Ideological Bubbles

A recent op-ed piece in The Baltimore Sun lambastes the institution of professorial tenure at America's colleges and universities and the notion of "academic freedom" it supports.

Thomas Sowell's "Academic freedom twisted on today's campuses" addresses, specifically, the rantings of Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado, who has written that the World Trade Center workers who died in the 9/11 attacks were "little Eichmanns" doing Nazi-style dirty deeds in "the mighty engine of profit." From this example Sowell extrapolates that tenure and academic freedom are crocks.

Mr. Sowell's logic is itself a crock. For one thing, he is tarring all universities and tenured professors by association with this one admitted "jackass." Furthermore, he himself admits that Churchill's "remarks that provoked so much controversy were not made in a classroom or even on campus" — so no students were at risk of left-wing propaganda. Moreover, if indeed "at one college, some gutsy students start chanting 'OT' — for 'off topic' — when one of their professors starts making political comments that have nothing to do with the subject of his course," then how big could the risk have been, even if Churchill were indulging himself right in the university lecture halls?

So where's the beef?

Manifestly, Sowell's article is an example of rhetoric in service to naught but inflating — or keeping inflated — his particular neo-conservative ideological bubble. This particular bubble is the one which says that unfettered pursuit of the profit motive is the mainspring of American liberty. Private enterprise, good; public welfare, bad. Markets, good; regulation, bad. That kind of thing.

But advocacy of the supposedly "good" things is never enough to inflate an ideological bubble and keep it inflated. Much of the air pressure must come from rhetoric that does nothing but bash the supposedly "bad" things.

Here, the "bad" thing is the seeming near-socialism (if not outright socialism) of Prof. Churchill's stance. It's as if making the slightest room for such ultra-left opinion on our campuses of higher learning threatens to bring down the whole American house of cards.

That's the way it always is with ideological bubbles. They wouldn't be bubbles if their main function wasn't to rigorously exclude whatever notions lie outside the surface of the bubble. It's as if anything outside the bubble might be a pin.

Thus, during the Cold War almost all Americans, even liberal ones, were anti-Communist. But there were ideologues who kept yelling that most of our national leaders weren't stauch enough in their anti-Communism. There were Reds under every bed, they said ... and so the thing to do was denounce, denounce, denounce the few actual Reds and their "fellow travelers" that did exist.

That didn't actually help win the Cold War, but it did inflate an ultra-conservative ideological bubble which persists to this day. The bubble was quite tiny in 1964 when Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican challenger, lost badly to President Lyndon Johnson on a platform of Cold War staunchness and small-government libertarianism.

But by 1980, the year of the Reagan Revolution, the bubble had grown considerably.

Then, by 1992, when Bill Clinton won the Oval Office, conservatives had to stop bashing Communists to keep their bubble inflated — Communism had fallen on the ash heap of history — and start bashing "liberals." We started to hear the "L-word" used as an out-and-out slur.

Of course, every now and then these days an actual socialist or near-socialist such as Prof. Churchill pokes his head out of the ash heap as if to judge how many more weeks of "capitalist winter" there will be ... and conservatives such as Mr. Sowell gleefully bash away at him, just like in the good old days. Anything to keep that bubble of ideology inflated.