Freedom from politics? No thanks.

The ongoing debate about academic freedom is proving to be politics as usual. And who's really surprised by that? After all, since the Duke Conservative Union spurred a discussion about the lack of conservative views in the classroom in February 2004, the fault line of the debate has been largely along party lines. The student group began the discussion by listing the political affiliation of professors in a variety of departments, focusing on the humanities. It turns out many of Duke’s professors in sociology, history, English and philosophy are Democrats. (Notably, the political affiliations of professors from economics or the business school were not a topic of discussion.) Students alleged that political views were coloring the kind of education the school could offer. Their conclusion: rampant liberal bias.

Unfortunately after two years of debate, the epicenter of this controversy is still focused on political parties and grades rather than whether there are actually any underlying institutional biases that might play a role in the substance of academic disciplines.

It’s an easy mistake to make. In conversation, “conservative” and “liberal” have become synonyms for “Republican” and “Democrat,” for “red-state” and “blue-state.” But in academia, the issue is—or at least should be—more complicated than straight-ticket ideology.

Political discrimination is a fundamentally different issue from anti-conservative bias, but the terms used in both debates are the same. Conservative (read: Republican) students, for instance, argued that liberal professors were talking about politics in the classroom and, what is far more troubling, they were giving lower grades for students who argued conservative positions. The debate quickly shed its ideological grounding and became a partisan and a grade thing. That never should have been the issue.

A university education ought to be about how to argue coherently and with proper rigor. If students really are being graded down for what they are arguing rather than how, then that is surely a problem Duke should address. It would be, however, a problem of individual instructor—not institutional bias. Political examples and correlations certainly belong in the classroom as a way of connecting theory to the world; but party-line politics shouldn’t be a part of evaluating student work.

That said, the focus on grade discrimination masks an underlying issue that potentially affect the education of every student. There is a dearth of conservative education in some parts of this University. And that has nothing to do with Republican or Democratic beliefs.

Conservative ideology, as defined in a classical, non-partisan sense, is less pervasive in many disciplines than its liberal counterparts (like Marxism), but it still offers a serious approach to thinking about serious academic questions. Too few classes at Duke offer instruction in these modes of thinking. Just as students should be able to learn conservative thought even if they hold fundamentally liberal beliefs, professors ought to be able to teach it.

But conservative ideas are still considered minority ideology in many disciplines. Fully integrating conservative thought into classes and into research would require a shift in thinking. Intellectual diversity has long been a goal of Duke's. As the debate about academic freedom evolves, the focus should be on the way universities regard conservative thought in a liberal education. That is a debate that could change attitudes.