Bacon's Rebellion

by James A. Bacon

Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Virginia, ran a column Saturday in the Wall Street Journal about threats to academic freedom.

He leads with an anecdote about teaching John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” with his students. “Milton can help you think about almost any consequential human subject. How shall we govern ourselves? … I am never tired of Milton and neither, it seems, are my students. And I sometimes give quiet thanks for the freedom to teach ‘Paradise Lost’ as I like.”

“One of the best freedoms in the world,” he writes, “is the freedom to sit in a quiet room and try to get at the wisdom in great writing with a group of students,” he writes.

But now, as the WSJ sub-head puts it, “ideological demands from the right” are putting the teaching of literature “in danger.”

In danger? Really?

The irony is that Edmundson’s column describes a very real threat to academic freedom — from the left, although he minimizes it. He offers no tangible evidence whatsoever of a peril from the right. When I say no evidence whatsoever, I mean no evidence whatsoever.

by James A. Bacon

Two days ago, I made the case that the University of Virginia has a shot at becoming the most desirable university in the country to learn, teach and pursue knowledge. To do that, the Board of Visitors must recruit a president and a provost committed to building a faculty nationally renowned for its intellectual diversity. Only if there is pluralism in the professoriate can there arise a free-wheeling academic culture where ideas collide, mutate, propagate, die and synthesize into exciting new forms.

There are many obstacles to achieving such an outcome, both internal and external. The tenure system, though useful for protecting academic freedom, favors seniority and slows turnover. Moreover, many departments have been captured by ideologues, so even when positions open up, hiring committees have no interest in hiring colleagues whose ideas they find unsympathetic. In the political realm, Democratic legislators are mobilizing in defense of academic “freedom” and “autonomy,” by which they mean working to ensure the dominance of those who think like them on fractious culture-war issues.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to change is that conservatives themselves have given so little thought to what “intellectual diversity” means. No one — not Governor Glenn Youngkin, nor the Board of Visitors, nor even conservative intellectuals anywhere, as far as I know — has clearly defined the concept.

They’ll recognize it, apparently, when they see it.

What is the desired ratio in an intellectually diverse faculty between Marxists, leftists, liberals, moderates, conservatives, classical libertarians and free thinkers who can’t be confined to any ideological box? Should we vie for partisan parity, or is it sufficient to break the left’s lock on campus culture? Should there be a 50/50 balance of left and right? Should faculty viewpoints look like — or more to the point, think like — America? Or, as a state institution, think like Virginia?

Then, once we have defined intellectual diversity, how do we attain it?