You can't have it both ways

A few months back, I was lucky enough to have dinner with one of this year's fellows from the James Madison Program, which is considered by many to be the nexus of conservative academia on campus. After a long dinner and dessert, drinks were poured, and after metaphorically praying at the altar of Ayn Rand, conversation turned toward one of the perennial favorite conservative whipping boys — liberals in the academy. Stories came out from around the nation of entrenched liberalism among faculty and administrations, which is today being used to deny conservatives the opportunity to teach undergraduates — or even high school students, but that's another column. War stories from the fight against leftists were passed down to wanting ears like older brothers back from Iraq, and by the end of the evening, we were convinced that there really was a liberal conspiracy in Nassau Hall that was deathly afraid of the power of Rand and Pixar's "The Incredibles."

I wrote off the vast majority of what I heard that night as partisan banter. It is definitely true that there are far fewer conservatives on the faculty than there are liberals. The faculty and staff of this university gave overwhelmingly to John Kerry over George Bush, and Princeton is by no means unique in that regard. Within the rapidly growing Politics Department and Woodrow Wilson School, the most hardcore theory of warfare course is actually taught by a neo-liberal, who openly told our class that he planned to vote for John Kerry. Does this pose a problem? To be honest, I'm not sure. I've only been made to feel uncomfortable due to my political beliefs in one class, and that was in an introductory economics class to boot. After all, if hiring standards are technically ideologically neutral, aren't we simply being taught by the best?

In his guest column on this page, Jon Wiener '66 summarized many of these points. An academic himself, he ends his column by saying, "Faculty hiring at Princeton — and everywhere else — should be based on academic qualifications rather than on political criteria." I can't agree more. But many of the same people who lambast the idea that there should be more conservatives in the Ivory Tower support affirmative action for African Americans, Latinos and other underrepresented minorities. All of a sudden, hiring and admissions are no longer about merit per se, but about the values of a "diverse" environment. They claim that as students, we become well-rounded by learning from people — both our fellow students and faculty — who have had different experiences than we have. By bringing difference to the table, many on the left claim, allows us all learn from each other.

Honky dory. Wiener mocks conservatives for their hypocrisy, but I hope that his views on affirmative action do not reflect a problem with pots and kettles, for if one truly believes that education comes from diversity, then there is no intellectually sound argument to deny that conservatives bring something to the table as well. Do students get a better education if they're taught by a libertarian or two? Does that make them consider problems from new and different angles? Shouldn't the hiring and tenure committees take this into consideration when making decisions on who shall enter these hallowed gates?

This is not to say that things are different on the right. At that dinner, a good friend of mine at the table suggested affirmative action for conservatives. Gosh darnit, he said as he pounded the table, socially conditioning our education to expose students to viewpoints on the right is a good thing — it simply makes our education better. His point of view is a good one, but it is difficult to rectify with the longstanding conservative/libertarian opposition to affirmative action. In the same way that it is hypocritical for a liberal to support quotas for all but conservatives, the right would be wrong to do the opposite. To claim that political diversity is a tangible benefit in education, but socioeconomic, ethnic and gender diversity are not, may be convenient but surely does not represent cohesive ideology.

Perhaps therein lies the problem: both sides have ducked the responsibility of being guided by an all-encompassing ideology and digressed into "ME ME ME" politics, where the goal is not so much to do the right thing, but to keep one's self on top at the expense of the competition, using whatever incoherent argumentation necessary to get it done. Matthew Gold is a politics major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at mggold@princeton.edu.