Jonathan Marks: partisan political scrapping won’t help universities

At the beginning of Let’s Be Reasonable, Jonathan Marks tells his readers: “Get out your camera, for here is that rare beast, the conservative professor.”

Now professor of politics at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, he was long a registered Republican, although he has since become a convinced Never Trumper and independent. He remains committed to a form of liberal education, inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, that “tries to shape people who answer to the authority of reason”. His new book, published by Princeton University Press, is subtitled “a conservative case for liberal education”.

According to the Higher Education Research Institute survey for 2016-17, noted Professor Marks, only 11.7 per cent of US faculty identified as conservative (and 0.4 per cent as far right). Meanwhile, just over 80 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that one of their roles was to “encourage students to become agents of social change”.

There was also some reason to believe, said Professor Marks, that “student-facing college administrators are actually more liberal than faculty”. A striking instance of this was the Holiday Placemat for Social Justice, presented to Harvard students at the end of 2015, which “consisted of pointers on how to talk to your unwoke relations” on issues such as Islamophobia and “black murders in the street”. These had been produced “not by enterprising student activists but a staid office for diversity and inclusion”.

Up to a point, therefore, Professor Marks accepts conservative critiques of today’s academy. A strong political tendency was likely to have “an impact on what’s felt valuable to teach and research” and to introduce “a selective rigour in assessing journal articles…You might just think the truth has a liberal bias and not get much pushback if you are surrounded by people with similar views.”

Another issue for Professor Marks was the way that political convictions can shut down questions in advance: “You can’t say on Tuesday: ‘We are going to examine whether the active or the contemplative life is best’; and then on Wednesday say: ‘Just kidding! I’m trying to turn you into an agent of social change.’”

Furthermore, once certain political values are adopted by administrators and so become part of “the public face of the university”, Professor Marks pointed out, it was difficult to claim that: “‘We need our academic freedom in order to maintain an atmosphere for enquiry.’ If we’re teaching a particular politics, why shouldn’t state legislators say: ‘If it’s politics which is being taught here, it should be my politics instead of your politics?’”

As an example of what he is opposed to, Professor Marks cited the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, arguing that “its purpose is to win a battle of ideas, and that sometimes means hiding your intentions…You just have to convince people by hook or by crook. And that is utterly antithetical to the task of shaping people through reason.”

Despite his firm conservative views, however, Professor Marks was utterly unconvinced by heated claims that “conservatives are being exorcised from campuses, which are left-wing, totalitarian mini-states…Fighting with bare knuckles to destroy universities is unlikely to be a way of getting at the real problems conservatives identify.

“What is going to survive after the flood if you shut down universities and get legislators to defund them? Very well-resourced elitist institutions, which are at the centre of the things conservatives are complaining about. It doesn’t look to me like a strategy; it’s more a howl of despair.”

Even more deplorable were the actions of some conservative groups described in Let’s Be Reasonable that “put the names and sometimes the faces of students on posters proclaiming them terror supporters or Jew-haters because they’re involved in pro-BDS organisations”.

So can the ideals of liberal education be applied to very controversial topics?

One example of how this can work, replied Professor Marks, came when he teamed up with a colleague of very different views to teach classes on the forthcoming Israeli elections and then on Zionism.

“The rule we made for ourselves,” he recalled, “was that we would not include anything on the syllabus that the other didn’t agree to…In a classroom, you can create an atmosphere of reasonability. We have the evidence in front of us, let’s try to set aside, at least temporarily, party, interest and fashion and let’s see what valid conclusions we can draw – or work out what else we need to find out.

“Even ardent partisans are compelled to make their case in that atmosphere. It can lead to a kind of pride in following arguments where they lead, accompanied by a kind of revulsion about propaganda − either propagandising or falling for it.”

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com