It's entertaining, to be sure, but of how much use is it in shaping hiring decisions? You've no doubt had broader experience than I, but over the course of my career I worked for some academic-ish institutes where I was involved in hiring decisions for scores of new PhDs, interviewing each candidate in extenso and reading their dissertations. I did routinely ask who had influenced them most but with very limited exceptions would have been hard put to have placed them on a political map. There was one who wrote her dissertation on Edmund Burke (a distant relation of mine) but she focused on Burke's impassioned (and rather impolitic) opposition to slavery, which would no doubt have disqualified her as a conservative in the eyes of most who claim that title in today's US. My point is that if someone had urged me to make my department "more conservative" (or even "more liberal") while still emphasizing intellectual standards I would have had no idea how to operationalize it. After a few years you will have a candidate's body of published work to review, but that will never tell you whether the candidate is the second coming of Wilson, Huntington, etc. To me it seems that a defining characteristic of a good scholar is the capacity always to surprise you.
And if we were to find a way to answer Teles' plea and install genuine critically-minded scholars who are inclined to investigate more deeply how these issues could be seen through a "conservative" frame (however defined) what might be accomplished? Would they somehow craft arguments that would convince skeptics that the claims of authoritative religion were not only true but deserved to be taken as law? That would convince the poor, members of racial minorities, people regarded as sexual and social deviants, etc. that their inferior status is deserved and must be embraced? That would reconcile the mass to the disproportionate political power of great wealth? Putting aside any considerations of morality, is such a thing even conceivable? Surely not if one is to give any credit to the work of Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, et al.
Which is why I want to talk about actual, real individuals...
It's entertaining, to be sure, but of how much use is it in shaping hiring decisions? You've no doubt had broader experience than I, but over the course of my career I worked for some academic-ish institutes where I was involved in hiring decisions for scores of new PhDs, interviewing each candidate in extenso and reading their dissertations. I did routinely ask who had influenced them most but with very limited exceptions would have been hard put to have placed them on a political map. There was one who wrote her dissertation on Edmund Burke (a distant relation of mine) but she focused on Burke's impassioned (and rather impolitic) opposition to slavery, which would no doubt have disqualified her as a conservative in the eyes of most who claim that title in today's US. My point is that if someone had urged me to make my department "more conservative" (or even "more liberal") while still emphasizing intellectual standards I would have had no idea how to operationalize it. After a few years you will have a candidate's body of published work to review, but that will never tell you whether the candidate is the second coming of Wilson, Huntington, etc. To me it seems that a defining characteristic of a good scholar is the capacity always to surprise you.
Yes, indeed: someone for whom ideologies and frameworks are their tools rather than their masters...
And if we were to find a way to answer Teles' plea and install genuine critically-minded scholars who are inclined to investigate more deeply how these issues could be seen through a "conservative" frame (however defined) what might be accomplished? Would they somehow craft arguments that would convince skeptics that the claims of authoritative religion were not only true but deserved to be taken as law? That would convince the poor, members of racial minorities, people regarded as sexual and social deviants, etc. that their inferior status is deserved and must be embraced? That would reconcile the mass to the disproportionate political power of great wealth? Putting aside any considerations of morality, is such a thing even conceivable? Surely not if one is to give any credit to the work of Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, et al.