In the comments section at Crooked Timber, the always canny Timothy Burke sums up the central hitch in David Brooks' New York Times op-ed on what professors tell conservative students who are thinking of pursuing an academic career:

No one gets asked about their politics in interviews in the humanities. Of course not. To speak of having a ìpoliticsî in such concrete terms is already seen as a sign of unsophistication. But scholarship by aspiring academics is read politicallyónot in terms of someoneís party affiliation, but as a composite picture of theoretical and social affiliations that have a discrete political alignment to them. A candidate who was ìreadî as being a conservativeósay a budding literary scholar who regarded Northrup Frye, Matthew Arnold and Edmund Burke as guides toward an anti-historicist strategy for textual interpretationówould run into serious trouble in the vast majority of English Departments no matter how intelligent, productive or pedagogically gifted they were. The tripwires here arenít generally as obvious as saying, ìI voted for Bushîóthough Brooks is completely correct in thinking that this would possibly be one of the three or four most disastrous things an aspiring humanities scholar could say during an on-campus interview.

What Brooks misses, of course, is that this isnít just about conservatism. Virtually anything that departed from a carefully groomed sense of acceptable innovation, including ideas and positions distinctively to the left and some that are neither left nor right, could be just as potentially disastrous. Like a lot of right-wing critics of academia, he generally thinks too small and parochially, and too evidently simply seeks to invert what he perceives as a dominant orthodoxy. If they had their druthers, Horowitz and Pipes and most of the rest of the victimology types would simply make the academy a conservative redoubt rather than a liberal one. The real issue here is the way that each successive academic generation succeeds in installing its own conventional wisdom as the guardian at the gates, and burns the principle of academic freedom in subtle, pervasive fires aflame in the little everyday businesses and gestures of academic life. The line behind Brooks of people who could rightfully claim that an important perspective or methodology is largely unwelcome within the academy is fairly long.

Brooks wrote me last week asking if I would be willing to "chat" about his proposed piece. I wrote back saying I'd prefer to respond to his questions in writing, and invited him to send me some (none came). I wanted a chance to think the issue through and choose my words carefully. At the back of my mind were the issues Burke raises above: that gatekeeping in English departments almost never takes the form of explicit political gatekeeping; that I do not know, nor do I care to know, the politics of students who express interest in going to graduate school in English; and that I do not address their questions about their prospects from that standpoint. I tell them about the economic reality of graduate school, I tell them about the deplorable job market, I tell them about the petty maneuvering and rampant careerism that characterizes the profession at every level; I tell them to go out and read examples of the sort of work they will be expected to produce and ask themselves if that is the sort of writing they feel called to do; I tell them to sit in on a graduate seminar to see what the discussion is like and to get a taste of grad student culture. I have never had occasion to say to a student, "As a conservative, you will be derided for your politics and will experience a level of discrimination that may ultimately mean that this profession is closed to you."

On the other hand, I have often had occasion to say to students that the things that draw them to advanced literary study--a love of learning, a love of literature, a deep desire to share those loves with students through teaching--are not the things that drive most English professors, and have next to nothing to do with what they would be expected to do in graduate school and beyond. The student who enters grad school intent on becoming a traditional humanist is the student who will be labelled as hopelessly unsophisticated by her peers and her professors. She will also be labelled a conservative by default: she may vote democratic; may be pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, and anti-gun; may possess a palpably bleeding heart; but if she refuses to "politicize" her academic work, if she refuses to embrace the belief that ultimately everything she reads and writes is a political act before it is anything else, if she resists the pressure to throw an earnest belief in an aesthetic tradition and a desire to address the transhistorical "human questions" out the window in favor of partisan theorizing and thesis-driven advocacy work, then she is by default a political undesirable, and will be described by fellow students and faculty as a conservative. She will become untouchable, mockable, and literally unsupportable. She will have a hard time finding people to work with, a harder time getting good letters of recommendation, and may feel that she is being drummed out of the work she is called to do by people who are using that work for profoundly other, self-serving ends.

As Burke points out, this is at least as much about conformity as it is about politics, and I have long believed that if the tables were turned, and most of the people in academic gatekeeping positions were conservative, a similar kind of exclusionary scenario would result. It's the culture of academe--or at least of the academic humanities--that is the main problem. If you don't have to be a conservative to get labelled--and reviled--as a conservative, then "conservative" means something other than "conservative" in the academic circles I am discussing here. It means something more like "non-conformist," which, ironically, often translates into either "traditional humanist" or "person who questions prevailing orthodoxies of any stamp" or both. Certainly, left-wing politics are central to this problem--the people who are labelling the "conservatives" in their midst are by definition on the left. But what they are labelling "conservative" is more often than not not conservative per se, but simply different from them. You could say this is an indication of just how far left campus leftists are. Or you could say that it shows how brutal and brilliant the system of academic peer pressure is: how better to embarass a free-thinking liberal into becoming--or seeming to become--a lockstep ideologue than by threatening to call her a conservative? In English departments, "conservative" is as dirty and shameful an epithet as one can imagine.

UPDATE: There's more from Virginia Postrel, the Volokh Conspiracy, and the Invisible Adjunct.