By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Conservative commentators have been having a field day of late mocking what they call the campus “snowflakes” who are seeking “safe spaces” to deal with Donald Trump’s election to the presidency.
But have you wondered if there are intelligent and clear-headed members of the liberal establishment who are also taking stock of the overreaction of the students? Universities are supposed to be the training ground for our future leaders, for mature and rational young people worthy of being called the nation’s “best and brightest.”
You can’t get more “establishment” than longtime New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof. In his December 10 column he makes clear his discomfort as he watched our universities “echoing with primal howls,” with “faculty members canceling classes for weeping, terrified students who asked: How could this possibly be happening?”
Kristof is no fan of Donald Trump: “I share apprehensions about President-elect Trump,” he writes, “but I also fear the reaction was evidence of how insular universities have become. When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans.
“We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological.”
Kristof points to a phenomenon usually heard only from conservative commentators: “Repeated studies have found that about 10 percent of professors in the social sciences or the humanities are Republicans. We champion tolerance, except for conservatives and evangelical Christians. We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us — so long as they think like us.”
Did you ever think you would hear a prominent liberal saying these things? But Kristof is just beginning.
He fears that Trump’s election will “exacerbate the problem of liberal echo chambers, by creating a more hostile environment for conservatives and evangelicals. Already, the lack of ideological diversity on campuses is a disservice to the students and to liberalism itself, with liberalism collapsing on some campuses into self-parody.”
To support his observation, he points to Oberlin College, where “soon after the election, students erupted in protests after a local bakery was accused of racial profiling of a black student in a shoplifting case. The student senate endorsed a boycott of the bakery, and demonstrators carried signs calling the owner a racist. But allegations of a pattern of racist behavior were undermined by police records showing the overwhelming share of people detained for shoplifting at the bakery were white.”
It is a phenomenon we have seen before, from President Obama jumping to the false conclusion that the policeman who confronted Harvard professor Louis Gates had “acted stupidly” to the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri, based on false reports of Brown’s actions.
Writes Kristof, “By all means, stand up to the bigots. But do we really want to caricature half of Americans, some of whom voted for President Obama twice, as racist bigots? Maybe if we knew more Trump voters we’d be less inclined to stereotype them. Whatever our politics, inhabiting a bubble makes us more shrill.”
Kristof points to a survey indicating, “Half of academics in some fields said that they would discriminate in hiring decisions against an evangelical.” He rejects the theory that devout Christians and conservatives are unsuited for university teaching positions because they “have nothing to add to the conversation.”
He cites Harvard University professor Cass Sunstein to underscore this point: “The idea that conservative ideas are dumb is so preposterous that you have to live in an echo chamber to think of it.”
Whatever some liberals think, he continues, “‘conservative’ and ‘bigot’ are not synonyms. One of America’s most eminent scientists is Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian who is director of the National Institutes of Health. Few scholars had as much impact on modern thought as Gary Becker, the conservative University of Chicago economist. Condoleezza Rice, a secretary of state for George W. Bush, would add value to any campus.”
The bottom line: Kristof argues American universities “can try harder to recruit job applicants who represent diverse views, to bring conservative speakers to campuses and to avoid a hostile work environment for conservatives and evangelicals.”
Kristof repeats that he is no fan of Donald Trump, admitting to his fears about “the damage a Trump administration will do, from health care to foreign policy.” (I think we can forgive him for going out of his way to make this point. He does have to live with all the liberals who inhabit his world.)
“But this election underscores that we were out of touch with much of America, and we will fight back more effectively if we are less isolated. When universities are echo chambers, they become conservative punch lines, and liberal hand-wringing may be one reason Trump’s popularity has jumped since his election….One step to correcting that is for us liberals to embrace the diversity we supposedly champion.”
No question, it is encouraging to see Kristof’s analysis. But it is by no means clear that he represents an emerging consensus in academic circles. The comments section in the Times that accompanied his column indicated that some liberals get his point about how the Democratic Party has lost contact with the needs of the blue-collar workers who once were its base. But there were many others that illustrated the opposite, that there are many liberals who are digging in their heels.
Some of the respondents hammered away at Hillary’s popular vote majority, as if they would not have been ardent defenders of the Electoral College system if Trump had won the popular vote; others argued that liberals have an obligation to stand on principle against the “reactionary” groups that backed Trump; others stressed their right to “vent” at this “menacing moment” in American history — thereby underscoring, whether they can see it or not, Kristof’s point about the liberal bubble that they inhabit.
Check out the comments for yourself if you think I am exaggerating. They come at the end of Kristof’s column, which can be seen at www.nytimes.com for December 10, 2016.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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