dealing with ideology in the classroom

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber muses on Michael Berube's latest book on the Horowitz problem. Includes a discussion of three kinds of conservatives that come up in the classroom (briefly: obstinate ones who seek not to be confronted, dishonest partisan manipulators, and intellectually honest thinkers).

Also includes thoughts on Weber's Politics as a Vocation, and some thoughts on the differences between a professor and a politician. Put simply:

The duty of the professor to the student is not to impart the professor’s values to the student, but rather to help the student to understand his or her own values more clearly.

vs the politician:

The duty of the politician, in contrast, is precisely to use argument to express one’s own beliefs and, where possible, to sway others towards them so that one’s political goals can be achieved.

There is a difference between the way these two worlds look at debate. Here Henry puts some good words to a problem I've experienced firsthand when debating friends with political jobs. It is not just about expressing yourself, but in exploring which aspects of your views are flawed. Not in trying to cover them up or distract from their flaws, but to expose their flaws to your own analysis. Politics avoids that altogether, understandably so.

The scholarly realm (within the social sciences) is one of debate where one starts from the premises that no point of view is foundationally right. Thus, the teacher imparts two important kinds of moral lesson to her student – lessons that allow the student to clearly articulate his own views to himself, and lessons that allow the student to recognize in principle that no point of view provides an account of the world that is complete and foundationally grounded.

Very interesting!

And to make a point directly to Horowitz and those of his ilk:

His main line of attack is that of the standard political hack, concocting a farrago of innuendoes, half-truths and out-and-out lies in order to beat down those whom he sees as his political opponents. However, when he’s attacked in the same terms as those he himself engages in, he’s perfectly happy to appeal to academic norms of reasoned debate in order to accuse his accusers of themselves being politicized.

This is something that's annoyed me about the current incarnation of conservatism -- they don't believe in politeness, diversity, respect for others.... except that they've learned to use these as cudgels against people who do believe in them!

Bonus: a commentator links Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance from 1965.