My SDP colleagues Professor Schaff and Jason Heppler have commented on liberal bias in the academy. Anyone who has visited a many a college campus in the past three decades, as I have, knows that most of the major public and private university faculties are clearly much further to the left than are the people at large. Surveys always support this impression. My friend Anna at Dakota Women calls this complaining on our part. Well, I suppose that one person's comment is another's complaining or whining.
The problem with this bias lies not so much in its unfairness, but in the fact that it contradicts principles that persons on the left profess to believe in. The left has frequently argued for affirmative action in university hiring and admissions on the ground that it promotes a diversity of perspectives. This argument is the basis of Supreme Court decisions upholding deliberate discrimination by universities in favor of minorities. I have seen for myself how well it works. Some years ago I joined the National Association for Ethnic Studies and delivered a paper at their annual conference. At one panel I attended, a number of persons from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds stepped up to testify about their experiences and perspectives. Every single one of them told exactly the same story, and expressed the same set of opinions about race, cultural, and equality.
Much closer to home, I experienced real diversity of thought when I occupied an office just across a narrow hall from a historian, Walter King. Walter and I were very similar in most demographic details, but when it came to a wide range of political and intellectual questions, we were miles apart. So we argued for hours at a time. Much the same was true of my friendship with a sociologist from Nigeria, Olu Oyinlade. That is what happens when you have a real diversity of perspective. The liberal bias in the modern academy largely freezes out the most interesting kind of diversity, real differences on the issues that generate the most passion. All you have to do is look at the reaction of many academics to the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. They couldn't believe it would happen, because they never, ever, talked to anyone who would admit to voting Republican.
Anna says this:
I find it interesting, the way Schaff and Heppler word their complaints about the lack of conservatives in academia - Heppler criticizes "the more personal aspect of ideological bias -- the assumption that all the strangers in the room are liberals." Has it ever occurred to either of them, I wonder, that women feel the same way? People of color? GLBT people? People with disabilities? Why is it that only political conservatives ought to be better represented?
I know of no one who says the latter. It looks to me like a straw man fallacy. But the question is not how people feel, but what selection processes are in fact at work in the academy. Women, persons of color, GLBT persons, and persons with disabilities, all get extra points when applying for admission or for a position. That is a simple and very consequential fact. Persons who think that the war in Iraq was the right policy or who believe that affirmative action is bad for minorities would do well to keep their politics a secret, at least until they have been granted tenure. That is also a fact.
When I came to Northern, the historians and sociologists were, for the most part, liberal to socialist in their leanings. They were nonetheless eager to welcome me, as a conservative, into the department. They were scrupulously respectful of and even delighted by honest disagreements. I learned much from our conversations, and perhaps they profited as well. The contemporary academy has not taken that as a model. I humbly submit that this amounts to a decline.
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