Conservative Culture at Wabash
My year at Wabash College is coming to an end. It has been a very rewarding experience, and come to appreciate Wabash for many things that it had to offer me. One of those things that is quite specific to the place is its active, engaged conservative subculture. I had been asked to write a reflection on my experience with that culture for the student magazine The Phoenix, and what follows below is the article that came out of that effort.
During my first visit to Wabash College about a year ago, one thing that immediately struck me was the sheer number of student publications. I thought this was quite remarkable for a liberal arts college of Wabash's size. In one way or another, over the years I had been affiliated with public and private universities as well as liberal arts colleges, and nowhere before had I seen the number and variety of publications that I saw at Wabash. The quality of writing in those publications varied, but overall it was quite good as well. Later on I was to find out that Wabash prided itself on the emphasis it puts on writing, but at the time this came as an interesting curiosity. Furthermore, a particularly pleasant surprise for me was that a substantial amount of writing in those publications was dedicated to conservative voices and ideas. Not nearly to the point that these would dominate the discussion, but certainly at the level that was more at par with the representation of such voices in the US population. This left an impression that there was an active, vibrant conservative movement on campus, which also was a stark contrast to most college campuses these days. At the time I did not know how to account for this fact, but over the past year I think I have been able to glean several factors that contribute to making such a movement possible. Oftentimes these factors have more to do with what Wabash doesn't have, rather than what it does has.
Probably the single most important factor that helps and sustains the conservative cause at Wabash is the Gentlemen's rule. Over this past year I have come to appreciate its subtle but pervasive role in making it possible for conservative voices to be heard. When I first entered college as a freshman many years ago, I was dazzled and impressed with the incredible resources and facilities of my alma mater, and the access to technologies that I had previously only heard of. But more than all of the technological resources, a different thing left a particularly strong impression on me: the honor code. In a nutshell the honor code sends the following message by the college: "we will trust you not to cheat, and will not police you while you work on your homework and exams." It meant that as far as the academic work is concerned, you as a student were innocent until proven guilty. For the first time in my life I truly felt like an adult. I had been given a lot of trust. Do students still cheat even at schools that have some form of honor code? Of course they do. But studies have shown that on an average they cheat less than at places where no honor codes exist. Wabash's Gentleman Rule operates in a similar fashion and offers a similar level of trust. In trusting Wabash men to be guided by an internal ethical code of conduct, it places an adult-like responsibility on their shoulders, and facilitates their transition from student to grown up.
Indeed, the process of going to college is one of personal growth and self-discovery. It takes place in the classroom, but it is also largely determined by what happens outside of strictly academic settings. College is the place where many of us will be faced for the first time with the kinds of life decisions that mark the passage into the adulthood. This passage is best facilitated if you are treated as an adult throughout that process. This can be both unsettling and liberating. We get to do things that we were not supposed to be doing just a little while ago, but we also don't have the kinds of safety nets that we were used to. Undoubtedly, some students handle this process better than others, and sometimes mistakes are made that have extremely dire consequences. Unfortunately, when mistakes happen the knee-jerk reaction by many is to reach for more rules and regulations. Needless to say, this is a very liberal way of going about business. It does not help prepare students to face the full consequences of their actions; it only postpones the day when such consequences take place.
Colleges that decide to extensively regulate student behavior are seldom content with just monitoring actions. They invariably impose certain norms on what students may or may not say. These norms reflect the liberal ideological biases on the part of faculty and administration. Students, often under the guidance of faculty, are praised for being courageous and for "speaking truth to power" when they engage in very low form of name-calling against conservative politicians, causes, public figures, or even other conservative students. On the other hand when a student makes a pun or double entendre that is perceived to offend some core liberal constituency (even when no member of that constituency can be found to take umbrage) then a specially assembled committee is formed to deal with the situation. Some of these proceedings would make any old Soviet court proud. It doesn't matter that no court of law would ever rule in favor of the accusers, it doesn't matter that free speech is being trampled upon. What matters in the end is that a certain liberal ideological purpose is being served and that the opponents get a clear message that their points of view and attitudes are not accepted. This puts a damper on free expression of ideas across the board, but at most college campuses conservative voices and values are particularly vulnerable. Under such circumstances a minimalist code of conduct like the Gentleman's rule is a safeguard against an arbitrary usurpation of the students' free speech. It protects the free exchange of thoughts and ideas and a true, meaningful, diversity. A college that is spending too much of its time and resources on monitoring what students think and say, and engaging in disciplinary proceedings against unpopular ideas under the slightest pretext, is not using its time and resources wisely or efficiently. In these trying economic times when all of us are asked to make a certain amount of sacrifice, it becomes just wasteful to spend resources on items that don't contribute to college's core mission: education. It is my hope that Wabash College will hang onto its spirit of free inquiry.
Another notable "absence" that actually promotes the conservative cause at Wabash concerns its selection of academic disciplines. One of the first things you notice when you look at the names of academic departments at Wabash are, of course, their names: History, Biology, English, Physics, Political Science, Art. So what's so special about those names? Nothing, and that's exactly my point. Every one of these departments has a very traditional, staid even, name. Not a single one of them is a "studies" department, the likes of which have proliferated through modern academia. The rationale behind the establishment of many of these "studies" departments is that they better serve the interdisciplinary nature of modern scholarship. However, in practice they inevitably end up serving a very narrow subfield of a particular discipline, or are organized around a subject matter, rather than methodology. Inevitably, most of these subject matters have a very specific liberal ideological tilt. From the very outset these fields are de facto closed off to conservatives, both faculty and students. A conservative student going to college has markedly fewer options of potential majors than his liberal colleague, while his tuition dollars still pay evenly for all of the departments on campus. Furthermore, the curricular requirements for graduation are oftentimes imposed in such a way as to require all of the students to take at least one of the classes in these "studies" departments. The rationale behind this is to expose students to a variety of scholarly styles and approaches to the pursuit of knowledge, but in reality this just ends up being yet another attempt at liberal indoctrination of students. To me personally, this has a strong parallel with the curriculum that I was exposed to in high school. During the communist days it was not enough that all of our social sciences were heavily influenced by Marxist ideology. We also had "Marxism" as a separate, independent, subject that all of us were required to take. Back in high school I was just going through the motion of learning the material well enough to get a good grade, without necessarily believing any of it. I had not expected that I would need such an attitude when taking classes in an American college. It was not the last of the surprises that I came across.
Another way that the "studies" departments seem impervious to the normal academic life-cycles is that they stick around well after their particular raison d'être is gone. They seem impervious to the normal ebb and flow of academic interests. During the Cold War many colleges had very popular Russian departments, which are nowadays largely disappearing. Computer Science at one point did not exist as a separate field, it became extremely popular during the nineties, and now it looks like it is slowly fading away. In contrast, "studies" departments are artificially propped up by the prevailing ideological mores that have little to do with the actual importance of the particular subject matter. Just like the case of the absence of explicit or implicit speech codes, the absence of "studies" departments is a prerequisite for the existence of a free marketplace of ideas, untainted by the artificial ideological biases. And the existence of the free market in ideas will guarantee a vitality and relevance of the conservative movement at Wabash for many years to come.
During my year at Wabash I have had wonderful experience interacting with students, faculty, and administrators. I have come to appreciate and value Wabash's conservative movement and I hope that it will maintain its place in college's intellectual life. For this to happen Wabash needs to continue to maintain and nurture its unique culture, and resist temptations to "grow" in ways that will ultimately undermine it. In this particular case, less is definitely more.