It’s still amazing to think that there are so few conservative professors that CU Boulder had to go out of its way to find one.

Andrew Desiderio has the story.

Conservative Professor Heads Into The Fray

Conservatism is often misunderstood, maligned and manipulated, said Dr. Bradley J. Birzer.

Its “poor reputation,” said Birzer – recently tapped as the incoming Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at CU Boulder – stems from many sources.

“It’s been hijacked by those who want to commodify it and narrow it for personal gain,” he said in an interview with The College Fix.

It’s often also identified as being “imperialist and fundamentalist, politically, though its origins are as rich as they are broad and far more often non-political than political,” he adds.

As Dr. Birzer heads into his new post, he said he hopes to illustrate that, at its heart, conservatism is rooted in the founding principles of America.

“I’ve spent the last fifteen years at a small but powerful college that proudly defends the liberal arts and the American tradition of liberty under law,” said Birzer, a history professor and the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College.

In a statement to CU Boulder, he added that: “To my mind, being a conservative has little to do with politics, but instead has much to do with identifying and preserving excellence in art, culture, literature and scholarship.”

“It means to identify and conserve the particular talents, dignity and freedom of each individual and, where possible, to connect all persons across time from the beginning of things to the end.”

Birzer will teach several western civilization courses at CU Boulder, and said he believes that conservatives “must not only embrace the western traditions of the Great Books, Stoicism, excellence in all things, individuality without community,” but also remember more recent voices often forgotten, including Irving Babbitt, Willa Cather, Russell Kirk and Christopher Dawson, among others.

University leaders say the point of the conservative post is to secure a highly visible scholar “deeply engaged in either the analytical scholarship or practice of conservative thinking and policymaking or both.”