Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Vol. CLIV, Issue 6
Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Whitman news since 1896

Whitman Wire

Whitman and the end of politics: A conservative farewell

I owe a lot to Whitman. During these years I have traveled all over the Middle East, China and Latin America and studied the languages of those areas. The texts and authors I have read in class have been a jumping off point into my own reading and intellectual journey. My professors have on the whole been excellent. I have met some people here who I consider life-long friends.

Yet, I have never seen a worse case of group-think than the Whitman campus. There is something about the Northwest culture of politeness (or just aversion to conflict) and the dominant environmentalist-postmodernist-globalist mindset that combines to make for a rather stifling public intellectual atmosphere.

What is an education if not an intellectual debate? Debate presupposes difference. If I have one great problem with Whitman, it is the incredible homogeneity of belief, and thus a lack of genuine public discussion.

I know of at least two students who left Whitman because they simply could not stand the homogeneously leftist and secular intellectual atmosphere.

Whitman is a less diverse campus than when I came four years ago, despite now boasting an intercultural building. When I came to Whitman, I encountered a handful of people seriously concerned with publicly questioning the dominant mode of thought on campus.

Today, however, I can seriously say that I am the only person who publicly identifies and engages in public debate as a conservative. There are other conservatives, of course, but try getting one to write an article in The Pioneer or start a conservative group and it is quickly a different story. Maybe Whitman, an intellectual and academic institution, should start spending its money to encourage intellectual and academic diversity.

The world of ideas is one of combat. There is no combat at Whitman. There is not even a College Republicans or a College Democrats, let alone an institutionalized system of political discourse like the Yale Political Union. This kind of environment is crippling for Whitman students, who will encounter an America and a world with drastically different values then they have and where high stakes mean taking few prisoners.

The problem isn’t just about conservatism, but also about liberalism on Whitman’s campus. I was at Seattle University over the weekend and saw posters advertising a public discussion about the possibility of (and advocating) socialism in America today. Clearly at least some college students still consider social injustice serious enough to advocate for something more than the bourgeois liberalism of the Democratic Party. The liberalism at Whitman strikes me not as a philosophical or ideological one, but as a cultural one, which arises not from critical thought but from conformity with the dominant discourse of most Whitties’ class and cultural background.

This column is not a prelude to “God and Man at Whitman,” my illusions of Buckley-like grandeur aside (I don’t expect many Whitman students to get that reference). This is, however, my last column in The Pioneer, after years of sporadic writing and editorships. I had high hopes for my columns. I wished to challenge Whitties’ assumptions about politics and hopefully stir debate by taking controversial and conservative positions. I may have challenged, but there was little debate. I got some letters to the editor, some comments online, but largely, there has been little response to my writing. Conservatism at Whitman is such a minority position that it appears ignoring it is far more effective than debating it.

For example, during the presidential primary I put up a Ron Paul sign on campus and the only response was not a competing candidate’s sign, but one calling Ron Paul a white supremacist. Behold the product of a liberal arts education?

Or perhaps last month, when I was asked to sign a thank-you poster in Reid for “National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers,” not merely to celebrate a woman’s right to choose, but to celebrate the actual individuals who physically abort fetuses. I wonder what would have happened if I held a “National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Provider Assassinators” in response. Both glorify what millions of reasonable American citizens consider violent and murderous acts. Yet I probably would have been reprimanded or expelled.

Thankfully, Whitman seems to know it has a problem. There have been a couple very good libertarian speakers this year, which hopefully indicates a trend towards greater intellectual diversity. This year Whitman also offered a politics seminar called Conservative Political Thought, which was an excellent class and puts Whitman at the cutting edge of a growing trend: the academic study of conservatism in political science and sociology.

Whitties seem solely concerned with solving other people’s problems. Yet I look at my four years (or three minus one in Egypt) at Whitman as an incredible lesson in the problems of America’s own elite. Since we will be called upon to solve the immense fiscal, moral and military problems facing our nation soon enough, I find this lesson in self-awareness more important than any.

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  • A

    Alex PotterMay 26, 2010 at 12:29 am

    Dear Gabrielle Boisrame aka “A Comrade”,

    I think you are absolutely right that dualisms like “conservative” and “liberal” are hegemonic and stymie real political discussion. However, and you may disagree with me, I find that the best rhetorical tactic is to redefine what we mean by terms we commonly hear like “conservative” rather than invent new words. So yes, I say “conservative”, but what I mean by that you obviously have not been following. Particularly in a newspaper column, I must work within the commonly understood language of our political scene.

    I challenge you to read my articles for the Pio this year, like “Obama’s conservative foreign policy” “Gay marriage is conservative” “Is capitalism conservative?”, “Localism is conservative”, “The dawn of the conservative democratic party?”, or “What liberals can learn from paleoconservatives” and then argue that what I am representing is merely a regurgitated Republican Party platform. Indeed, you mention paleoconservatism in your post, which is what most of my own columns have actively represented as a “real” conservatism. I will let your more vitriolic comments stand on their own as comments more about your own ability at intellectual discussion than mine. If you would like a more extended discussion, my email is [email protected]

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  • F

    From a comradeMay 25, 2010 at 2:06 am

    You’re ridiculous. This column is ridiculous. You presuppose that the only alternative to “the dominant environmentalist-postmodernist-globalist mindset” is conservativism. Wrong. You fall into the trap you’re precisely highlighting as hegemonic. There are many more ideologies and political positions than liberal and conservative Mr. Potter and you should know better than to reinforce a duality that stifles discourse as much, or even more, than having one dominant ideology. If you would like to speak about diversity, then you should lead by example and not by the pathetic, limiting, and insulting two-party system upon which our country’s sad excuse for a democracy–perhaps one of the worst in the world–is based. Your columns for The Pioneer are useless. All you do is restate mainstream conservative ideas, not attempting to engage anyone in a debate. If you really cared about difference, pluralism, or the like, you would surely make some sort of effort to speak about truly “different” political positions like communism, Zionism, religious feminism, paleoconservativism, and social anarchism, to name a few. I really hope you’re self-reflexive enough to think for yourself and not buy into all those ink stains you make on the paper.

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