Conservatives frame the ideal university as apolitical and thereby dismiss criticism as ideology.

Evidence

Because of its complicity with dominant ideologies and practices, Jacoby saw the university as a conservative sphere that bought off even its most critical intellectuals. On the other hand, conservatives like Roger Kimball, Charles Sykes, Lynn Cheney, David Horowitz, and William Bennett translate a contempt for critical thinking and social criticism into appropriate educational behavior and see the ideal university as an apolitical public sphere inhabited largely by a disinterested faculty engaged in an ahistorical conversation among great minds and pedagogically bound to hand down the ideas and values of the classics to a new generation of would-be thinkers. The university of this latter scenario becomes in instrumental terms largely a mechanism for social and cultural reproduction and a repository for transmitting both the timeless knowledge and skills of the culture of business and the high cultural values and ideals of the dominant society see Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991, 1993. More nuanced neoconservatives such as Alan Wolfe (2001) argue a similar position but without the courage of making visible their own political convictions. Defining the most important attribute of the public intellectual as being true to oneself, Wolfe celebrates objectivity, independence, and civility as the most important elements that define the vocation of the intellectual. In this view, conventionality and disinterestedness replaces intellectual courage. Producing ideas that might be critical of existing orthodoxies or crucial to a democratic society are summarily dismissed as an expression of ideology. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2627

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the wider debate about the ‘tenured radicals’ charge and how institutions depoliticize critique — parallels with readings on the corporate university and academic labor.
• SEED: Possible essay: how ‘disinterestedness’ and ‘objectivity’ are deployed as silencing mechanisms against critical scholars, with the right’s university critique inverted into a defense of the status quo.