The recent firing of Harvard president Claudine Gay (a fitting prelude to the presidency of Barack Obama) has encouraged many conservatives to heap contempt on Harvard, our elites, & higher education. Yet liberals do own Harvard & many other institutions that bolster their dominance of America, whereas conservatives have very little, so one expects that there is a great shame that underlies this contempt. After all, we all suspect that almost anyone on the conservative side would love to be invited to ascend into the liberal elite. These days, even the more embarrassing or shameless conservative political or media figures, however demotic their rhetoric, tend to come with Harvard degrees or whatever is second best…
This difference goes under many names, because there are a few different analyses of the situation we all see: The people who run America spit on Americans for sport or out of principle. My friend Chris Rufo, who played an important part in getting the Harvard president fired, prefers to think of this as the Progressive “long march through the institutions,” following the Gramsci transformation of Marxism into, well, fascism for the lefties. One difficulty of this analysis is that liberals ran elite American institutions & despised most of the country even before WWII. (Think of the liberal v. fundamentalist quarrels among Protestants going back a good century.)
However we think about the causes of our problem, we should notice the structure. Money is not the preserve of liberals, conservatives have money too, but prestige is uniquely to be found on the liberal side. This situation encourages different kinds of leaders to seek success in either camp according to their abilities & outlook. Friend of PoMoCon James Patterson talks about this in a fine new essay I recommend, over at Law & Liberty. Patterson calls this conservative v. liberal dichotomy “car dealers v. New Dealers,” the people who fear taking any losses versus the people who will make all sorts of sacrifices (preferably at others’ expense) to achieve long term goals.
[Seen] through the car dealer paradigm, education becomes a service for sale, while students are the consumers, administrators the management, & faculty the labor. Under this model, the primary source of income is tuition, so tuition dictates low-prestige education that diverts the college away from its mission.
New Dealers focus on institution-building in the long term. According to the New Dealer approach to higher education, education is formation, & students are investments, administrators patronage appointments, & faculty the face of the institution. Under this model, donors are the primary source of income.
Patterson talks especially about conservative institutions of higher education, which are oftener than you might think Christian liberal arts school. Under “car dealer” administrations, every aspect of that assembly of high callings is being ruined—because conservatives do not understand prestige & do not think they either need it or can afford it. Hence the inability to produce elites that would challenge & replace liberal elites at least in conservative America. To put it in strong terms, conservatives tend to illiteracy.
My friend Joshua Steinman often talks about this same dichotomy, especially in his domain, tech startups, as “merchants v. aristocrats.” Steinman likes to compare Zuckerberg to a merchant, because he obeys elite opinion—cannot afford bad publicity—& gov’t agencies—the conditions of doing business; he likens Elon to an aristocrat because he asserts his will & makes enemies accordingly. Joshua brings out something Patterson rather leaves concealed, that you need pride & courage to achieve anything over the long term, because you need the trust of the public & the loyalty of your followers. Conservatives badly fail here because they either cannot find leaders who have such qualities or they cannot find projects that summon such leaders.
Another friend, Andrew Beck, often complains about this same problem in other terms still, he wonders that, given how rotten liberal cultural institutions are, conservatives have not formed any avantgarde. Well, at this point we must bring up the question of aristocracy. Modernism in art has always been the attempt to create a new aristocracy, to the point of the bohemians imitating decaying aristocracy. The French Revolution created the Marquis de Lafayette, but also the Marquis de Sade. The major issue in 19th c. art is the decay of the aristocracy & its soulless replacement, the bourgeoisie. This criticism is rightwing, ranging from the reactionaries, to the artists—Balzac, Stendhal come to mind—to the philosopher Nietzsche.
The modern & American problem is to find the opportunity for aristocracy & the need for it within democracy itself, without depending on the victims of the various revolutions. Tocqueville is the thinker most concerned with this moral-political problem. How can America summon men who are at least aware of greatness or touched by greatness, that they might contribute their unique powers to the common good, especially in moments of great danger? The American republic is no doubt in deadly danger. Conservatives will all find out what they really believe in now, since they will be robbed of their favorite dream, caution, which has lead to institutional mediocrity, endless talk of leadership & no leaders to speak of, much less to follow. The commercial republic makes of us betting men, gamblers, & now we must put our money where our mouths are. The most important things for us are suddenly also urgent, these two things, what does it mean to be generous & what does it mean to be daring?
I went to high school through one of these conservative Christian liberal arts universities you mention and attended college through another, two that are sort of infamous in America actually: Bob Jones University (the Coens' even made a joke about it in 'The Ladykillers') and Pensacola Christian College. The problem you say about them is very true. They were not at all interested, or so they said, in having the prestige of the elite institutions. They sought to create their own little islands of influence, both of those institutions offering and encouraging their own conservative Christian education from kindergarten to doctorate degrees. However, very few of the graduates from these two institutions have had any influence on America at all, even though the two schools' names are well-known, and even though they have been around for 97 and 50 years respectively. I guess one of the best things I can say about Bob Jones is that at least they have a pretty good collection of medieval and Renaissance Catholic art, but they hide it way in the back of their (halfway decent) museum and give it numerous labels explaining why Catholic Christian doctrines are wrong haha. They perform some pretty good Shakespeare plays as well. As for PCC, they don't really have much art at all (mostly just what people associated with the college have done).