CU Chancellor Bud Peterson is reportedly looking for resources to support a chair in Conservative Thought and Policy. Dan Haley, Denver Post editorial page editor, fears that the successful candidate might not be a “real” conservative (The Denver Post, May 18).
Unfortunately for Haley, any university hiring process must, above all, advance the academic prowess of the institution and protect its academic integrity. There is no better guide to these thorny issues than Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. He considered it among his three most significant accomplishments. He advocated the University’s case in the legislature, struggled for the freedom to hire the best faculty and was its rector and architect. He wrote, “We concluded to employ no professor who is not of the first order .” (p. 327, “Jefferson Himself,” Bernard Mayo, University Press of Virginia, 1942)
Like today, various factions wished to impose doctrinal qualifications for Jefferson’s hires, but Jefferson resisted and ultimately won. “Mister Jefferson’s University” is among the finest. World-leading American Universities succeed because their leaders win that battle with their publics, legislatures or trustees, year in and year out.
Following Jefferson, we want the CU Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy then to be “of the first order.” In what discipline is he/she to be of the first order? What special knowledge or methods would this hire bring to the University?
It seems that the distinguishing feature of the chair would be that its occupant would serve as an apologist for a specific ideology. Recently, this ideology has been competing with science to offer narratives for understanding ozone depletion and climate change. Its performance in this competition suggests that the skills of the proposed chair would be in rhetoric and elocution rather than in analysis and understanding.
In the sciences, the practitioner’s preferences for a certain outcomes are subordinated to the scientific observations and the scientific disciplines. The scientific processes for evaluating conclusions are honed to remove common fallacies and to elevate the importance of the relationship between data and conclusions. We know that the role of chlorine in the destruction of stratospheric ozone was clear by 1990.
President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors estimated that 5 million excess deaths from non-melanoma skin cancer would result by the year 2165 from a failure to protect the ozone layer. However, apart from this President, few conservatives were able to utter a coherent thought about the preservation of stratospheric ozone. They feared so much for the fate of the free market in a world committed to protection of the ozone layer that they could only sputter.
Fortunately, under Reagan and subsequent Presidents, the US has participated in aggressive, global measures to protect ozone that are clearly working. One hundred and ninety one countries have ratified the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer and U.S. conservatives are still unable to acknowledge the scientific facts or policy successes. Markets are only slightly less free as a result of ozone layer protection.
The right is similarly disabled with respect to climate change. They routinely attack the scientific consensus on climate change with ad hominem arguments, cherry picking, the use of the red herring and the straw man. It is not right versus left; it is the right versus the National Academies of Science of most countries that have an academy (including the U.S.).
Would a chair of Conservative Thought be expected to take up the cudgel against the laws of physics or would this chair be employed in psychoanalysis of a conservative movement that apes the Italian Inquisition?
Neither adds distinction to the University of Colorado, and no one would much care whether or not the occupant was a real conservative.
James C. Wilson is John Evans Professor, Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, at the University of Denver. EDITOR’S NOTE: This online-only guest commentary has not been edited. Guest commentary submissions of up to 650 words may be sent to openforum@denverpost.com.
