Leftist Fragility, Chapter 3

A ruckus at the University of Florida provides further evidence of our thesis.

I have borrowed previously M. Stanton Evans’s great line that young conservatives in 1964 had to get over the Goldwater defeat without grief counselors. And sure enough in the wake of Trump’s triumph we find the fragile and oppressed students at Harvard and everywhere else taking to their fainting couches, coloring books, and stuffed animals.

In the first two installments of this series (here and here) I propounded the thesis that many leftist thinkers—especially leftist faculty—are both intellectually and professionally insecure (that is, fragile), and can’t stand any challenge to their point of view, or their campus sinecures in the case of professors. This helps explain their intolerance for heterodox (i.e., conservative) views.

A fresh example of this is found in a Chronicle of Higher Education feature this week on the controversy over the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida. The Hamilton Center is among several recent initiatives in red states to introduce some intellectual and ideological diversity to major public universities, and they emphasize civic education and the liberal arts as they used to be taught. The idea is spreading rapidly in red states where the legislatures are rightly fed up with the leftist monoculture of their public universities. Similar efforts are under way in Arizona, Tennessee, Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas.

The Hamilton Center is going to become a full-fledged school within the University of Florida, and it has already started hiring a stellar faculty. (You can catch my podcast interview Will Inboden, the center’s director,here.)

Naturally the liberal faculty at Florida is deeply threatened by this competition, and the Chronicle story offers details of how the established faculty has worked to undermine the program, including by blackballing or even threatening graduate students against any involvement with the Hamilton Center. As the story reports:

But the rollout was hitting roadblocks. Several graduate students had complained that liberal-arts faculty were targeting them for affiliating with the Hamilton Center. There were murmurs that humanities departments would block its curricular proposals. The center’s director later described some professors’ conduct as “abuses.”

Ben Sasse, the outgoing president of the university, called the dean of the humanities, and rightly threatened to fire him if he didn’t move to stop this bad behavior.

So Sasse spoke to David Richardson, then dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. According to two academic leaders who received nearly identical accounts of the conversation, Sasse gave the dean an ultimatum: Deal with it, or he would absorb the liberal-arts college into the Hamilton Center. In one of those accounts, Sasse said Richardson’s job was on the line.

At least six faculty are being investigated for their interference, with termination possible. Let us hope so!

So far so good, as far as reporting goes. But the story takes a certain turn about a third of the way through, and the slant is undeniable. For example, the story says the Hamilton Center is a “Republican-led effort.” Let’s stop right here for a moment. I imagine if anyone checks they’ll find that the University of Florida, one of the most highly ranked public universities in the world, resembles most every other elite university in our land, with 95 percent of faculty and staff political contributions going to Democrats. Any accurate account should acknowledge that the University of Florida is a Democrat-run institution. As a public institution, accountable to the legislature and the citizens of Florida, why shouldn’t some balance be expected?

But let’s keep going with the Chron article:

After the former DeSantis aide delivered the proposal to the university in January 2022, a lengthy deliberation ensued. Joseph Glover, the then-provost, argued the proposal laid out “a conservative agenda to influence the curriculum” and did “not align well” with administrative and faculty governance structures. Edits were made, the proposal was OK’d, and by July, the center had been established, had a director, and was equipped with a $3 million start-up injection from the Legislature. [Emphasis added.]

Horrors! This reminds of the Babylon Bee meme from a few years back that went something like “Students outraged when exposed to a different idea.”

To continue:

Not all faculty were convinced. Some still suspected that the Hamilton Center was a Trojan Horse for the state’s conservative agenda and would siphon resources from existing units. A few months after the center was established, an anonymous swath of liberal-arts and law professors told the Faculty Senate that they feared the center was a “shadow college” meant to replace humanities departments without faculty input, and now regarded university officials who helped in its creation as “agents of the state.”

First of all, “university officials” are agents of the state. What part of “public taxpayer supported” university don’t they understand? Tenured faculty really do seem to think it is the obligation of taxpayers to pay their salaries, no questions asked.

Second, since most university departments are unreformable (because the inmates run the asylum), a ”shadow college” is exactly what is needed at most universities to have even the tiniest bit of balance. The real fear of the left professoriate, whose capacity for boring students to death is actually a bigger problem than their ideology, is that the Hamilton Center is likely to be more popular with many students than the regular humanities and social science offerings.

This passage makes it explicit:

The history chair [Jon Sensbach] wasn’t a foe of the Hamilton Center. The scholar of colonial America and the American Revolution didn’t think it was a problem that the center’s curricular offerings overlapped with his department.

But he understood the more critical views. The university’s humanities departments have had to “scratch and scramble” to hire faculty in recent years, he said, whereas the center had a “lavish” $10-million recruitment stipend from the state. The history department’s entire budget is $4 million.

A “jealousy” toward the center brewed, he said.

There’s a lot more in the story, but we can sum it all up very simply: A humanities faculty that is likely 95 percent left-liberal is now going to be perhaps only 90 percent left-liberal. It’s intolerable! We must throw a fit!

We keep hearing that leftist faculty in red states where the adults are trying to tame the lunatics are going to leave for some other institution in some other states, but like Hollywood celebrities threatening to leave because of Trump’s election, I haven’t seen much evidence that any leftist faculty are making good on their promises. Because they are too fragile.