Rick Santorum scares a lot of people here. That much was clear when he was still running for president, and even clearer yesterday as he spoke to the YPU amid choruses of profanity and other kindergarten-appropriate responses. Santorum’s outspokenness on issues like gay rights and abortion gives his opponents ample license to bellyache about “insensitivity” and are always good for an indignant Facebook status or eye-roll.
While we have heard other controversial conservative speakers, Santorum seems particularly good at provoking Yalies’ ire. Through the campaign season, one of Santorum’s platform planks that most negatively reverberated around campus was his critique of elite academia, which he referred to as “indoctrination centers for the left.”
He also frequently criticized the Obama administration for its taxpayer-funded support of widespread college education. At the same time, Santorum was a well-learned holder of a law degree who liked to quote classic works of political philosophy offhand — it seemed a contradiction.
Interpreting his speeches as anti-intellectual, though, completely misses the point of Santorum’s critique. Rather than being a learned anti-intellectual (in other words, a hypocrite), Santorum is critiquing the tack that education in elite institutions has taken in recent years. While he may undermine his own argument by his conspiratorial tone, implying that American leftists set up academic institutions to indoctrinate students, his argument would be better served by a different justification: Academia, simply by its inherent egoism, is liberal and statist by nature.
Why does it seem so natural that elite institutions be liberal? They certainly haven’t always been. Conservatives like to scapegoat the licentiousness of the ’70s, but, as William F. Buckley brought to light, liberal bias in education far predated the victim studies era. The roots of this bias, rather, lie in the social sciences.
Now that we claim to understand the human psyche in our psychology classes and divine how they will behave in groups through political science, we the learned are privileged with a higher position in society than ever. Beyond an education in the classics, studying the conflicting great thoughts and leaders of the past, the social sciences give us the false assurance that we know all the answers and have a greater right to design our fellow citizens’ lives than ever before.
New disciplines like behavioral economics provide a forum for the socially learned to try out their inventions. Therefore, a social science-centered academy will always be, in the bigger government sense, liberal. The social sciences tell the ennobled they have both the right and the responsibility to lead where everyone else’s understanding falls short. Our modern academia will always demand a more centralized government power, because leaving so many daily decisions up to all the little people will seem irresponsible and a waste of time. Plus, it feels good to be important.
Modern conservatives and economic liberals have always staked out the opposite approach. Friedrich Hayek, in his “Road to Serfdom,” identified central planning as the greatest bugaboo of freedom and prosperity. This is the classic academic tradition — the desire for academic humility, for the realization that no matter how many right answers the ruling class may have, the free human spirit always loses something in the transfer.
Rick Santorum thinks “the purpose of government is to create an opportunity for people to be free.” No matter how smart one person or group may be, they are never smart enough. This is why, when Santorum accuses President Obama of trying to “remake Americans in his image” by trying to get more Americans college-educated, he may as well be attacking the academic desire for bigger government control, not education itself.
So many see inconsistency in Santorum’s stance because they fail to distinguish between leadership and control. They fail to see how it is not hypocrisy that a man with a law degree who talks about leadership while quoting Burke and Tocqueville simultaneously tells an audience that many American universities are centers of liberal indoctrination and that too many Americans go to college.
Santorum believes in the real liberal education, which values debate, experience and everyday life over formulas. We can argue all day about whether universities really are liberal indoctrination centers or whether Obama really wants to nationalize curricula. It is clear, though, that Santorum’s problem is not with intellectualism but with modern academia’s lack of diverse thought, and, though he may not say this directly, its slide toward the desire to control.
Santorum’s ideas of replacing government with a powerful social infrastructure, grounded in faith, family and, as he stated last night, a sense of shame, will never ring true to Yale or the rest of modern academia. This tone of Santorum’s made Yale so reflexively angry at his appearance. To Santorum, the educated class — that is, us — are a little less special than we think.
John Masko is a junior in Saybrook College. Contact him at john.masko@yale.edu.