Anti-Climacus

LINK: Diotima has an interesting post on conservatives as undergrads. I'm not strictly speaking a conservative (just have a lot of sympathy to many conservative arguments, and especially disproportionately in political theory), and by and large I'd say that even in political science, politics tends not to be an issue*, though the level of sniping asides against the Bush administration seems to have been running higher than normal recently.

Sara says:

"More conservative whining about liberal academia is not productive; more conservatives going to grad school, that's productive."

There seems to be another level of complexity in it, at least for me, because I'm going into grad school in political science, and I have discovered lately that I'm going to further lengths to keep from discussing my political beliefs in class-related contexts. I don't know that this is directly related to GPA--my own suspicion is that I'd like my ideas to rise and fall on their own merits, and keeping my professors guessing about my affiliations is the best way I have to do that. It seems to me like most people of a conservative persuasion would be liable to say something similar, but this does seem to imply just the tacit denial of one's political beliefs that Sara presumably wants done away with (or, rather, it seems that she wants the perceived need to conceal one's beliefs to go away, though it's unclear how that happens if everyone conceals their beliefs).

*in part because a lot of professors believe that politics and political science are two separate things, and in part because their professional commitment to be objective supervenes on their individual interests. I can tell you, for example, that all of the PS professors I've had are Democrats, but it seems like more than a few of them (50% or so) are New Deal-ers, and clearly uncomfortable with Democratic Party politics since 1968 or so.