Last week, Karl Rove said, "The press is not so much liberal as oppositional." Rove is rarely that honest, particularly regarding a hot-button or talking-point issue, but he's very smart and there are few about who have studied the mechanics of modern governance and public relations as minutely as he.
His statement is
exactly correct. It is why all presidents, prime ministers and their administrations get regularly pissed at an independent press. It is why they try to make friends with representatives of an independent press, or try to bully and badmouth and discredit or disempower an independent press, or seek to bypass any independent press and replace it with one more supportive and aligned to their goals and policies. It isn't too difficult to understand that the further one goes on this scale from 'make friends with' to 'discredit' to 'bypass/replace' is to move in the direction of demanded conformity. Which is to move towards tyranny.
We are talking here, in this discussion, primarily about America - about American universities and about American political thought regarding universities. This push, organized and strategized (does anyone contest that?) to bring about an equity between conservative and liberal representation in higher education is unique to America. Canada has nothing comparable. Nor, so far as I know, does Australia nor Britain nor Germany nor Denmark, etc. (Voices here and there, from the business community or from more fundamentalist religious communities, arguing against violations of tradition or against liberal economic ideas or against 'impractical' curricula which include Shakespeare but not math, etc., but such diversity of social notions and concepts of educational goals is to be expected).
So, how do we account for this organized push arising in America and not elsewhere? I posit two central factors: a broad societal demand for conformity in America, and a purposive campaign organized to counter the events and changes of the sixties.
The first seems counter-intutitve on the face of it. But as I've noted elsewhere, even De Tocqueville, the great observer of America saw this element in US culture:
Quote:I know of no country where there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America...The majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion; within these barriers and author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent if he ever step beyond them."
This observation might seem least agreeable to those Americans who are of the flag-waving and more nationalistic sort. Yet, in this present climate, many of them would likely subscribe to it at least so far as what they perceive to be happening in American universities - "little independence of mind"..."formidable barriers to liberty of opinion"..."write what you please and you will repent it". This IS the indictment leveled here by fox, lash, etc. after all. They may well attribute this tendency to some particular characteristic of 'liberalism' (highly ideological and exclusive, perhaps) or perhaps to the hiring practices of American universities ("no gurlz alowd") or to some such. But the claim is the same as DeTocqueville's.
I happen to agree. We all can fall to conformism by default simply through being social creatures. The examples in our social histories, particularly the very ugly ones, are stories we all know. Conformism is dangerous. Group-think very easily leads to disaster.
(more later)
