I was forwarded a remarkable column written by Dan Knecht, a senior at my alma mater Dartmouth and a columnist for The Dartmouth, the traditional campus newspaper. Entitled “The Monolith on the Hill,” Knecht observes:
In my almost four years at Dartmouth, I have encountered more than a handful of dyed-in-the-wool liberals. I have yet to meet one conservative professor.
I don’t know Knecht or his politics, but I think the valuable point of the column is simply to illustrate the harm to students and the educational process from a lack of diversity of intellectual opinion on campus.
When I was a Dartmouth students, conservatives were on the threatened species list. There were a few, including notables such as Roger Masters, Vincent Starzinger, Colin Campbell, and Jeffrey Hart. This is an eclectic group–Straussian, Traditionalist, Libertarian, Paleocon. And there weren’t many of them, but at least you knew where you could go to get some ideas that might be different from everything else on campus. But every one of these guys is now retired, and from a review of Dartmouth’s faculty today it appears that conservatives are now on the endangered species list. There are a few, but if Knecht is right, they remain pretty well undercover in dealing with the students.
Casual observation about Dartmouth thus seems consistent with Dan Klein’s findings about academia in general and elite universities specifically (Berkeley and Stanford). Klein finds that not only are conservatives and libertarians dramatically outnumbered in academia, but that among younger professors, conservative thinkers are virtually nonexistent. Like Dartmouth, the handful of conservatives on the faculty continue to retire, never to be replaced by like-minded successors.
Let me make very clear–I am not calling for affirmative action for conservative professors or some such thing (so save your emails about what a hypocrite I am). All I am observing is that students such as Dan Knecht are increasingly becoming aware that they are being cheated by spending tens of thousands dollars per year and not getting a true liberal education.
Update:
A number of students and alumin of various schools have written me this morning to remind me that Dartmouth and “elite” schools are not unique in lacking intellectual diversity, which seems readily apparent to me from Dan Klein’s study of the public policy views of academics nationwide. This particular column just caught my eye because it came from my alma mater.
Comments are closed.