BY JOHN K. WILSON
The following is an email interview I conducted with Jonathan Marks, the author of the new book being published today titled Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education (Princeton University Press). Marks is a professor of politics at Ursinus College, and he will be discussing his book on Thurs. Feb. 11 at 2pm ET in an online event with the Bipartisan Policy Center.
1) Your book title is a reference to the importance of rational thinking, but another meaning of “let’s be reasonable” is the idea of moderation, of avoiding extremes on any side. And those meanings have some connection: We all define what we think rationality means, and we tend to define those with extreme political views we oppose as being unreasonable. The biggest gap in academia is not liberal vs. conservative, but far left vs. far right. Are you dreaming of a reasonable academia that keeps out the “far” out views, or do you want to see more of the far right in academia? Does extremism challenge our assumptions or does it reinforce our prejudices and polarize our discussions?
Jonathan Marks: I picture, in reflecting on your question, a defender of something like our existing order, shouting “be reasonable!” at two figures one of whom shouts back “get woke!” while the other shouts back “wake up sheeple!” Political disputes occasionally have something directly to do with the authority of reason, but more typically, right, left, and center assert that they’re reasonable, and that the others are asleep, fanatical, or acting in bad faith. So I take seriously your idea that “let’s be reasonable” often means “adopt my position,” which raises the question, what kinds of political positions are wont to grow at universities that put “let’s be reasonable” on their banners?
I don’t think this question is answerable in advance. The reasonable person, more than a bundler of skills, is the one who says to herself and others, “let’s stop playing around, or boosting our tribe, or selling our wares, or puffing ourselves up, and let’s instead consider, as if it really mattered, what valid or probable conclusions, if any, we can draw from what we know.” She thinks that there is something disgraceful about evading reason’s authority. With John Locke, she says, “there cannot be anything so disingenuous, so misbecoming . . . anyone who pretends to be a rational creature, as not to yield to plain reason and the conviction of clear arguments.” I thnk that if this principle sinks into a community, its members are less likely than others to fall for many variants of foolishness and fanaticism, and also some variants of thoughtless moderation. There is, it seems to me, something about being tethered to what conclusions one is able to draw from what one knows, and the corresponding awareness that there is much one doesn’t know, that makes it more difficult to adopt conspiracy theories, explain-it-all ideologies, and so on, that accompany many varieties of political extremism.
It’s this sense that we don’t know, or that we know only partially, which Locke shares with John Stuart Mill, that suggests a related kind of moderation. If we are aware that “we see but in part, and know but in part” and consequently tend to “conclude not right from our partial views,” we have a motive for listening intently to people who don’t agree with us. We are more likely to be reflective partisans than thoughtless ones, and less likely to have a scorched earth mentality.
I doubt that far right views prosper in a “let’s be reasonable” climate. But that can’t rule out the possibility that following arguments where they lead will lead to some strange and dangerous places.
That’s one reason I characterize the view that our politics will survive rational scrutiny as a gamble. In his Letter to Roger Weightman, Jefferson says that “the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion” tends to open all eyes to “the rights of man.” Even conservatives, the ones who are attached to liberalism anyhow, don’t usually insist that universities adopt some version of the 1776 project. They think that the principles of the Declaration and the politics of the Constitution are rational enough to hold up under pressure.
In any case, one reason I turn to Locke is that he makes one wonder, even more than Plato does, what our alternative is, at least as universities responsible in some way to the people who pay our bills. Being reasonable is less a divine madness for Locke than the means we have to improve our understandings, which is our last recourse in matters of importance. Of course, being a person of good sense—one is not calling for a nation of philosophers—is consistent with something less than the unbounded exercise of reason, and even children of the Enlightenment take much on authority. But it is hard to know what a university in a liberal democratic society is for, if it is not for being reasonable in something like Locke’s sense.
2) You write, “Conservatives, instead of standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop,’ are stamping on the higher education bubble yelling ‘Pop’” because “they believe the battle of the universities has been lost and that the best policy is to burn them down, rather than leave them to our enemies.”(61) How can liberals best convince conservatives to embrace higher education (in funding as well as participation) and avoid having conservatives abandon academia because they think academia has abandoned them?
Jonathan Marks: Let me begin by conceding that attacking college professors is a longstanding conservative pastime and that it is likely to continue to a point no matter what liberals do. If Campus Reform has nothing else to write about, it will write about a stray, foolish op-ed penned by a sophomore, as if it were a sign of the general corruption of the academy. That’s not going away.
At the same time, colleges and universities had managed to maintain considerable esteem among Republicans—I’m unaware of surveys that would help us with conservatives in particular—until recently. In 2015, 54% of Republicans and Republican leaners told Pew that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the country. By 2017, that number was 36%. Republicans are much more likely to complain that professors, a majority of whom identify as liberal or far left are bringing their politics into the classroom.
I doubt that’s happening to nearly the extent that Republican voters suspect. But Republicans watching the wave of protests that swept across campuses in 2015 and, more importantly, watching the reactions of administrators to them, have good reason to believe that some colleges, whatever administrators may say when convenient, have adopted, institutionally, a politics that sits somewhere on the left wing of the Democratic Party.
I think that liberals, without abandoning academic freedom, or accepting without protest specious arguments about balance, could do something to assuage that concern. It’s helpful voluntarily to adopt strong statements regarding freedom of speech and inquiry, as some universities have done, and actually to talk about them. It’s helpful, without adopting affirmative action for conservatives, or enshrining political diversity as the most important form of diversity of opinion, to at least acknowledge that a big skew toward left-liberalism among professors and a perhaps more overwhelming skew among student-facing administrators, is likely to produce biases. In professors, that bias may manifest itself in hiring, because we like to hire people who are like us, or with respect to which subjects they deem worthy of attention, and which studies most merit skepticism. In administrators, bias might manifest itself when it comes to whom they imagine they’re serving when they speak of “the students,” or to which ones will be lauded as heroes for challenging the administration, and which will treated as nuisances, or to whether it’s wise to put the college’s imprimatur on left-inflected trainings.
Unfortunately, I think this is one area in which college people rarely imagine that they could have biases of which they are unaware. Instead they tend to imagine that a left-liberal skew is the natural order of things, because conservatives like money too much to accept a professor’s wage, or are too closed-minded to want to be at the university, or because reality has a left-liberal bias.
To repeat, colleges and universities would receive negative coverage in conservative media, and in a sensation-seeking “MSM” almost no matter what. But that coverage isn’t always wrong, and it’s lazy, if human, to dismiss it.
3) You praise William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale because “his prescription was not to cheer on the forces of creative destruction” and instead he “urged university trustees to intervene”(60) But Buckley was a devoted enemy of the “superstitions” of academic freedom; he had more optimism than today’s conservatives in the power of trustees to suppress it. Ironically, today’s conservatives are more pessimistic than Buckley but also more supportive of campus liberty. Is today’s pro-free speech position of the right often a ruse? Are conservatives who support campus free speech sometimes just cynical versions of Buckley who dream of repression but have lost the power to enact it?
Jonathan Marks: I think dreams of repression is too strong. Buckley, at least in God and Man at Yale, seems to imagine multiple universities with different boards promoting different sets of ideas, though he favors as many as possible teaching within the limits of a core devotion to Christianity and capitalism. Even within the limits of that core devotion, he seems to imagine sufficient flexibility to make room for refinement and even displacement of those values, though how that is supposed to work where a faculty must worry about being let go if they find themselves on the wrong side of that flexibility is lost on me. In any case, it does seem to me that Buckley’s later championing of The Closing of the American Mind, which insists on our “perpetual uncertainty” regarding matters Buckley thought we could pretty nearly certain about, represented a strategic alliance. Where few boards are wont to exercise the discretion Buckley would like to see them exercise toward the ends Buckley favors, The Closing of the American Mind offers at least to give Christianity and capitalism a hearing and opposes the relativism that Buckley also opposes.
But to answer your question regarding today’s conservatives, yes, of course, some of them are cynical in their support for campus free speech. I think, though I can’t cite chapter and verse, that some of the same people denouncing the persecution of conservatives on campus regard the conservatism of David French, who has done a great deal for freedom of speech and religion on campus, as squishy. I suspect that for them, though not for all conservatives, President Trump’s Executive Order on Campus Free Speech was more a cudgel with which to beat a hated enemy than a win for free speech. Or one might think of Charlie Kirk, that deep worrier about cancel culture, whose organization maintains a Professor Watchlist.
The appeal of more or less illiberal types to free speech when and only when free speech norms might protect them is not confined to conservatives. But yes.
4) I think one of the most disturbing and dangerous trends in American conservatism today is its embrace of an anti-intellectual conspiratorial mindset under Trump and the decline of reasoned thinking. Would campus programs to hire more conservatives (such as John Eastman at Colorado) help solve the problem, or would it bring more partisan conspiracy nuts (such as Eastman)? How can colleges help fight the conspiratorial mindset without resorting to censorship (as Colorado did with Eastman)?
Jonathan Marks: Eastman, I don’t know enough about to say. But I don’t think that anti-intellectual professors with a conspiratorial mindset are a big enough problem on our campuses to require a special response. For one thing, one assumes that some of these will fail on some standard measure—teaching, research, service. Since people are quite good at compartmentalizing things, some won’t. But we’re probably not starting out with big numbers. In any case, I don’t think, for example, that Northwestern University suffers terribly by virtue of having a Holocaust denier on its faculty, teaching electrical engineering. And although I know that self-identification tells one only so much—there are undoubtedly professors who identify themselves as conservatives who are on the far right—the Higher Education Research Institute Faculty Survey suggests that far rightist professors remain a trivial presence on our campuses. I tend to think—though there are always hard cases—it best to deal with these issues on the demand side. A campus that regularly says to itself that there cannot be anything so misbecoming as refusing to yield to “plain reason and the conviction of clear arguments” is unlikely to be hospitable to Holocaust denial, which doesn’t mean there won’t be some among us. One has only so much influence.
For the same reason, I don’t think colleges and universities run a great risk of hiring hyperpartisan conspiracists if they make a point of bringing in more conservatives. And to repeat, I wouldn’t like to see affirmative action programs for conservatives, though I think Colorado’s Visiting Scholar program for conservatives is fine.
5) As a conservative, you embrace the idea of old books and say that Homer challenges today’s students and gives us more diversity of thought than Toni Morrison. But there seem to be some important contemporary issues–racism, sexism, homophobia, inequality–for which most old books are silent or stupid. Should we better understand colonialism by reading Mill (“despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians”)? Are you arguing that those issues should be given less attention on campus, or do you think the old books can teach us about bigotry today?
Jonathan Marks: I think that old books are nearly essential to help us recognize the unexamined premises of our time and place as unexamined, and that some old books, more than others, are insightful about our condition, or otherwise wonderful, in a way that transcends the period in which they were produced. So I am, yes, a great books man. On the other hand, my book is entitled Let’s Be Reasonable rather than Let’s Read Great Books because I think that humanists, who usually are our teachers of great books, and natural scientists, who teach them much less frequently, are engaged in a common enterprise. So I don’t think every or even very many courses on contemporary issues need to deal with great books.
On the other hand, it would be nice if, for example, those who have difficulty understanding why a school might still be named after Lincoln, had the opportunity to read Douglass’s “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln.” I also think that even where old books are silent, for example, about sexism, they may not be silent, or stupid, about other matters in which our understanding of sexism is likely embedded (freedom, equality, sex, human psychology, the common good, and so forth). But, to repeat, my book doesn’t demand that we examine Plato’s understanding of gymnastic in our course on global health policy.
My discussion of Homer and Morrison, by the way, is not an objection to including Morrison in Columbia’s Core Curriculum but an objection to doing so on the basis of the idea that reading a living black author who writes in our language and inhabits a world we know in part is more of an experience of diversity that reading the Iliad, whose world is for the most part lost to us. It’s odd that the alt-right and some corners of he left share the view that in reading the Iliad we’re reading a “white” book.
