Anti-Climacus

In the comments to this post, Phoebe Maltz notes, quite reasonably:

Not sure how to get out of that bind - if the academic CCOAs are turning young, non-academic CCOAs (that is, young conservatives who at least wish to discuss academia) away from its ranks, the critics and the participants will remain in ever more separate spheres.

The answer here is more or less the same answer that has been preached in Evangelical/conservative Protestant circles for the last ten years or so: Do Good Work. Do Work that is so Good, within the terms of the discipline in which you find yourself, that your fellow academics are obliged to take it seriously, even if they are not originally disposed to do so. The examples of successful change with which I am familiar (e.g. Princeton's Religion department, Duke's English department) were slow changes over a decade or more, mostly centered around prominent conservative or religious academics who produced Work good enough that it was recognized as such. Academics may be petty on occasion, but they're not stupid: if you Do Good Work, someone will want the prestige of employing you.

If CCOAs are convinced that academia is hopelessly stacked against them, they will choose to not participate. As I discovered in grad school, and many other people have as well, the concerns of producing good research are orthogonal to political ideology. Academics like good close-text reading; academics like good history; academics like good conceptual analysis; academics like good treatments of classic texts; academics like good work that introduces new avenues of study. None of these are the exclusive province of any ideology. I can imagine good (and bad) works in each from a 'conservative' or 'liberal' perspective. I think if you are committed to Doing Good Work, your limitations are based on the quality of work you produce and not on your political beliefs. This point must be hammered home, over and over again.*


*I would like to think it goes without saying, but it often doesn't. As important as Do Good Work is, Don't Be An Ass is also important. It matters that you show interpretive charity, take an interest in the work of others, and cultivate a friendly relationship with your peers and colleagues. CCOAs often violate one of these, if not more. I would attribute this, in part, to the high value conservative intellectuals place on cutting aphorisms: Chesterton and William F. Buckley have that in common, as do the people who quote one or both most frequently. But the price of the cutting aphorism is charity to one's opponent, and one will never make it in academia if one doesn't learn how to Get Along.