Academic

Taking the Right Seriously

By Alfred Brophy

This week's Chroncile Review has an essay by Mark Lilla, "Taking the Right Seriously," that you may be interested in.  I think Lilla under-serves the conservative movement (and those of us who take conservative ideas seriously as scholars) with statements like, "It is a convenient left-wing dodge to reduce 20th-century American conservatism to cold-war politics, since it implies that conservattive ideas are embedded in a world that no longer exists and never should have."  For I fear that gives less credence to the ways that conservative ideas have been (and are) being engaged on campuses, by faculty and in classes.  Moreover, while Lilla refers to college catalogs for evidence of the preponderance of post-colonialism and identity politics, he doesn't mention that there are a whole bunch of courses -- perhaps flying below the radar because they're offered in law schools -- in which conservative ideas are the stock in trade.   (I know what he's interested in is conservative political theory, but I think if we're assessing the relative power and presence of the right and left, we need to be looking at the curriculum more broadly.)

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on September 17, 2009 (boomark / email).