I suspected that my answer to the gentle but surprisingly direct query about my politics would have a bearing on my long-term prospects to be welcomed at the dog park. Picking up on my questioner’s left-of-center sensibilities, I’d hoped my confession about being Strom Thurmond’s illegitimate child would not kill my chances to be welcomed back and deny Sadie, my ten-year-old beagle-dachshund pup, the opportunity to frolic with the other people’s left-leaning canines.
I passed the entrance exam. But I wasn’t surprised to learn that other first-time dog park visitors had not, and quickly concluded that self-deportation was in their best interest.
These days, I enjoy the company of my fellow dog owners and contribute to our conversations. These veer off into restaurant recommendations, concerts, golf tips, and upcoming visits by their children or grandchildren, but usually before and always after come back to Donald Trump’s most recent transgressive act and uncouth outburst.
In my personal life, I don’t go out of my way to seek out people whose views on a host of contemporary social, political, and economic issues I find disagreeable. And except for conversations about Druids, I keep my opinions to myself and work hard not to roll my eyes when someone says something untoward about different kinds of people.
I have a much different opinion about “viewpoint diversity” at my workplace. I’m all for it.
This might surprise most everyone who knows me, given that I am a university professor. Not just any kind of professor, mind you, but a sociologist, a practitioner of one of higher education’s most liberal fields of study. For over five decades, I have taught and written about many sensitive racial matters, the mix of liberal and conservative values Americans practice, and our penchant for misbehaving in public when we don’t like how our leaders and neighbors behave.
I should be happy that my colleagues have the same points of view on social and political issues as my new friends at the dog park.
But I’m not.
I shouldn’t be interested in bringing more disparate voices into my professional conversations.
But I am.
Here’s why.
American history has had several big rightward and leftward political and cultural swings. There have been periods in which we have embraced conservative ideas and sometimes quite reactionary causes, and some when we tried out more liberal ideas and progressive public practices.
By all accounts, today we are working our way out of one of the more liberal times and away from more progressive social and political initiatives. The caterwauling against higher education generally and the financial punishments being threatened and meted out to elite universities are a big juicy example of how seriously people want more conservative ideas and cultural lessons to be shared with their children. Donald Trump may be leading this charge, but he didn’t invent the cause.
Who fills faculty positions is only part of the problem. My colleagues are vastly more Democratic and liberal-minded than they are Republican and conservative-minded. But their party affiliation is only the tip of a much broader and deeper problem that all kinds of people, not just Trump supporters, have with the kinds of evangelizing more liberal professors do.
To be sure, academics in some fields are less directly implicated in all this pushing and shoving than my own. But I don’t know any card-carrying academic who doesn’t have strong opinions about the strongarming we see ourselves and our institutions going through. None of us looks kindly on the prospect of being told what we should teach, the kind of research and writing we should do, and who we should hire and promote in our departments.
Handwringing over how far backward conservative people have had to bend to accommodate more liberal views and social practices in education has been growing since the 1970s. Academic types like me may not have imagined ever becoming involved in what feels like a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled fight. But there’s nothing new about Americans showing great concern about the moral standing of their schools and the moral content of what their children are taught.
While these fights are dramatic, they are not so important as we make them out to be. Over the last three centuries, controversies over what happens in schools have given us the time and space to grow accustomed to changes we were already making in who could do certain kinds of jobs, who our neighbors would be, who could vote, and how much we should spend to keep more of us healthy longer.
Such things matter more immediately for adults than the complexion of the kids with whom their children attend school, what bathrooms they use, what teams they can play on, the pronouns they use to describe themselves, and whether Johnny has two mommies or daddies. At the same time, we adults are rightly concerned that the answers to such questions tell us something about the kind of moral world we want to leave for our children.
There are three other reasons why we should celebrate all the challenges and ill-tempered asides about “viewpoint diversity” that educational evangelists are throwing at each other these days.
First, no matter how their jeremiads turn out, young people see how they figure into discussions about the future they will inherit and help reshape. They also have a chance to see how impassioned public fights need not create as much havoc and leave behind as much mess as chest-thumping adults are threatening to make of an important institution.
Second, given all the different kinds of schooling and ways of educating young people that are practiced in our country, it is all but certain that whatever answers adults come up with will play out in more accommodating ways than they imagined when they started scratching their current conservative or liberal itches.
Third, the less violent, deadly, and destructive ways we fight in public over our children’s schooling have come to be copied in how adults fight over other political, social, and cultural concerns. Included among these would be the way we incorporate or seek to rid ourselves of unwanted foreigners and address inequalities in employment, housing, and healthcare.
In recent decades, we have come to see more and very different groups of citizens elbowing their way into the public arena than we did in the past. Whatever the issue – the rights of gay and transgendered children, for instance, and virtually anything to do with the fragility of white people or the racism of black individuals – more people than ever are acting up and speaking out about their views on the kind of country they want and how best they can contribute to it.
I think this is a very good thing.
During that same time, we have seen both liberal and conservative rabble rousers try to litigate and legislate their way out of trouble instead of duking it out on the streets, taking each other’s life, and burning down their opponent’s home or business. We still fight out loud and in public, sometimes violently; just not as violently and destructively as we did in the past.
I think this is a pretty good thing, too, but doubtlessly bad news for the loudest-mouthed agitators among us who insist we are in a civic death spiral.
Against signs of attempted and realized public accommodations stand all the unfinished and exuberant arguments we are seeing today over “viewpoint diversity” in higher education.
The public flagellating and evangelizing over “viewpoint diversity” may have been decades in the making. But if I’m right about how finger wagging, legislating, and litigating have become more popular as the weapons of choice in our moral crusades, something else important is happening, too. People will walk away from these fights with intellectual black eyes and bruises, but with their bodies and property unmolested. They’re also likely to find more accommodating ways to think about their problems and practice more of the good public habits and principles they like to preach about.
On the one hand, then, do I think my colleagues should hire and promote people whose political and intellectual ideas are more conservative than their own?
Absolutely. I can’t come up with a good reason not to and many good reasons to do so. But until that happens and even after it happens, we should go out of our way to incorporate explicitly conservative ideas in the readings and writing we assign our students and in the research we do and the work we publish.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the first great chronicler of Americans’ manners and morals, argued 200 years ago that bringing different people together in the public arena would diminish the chances that they can hide behind the protections afforded by their “small private circle” of friends, family members, and like-minded colleagues.
He wasn’t wrong.
And I believe that’s what teachers and scholars are supposed to do. To that end, we must do more to break out of our small private intellectual bubbles.
On the other hand, do I want state and federal officials telling me how many conservative-minded faculty should be hired and promoted?
No way in hell would I tolerate that kind of interference. My colleagues would bristle and resist it as well.
Having said that, I acknowledge that most of the people who do what I do for a living have never seen a racial or affirmative action quota they didn’t like for people who work anyplace other than a university.
Most of the teaching and research people like me do has been used to promote racial and gender diversity in housing, people’s jobs, and political representation. Wedging people who weren’t white or men into places and professions where they were underrepresented struck us as a good and necessary thing to do.
What can I say to convince liberal academics that introducing our students to more conservative ideas is just as important and will not just help us understand each other better but make democracy more alive in our everyday lives?
I do not have a good answer to that question, except to suggest that my colleagues read more of their own American history.
In rebuttal, I think my colleagues would say they should be protected from such democratically inspired abuses because America is hopelessly sexist and racist. We know what the truth is, and we shouldn’t be defamed or pushed around for telling everyone else how to behave differently and better than we ourselves are prepared to act.
I’m not saying I buy this argument, only that it’s the last place that people in the small private academic circles I know best have left to hide.
I can only hope that my apostacy won’t make my friends at the dog park want to kick me out of theirs.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.
