We’re All Conservatives Now

„Mankind, says Kant, must constantly labor to »expand its knowledge (...) to rid itself of errors, and generally to increase its enlightenment.« No one in the Carvalho-Downing volume or on Horowitz’s side of the street would dissent. Indeed, what is remarkable about reading the essays by the lefties Carvalho and Downing have assembled is how conventional (for me a good word) and, yes, conservative, the authors are both in their pronouncements and their performances. Ward Churchill, the most notorious of them all, writes a lengthy essay free of political posturing. His concern is with due process, academic integrity and the freedom the University of Colorado Regents’ statement proclaims, the freedom »to discover, publish and teach truth as the faculty member sees it, subject to no control or authority save the control and authority of the rational methods by which truth is established.«

In his essay, Norman Finkelstein does not argue or reargue his case for the exploitation of the Holocaust by Elie Weisel and others Jews; rather, he discusses the question of academic style and the place in it (if there is one) of »uncivil« language, language that refuses the politeness of academic decorums and opts instead for calling a spade a spade. Despite his brief for incivility Finkelstein does not condone license in academic performance, and even goes as far as to maintain that professors should be constrained in, and held accountable for, their extramural utterances lest they »degrade a position on which society has conferred prestige.«

You can hardly be more conservative than that, but Cornel West goes him one better when he declares, »I really don’t have trouble with military recruitment on campus (...) because I believe in robust uninhibited dialogue« (a reference to New York Times v. Sullivan). And he warms my heart (and Kant’s, too) when he declines to measure the educational experience by »results and consequences,« even the consequence of »fundamentally changing the world,« but insists instead that »it has to be, in the end, an existential question of vocation.« »What kind of love do you want to express? What kind of service do you want to render? What kind of intellectual engagement do you want to enact?« These are hardly the questions of someone anyone should fear.”