OPINION:
American universities have questioned the legitimacy of Western institutions for the past six decades. Although they were building a case against every other entity, they were unwittingly creating a case against themselves. If universities want to regain public trust and its attendant benefits, they must make a place for conservatives on their campuses.
The duty of higher education is to serve the public interest. Accepting this charge enabled American higher education to secure special privileges, including academic freedom, institutional autonomy, faculty self-governance and access to federal research funding. The dereliction of this duty destroyed public trust in the institution and led to the imposition of external reforms, and rightly so.
We must consider three factors before reinstating the privileges of higher education: what professors are saying, what the data shows about politics on university campuses and what social science reveals about group psychology.
Let’s begin with what professors are saying. The American Association of University Professors used to defend the rights of professors; now, it openly publishes censorship mandates that read like political manifestos. The academy labels conservatives and the “viewpoint diversity curious” as fascists in their exchanges with critics on X.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is reliably left of center on most issues, recently published a piece about the rise in the number of Turning Point USA chapters across the country. The experts consulted for the article expressed concern that having more TPUSA chapters on campuses would exacerbate division.
The arguments for academic freedom and institutional autonomy ring hollow when they apply only to the professorial class and not the students who disagree with their professors. They ring especially hollow when these freedoms are used to protect professors of only one political persuasion.
In addition, poll after poll demonstrates that college faculties are overwhelmingly on the left, which presents some issues that institutions of higher education are poorly equipped to handle. Liberals are experts at identifying institutional and cultural barriers to freedom. For that reason, they tend to be indigent defenders of social institutions and cultural heritage, which often impose limits.
Before reinstating any special privileges, higher education needs to acknowledge the moral and intellectual failures that have enabled and perpetuated the one-party academy.
Universities are understandably wary of bringing conservatives onto campus because they cannot protect them. For example, in 2017 the University of California, Davis, canceled a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos after a brawl broke out between protesters and counterprotesters. More recently, Charlie Kirk was assassinated on the campus of Utah Valley University.
This poses an uncomfortable question: If conservative points of view are dangerous, as critics have claimed, why are conservative speakers the ones who need additional protection? Moreover, if universities cannot or will not pay for these safeguards, we should not pretend they value academic freedom, viewpoint diversity or the free exchange of ideas. (Similarly, higher education has failed to ask why its students have become increasingly accepting of violence as a means of shutting down a controversial speaker.)
Ultimately, a significant portion of higher education’s reluctance to address these issues stems from its own political and cultural biases. Every culture possesses certain kinds of expertise, yet no culture contains the totality of knowledge. In the case of politics, shared values and practices are what bridge the political divide. In their absence (or deconstruction), political differences become tribal differences.
If universities wish to survive, they must commit themselves to shared values and practices that transcend political tribe. For example, they could follow Heterodox Academy in adopting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement as foundational principles.
For the professorial monoculture, that means engaging with conservatives in good faith. Instead of fighting to keep conservative ideas, individuals and student organizations off campus, higher education should hire conservative consultants. They should bring in conservative speakers and provide the necessary protection to facilitate a civil exchange of ideas. They should consider including more conservative texts in core class offerings. They should offer more classes about conservative ideas and thinkers.
If higher education wishes to regain its treasured privileges, it needs to regain the public’s trust. This will not happen so long as half the electorate sees its ideas and values vilified on college campuses.
Universities have failed to keep politics out of the classrooms, hiring committees and student services. More important, higher education has not modeled or taught students how to disagree with one another, which is the basis of civic engagement. I don’t think universities are beyond hope, but I’m certain their only hope will be found in cultivating the virtues appropriate to civic life.
Correction: A previous version of this piece gave the incorrect year for the canceled University of California, Davis, speech by Milo Yiannopoulos.
• John M. Kainer is associate professor and department chair of sociology at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, and an affiliated scholar with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. His work has been featured in a variety of scholarly and popular outlets, including First Things, The American Spectator, Minding the Campus, Catholic Social Science Review, the Journal of Sociology and Christianity, and William James Studies. You can follow him on X @JohnMKainer.
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