April 23, 2000
Education or indoctrination?
Suzanne Fields
STATE COLLEGE, Pa.
Conservatives have a hard time on most college campuses. In
the spirit
of the free inquiry that is the purpose of the university,
conservatives are
often told to shut up and keep their opinions — their bigotries
— to
themselves.
This is the season of speeches and seminars, and lately
I've been a
guest of campus organizations on campuses from Missouri to
Pennsylvania, and
the first question I get, asked in a manner usually hostile but
occasionally
plaintive, is this: "How can a woman be a conservative?"
The point of departure is nearly always abortion, and
anyone who admits
to thinking that abortion is a complicated issue is regarded as
a heretic and
a beast, like a skeptic of the doctrine of the virgin birth at a
seminary in
Rome.
But the campus contempt for conservatives, or for anyone
who questions
the feminist dogma, goes beyond abortion. When, for example, I
explain that
as a cultural conservative I want to preserve the roots of a
successful societ
y, which requires that we acknowledge the differences between
men and women,
the fierce defenders of dogma usually drag out the college
catalog, with its
list of courses in women's studies, and demand to know how on
earth any sane,
good and worthy person could object to any of them.
Intellectual horror stories abound in academia, provoking
the student
joke at one Midwestern campus that "what we need here is not
more academic
freedom, but freedom from the academics." Indeed, my concern is
not an
ideological one at all, but academic: The campus life is the
last time
students will have the leisured opportunity to read and debate
the great
books, the great ideas, the great controversies — the Federalist
Papers, the
Greek philosophers, John Milton's "Paradise Lost." Why should
the kids be
required to spend these golden years reading minor works by
obscure
pamphleteers? These pamphlets, which usually read like
complaints, appeal to
emotion over intellect, feelings over thought. There will be
time enough to re
ad such masterworks later, when the students are on their own.
There's a rising anger from many of the brighter kids on
campus. They
know they're being cheated, and they're angry because they can't
voice
dissenting opinions without risking the grades that will
determine the jobs
they'll get when the golden years are over. In my lecture here
at Penn State
the other night, I was astonished at the reaction I got to what
I thought was
a well-known quotation from John Stuart Mill: "He who knows only
one side of
the case knows little of that." Mill had the applause line of
the night. Two
earnest young men came up to me later. "That line from Mill was
great," one
of them said. "We had never heard that."
I'm not singling out Penn State, a lovely campus with lots
of bright,
eager kids who are proud of their school and eager to share its
history and
traditions with a visitor. Its football teams are famous, of
course, but the
campus is dotted with brass markers commemorating other
accomplishments: the
"Penn State heart," a pump that made possible advanced heart
surgery, was
developed at the engineering school, and early work perfecting
the diesel
engine was done here as well.
All the sadder, then, that rigorous intellectual discipline
is
compromised elsewhere on campus. Christopher Gillott, one of the
members of
the Penn State chapter of Young Americans for Freedom that
invited me to
speak here, makes a telling cost-benefits argument against the
excesses of
women's studies courses.
A traditional arts and sciences curriculum teaches students
to "think
systematically and logically, to weigh competing ideas
objectively, and to
master a specific body of knowledge," he argues in a column for
the
Collegian, the Penn State daily. Professional schools train
individuals to
"succeed in a specific career by mastering its language,
methodology and
technology. By these standards, how do women's studies programs
measure up?"
He cites one Penn State course with required readings on
masturbation
and "reverse-gender roles," and the requirement for women to
write "a
hypothetical essay on what life would be like if she had male
genitalia."
(Wouldn't that make her a "him"?) "Instead of preparing students
for specific
careers," concludes my young friend, "those who have majored in
women's
studies have spent four years doing little else than talking
about gender and
feeling their way around the insular world of feminist
ideology."
Or to quote John Stuart Mill again: "As often as a study is
cultivated
by narrow minds, they will draw from it narrow conclusions."
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