Universities in Maryland need to include conservatism in the curriculum

June 17, 12:38 AMBaltimore Republican ExaminerSean O'Donnell

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                 (AP/Alex Brandon)

This past weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran an intriguing opinion column calling on American universities to include conservatism in academia, especially in the political science departments. It was a serious statement mentioning how universities and colleges currently neglect including academic courses on conservatism.

In the article, the WSJ happened to mention the University of Maryland, College Park (alongside Harvard, Yale, Cal-Berkeley, Swarthmore, and Williams) as a “distinguished university” that ignored conservatism. This was an understatement.

When I went to school at the University of Maryland, I became very familiar with the inner workings of the history department as an employee. After I had worked there for several months, I realized that the faculty had many more liberals than conservatives – if it had any at all. This meant that almost no one provided an alternative to the politics of liberalism that dominate the liberal arts curriculum.

Working in the department I saw that many professors had their offices decorated with anti-Bush adornments, both on their office doors and walls. It seemed kind of immature to me as I expected to see something like that in a freshman dorm room, not a professor’s office. Instead of being for a political ideology, some professors showed that they were instead against one – conservatism.

When I sorted mail for the professors, I noticed that many of them subscribed to progressive publications such as The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, etc. I can honestly say that I never once saw a conservative publication enter the mailroom like the National Review or Weekly Standard. One day I even conducted an “ideology test” in the mailroom by taping to the wall a postcard sized graphic of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that said “YES” above them and had Hugo Chavez and Michael Moore that said “NO” above them. Sure enough, before I left for the day, the graphic had been taken down.

Here of some more examples of how the university advocated liberalism while disregarding conservatism in liberal arts classes:

I had a conversation on an elevator with then-history graduate student Robert Chase who said, “Socialism never hurt anybody.”

During a lecture for a history class, professor Howard Smead stated (I’m paraphrasing him), “We brought 9/11 on ourselves.”

Classics professor Steven Rutledge, who politically self-described himself as “independent,” wasted almost an entire class praising Sen. Obama before the 2008 election. I would’ve had no problem with this if it had been politics class, but it wasn’t. The class focused on ancient Roman religion. What did Obama have to do with ancient Roman religion?

One day during a summer history class taught by then-graduate student Erik Christiansen, I got into an argument with him over American internment camps. Christiansen had equated and likened the American internment of the Japanese during World War II to the Nazi imprisonment of the Jews. This of course was an outrageous comparison because of their countless differences.

These are just some examples from one university in Maryland. I wonder what the students at Towson, Frostburg, Salisbury, or Johns Hopkins have to say about the lack of conservatism taught at their schools. In order for academic freedom to truly be free, colleges and universities need to attract professors to teach about conservatism. Only then can academia in Maryland truly be diverse.

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