Winds of Change.NET: The Price of Academia's Relevance

June 14, 2006

The Price of Academia's Relevance

by Demosophist at June 14, 2006 9:39 PM

I recently read an essay about academic freedom, by Michael Berube on Le Blog. I'd like to address some of what I think are flaws in his argument, but I appreciate the fact that he has gone to the trouble of expressing his thesis in a form that's accessible to the blogosphere. The first issue I'd like to raise is that I think he understates the problem of bias in the academy:

I'll make the obvious argument first. Academic freedom is under attack for pretty much the same reasons that liberalism itself is under attack. American universities tend to be somewhat left of center of the American mainstream, particularly with regard to cultural issues that have to do with gender roles and sexuality: the combination of a largely liberal, secular professoriate and a generally under-25 student body tends to give you a campus population that, by and large, does not see gay marriage as a serious threat to the Republic. And after 9/11 again, for obvious reasons many forms of mainstream liberalism have been denounced as anti-American. There is, as you know, a cottage industry of popular right-wing books in which liberalism is equated with treason (that would be Ann Coulter), with mental disorders (Michael Savage), and with fascism (Jonah Goldberg). Coulters book [sic] also mounts a vigorous defense of Joe McCarthy, and Michelle Malkin has written a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. In that kind of climate, it should come as no surprise that we would be seeing attacks on one of the few remaining institutions in American life that is often though not completely dominated by liberals.

Simply put, be begins by understating the bias and misrepresenting the opposition as a bunch of right-wing kooks. No doubt there's a little hyperbole in the submissions of the three critics he mentions (though at this point he omits more credible critiques, such as Alan Kors' The Shadow University), but sometimes a little hyperbolics are necessary to get the boulder rolling. Recent polls indicate that left self-identification in the humanities within American universities varies from a high of 88% (English) to a low of 77% (Sociology and History), while less than 10% identify with the right in those disciplines. More to the point, there are no longer any reliably conservative disciplines anywhere in academia. Even campus departments traditionally viewed as conservative tend to be more "liberal" than the general population, including business and engineering. According to Stan Rothman's recent testimony to the "Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on American Faculty Ideology", 49% of business and 51% of engineering faculty self-identify as "on the left or liberal" while a minority of 39% in both disciplines self-identify as "on the right or conservative". Moreover, the major shift leftward has been relatively recent. In 1969 the Carnegie Commission found that 45% of faculty identified as left/liberal and 28% as right/conservative. Over the next two decades the situation didn't change much, but then by 1999 72% identified as on the left with only 15% on the right. What changed?

It's difficult to imagine how this change could have been effected without the "piling on" of a cultural orientation that generally attempts to reward like-minded people, and either inadvertently or deliberately excludes oppositional voices. And the shift also coincides with the emergence and rapid ascendance of the multiculturalism theme in academia, which provided effective "cover" for this "piling on" approach. Most people believe "diversity" and "multiculturalism" are simply synonyms for "variety", rather than products of the cultural remapping of Marxist ideology produced by the Frankfurt School. But not only have multiculturalism and diversity become wildly popular concepts (mostly within academia, however) but the concepts have even displaced tried and true leftist iconic prescriptions like "equality of condition". According to the new campus ideology traditional ideological watchwords such as"equality", "freedom", and "liberty" no longer apply to individuals, but to groups. Group rights now not only trump individual rights in nearly every corner of society, but they even trump "academic freedom"! If you doubt this go to any university website and enter these words to compare the number of hits produced. You'll find that there are almost no exceptions to the rule that "diversity" trumps everything. Now try it with a few other institutional website search engines, and compare.

Given these apparent preferences it seems reasonable to at least consider the possibility that such commitments to group rights undermine the set of commitments that, according to Ladd, Lipset, and others define an American Identity. How does it not amount to slander to label this equivalent to racism, and what sort of weak substitute for such a robust rights orientation does "multiculturalism" really represent?

But the second issue is probably more important, though a great deal more difficult to nail down. Ironically it involves the same confusion that sometimes afflicts people on the libertarian right. This involves the notion that freedom is an apparently infinitely extensible attribute, and that absolute freedom is something that one ought to aspire toward or desire, like being rich or thin. In fact, if academia is able to convince both itself, and others, of the truth of this conceptual meme they're liable to find themselves stranded in an airless wasteland where the only movement they'll be able to produce is a helpless Brownian agitation. As the great economist from the London School of Economics, Ralf Dahrendorf, once observed in his book Life Chances (paraphrasing) "Freedom without obligation might as well be obligation without freedom."

Even if we completely discount the "social contract" concept that Berube argues isn't applicable to academic freedom it's nonetheless a fact that failure of the academy to obligate itself in some realistic way will lead to complete ineffectiveness and marginalization, like a weightless untethered astronaut in outer space. That's not the fault of the kooky right. It's just the effect of bad judgment.

In his essay Berube betrays no awareness of this danger at all. The argument is simply that academic freedom is, by definition, without obligation (or that all freedom is, by definition, unobstructed by obligation). If this is freedom, it'll prove useless and powerless. And if achieved it'll feed radicalization on the theory that powerlessness must be someone else's fault.

Michael then addresses the testimony of National Association of Scholars President, Stephen Balch, to the Select Committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (Nov. 9, 2005):

More seriously, Balch is drawing on the history of affirmative action and employment discrimination law in order to argue that universities should make good faith efforts to hire people more to his ideological liking. This is a common theme in right-wing attacks on universities, especially among those critics who have become alarmed that affirmative action has gone too far, insofar as fully five percent of all doctorates are now awarded to black people.

The implication that racism is attributable exclusively to the conservative opposition is a meme so dear to the left that it inevitably proves irresistible. So perhaps we can excuse Michael for being "in the tank." But I think Dr. Balch was employing irony to make the point that there are distinctly credible arguments against such notions as "multiculturalism" that have been effectively silenced within the academy due to the dominance of a contrived ideological formulation, insisting on the "inherent racism" of privileged cultures. S.M. Lipset, who with Everett Ladd produced one of the seminal studies of academic bias, The Divided Academy, once said that in the 1960s and '70s, when he and Ladd conducted their analysis, the ends of the competence spectrum were relatively immune to social pressure in hiring, tenure and promotion. That is, people of extremely high ability were hired and promoted irrespective of their ideological views or race, while those of manifestly low ability simply didn't make the grade no matter how ideologically servile or white they were. But for the vast majority in the middle their "ability to fit in" was the primary determinant of hiring, tenure, and promotion.

This suggests that, at least at the time, people of extraordinary gifts tended to really be free of the threat of social pressure. And if there's a rationale for academic freedom, providing the benefit of independence in research and education, it was only this smallish group that achieved such an absence of limitation during that post-Vietnam era. More recently, another analysis conducted by Stan Rothman suggests that the situation has become worse rather than better, though descrimination is no longer on the basis of race. In other words, not even people of exceptional talent can depend on their abilities to see them through the ideological gauntlet. In such a situation "academic freedom" is starved of significance. It might as well be a straight jacket.

And again, Berube suggests that concerns about bias in the academy are being fomented by the "radical right":

There is a sense, then, in which traditional conservatives are procedural liberals, as are liberals themselves; but members of the radical right, and the radical left, are not. The radical rights contempt for procedural liberalism, with its checks, balances, and guarantees that minority reports will be incorporated into the body politic, can be seen in recent defenses of the theory that the President has the power to set aside certainlaws and provisions of the Constitution at will, and in the religious rights increasingly venomous and hallucinatory attacks on a judicial branch most of whose members were in fact appointed by Republicans.

The first sentence suggests that at least the principle of liberalism is intact for some members of the academy. But I think Berube misrepresents the problem. He'll first have to address the issue of whether or not we're at war; since in most wars certain liberties have been interrupted for the sake of preserving the context responsible for maintaining freedom in general, not by the "radical right" but by the President who emancipated the slaves and by a number of Democrats, most notably Wilson and Roosevelt. It isn't clear to me, for instance, why we'd support a demand for MIT to pay the salary of Noam Chomsky if he persists in giving aid and comfort to sworn enemies of the US, including those who decapitated Daniel Pearl, any more than we'd allow the German/American Bund to schedule campus demonstrations during WWII. Tolerating such activity during wartime may simply be too much to ask. One needn't be a "wing nut" to scratch one's head over the wisdom of such masochistic tolerance.

It seems to me that until the ideology of multiculturalism began to infuse the universities in the early '80s, academia was more or less capable of self-correction, simply because it was able to recognize that its bread wasn't buttered on the edge. But the doctrinally relativist commitments involved in the new ideology apparently undermine even that kind of pragmatic judgment. Nonetheless, there are some decent models for dissensus within academia that could contest this now-pervasive ideology, if we opened the door a little--to a new degree of freedom.

In summary, I can conceive of but three methods to correct the dysfunctions noted above: open or veiled quotas based on ideology that attempt to ensure ideological diversity; some abrogation or alteration of the common conception of "academic freedom" to include revocation of tenure; or some institutional arrangement that allows the creation of new departments or programs that can open career paths for competent people of more traditional classical liberal values. Or perhaps some combination.

Of course, anyone who is liberal, in the classical sense, will oppose quotas and will recognize the dangerous precedent they set. That leaves the latter two. It's important to recognize that freedom must be balanced by obligation of some sort, and that this is less a matter of principle than necessity. If academia were populated by people wise enough to perceive this necessity themselves there'd be no problem. But since it apparently isn't, we may need to open the door to markets by ending or attenuating the practice of tenure. I regard this as a loss, so perhaps we could try something else first?

We may need institutional arrangements that at least establish the conditions for a credible contest between the "multi-culti left" and the classically liberal or even theo-conservative right, in order to infuse a little wisdom into the self-satisfied academy. If academia wants relevance, this may be the price.

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Comments

#1 from Yehudit at 10:01 pm on Jun 14, 2006

"some institutional arrangement that allows the creation of new departments or programs that can open career paths for competent people of more traditional classical liberal values."

There is precedent for this in the creation of "Women's Studies" and various minorities creating their own disciplines, which have turned into Departments under the Humanities umbrella. This process took 15-20 years, and needed members of the identity group to get interdisciplinary PhDs or work within a recognized discipline like English or History and specialize in their chosen group. Finally there were enough people with academic credentials to create a new area of study.

Another way to do this is to endow a chair within an existing discipline. This has been done with "Jewish Studies," in several cases specifically to counteract the anti-Israel bias at a university. But the donors have to be careful. One wealthy family endowed a chair in "Israel Studies" (or whatever it was called ) and then the university staffed it solely with leftist anti-Israel professors.

#2 from Yehudit at 10:07 pm on Jun 14, 2006

"According to the new campus ideology traditional ideological watchwords such as"equality", "freedom", and "liberty" no longer apply to individuals, but to groups. Group rights now not only trump individual rights in nearly every corner of society, but they even trump "academic freedom"!"

Yet even within this paradigm, some "groups" are more equal than others. So even the desire for "diversity" is a bit hollow, since it excludes conservatives.

#3 from Mark Buehner at 10:51 pm on Jun 14, 2006

"Recent polls indicate that left self-identification in the humanities within American universities varies from a high of 88% (English) to a low of 77% (Sociology and History), while less than 10% identify with the right in those disciplines. "

It's part of the left's built in narcissism that they, having proven their moral and intellectual superiority by simple virtue of their liberalism, can conduct themselves in an entirely neutral, fair, and evenhanded fashion in all forums. Furthermore this should be seen to be self-evident, and even broaching the issue is both distasteful and a priori proof of the biases of the critic.

Working in the other direction, however, anyone of the conservative bent must by nature be either intellectually stunted, repressed, or simply a bad person, and needless to say cannot be counted on to display intellectual rigour, much less neutrality.

The funny thing is, I guarantee you as baiting as the above may seem, many if not most academics would go on record as agreeing with it.

#4 from Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) at 12:03 am on Jun 15, 2006

But the doctrinally relativist commitments involved in the new ideology apparently undermine even that kind of pragmatic judgment.

There may be a deeper cause, built into the entire academic endeavour, hinted at as above. Permit me to make my point via analogy.

We operate a number of greenhouses. The environment therein is remakably favourable to plant growth, but if we aren't careful we will produce plants having a lush top but no functional roots. These plants have tender leaves and must remain in the greenhouse environment to survive. For a greenhouse plant to be any good it must be hardened, almost from the beginning, and most certainly before going out into the soil on its own.

How many people in academia have ever even had to do something as simple as make payroll? Admit that a product has no market and scrap it? Take a big financial hit because of a mistake? Deal with getting shafted by a customer? Determine market depth and build a customer base?

You get the drift. There has been a long selective pressure in academia in favour of people who have never really had to operate in the larger, harsher world. There is no personal cost to them for holding (and promoting) a bunch of goofball ideas that simply don't work.

And because they work primarily in the world of ideas they rather naturally assume they're 'smarter' than everybody else ... and especially smarter than folks who've done things like run huge oil industry hardware and logistics firms.

Most academic types couldn't cut it even at entry level in the corporate world, to say nothing of run a successful business of any size. They will continue to flocculate in their sheltered environments as long as they can get someone else to pay the bill.

#5 from tcobb at 12:55 am on Jun 15, 2006

If you want to get rid of the imbalance a good place to start might be in getting some legislative oversight over the degree requirements in publically funded colleges. Do we really need to require someone who wants a degree in engineering to take X number of courses in women's studies/minority cultures/sociology or whatever that are totally unrelated to what they really want to learn about? Many of the courses I took in undergraduate school were almost wholly unrelated to my major, and were taken because I had to have so many courses in certain categories to graduate. I choose them on the basis of how well they would fit into my schedule of the core courses I was taking, not because I was interested in their subject matter.

I suspect that the great majority of the fruitcake academics are concentrated in subjects that very few students wish to take and that have very little utility, if any, to the career paths they have chosen. If you do away with the requirements for students to take useless courses the departments that teach them will ultimately wither away.

#6 from The Mountaintop at 2:12 am on Jun 15, 2006

"It's difficult to imagine how this change could have been effected without the "piling on" of a cultural orientation that generally attempts to reward like-minded people, and either inadvertently or deliberately excludes oppositional voice."

I disagree completely. Please cite examples of people being expelled frombecause of their political orientation. You won't find many because there aren't.

You need to use your imagination more effectively, like Berube. Perhaps then you can understand how you would end up with one institution being populated by a majority of people holding similar views. Take the Right Wing's favorite example: the military.

Any "solutions" to the non-problem of political bias in academia is going to be worse than the alleged problem. Do you want to impose political quotas? Please.

Academics works to advance knowledge because of the tendency of people to come to agreement on things, and then build on that. If some don't like the consensus, that's too bad. The right wing unfortunately finds itself increasingly in this position as it continues to attempt to inject assertions into arguments and expects everyone to give even kooky ideas the same weight or consideration as the good ones. Lucky for the world that's not the way knowledge has advanced up to now...otherwise we'd still be stuck in the Dark Ages.

The Right Wing would rather occupy an artificially bestowed position among academics in a New Dark Age than allow academicians to do what they do best.

#7 from Foobarista at 3:28 am on Jun 15, 2006

Some good discussions on this topic is in This Volokh thread.

The "Related Discussions" are also good...

#8 from Michael B�rub� at 3:28 am on Jun 15, 2006

Well, thanks for excusing me. It's awfully generous of you, if a bit smug and high-handed. But you really should acquaint yourself with more of Balch's work before you attribute "irony" to his testimony. He and the NAS have been fulminating about so-called "racial preferences" and "quotas" for twenty years now, just as you do here -- even though, as I point out, only 5 percent of all doctorates in the U.S. are awarded to African-Americans. Balch is quite serious about opposing affirmative action for women and minorities while proposing it for conservatives, though it is not clear just how we're supposed to determine a job candidate's conservatism in the course of the search. Likewise, Kenneth Lee's remark about conservatives facing "clear practices of discrimination in American academia that are statistically even starker than previous blackballings by race" is meant quite seriously. That remark is pretty strong evidence that the right's sense of victimization is real, as is their delusional sense that they have it worse than black folk ever did. Strange that you didn't mention Lee's statement here, in the course of suggesting that Balch was just kidding.

As for the state of academe before 1970, just keep in mind that white guys back then were competing with 44 percent of the population for jobs, and the jobs in higher education were plentiful. Professors back then were not uniformly people of "extremely high ability," as Rutgers professor George Levine admitted when he wrote, "When I got my degree from the University of Minnesota [in the late 1950s], almost all my colleagues, no matter how dumb they were, got at least three job offers."

#9 from PD Shaw at 3:47 am on Jun 15, 2006

strong evidence that the right's sense of victimization is real, as is their delusional sense that they have it worse than black folk ever did.

Proving Demosophist's implicit point that some people don't get out much.

#10 from M. Simon at 4:53 am on Jun 15, 2006

Michael Berube's premise is wrong. Liberalism is not under attack in the academy. Liberalism in America is doing fine (old prejudices and privledges are losing ground even among the prejudiced and privledged). What is not doing well is socialism and identity politics.

I might note that freedom is actually a group (government can help a lot here if it is done right) activity while obligation is personal. If there was only one person in the world freedom would be meaningless. It is only when you have more than one person do you need a concept like freedom. What makes maximum freedom possible is an individual upholding his obligations.

Which is why our founders continually stressed that we could only keep self government if we were a moral people. You have to avoid any temptation to covet your neighbors stuff, because with government and enough other like minded citizens you can actually steal stuff and get away with it.

This is a huge temptation because it always starts out by only stealing from those who have "too much". Folks are not falling for this one as much which is why the right is doing well and the left is under existential attack.

The left has no sound philosophical foundation. Its theories do not match people's experience. The left is cracking up. The increase of the number of articles on the subject in the last few months shows that the strain is nearing the breaking point.

If the November elections go badly for the netroots candidates the split will immediately worsen. A big loss in '08 and I think the Dems current coalition is finished.

#11 from The Mountaintop at 4:54 am on Jun 15, 2006

Michael provides the key criticism here that prompts me to re-state my question after correcting the typo.

He stated: "That remark is pretty strong evidence that the right's sense of victimization is real, as is their delusional sense that they have it worse than black folk ever did."

Which recalls my unanswered challenge to your polemic:

Please cite examples of people being expelled from academia because of their political orientation.

Let's see if you can back up your opinion with solid facts, or whether they prove to be nothing more than the imaginary ghosts of Right Wing propoganda.

#12 from M. Simon at 5:11 am on Jun 15, 2006

I think the concerted attack on Lieberman is symptomatic.

The country is now more right than left. This is a sign that the party on the left needs to move right. Which it has to some extent. Gun control for instance. On the issues of identity politics and economics they are too far off center.

DeLay is out and Jefferson is still in. Culture of corruption?

#13 from M. Simon at 5:24 am on Jun 15, 2006

Demosophist,

How about keeing them alive as long as possible as living relics of a bygone era.

Really. We have little to fear from them because with the net we can now keep a very close watch on them and refute their arguments in public even if their students can not do so in class.

Some times keeping a weak enemy alive fills a niche where a stronger enemy might arise.

Besides a taste of Stalinism when young is a great curative.

In the 60s we had the theories of how great it was going to be. In the 00s we now have the experience of how bad it actually is. It is inherently corrupt. It will die of its own contradictions. Its own words will kill it. Make sure they are universally examined. Good job here, wot?

#14 from tcobb at 5:24 am on Jun 15, 2006

Please cite examples of people being expelled from academia because of their political orientation. Was I just dreaming or was there this guy named Summers who dared imply that there might be statistical differences between men and women regarding the relative distribution of intelligence? What happened to him? Of course it can be argued that it was not his "political orientation" that got him into trouble, but rather his unpardonable sin of questioning certain tenets which are Forever Beyond Dispute and Must Not Be Questioned. Its a good thing he got slapped down though; someone that unbalanced might even get around to questioning whether the sun revolves around the earth.

#15 from mark.poling@gmaul.com at 6:13 am on Jun 15, 2006

Actually, Mountaintop, Bjorn Lomborb has had a pretty rough time of it (at least within the halls of Academia), although it would be hard to call his personal politics "conservative".
Richard Hernstein died before "The Bell Curve" was published, but one suspects it might have had an adverse effect on his peer-reviewed articles.

And of course, that gets at the crux of the problem; academic discourse is rigourously, ruthlessly constrained by the peer-review process. Anything that puts a person outside the mainstream of the community's prejuidices puts that person's career witin academia at risk.

Meanwhile, work that should ring all sorts of alarms vis-a-vis conformance to accepted data gets a pass as long as it supports and reinforces those prejuidices. (Michael Bellesiles ring any bells?)

Or, the short form Mr. Mountaintop, is that it's damn hard to get into academia (so conformance is encouraged) and damn hard to get kicked out (as long as you don't ruffle any feathers). So no, conservatives don't get "expelled" from liberal arts academia for much the same reason that women don't get expelled from the Catholic priesthood; they never get there to be expelled from there.

#16 from The Mountaintop at 1:07 pm on Jun 15, 2006

So Mark Poling are you arguing that when someone applies for an academic position they need to make their political affiliations clear beforehand, and this keeps them out of the ivory halls?

Or just because it's "damn hard" to get into academia, conservative-minded individuals are somehow the focus of systematic bias?

Please...this entire line of reasoning is getting more and more flimsy by the minute.

If you can't back up these assertions with data, they're just paranoid fantasies dreamed up by nutcases like Michael's favorite fool David Horowitz.

And I'll fire back with some counter examples of my own showing that Liberal bias can be detrimental to an academic carreer....both Ward Churchill and Juan Cole have come under fire from the Right Wing critics, and Churchill's job is apparently coming under threat (even though he's tenured), while Cole may have lost an appointment at Yale because of an email comment.

If there's a bias in academia, you're all just either going to have to live with it or support the very non-conservative idea of affirmative action based on alleged under-representation of particular political beliefs.

But then you'll also have to let in the commies, fascists, etc. Let's throw in the Scientologists while were at it.

Then, we'll end up with an nstitution just like another that we already have....its called the Repubican Party.

#17 from Rand Simberg at 2:02 pm on Jun 15, 2006

Neither Churchill or Cole are suffering because of their political views, per se. Churchill has been committing academic fraud on a vast scale, and if he's fired, that will be the reason, not his "Little Eichmann's" comment, reprehensible as it was. If an email was Professor Cole's undoing, it won't be because of the political content, but because of its intemperate nature. Perhaps Yale thought that they wanted someone more emotionally mature for the position. They would have to live with the guy, after all.

#18 from FabioC. at 2:11 pm on Jun 15, 2006

I don't have links handy, but there are quite a few stories of students sent to ~~reeducation camps~~ sensitivity training for going against politically correct dogmas. And I remember reading of a professor who proposed an essay on how the Constitution was designed to perpetuate the hegemony of white men or somesuch.

Yes, this is not exactly the academia, but gives an idea of the situation. It's not really about being expelled for consorvative views, but about being excluded and emarginated.

#19 from Mark Poling at 2:18 pm on Jun 15, 2006

Mountaintop, I was married to a very nice woman who went through the whole doctoral dissertation gauntlet, plus the whole post-doctoral marathon that occurs afterwards.

She was and is apolitical. I'm just reporting what I saw.

Of course, what she studied was neuroscience, and apolitical was a-ok. However, the drive toward groupthink is what I'm talking about, and that, I think, hasn't been refuted.

I notice, in passing, that my answer to your challenge has been met with the counter example of Ward Churchill. Frankly, in a steel cage match, I'll gladly take Lomborg v. Churchill; one has mathematical rigor on his side, the other looks good in shades.

Bottom line, if this is about sides instead of principals, you've definitely got the home field advantage. On the other hand, if this is about strength of intellect, your team has been coasting on 19th century street cred for way too long. Wake up and smell the 21st century.

#20 from Demosophist at 2:41 pm on Jun 15, 2006

He and the NAS have been fulminating about so-called "racial preferences" and "quotas" for twenty years now, just as you do here -- even though, as I point out, only 5 percent of all doctorates in the U.S. are awarded to African-Americans. Balch is quite serious about opposing affirmative action for women and minorities while proposing it for conservatives, though it is not clear just how we're supposed to determine a job candidate's conservatism in the course of the search.

The idea that one might oppose racial and gender quotas without being a racist or a bigot is apparently something that, for want of a more neutral term, you don't grasp. This, in itself, is a whisper of the sort of bias we're talking about. And while Balch may very well propose "affirmative action" for viewpoints that create more intellectual diversity (although he doesn't support quotas) the notion of intellectual diversity seems a great deal more germane to the intellectual enterprise than mere ethnic diversity. Moreover, the sort of genuine discrimination that's leveled at "ethnic traitors" like Thomas Sowell or Jean R. Cobbs, suggests that a little more intellectual diversity might be in order. One might consider the creation of programs like the Madison Program at Princeton "affirmative action for conservatives", but it's a healthy development that has the potential of halting the gangrene in academia.

Finally, I'd say that if you conducted a poll of academics you'd find a good deal less than consensus regarding the notion of ethnic affirmative action. And the paucity of new black PhDs in the academy has been shown to be more closely related the paucity of black candidates in PhD programs, a fact that quotas or quota-like strategies probably won't cure. Indeed, what might cure the situation (again, according to people like Sowell) is greater intellectual diversity that doesn't immediately associate ideology and race.

At any rate, my attitude would be approximately the same if the academy were dominated by so-called "conservatives" since such a situation would be equally stifling, and out of synch with what I think is academia's mission. Though I think multiculturalism is a meme I'm actually somewhat intrigued by the similar notion of cosmopolitanism.

As for the state of academe before 1970, just keep in mind that white guys back then were competing with 44 percent of the population for jobs, and the jobs in higher education were plentiful. Professors back then were not uniformly people of "extremely high ability," as Rutgers professor George Levine admitted when he wrote, "When I got my degree from the University of Minnesota [in the late 1950s], almost all my colleagues, no matter how dumb they were, got at least three job offers."

I'm not quite clear how this speaks to Lipset's observation that "fitting in" was the prime determinant for tenure for the majority of people, but that people of exceptional ability tended to be excused. That may still be true to some degree. I imagine Robbie George is relatively safe, at Princeton. But in practical terms what it means for people of even progressive/conservative bent (read "armed liberals" who support the Iraq War) is that they keep their mouths shut until after they get tenure. The context is academic, and they don't seem particularly free... so you'll forgive us for doubting the commitment to "academic freedom."

But I think you missed my main point, which was that it's in the academy's own interest to intellectually diversify, and that not doing so is a form of institutional suicide. When in doubt I favor adding degrees of freedom, not taking them away (with the caveat that freedom and obligation go hand in hand).

#21 from Demosophist at 2:58 pm on Jun 15, 2006

M.:

How about keeing them alive as long as possible as living relics of a bygone era.
Really. We have little to fear from them because with the net we can now keep a very close watch on them and refute their arguments in public even if their students can not do so in class.
Some times keeping a weak enemy alive fills a niche where a stronger enemy might arise.

I don't intend to expell them. I just want to see some intellectual opposition. Robert George is going to co-teach a class with Cornel West. Although this will probably be a somewhat stylized situation, I'd like to see more of it. And my guess is that it'll be wildly popular.

I don't think it's a good idea to tolerate unhealthy institutions any more than it's a good idea to cultivate tumors. If we can fix it, let's do that.

#22 from Fred at 3:11 pm on Jun 15, 2006

Mountaintop,

You're absolutely right that it would be hard to find someone "expelled" for conservative views. Such expulsion is not necessary since conservatives generally never reach positions from which they can be expelled. I know, at least that this is true in my former field, English. Specific example: I overheard two members of a search committee at my university discussing their rejection of a candidate because of his (imagine the most derisive tone possible) "conservative writing sample." I was fortunate enough to have a committee that allowed me to do my own thing when I got my PhD, but they were the last of that breed.

Currrently, a conservative will either be washed out of a PhD program or adjust his work to fit the current political and theoritical mode just to get through because the Dissertion committees are composed of leftists who are Stalinist in their approach if not in their ideology.

If conservatives manage to get a PhD, they will not get published, as the editorial boards and peer reviewers of the major journals publish nothing that does not toe the party line.

Should they publish in the few journals that allow articles outside the current (enforced) consensus--such as Mississippi Quarterly, South Atlantic Review, or Philosophy and Literature--their publication is not taken seriously by Stalinist search committees like the one I cited above.

Bottom line, you're argument is a red herring. There are no expulsions becuase pre-emptive expulsion prevents there being anyone to expel.

#23 from lancer at 3:14 pm on Jun 15, 2006

"Please cite examples of people being expelled from because of their political orientation."

Nice try Mountaintop to obscure the argument. You know that is not how it works--political orientation is not the requirement for staying in the system, but getting into it.

Most academics, especially those that serve on admittance, funding, hiring, and tenure committees, conflate their political orientation with their scholarship. They assume that, because they study "X," it has shown them the rightfulness of their political and personal opinions.

So, when evaluating students, academics expect the same political orientation to arise out of the same studies. In short, some level of student evaluation is based upon agreement with the personal opinions of professors.

As an example, a question about the Cold War that was taught, and is thus expected to be answered, as the result of US aggression and an answer built around an analysis of Stalinism, if it could be given at all, would not be graded well. (Indeed, the response would likely be, "This is a US history class, not Russian!")

The insidious thing from my experiences (10 yrs in the academy, grad school and teaching), is that most academics fully admit they gauge a student's intelligence based upon how much the student agrees with them! "They came around during the semester, changed their minds," went one statement, but, of course, the professor would never change their mind--that was why they became a professor.

So it is very unlikely anyone has been expelled from the academey for their political views, they simply found it very difficult to get in. They were less likely to be encouraged to pursue higher studies, less likely to be admitted to graduate programs, if admitted, less likely to be funded, if able to continue, less likely to put up for post-docs or jobs, less likely to receive good letters of recommendation, if hired, less likely to be supported, and thus less likely to meet tenure requirements.

In short, academics equate their political opinions with intellectual ability, and have created a system to winnow out anyone who does not agree with their political opinions as not intellectual. And this is a very uncomfortable world for anyone who is not willing to be completely assimilated, to give over one's thoughts to those of the senior faculty--sell one's independent intellect, as it were, for tenure, only to perpetuate the system.

#24 from jdwill at 3:45 pm on Jun 15, 2006

M Poling,

... your team has been coasting on 19th century street cred for way too long.

WooHoo - a zinger. My sense of the radicalized left, exactly. They have become intellectually lazy. Or could it be that the boorish voices of either persuasion get the most attention? Am I missing some better left?

I read this site precisely because the Coulter, Malkin, and O'Reilly outrage factories don't seem to produce any positive solution. But, when the whip came down on 9/11 they were the type of voices that resonated with me.

I yearn for a classically liberal and progressive movement that doesn't fulminate 24/7 to try and shame America and ignore its true cultural heritage - a generally moral people who by their internally imposed rules allow the system to work. I want a movement that applies that lens to the world and its competing societies and has a larger perspective than a negative animus towards the current capitalistic republican system.

#25 from alchemist at 5:17 pm on Jun 15, 2006

(speaking of which, I'm supposed to be editing my dissertation as we speak...)

I work in the sciences, which I assume to be more or less pollitically neutral. Because I have never seen anybody care. Everyone's primary job is conducting research, getting tenure, and then convincing the administration that you're worth more money. The politics discussed are rarely left-right polliitical (outside of November 2004) and are typically of campus politics.

Now having said that, I would guess that a significant body of our professors are more liberal, even through it's never an issue. Why? Because of the nature of the job. Being a research/teaching professor is probably one of the most difficult jobs (for the money) in the world, with little reward until well after tenure. AFter 4 years undergrad, plus 4-6 years graduate, plus 2-4 years post graduate, you start out making ~60,000 a year instead of the industrial world where you would make over 100,000.

When you start, very little of that time is allowed for your real job, research. Much of that time is filled up with teaching responsibilities, department meetings, writing grants; while divying out your actually work to the grad students. And then there's the government grants, which drive everyone crazy, but it's also the only way you can get any real funding for research.

Simply put: the conservative grad students I have known were not intereasted in this lifestyle, they wanted to get out in the real world and make money.

Is there a generel problem with pollitical bias on campus? Sure, because I think departments like Art, Pscyhology, Drama and English are always going to be focused towards the left. And I would guess bussiness schools are generally leaning to the right (though not as much). But even if there weren't pollitical bias, the lifestyle of academica leans to the left.

#26 from M. Simon at 7:41 pm on Jun 15, 2006

#21 from Demosophist,

There is plenty of intellectual oposition. Why right here at WoC we have a discussion.....

I see a sick academic left as a positive value now that there are many other places to find alternate views.

Being an orthodoxy makes them vulnerable to samizdata. And there is a lot of it out there. And being unpracticed in rigorous self defence the orthodox fall flat.

It is the usual pre-revolutionary situation. The contradictions have multiplied.

#27 from PD Shaw at 1:48 am on Jun 16, 2006

I would be satisfied if Academia became more classicly Marxist, as in to each according to their need, instead of pretending that simple racial coding adds diversity when it just as often adds people of the same socio-economic background that happen to be a different color.

In particular, calculated efforts to determine the amount of need aid which is just short of the amount needed to attend the University, but substantial enough for self-congratulations, is quite disgusting.

#28 from M. Simon at 12:21 am on Jun 17, 2006

#27 PD,

I'd go evem more classically Marxists on you. Capitalism must advance and prosper until profit is reduced to zero. At that point socialism is inevitable.

To bring in socialism sooner you must speed capitalist development.

Not very revolutionary or romantic though. Is it?

#29 from Michael B�rub� at 3:52 pm on Jun 19, 2006

This response is, for want of a more neutral term, intellectually dishonest. I've written about affirmative action in the past, and my own criticisms of it are a matter of public record (and Nick Gillespie of Reason found those remarks to be fair and balanced, for what it's worth, though most of his commenters didn't understand why someone would discuss the history of affirmative action in a review essay on books about the history of affirmative action). Plenty of people, including many liberals, oppose quotas. But most sensible -- and honest -- people know what's wrong with the claim that conservatives in academe have it worse than African-Americans ever did.

As for your invocations of academic freedom "with obligations" -- that is, with the obligation to hire more conservatives: thank you for making my point for me. Honestly, though, I think I did just fine on my own.

#30 from Demosophist at 9:12 pm on Jun 19, 2006

The idea that one might oppose racial and gender quotas without being a racist or a bigot is apparently something that, for want of a more neutral term, you don't grasp. This, in itself, is a whisper of the sort of bias we're talking about. This response is, for want of a more neutral term, intellectually dishonest.

I'm not sure how the term "intellectually dishonest" applies here, but I'm sure you view that comment as more damning than plain old garden variety dishonesty. It was, however, you that claimed Balch was suspect because he opposed affirmative action to balance ethnicity, but supported it to promote "intellectual pluralism" (his term). And the datum you reported to drive the point home was that "only 5 percent of all doctorates in the U.S. are awarded to African-Americans".

Are we not allowed to infer from that, that you at least think Balch's position racist in effect if not fact? Or do you agree that affirmative action is inappropriate for ethnicity and gender as well as ideology?

But assuming that you didn't mean to insinuate that Balch is at least a closet racist (one of the most useful epithets that the left has ever dreamt up, and an implication they'd often just as soon leave hanging in the air like the smell of a corpse) then you've allowed your point to soften in some degree of obscurity. Whether the omission is deliberate on inadvertent it seems odd to accuse me of intellectual dishonesty over a point you, yourself, have left vague? It's not as though you assured us of your intentions in the piece. Whether or not you, yourself, have questioned affirmative action doesn't necessarily have a direct bearing on your intent here.

But assuming you observe the golden rule, you either object to the fact that Balch supports affirmative action for one thing, but not another, (we could call it "intellectual hypocrisy" to give it an added note of disdain); or you yourself oppose affirmative action for ideology, but not for race. If the latter, then your views and those of Balch only differ about what imbalance is in more urgent need of correction: the paucity of black PhDs or the paucity of conservatives.

That's the least biased interpretation I can come up with to the statement I quoted, and I'll leave it to others to decide which imbalance is more pressing. But one wonders why, if that's essentially your position, you even brought it up? Wouldn't it have been more direct to simply disagree about the priority?

Which brings me to the second bifurcation: The other "intellectually pristine" position is that you oppose affirmative action in principle. In that case your objection is that Balch is guilty of "intellectual hypocrisy". If that's the case, why didn't you say so? In fact, your statements about former positions you've taken regarding affirmative action suggest that you're rather more pragmatic. In which case, like Balch, you view affirmative action as an instrument and the only issue is how, and for what reason, you play it.

In either case I can't think of an "intellectually pristine" reason for bringing it up, though you might have done so in some state of confusion. And if that's the case you can't really blame the rest of us for being confused. The other option is that you raised the issue in a stealthy attempt to appeal to those in your audience who do consistently object to affirmative action in principle.

So, it seems to me that you have the luxury of an uncertainty that leaves the rest of us guessing about your intentions. Either you weren't sufficiently clear about the issues involved to address them directly and relieve the reader of the chore of interpretation; or you were wafting an odor you wanted associated with Balch: either the acrid smell of an implied intellectual hypocrisy that you, yourself, don't actually believe in, or the darker/denser smell of racism linked to conservatism.

But most sensible -- and honest -- people know what's wrong with the claim that conservatives in academe have it worse than African-Americans ever did.

So, here again you insist on having your cake and eating it. I suppose it'd be just too fine a point for me to suggest the "intellectually unkempt" quality of a claim that anyone who disagrees with you about a matter of priorities is, almost by definition, dishonest? But then this is just the internet.

As for your invocations of academic freedom "with obligations" -- that is, with the obligation to hire more conservatives: thank you for making my point for me. Honestly, though, I think I did just fine on my own.

Not to call your "inalienable right to impute" into question, but strictly speaking the obligation is for intellectual rigor, objectivity, and the imperative to teach... and learn. It's the performance of the academy in exercising those obligations that suggests the need for a little intellectual pluralism. So thanks for making my point.

#31 from Eli Rabett at 4:15 am on Jun 20, 2006

While one might oppose racial and gender quotas without being a racist or a misogynist it is equally true that a hell of a lot of people are racists or misogynists and they oppose racial and gender quotas, affirmative action, and in fact, hiring anyone who does not look like they do.

One can construct some very long essays based on the first clause while ignoring the second.

Given that the racist and my misogynists control(led) hiring at a lot of universities and companies and governments for a lot of centuries, how precisely do you propose to remedy the situation?

Merely declaring that you are not a racist or a misogynist, but you think any effort to even the playing field is wrong, is, as they say, both a fairly cheap way of trying to minimize a serious problem and pretty convincing evidence you are one.

Finally, when what you propose to improve the situation doesn't work, what would you do?

P.S. your spam filter is amusing

#32 from Demosophist at 3:04 am on Jun 21, 2006

Eli:

Given that the racist and my misogynists control(led) hiring at a lot of universities and companies and governments for a lot of centuries, how precisely do you propose to remedy the situation?

Well, first of all Hannah Arendt in On Totalitarianism makes an important distinction between "racism", which is an ideology based on race that serves the interests of those seeking power in a culture (and which can be utilized by both the majority and minority race), and "race thinking" which may be a precursor to or necessary condition for racism. In this case I think labels are important, because one of the two conditions is an effect of human nature and external conditions while the other is a whipped-up concoction with an Ur myth lurking behind it.

Having got that caveat out of the way, the formula established by the court system for the desegregation of formerly segregated elementary and secondary school systems is "unitary status." Having achieved that once, the assumption is that racial attitudes in the system are sufficiently exorcised that enforced deseg is no longer required.

In actual fact many school systems that have achieved unitary status long ago have cannily not established that status legally, because doing so would mean that they'd lose some of their federal (and state?) funding. Moreover, the history of the situation suggests that people of both races tend to prefer living with others of the same race, so desegregated neighborhoods don't tend to stay that way. More to the point, racial groups of disparate socio-economic status simply don't "get along."

Whatever we choose to do about it, "forced justice" tends to backfire, so perhaps we need to approach the situation in a way that's a little less bound up in assumptions about race relations. (Not all "race thinking" is "racism." In fact, most isn't.)

And I should add that I'm saying this, while genuinely hoping that my black niece (who is a loving smart little princess, both inside and out) is able to achieve her full potential in the future society, whatever it is. This hope leads me to the belief that at least part of the solution lies within the "black culture" itself, and that young people like my niece are part of that solution. How?

Well, to dwell on that for just a second, the book Maximizing Intelligence, by Dave Armor (an icon of the left in the early sixties), suggests that most of the "race gap" in IQ and achievement can be traced to child rearing practices, and the rest is a function of other "risk factors" that include economic condition, etc. All of this impacts children negatively before they reach age three, and once the damage is done... it's done.

So if I were going to make a recommendation I'd say that we ought to start with that set of risk factors for IQ development. And the biggest risk of them all is... single parenthood! If we could establish conditions that compelled, or at least strongly encouraged, parents to stay together at least until their youngest child reaches the age of three, we might well wipe out the "race gap" within a few generations.

Attack a few other risk factors and that time might be further diminished.

There's just no way to finesse this. For the most part we know where the race gap comes from. The good news is that it's almost certainly not genetic. The bad news is that most of the stuff happens way too early to be impacted by something easy like happens in the schools. That's the wrong end of the telescope.

But all of this is politically incorrect, of course.