Brandeis students are generally liberal. Brandeis students are generally closed-minded.

One of these statements seems wrong; together, they must be somehow contradictory. It is my contention that both of these two generalizations have at least a grain of truth, and their related nature helps explain the nature of student politics at Brandeis.

The first claim is perhaps the more familiar one. Evidence of Brandeis' leftward slant is so commonplace that it can be hard to single out. For what it's worth, U.S. News & World Report considered our student body to be the ninth most liberal in the country. Cranky conservative David Horowitz found two of the 101 most dangerous academics in America at Brandeis, including the generally beloved Prof. Gordon Fellman (SOC). Why so dangerous? Predictably, Horowitz worried that these professors would brainwash students with liberal values.

While I don't mean to dig this controversy up again, Horowitz's argument is silly for an important reason: Most students don't need any help converting to the cause of left-leaning liberalism. Furthermore, for many, liberalism is less a thoughtful political cause than a reflex, a worldview held by many who demand it be upheld at every possible instance.

The example for this can be seen in the familiar pattern of behavior that occurs every time a speaker is invited to campus. The speaking engagement somehow turns into a debate, Brandeis students inevitably protest this change and a storm of controversy builds up until the actual event when the speakers say exactly what everyone knew they were going to say, and few, if any, minds walked out unchanged.

To men, it has always seemed telling that students are often petrified of debate. Needless to say, a fear of hearing someone else's ideas does not demonstrate a confidence in one's own: witness the reactions to the on-campus presence of Alan Dershowitz and the lingering fallout from the Gold/Goldstone controversy. Remember, the cause of the latter event's disruptive protest was the lack of a Palestinian person onstage: Anyone of a different background was judged a priori to have nothing to contribute. This reflexive concern for style-i.e. diversity over substance-or whatever this non-Palestinian person actually would have said-is indicative.

There is, to be fair, some tension between theory and practice. The Politics department offers a class on conservative political thought. The enrollment figures suggest there is considerable interest in this course. In an e-mail to the Justice, the course's instructor, Prof. Bernard Yack (POL), claims that in his years of teaching this course he has encountered "no problem with resistance to the material." Yack stresses how the course is concerned more with classical political thought and not so much with "contemporary conservative [activism]."

The Chronicle of Higher Education, in two articles this year alone, has been concerned about classes like Yack's. A recent one proposed precisely the opposite of Yack's, namely a course that would study recent political developments up close. A more thoughtful article from earlier in the semester stressed how courses on conservative thought need to present the right as "a tradition" and not "a pathology." This seems to be what Yack is saying, although I wonder if many students interested in this "use" the tradition as a way to criticize the more "pathological" elements in the contemporary right wing.

The latter article from the Chronicle mentions Horowitz's aforementioned list; it concedes that Horowitz is an annoying man but annoying at least partially because he has something of a point. It seems somehow academically insufficient to allow politically involved students at a historically politically involved institution to graduate without an understanding of such a significant force in American politics. Professors like Yack will surely continue to offer meaningful and serious classes on classic conservative political thought that some students will surely always approach with genuine curiosity. But many more students will walk through college without this experience and will shirk away from new ideas. We Brandeisians, and left-leaning college students everywhere, would do well to seek out and listen to political viewpoints foreign to our own.