Exterminate the Brutes
Conservative politicians have complained so bitterly about a lack of viewpoint diversity in American universities that many have wondered whether they’re overreacting to a non-problem. They’re not. During a recent work trip to Dublin, I was reminded of what a homogeneous—and dangerous—progressive echo chamber the modern academy has become. At the tail end of a rather full day, I was taking in some traditional music at the Cobblestone Pub.
I grabbed the only free seat at the bar and was shocked to find that the woman sitting next to me was pursuing a Ph.D. in literature at the University of Texas at Austin, the very same program from which I graduated almost a decade ago.
What ensued was one of the most disturbing conversations I have ever had. I refuse to identify this woman, because the life of a graduate student is hard enough without having to deal with personal condemnation for what in truth is just one instance of a vast, systemic problem. Let’s just call her Jane.
Knowing nothing more about me than that I had once attended the same graduate program, Jane quickly found the occasion to shift our discussion away from mutual acquaintances and literature to politics. She reported being in Ireland on a 4th of July vacation but seeing nothing to celebrate because of the state of our country. When I suggested that this seemed a bit gloomy and asked what she thought was wrong with the United States, her response boiled down to conservatives. “What do we do about that?” I asked. “Blow up Texas, for a start,” Jane responded.
What this meant, according to her, was that Texas would be the ideal place for an armed progressive insurrection. It has a large number of gun-owning progressives who could capture both the University and the nearby Capitol building, kill the resident Republicans, and begin refashioning things. Greg Abbott was identified by name as the first to get a bullet. Trying to provide an off-ramp from this unsettling line of thought, I asked if this wouldn’t violate her convictions about inclusive treatment of people with disabilities. She responded that Abbott had screwed over so many people with disabilities that he had it coming (she used a more colorful word than screwed).
My suggestion that murdering all Republican lawmakers in Texas would be quite undemocratic was likewise brushed aside. Jane opined that we could do with more people like “Luigi” taking action against Republican politicians and billionaires. It took me a moment to realize that she was speaking in praise of Luigi Mangione, who conducted the premeditated murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. I’m not myself on a first-name basis with the guy. Again, I politely attempted to steer the conversation back toward sanity by pointing out that Mangione had orphaned his victim’s children and that her plans for Texas would mean doing this at quite a bit larger scale; her response effectively amounted to a shrug. Omelets. Eggs. I ordered a second pint of Guinness.
At no point did this conversation turn argumentative. I hardly got a word in most of the time. Jane was a talker. Had she asked me anything about myself or simply entertained the possibility that my worldview might differ from her own in substantial ways, she would have learned that I’m a fairly conservative Catholic who teaches at a fairly conservative Catholic university. Armed with the knowledge of our shared educational background, Jane obviously assumed that her politics would be my politics, or that I would at least enjoy playfully fantasizing about the mass murder of our shared political opponents.
I should also stress that I did not take her declared wish for armed insurrection to be a practical program but rather a barstool fantasy. When I asked if she would participate in the carnage, Jane confessed that she was not sure she could actually kill another human being. This was only very mildly comforting. The fiddles and the pipes played in the background. I suffered through a lengthy bodhrán solo.
My colleague’s revolutionary ambition was not the only disturbing thing about our conversation. Retired professors with whom I had studied a decade earlier were laughed at as out-of-touch second-wave feminists. The word “bitch” was used of one of them, though playfully.
Jane was surely right that the old guard are behind the times. I think the only reason I was able to complete a doctorate at UT was that my primary mentors in graduate school—female, agnostic or atheist, progressive—were still old-school liberals. If I could write well enough and make a solid case for an argument about literature, I was listened to, challenged, encouraged, and tolerated. They helped me a great deal, and I consider them friends even though we see eye-to-eye on very little. But they’re old and on their way out, and most of their replacements are frankly sick of liberalism.
During my time at UT, I was sometimes the only straight, white, theist, cisgender, male—it took me a while to learn all of my intersectional markers of privilege—in classes such as “Queer Poetics,” which was an entertaining and well-taught course by a member of the old guard. Inevitably this put me on the receiving end of casual and generally very minor anti-Catholic, anti-conservative, anti-Republican comments both in and out of the classroom. It never seemed like a big deal, because I knew what I was signing up for when I joined the program. I was also confident of the basic goodwill of my colleagues, several of whom even memorably and kindly attended the baptism of my first child in 2012. It was in Latin; it was weird for them, but they were cool about it. Suffice it to say I wasn’t a victim, just a minority.
The only time I felt the need to raise any concern was late in my time at UT, when my department chair’s secretary prominently displayed on her desk a large dildo dressed as a Catholic priest. This was in the middle of a 2016 “Cocks not Glocks” protest. Yes, that happened. It was not immediately apparent to my chair why a dildo dressed as a priest and displayed at the department’s front desk was a problem; however, she, an old-school liberal, eventually saw where I was coming from and asked her assistant to dress the dildo in some other fashion. I think it ended up as a peacock—clever, I guess.
The point is that my graduate program, like so many, is both homogenously liberal and increasingly extremist. Sometime after my graduation from UT in 2016, the English Department sent out a survey to alumni asking them about their experiences of racism in the program and soliciting ideas for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion. My response was simple: first, relax, no one in the UT English Department is racist, unless we torture that word into meaning something it doesn’t. Second, if you want diversity, hire just one conservative professor.
Neither the relaxation nor the hire has happened. Instead, the department has created an environment of such extreme ideological uniformity that its students cannot conceive that one of their own (even an unfamiliar heteronormative white male who graduated almost a decade ago) could be anything other than a progressive.
After about an hour of conversation with Jane, I left with the excuse that I had to get back to my hotel and pack for my trip home. I said the following, with a smile: “Thanks very much for a lovely conversation, even though I’m a Republican Catholic from Texas.” Expecting surprise, embarrassment, or maybe a half-hearted apology, I instead received what I can only describe as the sneer of contempt one might give to a cockroach discovered in the pantry.
I don’t think we could blame this on the Guinness—I left around 9 pm. Never in all my years has any one of my most extremely conservative colleagues, in the most relaxed or inebriated of circumstances, suggested to me that we ought to solve political problems by killing our opponents.
All the same, I don’t suggest that Jane would own these ideas in a public forum or actually kill anyone, and I would be very upset if my recollection of this incident were to negatively affect her. Though of course, it could just as well make her a minor celebrity among her peers—the plucky grad student who said what we’re all thinking and shocked a stuffy older academic.
That’s not the point. The point is that Jane was so convinced of the homogeneity of our department and our discipline that she felt perfectly safe assuming I would be unoffended and perhaps even entertained by her nightmare vision. She had good reason to think this; that’s the problem.
My challenge to the UT English Department and every humanities department at every state-funded university is simple: hire just one conservative. Just one. There’s a chance being around such people will make your students less likely to fantasize about killing conservatives, or at least less likely to share those fantasies with someone who just came out for some trad music and a pint of Guinness. Both of those were excellent, by the way.
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