RIGHT-WING demagogues have been blabbering for years about that legendary “liberal bias” in American higher education. What no one seems to notice is that it’s perfectly justifiable. The University, and others like it, emphasizes liberal perspectives in humanities programs because those perspectives have been the most vital in shaping recent history and the modern world.

Much of the debate at universities like this one and elsewhere is obscured by modern American political culture, which functions in Republican-Democratic, conservative-liberal terms that neglect larger historical trends. Nearly every currently legitimate and surviving sociopolitical and economic ideas in the past four centuries have had liberal inspirations – the modern conservatism that arose with the writings of Edmund Burke and the opponents of the French Revolution remained reactionary and negativistic, attempting to rebuke liberal ideology as, among other things, subversive and irrational while offering little in return.

To get a feel for some of the problems with conservatism, just consider this: small government and fiscal responsibility are not conservative issues, as they are so often rationalized in American political discourse, and to think they are is intellectually dishonest. The first classical liberals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even later, obsessed over limiting centralized power, arguing that humans were intrinsically free and to deny that freedom required explanations in the forms of social contracts and — guess what — constitutions.

Constitutions are essential aspects of liberal methodology, and virtually all liberal democracies today have adopted them as the pivotal, unifying forces that bind nation-states together. Most countries today emerged from liberal ideas. The empires and kingdoms that conservatives supported either fell or, as in the case of the British monarchy, perform ceremonial functions.

So what’s all this got do with our universities today? Colleges are institutions of higher learning — humanities programs within those colleges should seek to help us understand the modern world and how it materialized. Unfortunately for some, liberalism has been the main, though not the only, driving ideological force in human history ever since it exploded politically with the French Revolution. Colleges have to consider this force when they present the important aspects of the modern world.

Modern conservatism has functioned largely by opposing liberal movements and ideas — it is fundamentally reactionary. anti-liberalism, Since ideologies like modern conservatism make few if any original claims, it makes sense for those anti-liberal movements, which ultimately failed, to receive either disparaging or inadequate coverage in contemporary curriculums.

A University history professor described in an interview the larger context behind conservative attacks on academia, positing that marginalized groups feel increasing alienation in an increasingly changing world. The professor portrayed the frustration with intelligentsia as a mechanism to cope with the challenges of modernity. But despite these complications, the professor praised the University for fostering a positive environment for intellectual freedom in the past few decades — true to the wishes of Jefferson, who had high hopes that we would grow into a tolerant institution. The professor also generally disagreed with my stance, commenting that the accusations against academia result more from imagined threats rather than from any connate liberal intentions that colleges might have. By almost any standard, however, the University does have a humanities program that is liberally oriented, but there is nothing wrong with that. The University is trying to educate a new generation, and we should not have to feed it hokum so we can please people who are largely delusional about history.

Colleges do not have an unreasonable bias here. They should maintain liberal approaches in their humanities programs because they most accurately reflect the progression of humankind in the past few centuries. Intellectual freedom and debate of the kind Jefferson wanted should be desirable for us all, but the problem is conservatism has little or nothing to offer beyond saying, “We oppose whatever liberals asseverate.” Stephen Colbert said it best: “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Erald Kolasi’s column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ekolasi@cavalierdaily.com.