For a long time, conservatives allowed their quest for greater influence on college campuses to be discredited by monomaniacal, controversy-baiting spokesmen like David Horowitz and Jason Mattera. But the movement in favor of "intellectual diversity" in education can be quite a good one -- when it truly is about exposing students to the canon of conservative and liberal thought, not about censoring professors' viewpoints or trying to ban books like Nickel and Dimed.
So it's heartening to learn from this New York Times story that the Olin Foundation and other conservative organizations are shifting their focus away from the David Horowitz model of vilifying academia and toward a new model of supporting programs that actually expose students to conservative ideas through intellectual engagement. Some of the new programs do teach a triumphalist version of American history intended to explicitly counter more identity-based, postmodern historical narratives. But others are simply providing discussion forums for texts conservatives believe should be in wider circulation. At the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, a donation from the Veritas Fund for Higher Education (founded by the conservative Manhattan Institute) funded a reading assignment and discussion series for incoming freshmen. The texts included were Plato's "Apology" and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." Even liberal professors reported that they were impressed with the non-ideological tenor of the discussions that ensued.
This seems like a pretty good thing to me. Though "intellectual diversity" has become a catchword associated with the right, there's actually nothing wrong with the concept -- as long as the goal really is diversity, not the censorship of left historical and political interpretations.
--Dana Goldstein
