This is a draft of an unfinished opinion piece from a year ago where dig into some conservative writers on Higher Education.
Recently in some of my studies I’ve been trying to trace some of the modern history of conservatism. To this end I was looking for course syllabi (my usual modus operandi when trying to learn how to learn about something) and it sent me on an interesting page chain. I ended up reading a bunch of works of two writers, George Ehrhardt and Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry.
A bit of background, first. Ehrhardt is a professor of political science at Applachian State University, with a background in East Asian politics, and Emmanuel-Gobry is a business person who started an asset management firm with a portfolio focused on the digital economy. Both self-identify as conservatives, Emmanuel-Gobry as a devout catholic. Here, however, I don’t intend to delve into their day jobs, but into their writings.
In his paper, “Academic Conservatives and the Future of Higher Education,” Ehrhardt seeks to readdress the current conception of American Conservatives as cutthroat, business-suit clad, money-first men who seek to defund liberal-arts programs in favor of more pre-professional fields like those included in the umbrella of STEM. Ehrhardt argues instead that Conservatives are actually allies in the fight for the preservation of the liberal arts. He bases his argument on how Conservatives can see the importance of studying the foundations western thought, and sees the current division in academia detrimental to a potential pro-liberal arts alliance. Gobry’s works, which I surveyed in the Week, cover a wide range of topics, including not only higher education and philosophy, but a wide purview of world politics. Some of his positions seem fairly measured and reasonable. Others, such as his support for flogging, or the solution of ending abortion to solve the environmental crisis, seem a little more controversial. Both of these dudes bring some things to the table; their knowledge of the Western literary canon is indeed impressive, and I don’t take issue with their points that conservatives can and have supported the liberal arts. However, I do take issue with the assumption that their visions of the liberal-arts are something we should all be banding together to support.
Before I really get into it, let me lay out a caveat: I will be analyzing their discussions within the context of the study of history. This might not be entirely fair, as Ehrhardt is a political scientist (although some of his academic writing is historical), and Gobry is a… well… business-person, but the point I am trying to make here is that their arguments are historically flawed and rather context ignorant.
Today, seemingly under siege in the realms of academia and the media, conservatives have taken to spinning a counter-narrative. Much like those who use MLK quotes to discredit arguments for racial economic equality, Gobry and Ehrhardt enjoy removing history from its context or ignoring it completely to support their own discussions, especially when they can paint their cause as one that has been marginalized, or even ‘oppressed.’ They employ a strategy that is proving to be increasingly popular with conservatives, (my grandma even uses it!) which is using the language of the left against them.
Ehrhardt begins his discussion by announcing that “conservatives [or neo-liberals] have become the ‘Other’ in progressive discussions of higher education.” While the capitalized version of this pronoun has been around since the 18th Century, today it is usually used in the context of colonialism, in describing how the West viewed the East. For the beginning of that, see Edward Said’s Orientalism. It connotes a subordinate power, exploited by a stronger one. It is an interesting way to conceptualize the ideology that has had by far the most influence of the structure of the university over past twenty years.
To further this view, Ehrhardt argues that there is too much emphasis on the study of marginalized groups and cites writers that believe the pendulum has now “swung too far in the other direction.” He cites studies by the conservative National Association of Scholars, titled “What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students,” and “Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and Gender Dominating American History?” in saying that “there is too much important history to spend so much time on any one focus.” This seems like a reasonable argument — diversity courses are important but we can’t forget the roots that Western civilization was built on, right? Unfortunately, these studies assume that a multiplicity of college history courses focusing on the structures of race, class, and gender means the focuses of traditional history are being ignored. Personally, I can vouch that this is not the complete truth.
I also don’t feel bad about applying some anecdotal evidence here, because Ehrhardt does the same and he has a PhD! Although, rather than use it to argue that frat-boys have progressive notions of female sexuality, I’m going to talk about the sorry state of high school history education.
History was sort of the ugly duckling of high school courses. Most people found it extremely tedious, and god forbid that there was a teacher that attempted to assign regular homework assignments! It seemed that there was at least grudging respect for science courses or even math, but people always complained about the english and history classes. Most teachers took the easy way out and only assigned readings or taught out of the textbooks, although did get us to practice working through primary sources. I remember the most unfortunate year was when I had to take AP U.S. History. The teacher allowed everyone to use laptops to write the in-class essays, and consequently everyone based their writings off of wikipedia.
Some teachers were definitely more creative than others in their efforts to teach us history. In seventh grade, we were introduced to the savage capitalism of the late 19th Century through interactive activities that involved working on an assembly line, and price-cutting to form monopolies. My ninth-grade World History class largely ignored Western Europe, spending a quarter on the history of Russia, a quarter on China, and a quarter on Japan. However, by-and-large our education placed emphasis on narratives that recent evidence had debunked.
But I don’t blame my teachers. The thing was, the system was flawed. There was or is little or no bridge from academic to popular conceptions of history. I went to public school in Virginia, a state that got in trouble for using textbooks that claimed that thousands of blacks fought on the side of the Confederacy, or where the governor proclaimed April to be Confederacy History Month without mentioning slavery. The history of civil rights that we were taught ended in 1968, when MLK was shot and everything was resolved. (To be honest, that’s about as far as any modern history course made it by the end of the year) And the AP tests, while taking small steps in interesting directions in the past years, still by their very format mainly reward regurgitating information memorized in textbooks.
The problem is, the narratives put out by scholars now are complex stories full of grey areas that challenge the basic ideologies that exist in the public political arena. For example, contemporary historians present theses that challenge or counter the principles of modern day conservative movements. (Liberal ones too, but that’s another article) Contemporary histories of urban areas show that the national relocation of industry from the northern cities to the sunbelt, and local relocations from cities to the suburbs, were financed in a large part by federal defence spending, and how the engines of wealth were moved to the segregated suburbs. These narratives are showing that racial economic disparities owe more to systemic social and economic factors rather than a ‘culture of poverty.’ Its also pretty interesting that the suburbs created with federal dollars , or ‘handouts’ if you will, became reliable conservative voting districts.
Gobry often brings up past conservative support for ‘progressive’ causes. He would like you to know that “the most undercovered story in America is what’s been called the conservative war on prisons.” I don’t deny that there are conservatives who decry and have worked against the industrial-prison complex, and that most of them do not support replacing it with something like flogging. However, that doesn’t replace the fact that conservatives gave us this prison system in the first place.
Conservatives love to decry their ‘oppression’ in the current political climate, but the problem here is that they are taking the language used to describe periods and events of intense oppression and trauma of marginalized groups, and using them describe the discrediting of conservative ideas among liberal academic circles. These arguments only gain traction because we live a society that by and large neglects its history education, pushing narratives that generally underestimate or ignore this trauma and its legacies when they pertain to these same groups. I mean, maybe I seem bitter, but I grew up learning this Western canon that they seem to hold in such high regard. The result was in high school I could spit mad game about World War I, but I had no idea why all these black people were angry. The perspectives of some groups just were not taught, and you had to go out of your way to learn about them.
So my question to Gobry and Ehrhardt is: what is the end result of this “great forgetting of the West’s cultural heritage,” if it is indeed happening in the way they describe? Personally, writing from the US, ‘western cultural heritage’ makes me think of tater-tot casseroles with no seasoning. But Gobry, living in Paris, is thinking of a different ‘west’ here. In the linked article, Gobry writes:
We are in danger of becoming like the people on the planet in Star Trek whose every need is met by a super-smart computer their ancestors built, but who have become lazy and forgetful over the generations, so that once it breaks down they are completely powerless to fix it, much less live in any functional way.
Okay. Ignoring the fact that Gobry’s metaphor encourages a top-down view of history (not even a oligarchy but a silicon-based dictatorship), but what if the ‘super-smart computer’ has been continuously ordering the enslavement, death, and subordination of hundreds of millions of people over the past few hundred years? If anyone is confused as to what I am talking about, please consider the past fifty years of historical scholarship, and how it relates to the hundred years that came before it. i.e. post-colonialism, the history of imperialism, capitalist studies, etc. I’m not going to get into it deeply here, but to continue Gobry’s metaphor, many people have been working to build a new, more just and equitable computer, but some people prefer the very old, outdated computer that served their interests above others for a long time. Gobry might be choosing to ignore modern scholarship, but honestly it could be that it was not a part of the curriculum for his MSc in Management at HEC Paris. It is his ignorance, deliberate or not, that allows Gobry to seriously suggest that ‘Europe should build a Hong Kong in Syria,’ and that the devastating effects of imperialism should be responded to with, more imperialism. He even makes a little joke! “European nations used to have a very good experience at carving out pieces of foreign land; they should get the hang of it.” Haha!
I am inclined to repeat a certain quote by George Santayana, but considering he was a well-known western philosopher, I’m sure everyone can probably guess what I’m alluding to. (Hint: something about history repeating itself)
Gobry, at least, seems like he should know better. He almost gets into it here:
The simple fact of the matter is that people now known as “conservative Christians” used to run the world. And we did a lot of good things, but we also did a lot of very bad things. And that, ultimately, is why we’re losing.
However, it isn’t clear if he’s talking about the Catholic suppression of heresy in the Late Middle Ages of Medieval Europe, or the more recent Western Christian hegemony that ruled most of the world during modern times. Unfortunately it all seems like a game to him.
So at the end of the day, I trust neither Gobry’s or Ehrhardt’s visions of academic scholarship. At a basic level, they are complaining that their sides are being ignored, while having either disinterest or ignorance of the other side. At a higher level, they feel our society has progressed far enough that it is time roll back some of the curriculum we have in place in higher education that attempts to get students to consider the structures of race, gender, and class in their studies. The assumptions upon which their views rest are opposed by a large body of scholarship, most of which is still making its way into the consciousness of mainstream society (of which I definitely count myself part of). It is only with the exclusion of this knowledge, that Gobry’s and Ehrhardt’s claims sound convincing.