Inside Higher Ed recently reported on four University of Pittsburgh
professors critiquing the latest
survey suggesting ideological one-sidedness in the academy. According to the
Pitt quartet, self-selection accounts for findings that the faculty of elite
disproportionately tilts to the Left. “Many conservatives,” the Pitt professors
mused, “may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research
universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the
fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientific
method.”
Imagine the appropriate outrage that would have occurred had the
above critique referred to feminists, minorities, or Socialists. Yet the Pitt
quartet’s line of reasoning — that faculty ideological imbalance reflects the
academy functioning as it should — has appeared with regularity, and has been,
unintentionally, most revealing. Indeed, the very defense offered by the
academic Establishment, rather than the statistical surveys themselves, has gone
a long way toward proving the case of critics who say that the academy lacks
sufficient intellectual diversity.
In theory, ideology should have no bearing on how a professor teaches, say,
physics. Even so, should responsible administrators worry that the overwhelming
partisan disparity is worthy of further inquiry? And, in theory, parents who
make their money in traditionally conservative professions such as investment
banking or corporate law probably do not encourage their children to enter
academe. Yet, as money-making fields have always been attractive to
conservatives, why has the proportion of self-professed liberals or Leftists in
the academy nearly doubled in the last
generation?
Had members of the academic Establishment confined themselves to such
arguments (or had they ignored the partisan-breakdown studies altogether), the
intellectual diversity issue would have received little attention. Instead, the
last two years have seen proud, often inflammatory, defenses of the
professoriate’s ideological imbalance. These arguments, which have fallen into
three categories, raise grave concerns about the academy’s overall
direction.
1. The cultural left is, simply, more intelligent than
anyone else. As SUNY-Albany’s Ron McClamrock reasoned, “Lefties are overrepresented in
academia because on average, we’re just f-ing smarter.” The first recent survey
came in early 2004, when the Duke Conservative Union disclosed that Duke’s humanities departments contained 142
registered Democrats and 8 registered Republicans. Philosophy Department
chairman Robert Brandon considered the results unsurprising: “If, as John Stuart
Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of
conservatives we will never hire.”
In a slightly different vein, UCLA
professor John McCumber informed The New York Times that “a successful
career in academia, after all, requires willingness to be critical of yourself
and to learn from experience,” qualities “antithetical to Republicanism as it
has recently come to be.” In another Times article, Berkeley professor
George Lakoff asserted that Leftists predominate in the academy because, “unlike
conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice,
as well as knowledge and art for their own sake.” Again, imagine the appropriate
outcry if prominent academics employed such sweeping generalizations to dismiss
statistical disparities suggesting underrepresentation of women, gays, or
minorities.
These arguments become even more disturbing given the
remarkably broad definition of “conservative” employed in many academic
quarters. Take the case of Yeshiva University’s Ellen Schrecker, recently
elected to a term on the AAUP’s general council. This past spring, Schrecker denounced Columbia students who wanted to broaden instruction
about the Middle East for “trying to impose orthodoxy at this university.” The
issue, she lamented, amounted to “right wing propaganda.”
The
leaders of the Columbia student group, who ranged from registered Republicans to
backers of Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential bid, were united only in their belief
that matters relating to Israel should be treated objectively in the classroom.
Probably 98 percent of the U.S. Congress and all of the nation’s governors would
fit under such a definition of “right wing.”
Indeed, it seems as if the
academic Establishment considers anyone who does not accept the primacy of a
race/class/gender interpretation to be “conservative.” To most outside of the
academy, such a definition would suggest that professors are using stereotypes
to abuse the inherently subjective nature of the hiring process.
2. A left-leaning tilt in the faculty is a pedagogical necessity, because
professors must expose gender, racial, and class bias while promoting peace,
“diversity” and “cultural competence.” According to Montclair State’s Grover Furr, “colleges and universities do not need a single
additional ‘conservative’ .... What they do need, and would much benefit from,
is more Marxists, radicals, leftists — all terms conventionally applied to those
who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never
have too many of these, just as we can never have too few ‘conservatives.’”
Furr’s remarks echoed those of Connecticut College’s Rhonda Garelick, who decried student “disgruntlement” when she used her French
class to discuss her opposition to the war in Iraq and teach “‘wakeful’
political literacy.” Rashid Khalidi, meanwhile, rationalized anti-Israel instruction as necessary to undo the
false impressions held by all incoming Columbia students except for
“Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers,
television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they
know to be true.”
To John Burness, Duke’s senior vice president for public affairs, such
statements reflect a proper professorial role. The “creativity” in humanities
and social science disciplines, he noted, addresses issues of race, class, and
gender, leading to a “perfectly logical criticism of the current society” in the
classroom.
At some universities, this mindset has even shaped curricular or personnel
policies. Though its release generated widespread criticism and hints from
administrators that it would not be adopted, a proposal to make “cultural competence” a key factor in all personnel decisions
remains the working draft of the University of Oregon’s new diversity plan.
Columbia recently set aside $15
million for hiring women and minorities — and white males who would “in some
way promote the diversity goals of the university.” And the University of
Arizona’s hiring blueprint includes requiring new faculty in some disciplines to
“conduct research and contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the
importance of valuing diversity.”
On the curricular front, my own institution’s provost, Roberta Matthews (who
has written that “teaching is a political act") intends for the college’s new
general education curriculum to produce “global citizens” — who, she commented,
are those “sensitized to issues of race, class, and gender.”
Given such initiatives, it is worth remembering the traditional ideal of a
university education: for faculty committed to free intellectual exchange in
pursuit of the truth to expose undergraduates to the disciplines of the liberal
arts canon, in the expectation that college graduates will possess the wide
range of knowledge and skills necessary to function as democratic citizens.
3. A left-leaning professoriate is a structural necessity, because the
liberal arts faculty must balance business school faculty and/or the general
conservative political culture. University of Michigan professor Juan Cole,
denouncing the “ridiculous and pernicious line” that major universities need
greater intellectual diversity, complained about insufficient attention to the
ideological breakdown of “Business Schools, Medical Schools, [and] Engineering
schools.” UCLA’s Russell Jacoby wondered why ” conservatives seem unconcerned
about the political orientation of the business professors.” Duke Law professor
Erwin Chemerinsky more ambitiously claimed that “it’s hard to see this as a time of liberal
dominance” given conservative control of the three branches of
government.
Professional schools reflect the mindset of their professions: Socialists are
about as common on business school faculty as are home-schooling advocates among
education school professors. But, unlike business schools, liberal arts colleges
and universities do not exist to train students for a single profession. Nor are
they supposed to balance the existing political culture. If the Democrats
reclaim the presidency and Congress in the 2008 elections, should the academy
suddenly adopt an anti-liberal posture?
The intellectual diversity issue shows no signs of fading away. Ideological
one-sidedness among the professoriate seems to be, if anything, expanding. And
so, no doubt, will we see additional surveys suggesting a heavy ideological
imbalance among the nation’s faculty — followed by new inflammatory statements
from the academic Establishment that only reinforce the critics’ claims about
bias in the personnel process.
In an ideal world, campus administrators
would have rectified this problem long ago. A few have made small steps. Brown
University’s president, Ruth Simmons, for instance, has expressed concern that the “chilling effect caused by the
dominance of certain voices on the spectrum of moral and political thought”
might negatively affect a quality education; her university’s Political Theory Project represents a model that other
institutions could follow.
To my knowledge, however, no academic administration has made the creation of
an intellectually and pedagogically diverse faculty its primary goal. This
statement, it should be noted, applies equally as well to institutions
frequently praised by conservatives, such as Hillsdale College. Such an
initiative, of course, would encounter ferocious faculty resistance. But it
would also, just as surely, excite parents, donors, and trustees. If successful,
an institution that made intellectual diversity its hallmark would encourage
imitation — if only because other colleges would face the free-market pressures
of losing talented students and faculty. So, the question becomes, do we have an
administration anywhere in the country willing to take up the cause?
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