CCOAdom further explained

The CCOA discussion continues. Withywindle has more thoughts; Isabel Archer and Britta promise theirs are forthcoming. I'm waiting!

In the mean time, to continue (or sum up, really) the discussion following Withywindle's post about Epstein's credentials, and apparently not to make it to Withywindle's next point, re: research, I think the important thing to take away is not whether the more rigid requirement of a PhD to teach at a university (in most, not all) fields these days is a good thing, but whether the conservatives most hot-and-bothered about academia are actually academics.

Googling the first few authors at Phi Beta Cons, for example, I find one assistant professor of marketing, and several college graduates affiliated with a conservative education think-tank (?). Now, obviously people can be journalists who cover X without being themselves participants in X. But the problem with the CCOA genre is that it tends to be more a repetition of the same old complaints, ones that someone who, for example, sat in - with an open mind - on one grad seminar about gender would be unlikely to make. What results is, people with no interest in being academics address an audience whose involvement with academia is limited to attending college and maybe professional school. Academia is generally agreed upon to be a terrible universe of liberals and libertinism; all new CCOA contributions are designed to merely confirm what everyone reading them already assumes.

My theory about this, as I've mentioned before, is that picking on academia is a real uniter for conservatives who'd otherwise have little to agree on - social conservatives can freak out about coeds on the student-insurance-subsidized Pill,  elitist-conservatives can fuss about how there's too little Plato or how too many mediocrities now attend college, and populists can roll their faux-rustic eyes at the fancy coastal book-learnin' that's never done anyone any good. It is more productive for conservatives to use academia as an entity to bash than for them to try to reform or (counter-) revolutionize it in ways that would make it more receptive to them or their ideas. So, under the guise of protesting academia's ways in order to change them, the real CCOA goal is to provide ideologically-diverse conservatives without anything to do with academia with common ground. CCOAs say they're upset that conservatives are poorly-represented and that academia tilts left. When in fact, this is something that helps their cause.

Granted, Phi Beta Cons is not everything, and it appears there are conservatives genuinely interested in altering the academy. I'm not likely to be on board with any but a fraction of their platforms, but I'd much rather see profs imposing Great Books (or, for that matter, Withywindle pondering the role of research) than yet another article about, say, a prof using rap - rap! OMG! the world is ending! - in the classroom.

Yet the trend, it seems, is to use academia as a symbol in the culture wars. For example: "NAS membership is open to all. This is a change as of October 2009. Before that NAS restricted membership to academics. We now encourage anyone who agrees with the principles we espouse to join." To be a member of the "National Association of Scholars" - a professional guild of sorts, one might think - you do not need to have diddly-squat to do with higher ed, you just have to think it's a den of iniquity. Given the timing of this shift, one suspects the economy played a role. But this is also consistent with the overall popularity of (I haven't followed this well enough to confidently add "newfound") academia as a way of generically riling up conservatives about Young People Today.