I rise to defend the faculty lounge, that magical idea factory that has become, in the current presidential campaign, an object of unexpected derision.
Mitt Romney and his supporters have developed the unfortunate strategy of referring to President Barack Obama as a product of “the faculty lounge.” I would like to appeal to them, respectfully, to stop.
Some articles have pointed to the oddity of the swipe against the Democratic incumbent, given Romney’s two Harvard degrees. The problem isn’t the Republican candidate’s resume. It’s his effort to transform membership in a university faculty into a pejorative.
If what he means is that the professoriate at most universities is overwhelmingly Democratic, then the claim might be true if not particularly interesting, akin to criticizing a Republican on the grounds that he’s a member of the PGA. I suspect that those who refer to the faculty lounge, conjuring the image of a physical location, mean to imply something more sinister: a place where the left hatches its nefarious schemes to undermine American values.
Families from all over the world — and, here at home, from across the political spectrum — send their children to America’s great colleges and universities. What higher education offers isn’t merely a credential. At its best, the campus remains the world’s freest forum for the thoughtful and reflective exchange of ideas. The symbol of that exchange is the faculty lounge.
To believe in the faculty lounge is to believe that ideas matter, that people can and often do respond to appeals not to their self-interest but to their reason.
I am the first to admit that there is some degree of silliness and pretension on the best of campuses. A few years ago, I had occasion to chat with an Ivy League professor who had published a vehement attack on a controversial book. Skeptical about some of his claims, I asked him a couple of elementary questions, and he soon admitted that he had never read the book in question.
Yes, there is the occasional case of political correctness gone awry. Everyone has a favorite horror story. Consider the sad but well-known tale of a state university employee who was threatened with disciplinary action for reading a book from the university library about how students at Notre Dame fought against the Ku Klux Klan. (School authorities backed down after bad publicity.)
As a contrarian by nature, I tend to argue and question a lot. In my experience, those who police the rules of correctness most adamantly are often same as those whose contributions to scholarship are the slightest. Serious intellectuals welcome serious criticism.
Intellect and authority are indeed antipodes. But the largest threat to the freedom that has made our colleges and universities the best in the world is not the criticism of outsiders; it is the choice of insiders to withhold dissent. Whatever their reasons — to advance the goals of a political movement, say, or because of a fear that unintellectual colleagues might vehemently disagree — their reticence is counterproductive. Here is Hofstadter again: “Intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question.”
Left free: There’s the point. The principles of the faculty lounge at its best include tolerance of disagreement, preference for reason over authority, and avoidance of slogan and emotional appeal. These are the principles that those of us who teach (and, one hopes, all adults) should model for our students, and encourage them to carry with them into the world beyond the groves of academe. The better we do our work, the better our politics will be.
So, please, Gov. Romney. If you think President Obama has bad ideas, say so. If you want to criticize his record, go ahead. All of that is politics as usual. Please don’t drag the faculty lounge into it. Leave that space free for our serious, uncensored arguments. Our democracy will be the better for it.
Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a professor of law at Yale University. He is the author of “The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama,” and his next novel, “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln,” will be published in July.
It’s the faculty lounge where campus speech codes were hatched, where political correctness is nurtured and where conservative values and our own American history are held up to ridicule and scorn.
It’s where ideas so stupid only an intellectual would embrace them find refuge and receive accolades.
Governor Romney is right.
Because, of course, intellectuals are *so* stupid.
http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338234605&sr=1-1
Yeah, hypocritical, too.
http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-From-Tolstoy-Sartre-Chomsky/dp/0060916575#_
Not like Conservatives, of course.
A liberal, a moderate and a conservative walk into a bar. And the bartender says,
“Hi Mitt!”
Instead of imploring Mr. Romney “to stop”, I suggest you put that expensive education to work in supporting Mr. Romney’s right of free speech, then exercise that right yourself in defense of the faculty lounge. The defense you offer is very weak indeed. You speak in terms of idealistist platitudes, not reality.
The fact is, Romney is right. America’s colleges and universities are breeding grounds of failed leftist ideologies, where political correctness reigns supreme, and conservatives are consistently demonized. The far majority of professors have not one clue as to the enormous challenge of starting and running a business; instead, they work to achieve tenure, an outdated benefit that serves no one but the professor.
Obama is a socialist by any standard definition of the term. He is leading this country to the precipice that many European counties are now dangerously near. Yet he will receive 90% support among the members of America’s elitist faculty loungers. UMaine still, despite all we know, maintains a group dedicated to Marxist/Socialist Studies. Why?
Time to wake up and smell the coffee, profs.
You’re right: it’s easy to adopt unrealistic ideologies cloistered in the ivory tower. In the real world, most of us recognize human nature is at odds with a true socialist, egalitarian society.
You’re really going to have to provide more detail when you call Obama a socialist. The core of his health care plan was designed by the Heritage Policy Center in the 1980’s. He’s extended Bush’s tax cuts. A large portion of the original stimulus was tax cuts. John McCain’s own economic advisors advocated stimulus after the ’08 crash. He’s failed to prosecute anyone on Wall Street for the ’08 debacle, instead he’s allowed them to continue practices that caused the crash. By any standard definition, Obama is not a socialist.
Your appeal for Romney to stop thinking of Obama “as a product of “the faculty lounge”” ends up being a great piece for supporting that thought process. Obama likes to think of himself as an intellectual, an individual unable and unwilling to make a decision about anything, only prove that whatever decision is made is incorrect. Your rant supports that and I trust that you are the same, a talented and “intellectual” writer unable and unwilling to make a decision knowing full well that if you did, it would be proven wrong by one of your intellectual colleagues. Its awful hard being so smart and not really knowing anything.
And according to your rubric, Romney is in the same boat. What’s your point then?
The greatest indictment of the faculty lounge is the revelation that it is staffed by capitalist pigs in sheep’s clothing. As the government pours more and more money into higher education in a quest to make it more affordable, the true nature of the faculty elite comes out as tuition keeps rising higher and higher and the universities continue to charge whatever the market will bear. The chief beneficiaries? The faculty.
The faculty rail against the evil capitalist system while benefiting handsomely from it themselves. You just can not make this stuff up.
It’s just a bizarre attack. They say Obama undermines American exceptionalism and yet the first chance they get they criticize exceptionalism. It’s ridiculous.
Re faculty lounges: I daresay that the executives at Bain Capital didn’t and don’t eat on the street or in the alley or on the floor. Nor do professional athletes in the major leagues. It’s once again so easy to damn people who nerely think and teach vs. those who make big money for its own sake or who have exceptional athletic skills. Once again, too, the notion that leftists populate most American colleges and universities is nonsense: poll faculty in the vast majority of engineering colleges, of agricultural colleges, and in business colleges and see how many are avowed Democrats, much less leftists. And check out the boards governing most colleges and universities for further evidence of your conspiracy theories gone awry. Romney’s attacks on Obama as an Ivy League elitist don’t quite accord with Mitt’s own privileged education and upbringing. But what can one expect from someone who changes his basic positions daily if not hourly?