Russell Kirk was a man of tremendous influence in post World War II America. Literary critic, political theorist, and historian, Kirk was an ardent defender of the liberal arts in American higher education and was likewise a defender of traditional American conservatism. His landmark book, The Conservative Mind, has been an ever-present influence on conservative social and political thought since it was published in 1953.

During his career, Kirk was well-placed to observe the problems facing higher education in America. He taught for a time at Michigan State University, but quickly grew discouraged by what he saw as a move at that institution away from the liberal arts in favor of emphasis on technical training and sports.

After leaving Michigan State, Kirk turned to writing. He was an early contributor to National Review and was the founding editor of the journal Modern Age. In 1961 he contributed a lengthy article on the state of American higher education to American Opinion.

Out of print for decades, we are proud to make Russell Kirk's article, "The Intemperate Educator," available online for the first time since 1961.

The Intemperate Educator
By Russell Kirk

At a well-reputed private university, not long ago, a faculty committee was selecting the people to be invited as guest lecturers during the next year. One member of the faculty suggested the name of a famous professor of philosophy, Dr. Sidney Hook. This scholar is a forthright Marxian socialist, long associated with American "liberal" and "progressive" causes. But Dr. Hook also happens to be a courageous anti-Communist, opposing the presence of Communist teachers in the colleges—not simply because he disagrees with them, but because they are conspiratorial agents, discrediting the Academy and deliberately violating professional ethics.

Yet the dean of the faculty at this university angrily vetoed that suggestion. "What?" cried the dean. "Hook? That Fascist reactionary? Why, he's against academic freedom." The dean —not himself a Communist—was all in favor of academic freedom: liberty, that is, for anyone who does not deviate from the dean's private convictions. There are no real enemies to the Left, the dean thinks, and any heretic who believes so should be anathema.

Nowadays the social opinions of numerous American college and university teachers are held with a defiant rigidity. Though these scholars may praise complete freedom of opinion in the abstract, still if someone advances an argument running counter to their political prejudices, they reach for bell, book, and candle. Having known some hundreds of professors on fifty or sixty campuses, I venture here to describe this professional intemperance, and to suggest its causes.

Writing to me about a certain "liberal" conformity in textbooks for courses in American history, a distinguished historian of science observes, "Someone ought to analyze the reasons why an entire class of scholars, teachers, and workers in the field of American history should think so much alike. The situation resembles unpleasantly the pre-revolutionary conditions at the Russian universities of Tsarist days, where faculty and students formed a hostile falange against the regime. That our American government should seem in the same position as the Tsar, is very depressing."

My correspondent, born in Eastern Europe, once was a Communist, and knows American campuses well. Though there may be some measure of hyperbole in his comparison with the Tsarist universities, it remains certain that many professors are profoundly discontented with modern American life, and endeavor to arouse a similar dissatisfaction among their students.

"He that lives in a college, after his mind is sufficiently stocked with learning," Edmund Burke wrote while he was still a young man, "is like a man who, having built and rigged a ship, should lock her up in a dry dock." Now I submit that the principal threat to academic freedom in the United States comes from drydocked minds: the minds of ideologues within the walls of the Academy. Some men who spend their lives within the Academy grow mellow; but others turn sour. The minds of such have been drydocked, and that in rather a mean and ruinous dock. They put one to thinking of Wordsworth's lines:

"The good die first;
And they whose hearts are dry as
summer dust
Burn to the socket."

Theirs is the glory of Cyrus P. Whittle, the Yankee schoolmaster in Santayana's novel The Last Puritan: to demolish famous reputations and to expose as shams the most cherished traditions of our culture. Too many professors feel that they have been invested with the prophetic afflatus; and, having discarded theology and morals like so much antiquated rubbish, they are thrown back upon the dreary resources of Twentieth-Century nihilism. To feel one's self a prophet, but at the same time to insist "I am, and none else beside me," is to indulge a dangerous mood. For lack of anything better, such a professor often turns to some "political religion," some ideology, as a substitute for the traditions of civility and right reason.