The great Robert George, a right-of-center professor at Princeton, recently observed on X (formerly known as Twitter) that the “problem” at U.S. universities is a ‘monoculture’ of thought. George might agree that the problem as he sees it is arguably the solution now, and in the past too. We know this because groupthink by its very name is not terribly compelling, and it’s frequently wrong.
Better yet, it’s opposite opinion that frequently clarifies the arguments of correct-thinking people in the first place. If people are not actually challenged, it’s no reach to say their arguments aren’t as good.
Think about all this in terms of Harvard right now. If there’s a left wing, monoculture quality to thought on its campus, that logically redounds to right-of-center thinking. And votes in favor of right-of-center ideology.
Supposedly there’s lots of chanting at Harvard that goes unopposed by faculty and students alike about calls for the mass murder of Jewish people. Color this writer at least somewhat skeptical that the latter broadly describes thinking at Harvard or any U.S. college campus, but even if so, Harvard’s student body is something around 25 percent Jewish? And if Jewish genocide is what passes for common campus thought, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that a lot of Jewish students (historically Jewish people as a voting bloc have swung left) are rethinking how they both think and vote.
Importantly, George is thankfully not calling for limits on free speech on the campuses he believes are weakened by monolithic thought. Hopefully conservatives listen to him. If members of the left are allowed to speak freely and in hateful fashion without consequence, all the better. If left-wing thought is shallow and ugly, better if it’s exposed as just that. And if commentary from the right is looked at negatively and brings with it disciplinary consequences, that too is bullish in a very real sense. What’s censored is generally amplified, plus what better way to expose the left than to reveal those who fancy themselves as “liberal” in theory as controlling thought police in reality.
Contra George’s belief that uniformity of campus thought is the problem, it’s once again the solution since unchallenged thought is weak. And there’s more: people aren’t as malleable as conservatives imagine them to be. Consider 1984 when Ronald Reagan was running for re-election as president. According to a later accounting by USA Today’s Peter Johnson, media coverage of Reagan was over 90 percent negative heading into the vote. This was 1984. There was no internet, no Fox News, no Rush Limbaugh, while the content of local and national news (TV and print) was often shaped by news coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Talk about monoculture, yet Reagan won 49 states in an historic landslide.
It’s a happy reminder that people get it. The Soviet people knew they were suffering in the former Soviet Union in 1984, and Americans knew they were doing well in the United States in 1984. Bad ideas are bad ideas. Ones hatched on supposedly mono-campuses by definition suck.
Which brings us to the present. While George and others on the right point in downcast fashion to an elite campus culture that’s narrow in thought, it’s no reach to say it’s anything but. To see why, stop and consider the supercomputers that we call smartphones, and that expose college students to all sorts of ideas being formed well away from Cambridge, New Haven, Palo Alto, and Princeton. Far more than when their parents attended college, kids are exposed to so much more today thanks to an internet that mostly didn’t exist for their parents.
After which, pessimists on the right can’t have it both ways. They lament out of one side of the mouth a monolithic left wing campus culture, then out of the other they claim (laughably) that kids are no longer interested in socializing, the opposite sex (or same sex), or the booze and fun that used to characterize campus life. They’ve allegedly turned away from all that’s good and fun to curl up with their smartphones, but those computers if anything take them to people and ideas well away from campus.
Pessimistic conservatives like Peggy Noonan say the internet is full of “sludge,” so do conservatives more broadly, but it’s worth asking Noonan et al just how limited their own reach would be sans the internet, not to mention how limited their own access to information would be. Translated, the internet hosts a broad array of thinkers, including greats like George and Noonan.
Basically, it’s not that bad. More than ever, young people are exposed to all manner of ideas thanks to a capitalist profit motive that has put the world into their hands. And it turns out they’re buying the capitalist line if a recent Wall Street Journal story is to be believed about top U.S. businesses scrambling to stock their 2025 intern classes with U.S. college students. Yes, the kids are alright, and they’re not socialists.
Republished from RealClear Markets
