I have written before about “intellectual diversity,” which presupposes a sweeping view of American intellectual history in which a “nutritious” diet of Great Books was hijacked by liberals in the ’60s and replaced with feminist and race studies. In this nostalgic fantasy, students in crisp button-downs discussed the Aeneid en plein air until, at midnight on December 31, 1959, they metamorphized into bra-burning protest fanatics.

A recent grant of $50,000 from the Veritas Fund for Higher Education — in case it were unclear who is on the side of truth — has been earmarked to combat the persistent “cynosure of student rebellion” at Cornell. The goals of the proposed Cornell Program on Freedom and Free Societies are sufficiently vague: “[bring] intellectual pluralism” to the University, teach “traditional American history” and “bring back triumphalism to moderate the excesses of gender and [diversity courses].”

The summer update from the foundation laments that “most new courses of the last several decades have focused entirely on race, gender, or postmodernism,” postmodernism here being a little-understood label meant to represent everything that’s wrong with modern academia.

Prof. Barry Strauss ’74, who was chosen to spearhead the “freedom program” at Cornell, was rightfully embarrassed by Veritas’ summer proclamation, which touted the program as an “alternative to radicalism” here. The ideological ramblings of its executive director, David DeRosiers, sweepingly indict an entire campus culture with which DeRosiers has no connection; the accusation that most of the new courses at Cornell over the last several decades have focused on race, gender or “postmodernism” was not a conclusion made from combing through old course offerings, but rather a conservative caricature. It is an insulting, thoughtless assessment.

Had DeRosiers — or anyone from the fund — bothered to look through Cornell’s course offerings, they would find that instruction in the history of Western thought and philosophy remains a staple of Cornell’s curriculum. The Philosophy department teaches courses on Aristotle and Plato, on Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Students can take courses on Western Civilization and American history in the History department, read the Odyssey and study Latin and Greek. Were members of Veritas less concerned with iterating culture war clichés, they would realize that instruction in “the classics” still occurs.

I also wonder on what basis DeRosiers and those at the Veritas Fund make the claim that courses addressing issues of race, class and gender are taught excessively. There is a strange opposition by some to considering these issues, one I can only assume stems from a defensive fear that a blameless and “triumphal” history of Western civilization is being sullied, that American institutions of higher learning are not sufficiently appreciating the history of Western thought.

“They have had a focus on race, gender, class — and in doing so, students have been given a partial view of reality with America as the force of many evils,” DeRosiers states. In its desire to teach a “traditional American history,” the Veritas fund sounds echoes of post-9/11 blame-America-first recriminations. This view is also highly anti-intellectual; it takes exception to critical examinations of Western history that point out contradictions in our self-conception.

Calls for “intellectual diversity” are disingenuous, thinly veiled attacks against academia for being too liberal. The Veritas Fund paints contradictory pictures of Cornell as both a hotbed of dissent and an intellectual monolith whose students and faculty think in lockstep. But anyone who has attended faculty lectures on Cornell’s campus or been a member of an academic department would know that the campus is rife with academic conflicts; there is no shortage of intellectual disagreement on our campus. Just because there is not someone bemoaning the decline of Western civilization and American moral values at every turn does not mean there is no intellectual diversity here.

If the charge is instead that conservatives do not have a clear and compelling voice on campus, I would tend to agree. But this is not generally because their voices are silenced (save the despicable vandalism to The Cornell Review some time ago). Conservatives write regularly for the The Sun, participate in the College Republicans and run The Cornell Review. The fault is rather with conservative campus leaders, who have failed to engage anything but trivial matters such as the use of “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” in downtown December displays. The College Republicans spend their time protesting a student-sponsored lecture on anal sex instead of engaging pressing social and moral questions of our time, though periodically one of the token conservative columnists writes a piece about abortion or affirmative action, about diversity on campus or courses in queer theory. An article in the most recent issue of The Cornell Review satirizes a critical examination of Abraham Lincoln’s commitment to abolition, which I assume is the type of affront to “traditional American history” that the Veritas Fund is intended to address.

In this sense The Cornell Review and the conservative discourse it represents owe more to Ann Coulter than William F. Buckley; the discourse is polemical, a tired repetition of conservative mantras attacking a liberal campus culture. If the Veritas grant does anything, I hope it will be to invigorate conservative discourse that has — at least during my time here — failed to really engage the intellectual community here, to bring to light new opinions that do not simply recapitulate conservative pundits’ talking points. Perhaps it can start by refraining from attacking our faculty and students and propose something to talk about.

Gabriel Arana is a graduate student in linguistics. He can be reached at garana@cornellsun.com. The Red Line appears alternate Wednesdays.