Conservative ideology is focused around defining progress (a term somewhat at odds with conservatism itself) as a return to a previous state of affairs (that may have never existed in the first place). That our civilizations apotheosis is somewhere in the past, not the future. This does not seem a compatible perspective with the idea of the university, which was handed down to us from the ideas of Socrates: to probe the universe, to find the answers to misunderstood and perplexing phenomena; to search for the truth. To a conservative ideologue, the truth lies behind us. To the rest of humanity, the truth lies beyond us.

That's not to say that history doesn't have an important role to play for the forward-thinking. On the contrary. We'd like to get the record straight or as close to right as possible. This often flies in the face of the imagined past conservative thinking seems transfixed upon.

This strikes me as a vast generalization. I think that the author of the article is also including people who have conservative economic views (he calls out libertarians as a marginalized group, who are socially liberal and economically conservative). Surely there's nothing about economic conservatism that flies against progress or probing the universe.

While I am not conservative, I believe there is a lot that can be learned from those with a conservative viewpoint.

Libertarians are in a special category. They are the ultimate utopians in the sense that they believe, perhaps in the complete absence of understanding of the role of the state in the creation of markets, that a market is purely a point of exchange between two or more individuals. There has never been such thing in history. Not in the sense that we understand civilization (for better or worse) as it is today.

Libertarianism and Conservatism doesn't make sense, as you said. Discourse of these ideologies should be banned from university grounds.

> a return to a previous state of affairs (that may have never existed in the first place)

If chasing a state that never really existed wouldn't that make conservatism some sort of defacto progressive utopianism?

Could not have formulated the question better.

> Conservative ideology is focused around defining progress [...] as a return to a previous state of affairs

> To a conservative ideologue, the truth lies behind us.

Given the context, I disagree with your interpretation of the "conservative" label.

It is obvious (to me) that what the author means in this particular article, and the grandparent, is "Conservatism as defined in United States political ideology" [1], perhaps of the Barry Goldwater flavour, and not your broader and in this context misleading definition, which coupled to some of the more vocal people calling themselves conservatives today leads to a form of association fallacy I've observed some university departments use precisely to reject "conservatives".

This particular definition of conservatism is compatible with scientific progress and new thinking, as shown by the evidence of decades of both happening in politically conservative university departments (in the US and abroad) in the 20th century.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_Sta...

I believe conservatism partially covers the "second moment" as well: for instance, one might think that civilization has progressed further than it has ever in the past, but it's accelerating towards a state of affairs that will "overshoot" and end up being worse than some future state.

Maybe we conceptualize political views around higher moments of progress, like jerk-progress and snap-progress.

Can you cite a prominent contemporary conservative who says "We think that progress is going back to a previous state of affairs"?

Because it sounds like a caricature that makes it easy to say "Oh yeah, of course we can't have these crazy conservatives around young people".

I think it's right there on the tin.

http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_conservatism.html

"Conservatism is any political philosophy that favours tradition (in the sense of various religious, cultural, or nationally-defined beliefs and customs) in the face of external forces for change..."

s/liberialism/conservitism

There's a reason people are voting with their feet in the millions for our capitalist country, not their socialist.

These are at best wiggle words now. Capitalism is a term coined by Marx no less as a criticism. Socialism is a term that is adopted by many different regimes, some democratic, some autocratic. So it too is an almost meaningless word.