I was struck by your references to the (quite laudable) efforts of the Montclair professors' union to preserve free speech on campus and the right of professors to confront accusers. I think that you make a valid point when you show that unions can serve to protect classical liberties. I would doubt that anyone here would refuse to give the union credit on this count. At the same time, I have to take issue with your assertion that "[m]any union people and representatives are old fashioned liberals." If this were true in the broadest sense, I cannot see how teachers' unions could be the anti-competitive and anti-merit institutions that they so very often are.

If, however, you mean that most individual teachers oppose the thought police, and that a teacher's union will usually reflect this view, I think this is probably and happily true in the very large majority of cases. Even for my teachers who were obviously on the left, most of the time this meant simply that they wanted kids to think and imagine freely, without a lot of prejudices and constraints gumming things up. I was hugely grateful for this, and I still strongly believe that it's the best environment in which kids can develop their minds. Unless one is of a certain type of socially conservative bent or group, I find it hard to believe that many mainstream conservatives would find any qualm with such classic negative (i.e. pro-freedom) liberalness.

By the same token, I think that most conservatives (and perhaps some liberals) find it unacceptable for teachers to positively impose acceptance of a certain social construct on their students that goes beyond the traditional American system of civics. For example, it is praiseworthy for a teacher to teach and demand respect for the efforts to end Jim Crow (and to hold its martyrs up as heroes) because this honors an attempt to ensure everyone's equal access to legal protection and enfranchisement in accordance with American ideals. By contrast, if a teacher were to make it clear that students cannot argue against gay marriage, or that students must mimic a Muslim prayer in a (clumsy) attempt to learn about other cultures, this would be as distasteful to the classically liberal type of conservative as requiring the Bible to be taught as revealed truth in the public schools, or announcing to the class that gay marriage cannot be justified or even discussed since it is against tradition. This is because the teacher's act would here be compulsive rather than persuasive.

Again, unless one is of a firmly parochial worldview, I doubt that many mainstream conservatives would take issue even with the dispassionate and disinterested presentation of information and ideas which are novel and controversial, or with which they might strongly disagree on the merits (such as with respect to the thinking of Singer with respect to infanticide) if the information and ideas actually inform and help the students develop their thinking skills, and if students are free to consider all sides of an argument or datum, and adopt and argue one of their choice without harming their grade. This is the purpose of a traditional, Western-style education, and conservatives must have the confidence to expect that if their ideas are substantively the best, they will be adopted over time by a majority of sharp-thinking, well-educated adults.

I think that common ground could certainly be found on such a basis between conservatives and "liberal" teachers and teachers' unions. If old movies and TV shows are anything to go by, this common ground once existed, at least in agreed principle. It would be very nice indeed if we could get back to that mythic past, laugh off and shoo away the wingnuts and vicious types, establish a general consensus that we all like a good debate and hate getting pushed around by authority figures, and get on to fighting about more practical matters like vouchers.