My colleague Steve Sverdlik argued in the pages of The Daily Campus on Jan. 31 that a conservative think tank will “tarnish” SMU’s reputation and divert SMU professors from their own research by prompting them to form “truth squads” to set the record straight.

This is a curious argument to make in the post-modern era when the very idea of a single objective truth has come under assault from within the academy, and when most faculty deplore David Horowitz’s right-wing “truth squads”-the so-called Students for Academic Freedom.

The argument is also parochial and misguided in its assertion that it would be the responsibility of the SMU faculty to counter the ideas emanating from a Bush think tank. The marketplace of ideas extends far beyond SMU. Few campuses possess a critical mass of experts in any given field. We look to our larger disciplines for the give and take that advances knowledge, not to our own campuses. When the University of Colorado’s Ward Churchill uttered his outrageous view that the victims of Sept. 11 were “little Eichmanns,” a national outcry ensued. The responsibility for countering his statement did not fall to his own colleagues.

Steve Sverdlik correctly notes that I suggested that the SMU faculty in the humanities and social sciences leans to the left (as they do in other American universities), but he incorrectly asserts that this is irrelevant and that I argued that our faculty “fear the intellectual challenges that a conservative institute would pose.” I did not say that opponents of the Bush institute fear intellectual challenges. They do seem to fear association with the Bush administration’s unpopular views and policies.

Sverdlik argues that research fellows at a Bush think tank would have a political agenda and not play by faculty rules. This is an old story. Whenever representatives of an unpopular group have sought to insert themselves into campus life, reactionaries have argued that the group plays by different rules and should not be allowed on the playing field. I recall the furor from conservatives when the University of California hired a radical leftist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, in 1965.

The camel’s nose would be under the tent, they said, and Marxists would take over the university. I recall the anger of conservative faculty when some of us promoted the establishment of academic departments in black studies, Mexican-American studies, women’s studies, Native American studies, etc. Opponents argued that these new programs would politicize the university and subvert putative academic standards of impartiality with slanted research.

Now the argument comes from the left instead of the right. Sverdlik claims that “over the last hundred years” universities have found “devices” to evaluate faculty research “only on the basis of its quality” and that think tanks lack those “devices.” He offers a useful distinction, but it is easy to exaggerate the ability of our “devices” to produce what he calls “impartial research,” and to demonize think tank that allegedly lack such devices. In academia, the “quality” of academic research is determined largely by a researcher’s peers.

The system produces valuable checks and balances, but “impartial research” has also resulted in such agreed upon nonsense as that blacks were happy in the South under slavery, that Mexicans were lazy and non-goal oriented, that women had penis envy, and that cigarette smoking did no harm. The peer-review system did not end academic group-think that endorsed these ideas. Rather, better ideas entered the marketplace and drove out the defective products of this supposedly “impartial research.”

So it will be with the ideas that come from a conservative think tank. It will make no effort to conceal its impartiality but will fail if it becomes known for shoddy thinking. It seems presumptuous at best to characterize a think tank that does not yet exist and to assume that its fellows will all be inexpert ideologues who think alike and utter outrageous lies that need to be countered by “truth squads” drawn from the SMU faculty. Ideologues can be experts and experts can be ideologues and they exist on university faculties as well as in think tanks-right along with shallow thinkers and deep thinkers (although, alas, what seems shallow one day might seem deep the next, and vice versa).

Universities are diverse places, and only the most myopic would judge a whole university by a single department or research center or institute. Did anyone suppose that Milton Friedman’s once unpopular group of free-market economists at the University of Chicago represented the university?

SMU is a large, complex and intellectually rich institution, as the present debate over the Bush Institute suggests. SMU will not be judged or tarnished by a Bush think tank unless its faculty abandons research for politics and leaves the think tank to play the only research game on the Hilltop.

About the writer:

David J. Weber is the Robert and Nancy Dedman Professor of History. He can be reached at [email protected].