At Butterflies and Wheels, Ophelia Benson picks up on my post about how the label "conservative" may be used to create, teach, and enforce intellectual norms in the academic humanities. And plenty of readers are writing in as well. From a liberal academic philosopher who is not as far left as his colleagues, and has consequently found himself erroneously labelled "conservative" and "reactionary," comes this:

Part of what's informing the brouhaha over Brooks is astounding ignorance about conservatism. I tend to think of conservatism as an intellectual tradition and tendency that I respect but do not endorse for reasons that I can give at some length. But 'conservative' as used of you and me has nothing to do with actual conservatism. In this all-too familiar commons-room usage, the term only means *unprincipled* or *vulgar*. It has no intellectual content at all.

I'd say it was a bad pun were it not for its impact on people.

Still, underlying Brooks's observations is an intellectual -- not merely a political -- phenomenon. "As a conservative in the academy, Ephebe, you'll encounter many who will regard you as unprincipled and vulgar...." is nowhere near as bad or as sad as "To many in the academy, Ephebe, your conservatism will be simply indistinguishable from unprincipled vulgarity..." The latter merely remarks on a failure of understanding. It isn't even (yet) nastiness. It's sheer incomprehension, from people who ought to know -- and teach -- better.

Your post on David Brooks's NYT column is completely accurate. An example of the means by which one's politics are deduced by colleagues is shown by my own experience at my final teaching job at [large state university]. I held a two-year appointment in history and taught medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation history and the philosophy of history along with asÝentry level course on early modern intellectual history. I chose mostly primary sources as texts, both because of my own training in intellectual history at [prestigious doctoral program], and because my classes lent themselves to the close examination of ideas within the context of the period in which they were expressed. Students generally loved it and I received excellent evaluations even though I was not an easy grader.

I also checked my political baggage at the classroom door, agreeing as I do with your thesis that bias from conservativesÝis no more acceptable than from liberals. I was the quintessential humanist of whom you write. After all, my period, the Italian Renaissance, gave birth to the very idea of the humanist as we still conceive it, whatever ahistorical barnacles may cling to that image in the popular imagination.

Nevertheless, it quickly got around the department that I was a conservative. By the end of my first year there, the usual suspects refused to speak to me, shot me their best malocchio, and attempted to talk students out of taking my class, seeing as how I was a "Nazi," "racist," and "reactionary."

The card posting my office hours and some Renaissance posters were twice torn off my door by, I learned after I'd left, a colleague (he's now at [prestigious private university]); without warning, a couple of weeks after my last class, I arrived to find all my belongings in the hallway and my name pried off my door. It wasn't so much anything that I said in class that caused such hostility, but rather the texts that I assigned. My colleagues simply strolled to the bookstore, looked at such volumes as The City of God, History of the Peloponnesian War, The Inferno, The New Science, The Prince, Utopia, Colloquies of Erasmus, and the like and knew that I didn't belong. On top of all that, I was aÝnative Georgian who sounded Southern. Surely, I was the enemy amongst them, and needless to say my bid for a tenure-tack position was literally rejected in a day. (Not to claim that I was the most qualified candidate or anything of the sort, but the message was clear.) My few allies were old enough to have been my father.

I honestly take some pride in the fact that I got along beautifully with the janitors and secretaries.

So, my word of advice for new professors: beware of the your reading assignments. TheyÝcan and will be used against you.

UPDATE: At the Volokh Conspiracy, George Mason University law professor David Bernstein writes about some of his personal brushes with anti-conservative bias in academe. Start here and scroll up.

UPDATE UPDATE: King Banaian corrects the above comment about how on too many campuses incomprehension surrounds the concept of conservatism: "Slight correction: it's sheer willful incomprehension. I remember my mother putting up one of those refrigerator magnets that said 'My mind's made up. Please don't confuse me with facts.' I had no idea that was a research agenda."