Let's Be Reasonable

A Conservative Case for Liberal Education

Jonathan Marks

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691207728, 9780691193854
• eBook ISBN: 9780691207711
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

A conservative college professor's compelling defense of liberal education

Not so long ago, conservative intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. believed universities were worth fighting for. Today, conservatives seem more inclined to burn them down. In Let's Be Reasonable, conservative political theorist and professor Jonathan Marks finds in liberal education an antidote to this despair, arguing that the true purpose of college is to encourage people to be reasonable—and revealing why the health of our democracy is at stake.

Drawing on the ideas of John Locke and other thinkers, Marks presents the case for why, now more than ever, conservatives must not give up on higher education. He recognizes that professors and administrators frequently adopt the language and priorities of the left, but he explains why conservative nightmare visions of liberal persecution and indoctrination bear little resemblance to what actually goes on in college classrooms. Marks examines why advocates for liberal education struggle to offer a coherent defense of themselves against their conservative critics, and demonstrates why such a defense must rest on the cultivation of reason and of pride in being reasonable.

More than just a campus battlefield guide, Let's Be Reasonable recovers what is truly liberal about liberal education—the ability to reason for oneself and with others—and shows why the liberally educated person considers reason to be more than just a tool for scoring political points.

CHAPTER ONE

Holding Harvard to Its Word

Convictions

This book is animated by several convictions. Here’s one story, straight out of Cambridge, to cover them all. Late in 2015, at Annenberg Dining Hall, hungry Harvard undergraduates got a prize with their meals: the Holiday Placemat for Social Justice.¹

The Holiday Placemat for Social Justice instructed students headed home for the holidays on how best to pierce the resistant skulls of their unwoke relatives regarding various issues, including student activism, Islamophobia, and “Black Murders in the Street.” The placemat also covered a Harvard-specific issue, namely the title, “Master.” Harvard had dropped this title for dormitory heads because some students associated it with slavery, although, as no one disputes, Harvard’s use of “Master” had nothing to do with slavery. The complaint, articulated by elite students, was no more defensible than the demand, made by the regular folk students at Lebanon Valley College, to change the name of Lynch Hall because it reminded them of lynching.² Nonetheless, Harvard’s placemats urged students not to back down, no matter how much less awkward it might make Christmas dinner. They were to say, perhaps with a smirk, that “it doesn’t seem onerous” to change the name. Uncle Trumpkin, one presumes, would be struck dumb.

This placemat had been distributed not by enterprising liberal students, but by administrators, the Freshman Dean’s Office and the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. When word got out, Harvard tried Harvard-splaining. Don’t worry that we’re mobilizing our students to proselytize for the left because, as one dean said, it’s “not that you have to believe in what’s on the placemat.” No coercion, no foul.

Another dean suggested that the placemats would encourage dialogue, which might also have been said of placemats that endorsed Jill Stein or denounced sex out of wedlock. A schoolchild could see through this defense. Accordingly, eighteen members of Harvard’s Undergraduate Council signed a letter reminding Harvard’s leaders of what they should have known—prescribing “party-line talking points stands in stark contrast to the College’s mission of fostering intellectual, social, and personal growth.”³ Perhaps administration officials looked it up in the catalog and realized that their undergraduates knew Harvard’s mission better than they did. More likely, Harvard didn’t want to dig itself a deeper publicity hole. The offices responsible for the placemats apologized.

What can we learn from this incident? First, it’s interesting that we know about it. Okay, it’s Harvard. But isn’t it strange that dining hall news caught coverage from major outlets, from Fox News to CNN? Journalists love a “Look, the campus lefties are at it again!” story.

One conviction, then, that I have about higher education is that its story is poorly told. Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, admits to “a great deal of absurd political correctness” at universities. But, he says, “The main thing that’s happening is what always happens: professors teach courses, students take courses, students aspire to graduate, they make friends, they plan their lives, they have a formative experience, they are educated.” Anyone “who thinks that’s not the main thing going on on college campuses is making a mistake.”⁴ As a freelance higher education writer, I regularly scan the academic ocean for the equivalent of shark attacks. But as a professor with more than two decades of experience, acquired at four different institutions of higher learning, I know that Summers is right. Most days, there are no shark attacks. But even in higher education news, if it bleeds it leads.

Although news about campus activists occasionally makes the New York Times, one more often sees campus shark attack stories in conservative outlets, since professors are among the elites whom conservative populists love to hate. American conservatives have been taking professors to task at least since William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. But that book could be characterized, in George Will’s words, as a “lovers’ quarrel.”⁵ Decades after God and Man, Buckley’s National Review published an article by Allan Bloom, which grew into the best-selling The Closing of the American Mind, a book that, whatever fault it found in them, was full of love for universities. Bloom, the teacher who got me into this mess, was no conservative,⁶ but the National Review’s association with him shows that it wasn’t so long ago that conservatives thought universities were worth fighting for. Such conservatives still exist, but the dominant strain in contemporary conservatism is done with the lovers’ quarrel, in the midst of a bitter divorce, and more inclined to murder its ex than to try to win her back.

Another conviction of mine is that conservatives shouldn’t give up on universities.

Yet the Harvard placemat story backs up the academy’s conservative critics. The left is so embedded not only at left-branded places like Oberlin and Berkeley but also at “grandees ‘r’ us” Harvard that one no longer needs student activists and radical professors with imposing beards to march around and demand things. After the shouts of activists subside, the news trucks depart; but the droning of deans, where the campus action is, continues. It’s hard to know whether the activists of the sixties, who worried about being co-opted, would feel triumphant or dismayed at how college administrators have, without fanfare, taken up their cause. “Of course we’re distributing social justice placemats,” they seem to tell us; “Why all the fuss?”

Another conviction that led me to write this book, then, is that colleges and universities harm their reputations and missions by adopting, even in this snoozy way, the language and priorities of one branch of the left. I doubt I’ll persuade many campus activists, who seem almost as hot to tear the university down as their conservative adversaries. But I hope to lure from the sidelines some of the many professors, administrators, alumni, and students who dislike controversy. The left has more power on campus than it has numbers because other stakeholders, as they say in the movies, don’t want no trouble.

One other observation about the curious case of Harvard’s holiday placemat: contrary to the widespread view that students, especially elite students, are coddled whiners, some of Harvard’s students are the heroes and heroines of the tale. Members of the Undergraduate Council, whether they agreed or disagreed with the points the placemats promulgated, didn’t want to be spoon-fed. They rebelled against their keepers for “telling them what to think and what to say.”⁷ They demanded to be treated as reasonable people.

College students aren’t, as some on the left would have it, moral exemplars at whose feet their degreed but clueless caretakers, born prior to the discovery of justice, could profitably sit. But they also aren’t, as some on the right would have it, cry-bullies who should be given a stern lecture about real hardship before we expel them without their suppers. Whatever closed-mindedness students exhibit isn’t obviously worse than that of their elders. Whatever suspicion students have of the glories of speech and debate is partly justified by the stupidity and insincerity of what passes for public discussion. Without romanticizing college students, we should be able to imagine that a non-trivial number of them will respond to an education that makes free discussion seem at all attractive.

That brings me to a final conviction. Colleges and universities should respond to and cultivate in students that in them which responds to the summons, “Become reasonable!” Locke, the philosopher of freedom, was also a philosopher of discipline. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he aims at the cultivation of “right reasoning [in order] to have right notions and a right judgment of things, to distinguish between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, and to act accordingly.” The products of Lockean education will feel and think that there can be nothing so “misbecoming a gentleman, or anyone who pretends to be a rational creature, as not to yield to plain reason and the conviction of clear arguments.”⁸ The discipline of yielding to and acting on reasonable arguments, rather than impulses, tribal loyalties, or superstitions, protects one’s freedom and can be a source of pride. There’s something appealing about education in such a discipline.

I don’t claim that liberal education properly understood greatly resembles the education of Locke’s Thoughts, much of which is about pre-adolescents. Nor do I claim that the intellectual freedom experienced by Lockean citizens is the peak of intellectual freedom. Socrates, the patron saint of liberal educators, about whom we’ll hear more later, arguably guides us to still greater peaks. What I’ll claim is that even those who can imagine higher heights would raise a glass if we had in our colleges and universities communities of students and faculty who considered it a disgrace not to listen to reason. We’d raise several more if our students carried that standard of praise and blame into their lives after college. Universities, as if bored with what they call “critical thinking,” have unfurled a multitude of other banners sporting other terms: diversity, empathy, world citizenship, civic engagement, and so on. But the work of cultivating the reason, and pride in being reasonable, of which Locke writes, is difficult. If universities, distracted by other things, fail at it, students and graduates marching under those other banners are unlikely to do themselves or others much good.

I aim especially to defend that last conviction. Colleges and universities will do better at justifying themselves, at guarding students against foolishness and fanaticism, and at preparing them to exercise good judgment, if they focus more single-mindedly on shaping students in the mold of the person Locke describes. We’re no gentlemen, Lockean or otherwise. But we profess ourselves rational creatures. Our colleges and universities need to do everything they can to ensure that we’re not mere pretenders when we claim to found our judgments about true and false, good and bad, right and wrong, on more than passion or prejudice. That’s a worthy aim for liberal education.

A Failure and a Success at Explaining Liberal Education

Early in my career, on my way to a job interview, I was forced to talk to a man jammed next to me on the airplane. Like many professors, I shouldn’t be allowed out in public, but at least I know it. So I had gone to great lengths to avoid conversation. I buried my face in a book; I played dead. But my neighbor was persistent and got me to talk about my work.

Remember: I was on my way to an interview. Thus prepared, I told him that I’m a teacher and that I bring my students into close contact with great thinkers who challenge their prejudices, goad them to think for themselves, and exemplify how to think well about important and elusive things. I told him that I’m also a scholar, engaged in the same work I ask my students to do. At the time, I was writing an essay on the eighteenth-century political philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Reading Rousseau, I explained, clarifies, and suggests serious objections to, the way in which certain politicians and philosophers have tried to found politics on compassion. This was, I must say, my best stuff.

After a long pause, my new acquaintance said, “I wish I could say that sounded interesting.”

Fast forward to 2013. I’d written an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about the anti-Israel movement in academia, about which I’ll say more in chapter 5. Bob, an alumnus of Ursinus College, where I teach, wrote to me. My argument, he said, confirmed his opinion that a too-liberal academia was ruining young minds. Thanks to me, he felt great about his decision, made years earlier, to stop giving money to Ursinus.

Sorry bosses.

I responded to Bob’s letter, making a pitch for Ursinus not unlike the one I’d made for myself on the airplane, refined, I hope, over the decades. We struck up a friendship. Bob is a retired doctor who served in the US Navy, just missing action in World War II, and who re-enlisted for Vietnam. After the war, he spent many unpaid hours helping people who needed medical care, near home and abroad. If Bob, who had risked his own life, saved the lives of others, and delivered many, many babies, had said his life was more admirable than mine, I wouldn’t have contradicted him.

Yet Bob, a self-described conservative, respected professors. At Ursinus, he’d focused on preparing for medical school and, since he had to work to afford his education, had time for little else. Later on, however, Bob sought out some of the same minds that I introduce my students to, including Socrates’s student, Plato. He had struggled with Plato. Who doesn’t? Thomas Jefferson once complained of Plato’s “sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities.”⁹ But Bob was more than ready to believe that he’d missed something worth knowing. He thought and thinks that a person who can help him understand philosophers like Plato, and so help him make better sense of things, deserves high respect.

Perhaps Bob has more respect for professors than our capacity to educate warrants. But from my friendship with him, I draw two conclusions. First, even those most angered at the stories they read about universities may not be badly disposed toward them or the work that most professors and students do. It would be comforting, in a way, if contempt for higher education were contempt for the life of the mind. If our accusers were proud ignoramuses, sure, we might all go down with the ship, but we could at least go down with smug expressions on our faces. No doubt some haters hate even our best work. But I doubt that Bob is the only lover of learning who disapproves of colleges because we’ve failed to make the best case for them. Which brings me to the second conclusion: Such a case might change minds. It’s not comforting to think that we bear some of the blame for our own woes. Still less comforting is the possibility that we’re not only bad at communicating our case to others but also not confident in it ourselves.

We Can Do Better Than This

Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, wrote that professors of the humanities, tasked with “interpreting and transmitting old books,” don’t “believe in themselves or what they do.” On the one hand, they’re “old maid librarians” who don’t imagine that the books they shyly love can be loved by the young. On the other hand, when they’ve tried to win the hearts of students, they’ve followed the un-shy example of 1960s profess...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Holding Harvard to Its Word
• Chapter 2. Left, Right, Wrong
• Chapter 3. The Importance of Being Reasonable
• Chapter 4. Shaping Reasonable Students
• Chapter 5. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement: A Case Study
• Conclusion. Fighting for More of This, and Less of That
• Notes
• Index