you help me?
Hey, you, out there beyond the wall, breaking bottles in the hall
Can you help me?
Hey, you, don’t tell me there’s no hope at all
Together we stand, divided we fall
[Outro: Roger Waters]
(We fall, we fall, we fall, we fall, we fall, we fall, we fall, we fall…)
Source: https://genius.com/Pink-floyd-hey-you-lyrics
Featured Image: Mark Moyar, A Conservative Professor on Academe’s Political Conformity: Decades of ideological homogeneity have hurt everyone, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2024.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Neville Buch
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