Creative Blogs

In the interest of full honesty, I need to point out that I am generally (but not always) left-of-center. Despite that, I don’t much care for liberal writers. On the other hand, conservative George F. Will is a writer I will generally read, even though he and I often do not see eye to eye.

My reasons for reading Will are simple: George usually gives good reasons for his arguments. Agree or not, I can see a logic to his conclusion.

And even more than that, Will doesn’t always toe the party line. When he objects to what other Republicans are doing, he says it. That is a critical attribute for any political pundit, and even, any citizen: if everyone is thinking the same way, who’s thinking?

But currently Mr. Will is contending that our colleges and universities are dominated by liberals, and that this is cause for alarm. I must take exception to his comments.

First, the Pentagon absorbs the largest share of the US Budget; if you consider that VA is part of our military budget, then the military budget is even a larger behemoth than we normally consider it. Not surprisingly, the military and the industrial lobbyists that support it have tremendous sway over our government. And this highly influential military-industrial complex is overwhelmingly conservative. But Will doesn’t object to that.

Likewise, huge conglomerates exert great influence over us, and they are almost uniformly conservative. They sell their wares– and their lifestyle– in the constant advertisements that surround us. In recent years, large corporations have also bought out much of our media, and so our news has also slipped to the right. That life-long educational input easily overwhelms the brief years of college, but conservative pundits are not so concerned about that partisan influence as they are about liberal college professors.

And our Churches, which ostensibly are our moral guides, are increasingly moving to the right. Evangelical churches, the fastest growing part of Christendom, overwhelmingly vote with conservative candidates. But Will doesn’t worry about those.

Are George Will and the other conservative writers worried that our colleges are overly partisan? Or just that it’s someone else’s party?

Then there is the imperative to produce independent-minded citizens, as well as the imperative of God-given Free Will. If we don’t expose students to as many viewpoints as possible, how will they learn to think? How will they every make their own choices, and exercise their Free Will? Where will our young people experience liberal ideas, if NOT in college?

This is no small point. For their non-college lives, our students are immersed in corporate– i.e., conservative– content. How will we expose students to liberal ideas, if we don’t do it in college? How else will they ever get a chance make their own choice, and make up their own minds?

Certainly Mr. Will is supportive of Providential free will, and the unfettered flow of ideas in a democracy.

It would be hard to argue that this liberal collegiate exposure has been detrimental to the conservative movement. To the contrary: despite many decades of dominance by liberal thinkers in our citadels of learning, in the past decade we elected the first unipartisan government since WW II– and it was conservative. This strongly suggests that neither the corporation nor the university dominate the mind of the citizen; her mind is her own. The citizen is exposed to diverse viewpoints, and this exposure strengthens the democracy, rather than weakens it.

Last, we need to consider what a university is for. If, as the name suggests, conservatives ‘conserve’– i.e., defend the traditional– then obviously, our universities need to be liberal. Our universities are our primary institutions of research, which means that one of their primary missions is precisely to question the traditional, to examine what is currently believed. If progress is a matter of constantly questioning the accepted and the obvious, then to be effective, our universities will always place themselves in opposition to conserved ideas.

And so, to be effective, our universities must be liberal.

So with all due respect to Mr. Will, I would hope that he stops criticizing our universities for being liberal. If they were not liberal, they– and we– would not be doing our jobs.

There is a chronic problem with politics. It’s the power of the incumbent. Once someone is elected to office, the chances of the candidate being unseated by a challenger decreases with each successful reelection. The consensus is, that this often leads to complacency, to laziness, and even to graft.

So an increasing number of states have instituted term limits: so many terms in office, and you can’t stand for reelection. Recurrent efforts at instituting these limits at the Federal level have failed, with the exception of the Oval Office. After FDR, presidents have been limited to two terms.

Political observers, however, have noted these limits are not entirely a good thing. Edmund Burke pointed out that skillful governance is a trade, a profession even; there is much to learn about running government. It takes at least two years for most elected freshmen to learn even the basics of a job. To learn enough to move into a position of real effectiveness may take 10 years or more.

Currently in Louisiana, our own term limits have just started kicking in, producing a madhouse turnover of the legislative branch, and a loss of all real seniority. The consensus among the pundits is that the winners here will be the lobbyists: they are the only ones left with any long-term experience in state policy. Shifting from incumbent to lobbyists, somehow, does not seem to be what reformers were aiming for.

Another problem is the nasty partisanship we see. The infighting has reached levels not seen for decades, to the point that effective governance has become a side-show, a secondary concern. Everyone is so busy trying to make the other guy wrong, that no one knows what is right anymore. At a point that the Soviet Union no longer divides the world, at a time that America could be leading the world in fighting oppression and suffering, we are simply fighting with each other instead.

So here’s a suggestion that might address both problems: Extendable Term Limits. When a candidate reaches the end of standard term limits, he/she may run again– IF a consensus (private) vote of the body in which the candidate serves permits it. The first post-limit try, the candidate needs a simple majority. But every election after that, the required consensus increases by 3%. So first post-limit permission requires more than 50% of the concerned house; next time, more than 53%; then 56%, and so on.

And for the executive office, perhaps candidacy beyond the basic term limits would require those percentages of both houses.

The impact from this could be large. ‘Good old boys’ who cut self-serving deals– and who are not above cutting a few corners in the process– will quickly find themselves unable to stand for reelection. Those who choose to do the real work of democracy, cobbling together coalitions, and negotiating to identify consensus opinions, will find their influence constantly increasing.

And the Good ol’ boys will find quickly find themselves in the political unemployment line. The damage they cause will be very limited.

Only those elected officials who show true leadership, those who reach across the aisle, those who build consensus, those who focus on agreement, not acrimony– those will be the people will move into increasing positions of power. And the number of their terms will directly correlate with the vision and skill they bring to the job.