Commemorating a Non-Conformist

Accuracy in Academia ^ | November 1, 2012 | Malcolm A. Kline

[Academiadotorg]

Just one of the many misconceptions about conservatives, particularly in the academy, is that we all come off of an assembly line. To preserve this fiction, academics prefer to study us from a distance, if at all.

Thus we get studies with bizarre conclusions about how much we love authority figures. They read us backwards: Conformity is the antithesis of our ethos. I’ve been to left-wing and right-wing events and found infinitely more diversity at the latter than at the former.

“For all the cant about ‘openness to ideas’ (that word again!), they cooperate to impose an ersatz consensus on the rest of us,” columnist and author Joseph Sobran wrote more than a quarter of a century ago. Indeed, Sobran spent a good deal of his writing career inveighing—to use a verb beloved at National Review, his place of employment for nearly two decades—against authority figures.

The Fitzgerald-Griffin Foundation has published a collection of Sobran’s NR articles in Joseph Sobran: The National Review Years. In these dispatches, the authority figures Sobran inveighs against run the gamut from then-President Jimmy Carter to Shakespeare (he loved the works but disputed the Bard’s authorship of them).

Although Sobran’s old boss, William F. Buckley, Jr., may be better known for his epigrams, Joe tossed off some pretty good ones himself. “A ‘bigot’ can be defined as a guy who gets caught practicing sociology without a license,” he wrote in 1987.