In one of the strangest calls for bipartisan — or maybe transpartisan? — unity we've ever seen, the New York Times (gift link) yesterday offered an op-ed by Jon Shields, a history prof at the very very conservative Claremont McKenna College, arguing that if liberals in academe would like to help save America, then liberal professors should "rescue the GOP" — by becoming mentors to bright young conservative students and by teaching courses on conservative thought. This, Shields argues, would be good not only for the students and for conservatism, but also for universities and American politics.

Honestly, it's such a naive argument, and so utterly divorced from modern political reality, that I kind of want to pat the essay on the head and say "goodness, you mean well, don't you? Have you looked outside, though?" It's as if David Brooks were huffing the concentrated vapors of uncut Kumbayah juice.

The are you kidding me? You've got to be kidding me! vibes start with the first sentence and continue throughout the whole mess:

When conservative undergraduates look around for mentors these days, who do they find? Not conservative professors, at least not very often. Our ranks have been slowly vanishing since the 1980s. Instead, those students find organizers from the MAGA-verse who teach them how to own the libs. That’s who is instructing the next generation of Republican leaders, modeling how to act and think like good conservatives. It’s a squalid education, one that deepens their alienation from the university and guarantees that the next generation of elected officials will make Ron DeSantis’s war against higher education look tame.

Who will mentor these poor wandering conservatives? All they have is the poisonous MAGA people, and they aren't conservatives, they're wild people!

Shields doesn't exactly say why conservative professors are so hard to find in universities these days, although there's certainly an implication that liberals drove them out because that's how progressives just do things. Nor does Shields give even a moment's discussion to how it is that conservative intellectuals have become so rare, much less why the MAGA folks have driven all the sensible smart conservatives from the GOP. (The abbreviation "RINO" appears nowhere in the essay, even though it's key to understanding how the wild-eyed crazies have ejected whatever intellectuals were still in the party.)

Still, Shields thinks it would really be a great thing if all the liberals who now make up the bulk of academe could help out and nurture conservative thought on campus, like a captive breeding program would help restore a species that's on the verge of extinction. Liberal professors can fix this sorry situation and teach conservative students

how to become thoughtful and knowledgeable partisans — by exposing them to a rich conservative intellectual tradition that stretches back to Enlightenment thinkers like Edmund Burke, David Hume and Adam Smith. They could mentor their conservative students, set up reading groups, help vet speakers and create courses on the conservative intellectual tradition.

Conservative academics are apparently now so rare in the wild that they can't do any of that themselves, so perhaps liberal profs can hand-feed the fragile conservative nestlings, like how the San Diego Zoo fed California Condor chicks by using puppets that looked like adult condors — you wouldn't want the young conservatives imprinting on a liberal prof who might infect them with postmodernism.