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“Women’s Studies” and “Feminism” and “Social Justice”? Sure! “Conservatism?” Sorry, not available.

GOOD READ:

Conservatism and the University Curriculum
If they can find time for feminist theory, they can find time for Edmund Burke.

—by Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, writing in the Wall Street Journal today. 

EXCERPT BELOW

It’s partly why I started this web site.  To help expose conservatism—sometimes for the very first time—to Canadians and even some Americans.  It’s why I also relentlessly promote Fox News Channel whenever I can—because they (and they alone, in TV-land) happily tolerate and actively engage actual conservatives alongside liberals, and pit them against each other in debate and let viewers decide, having seen both sides. 

Liberals call this “unfair” and “unbalanced” and “biased against liberals”.  I see their point. 

Many Canadians never knew there was anything but a liberal-left point of view countered by a far-left liberal point of view.  Many still don’t.  And you can tell —easily.  You can spot them easily when they speak.  They’re the ones who speak as though everybody in the room agrees with them.  Very often, everybody does.  They’re the ones who wince at the notion of your being pro-life (and then seek to banish you), or laugh at you or hurl insults at you because you’re in favor of normal, traditional marriage (thus exposing their abject intolerance, even as they pretend you’re the one who’s “intolerant”), or they roll their eyes because you’re a free-market capitalist or that you believe in smaller government and lower taxes and family and personal responsibility and —God forbid:  God

They always thought the liberal-left point of view was the “right-wing” point of view.  And so of course conservatives are therefore “extreme” — even though conservatives and traditional conservative ideas are exactly what made this country and America great.  Of course it’s a sign that they’re woefully uneducated, uniformed, not well-read, or worse.  They don’t know all the truth. 

You don’t get balance in Canadian media or in academia in either place —meaning those institutions are shirking their responsibilities. 

And what’s worse: they know what they’re doing.  They’re doing this on purpose.  Which means they’re propagating lies.  An agenda.  And that, my friends, is worth fighting against.

Here’s a snippet of Peter Berkowitz’s Op/Ed:

… To be sure, a political science department may feature a course on American political thought that includes a few papers from “The Federalist” and some chapters from Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.”

But most students will hear next to nothing about the conservative tradition in American politics that stretches from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt to William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan. This tradition emphasizes moral and intellectual excellence, worries that democratic practices and egalitarian norms will threaten individual liberty, attends to the claims of religion and the role it can play in educating citizens for liberty, and provides both a vigorous defense of free-market capitalism and a powerful critique of capitalism’s relentless overturning of established ways. It also recognized early that communism represented an implacable enemy of freedom. And for 30 years it has been animated by a fascinating quarrel between traditionalists, libertarians and neoconservatives.

While ignoring conservatism, the political theory subfield regularly offers specialized courses in liberal theory and democratic theory; African-American political thought and feminist political theory; the social theory of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school; and numerous versions of postmodern political theory. …

 

Joel Johannesen
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