How Academe Shortchanges Conservative Thinking

Concerning the lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses:

The gains in public life are real. But it's a mistake to take the media status of conservatives too far. For in another respect, little has changed. When we assess intellectuals, we enter a rarified habitat of books and ideas, and the prime setting for appreciating those is the college campus. There, conservative intellectuals remain stymied. Their relationship to the universities in which they found their calling and to the curriculum and scholarship they studied — that remains tenuous.

Such a situation has consequences, for liberals and conservatives. As three recent books — one by a leading liberal professor, one by a well-known conservative columnist, and the other by a visible conservative polemicist — demonstrate, while the denial of academic legitimacy to the conservative tradition begins in the classroom, it reverberates far beyond the campus. Read More.