Professors take their job very seriously, especially at a college where teaching is their primary reason to exist. My most left-wing professor, an avowed socialist, is my BA thesis adviser and is going to be writing me a recommendation for grad school. He loved that I was both his best student and the only vocal social conservative he's taught in years. The fact that he is a methodologist and is interested in public opinion basically meant that whenever we talked about liberal vs. conservative breakdowns of opinion on a variety of issues he would check in with me to make sure he was "getting conservatives" right.

Even at UChicago, a school that does have a sizable conservative/libertarian faculty contingency, the overwhelming intellectual center of the faculty is supremely left wing. I just remember the controversy that broke out due to our dedication of the Milton Friedman Institute a few years back; I've assiduously avoided the professors that signed the letter opposing its creation. But I've never really heard of any professors taking it out on students because of their ideological predilections.

When I read this, I just think about the customs my mother's family, who are of Japanese decent, instilled in me. Parents and children have moral obligations to one another: and the highest priority is the promotion and furtherance of the progeny. So it would be considered extremely shameful for an elderly parent to drain their funds so their children have no inheritance, just like it would be equally shameful if those kids took that inheritance and spent it on frivolous or luxurious things.

The goal of every Japanese parent is to raise children who are more well off, respected, and honorable then themselves, and the highest priority is placed on the young and the most likely to succeed. And the most important place to spend this money is, what a shock, education and individual betterment. Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but I cannot stand the self-centeredness of the baby boomers.

1. What specific reforms are you willing to make to entitlements to prevent insolvency?

2. Who would be on your short list for the Supreme Court, and what characteristics do you want in a Justice?

3. What does it mean to call yourself conservative? Besides obvious choices like Ronald Reagan, who would you say has influenced your conservatism?

I would add one more adjustment: no live audiences. Nobody but the candidates and the panelists/moderators should appear. The absence of cheering or booing crowds will alter the atmosphere, and force candidates to actually answer the questions. Being carefully probed by intelligent people who know what they're talking about will force Bachmann to explain how she would actually get gas below $2 per gallon. I think Romney, Gingrich and Huntsman would do well with this type of format to the detriment of candidates who throw red meat one liners, although it would be interesting so see how they would alter their debate style. The problem is that any such debate would have fewer viewers than Book TV, as debates are more or less bread and circuses anyway.

I think that's an excellent idea. Making these less and less like canned speeches and more like actual debates would be excellent. And in this format, sometimes politicians can, in fact, thrive: consider when Reagan debated William F. Buckley on the Panama Canal Treaty. Would any of our current presidential candidates (besides Newt) agree to something like that today?

For all of the issues Huntsman brings to the table, perhaps the most impressive is his commitment to the Ryan plan and his own tax proposals that actually, radically, reforms the tax code in a way that could greatly improve national productivity. See Nicole Gelinas (who's own book on the financial crisis After the Fall was outstanding) at NRO talk about the Huntsman plan.  James Pethokoukis also heartily endorses it.

I think with this, Huntsman is trying to fill the Paul Ryan/Mitch Daniels void in talking seriously about tax and economic reform. I don't know if he is actually serious about this though, so it is just speculative at this point.

Not to engage in too much collegiate partisanship here, but this is why I attend the University of Chicago, the only remaining elite research university committed to a classical liberal arts education. The fundamentals of the Core curriculum at Chicago have been somewhat watered down, I will admit, but my collegiate education began with two Core Great Books classes, my humanities sequence Human Being and Citizen partially designed by the late great Allan Bloom, and Classics of Social and Political Thought, put together by Nathan Tarcov, the director of the Leo Strauss Center.

The sad thing is Chicago used to not be the exception, but rather the rule for elite institutions of higher education; liberal arts and an appreciation for Western Civilization were prerequisites for any educated person.

Although UChicago is far from a conservative institution—a recent survey of the undergrads found that only 10% consider themselves conservative—it truly believes in a liberal arts education for its own sake. And I know many a liberal student whose mind was opened because of the Core; nothing makes you a conservative quite like reading Aquinas or Aristotle.

The problem may ultimately be one of perception over reality. Regardless of the realities of the place for scientific inquiries on the right and the left, if the public perception is that the right is anti-science, then those who consider themselves fundamentally "pro-science" may be dispositionally turned off by the right.

As to the question at hand, as to the "pro" or "anti" scientific bent of the right, all I will say is that both sides show a disregard for science when it does not fit their worldview. If anything, this is a problem more pervasive on the left, who wantonly ignore the entire scientific discipline of psychometrics and sociobiology, because both do much to damage the "sacred" ideas of equality—see the completely dishonorable reaction the left had to E. O. Wilson, one of the premier biologists of the last 100 years because he claimed that certain levels of inequality were biologically natural http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson#Criticism_of_human_sociobiology.