The Theologian and the Wonk

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Tuesday, December 15, 1998

It is numbingly difficult for me to think of two less offensive symbols for contemporary conservatism than CS Lewis and Ward Connerly. These two personify serious, thoughtful, courtly, tame — the theologian and the wonk.

The Ivy League, long noted to prefer the political thought of Marcus Garvey and the religion of Wavy Gravy, doesn't see things, of course, in quite the same fashion.

The Ivy League, through its two fine institutional representatives, Dartmouth and Columbia, seems to find Lewis and Connerly immediately and fundamentally frightening — so frightening, in fact, that the Ivy League (at this point a mindset far more than an athletic association) sees fit to employ the basest sorts of censorship to prevent their views from being freely spoken.

The examples, one by one:

Columbia and Ward Connerly. Accuracy in Academia, a think-tank and activist group dedicated to national issues of academic tradition, put up the money for a group of Columbia students to hold a conference on, of all things, speech codes and the repression of free expression on College campuses. Accuracy in Academia assembled a fairly formidable and accomplished roster of speakers — US News' conservative columnist John Leo, author and biographer Dinesh D'Souza, and Connerly.

Columbia's administration demanded that Columbia come up with several thousand dollars extra security (and gave them four hours to do it) — as if anyone this side of the Gulag thinks serious thinkers like Leo and D'Souza constitute an immediate physical threat. Accuracy in Academia fronted the money, and the conference went on.

The conference had, of course, been preceeded by two weeks of antagonistic propaganda in the daily Columbia papers — the usual fare: badly veiled charges of racism, sexism, the urgent threat posed to Civil Rights by Dinesh D'Souza, etc. — and all of this pervaded not just by students but by administrators and professors too. So it was quite a lynch mob that greeted Ward Connerly when he went to speak at this conference — participants were jeered, spit on, and physically threatened.

Rather than take action against the protestors, however, institutional Columbia, in a memo that also incongruously affirmed its dedication to affirmative action (an issue not being discussed at the conference), unceremoniously booted the conference off campus, effectively denying its own students the right to free political expression. The same memo contained a stern political rebuke of Connerly et. al.

Dartmouth and CS Lewis. Dartmouth's chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ, a national evangelical organization, has distributed a copy of the theological works of CS Lewis to the Hinman Box of every Dartmouth student, as a reminder of the spiritual basis of Christmas. There was no problem up until this year, when Scott Brown, Dean of the Tucker Foundation, decreed that this was offensive, an imposition of religion on non-Christian students. Brown told the Campus Crusade that they could only distribute the book to those students with a declared Christian affiliation — a big limitation, considering the CCC's avowed purpose is to convert non-believers to Christianity.

Scott Brown seems to forget a simple solution for those students offended by the presence of CS Lewis' book in their mailboxes: they can throw it out. In the last year, I've gotten unwanted solicitations for American Express, propaganda from Uncommon Threads, and offer sheets from pornographic equipment stores — far more offensive material, it strikes me, than the theology of CS Lewis.

All of this comes on the heels of the national reaction to Chi Gam's silly but harmless ghetto party, which has been deemed racist and classist on ABC and in The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and on most of the major wire services. Bill Cook's consequent attacks on free speech, delivered to spearhead the protest against Chi Gam, meanwhile, have gone either unnoticed or supported.

The hysterical, near-millenial righteousness with which the new New Left takes its shrill political subjects forces campus debate into a climate about as temperate as the more boa-infested regions of the Amazon. The freedom with which the 'tolerance' crowd charges 'racism' at the drop of a hat is shameless — and it is the thread which draws together the reaction to the Chi Gam party and the censorship at Columbia.

Words, as the feelings folk have been telling us for years, do tend to hurt.

The Theologian and the Wonk

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