Comments on: What liberal academy?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 03:58:25 +0000

In most all academic conversations I have been in—in classes, at conferences, in private conversation—liberal-to-left political opinion is presented not as one belief in a pluralist public sphere, but as a casually accepted universal, a quasi-ritual expression of communal bonding. To express conservative opinion is taboo—a disruption of communal rituals. So long as liberal-to-left political opinion and the profession’s rituals of community are fused—and they are tightly fused—discrimination against conservatives will remain not merely incidental to, but essential to, academia

By: nick

nick — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 23:18:29 +0000

One comment: Niall Ferguson isn’t really a military historian. He’s an economic historian, and always has been. Which is nice when it comes to getting gigs such as writing the history of the Rothschilds. And yes, he’s high Tory, but he’s also a very good historian. And Oxford history (and EngLit) skews… well, high Tory, really.

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 22:34:05 +0000

What if the answer is that right-wing do not like to study? In fact from what I have had the occasion to read through quite a few years is that they heartily despise intellect. hen there is no point in claiming a bias from university, the bias is in the right. DSW

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 15:29:47 +0000

“If the people being hired there still vote for Democrats disproportionately then this shows that conservatives are probably just nitwits (especially considering the fact that those departments tend to be skew male) and aren’t smart enough to get hired.” I read this blog instead of scrappelface because it is funnier. Tim comes the closest to getting it right. Here is the problem. To a fish, the air seems like the vacuum of outer space. The academy in America lives in its own little world somewhere on the outskirts of Paris, France. The rest of us (a/k/a the chumps) live in a trailer park near Luchenbach, TX. While the academics sip their chablis and nibble at their brie, they complain that the chumps do not send them enough money. The chumps, who are still intimidated by the academics, gnaw on their venison jerky and guzzle their beers and shrug their shoulders in blank incomprehension. Not liberal? they ask. If they aren’t, who is? Who do they think they are kidding? Bottom line. The chumps are either pond scum who must be exterminated or they are your meal ticket and they must be understood and courted. Because there are a lot more of them than there are of you and they will inevitably divert the tax revenues and privileges on which you live, to services they can understand, your continued dissdain for and uncomprehension of the average American, can only injure your own interests. I no more expect the academics to follow my advice than I expect the Palestinians to behave like rational men. I am therefor long DeVry and U Phoenix and short the rest of the academy.

By: PZ Myers

PZ Myers — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 23:25:58 +0000

Well, yes. Biology is not infinitely labile, able to accommodate any answer you want if you just go through enough contortions—there are correct answers to problems. I’m afraid there is no way somebody can look at the evidence and draw the conclusion that the world is 6000 years old, and still be a competent biologist. And yes, there are complex topics that require a more sophisticated approach; which means, of course, that we will naturally repudiate the simplistic attitude of the worst conservative positions on those topics. Religious bigotry doesn’t play into it. I have colleagues who are atheists, others who are Catholic or Baptist or Lutheran or Moslem or Buddhist. Their faith simply doesn’t come up in our professional life.

By: Bryan C

Bryan C — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 22:32:32 +0000

pz myers, that’s a very interesting statement, but perhaps not in the way you intended. I’m dismayed by the very notion that among a wide range of biologists there’s only one “proper” way to think about incredibly complicated topics like global warming and stem cell research. Or that scientific and academic peers could exersize such bigotry as to write off colleagues who associate with people of the wrong religious beliefs. If people you know actually operate and think like that, then you’ve made a pretty strong argument against academic political monocultures, because there’s obviously something seriously wrong.

By: PZ Myers

PZ Myers — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 16:53:29 +0000

Two points: 1) One justification I’ve read (on the Corner, another reason I don’t find it credible) for the accusation that academia filters out conservatives is the personal anecdote. Conservatives know lots and lots of fellow conservatives who are failing to get jobs at universities, therefore they are being discriminated against. They fail to notice that lots and lots of liberals are also failing to get university jobs. Part of the problem of perception here is that it is extremely difficult to get tenure-track positions, no matter what your political affiliation. 2) Another reason that lefties are disproportionally represented in the academy might be because, with such a rigorous filter present at every stage of the game, and relatively few people making it, there is a greater selection for people who are simply correct (OK, I say that only semi-seriously). American conservativism, at least, is also infested with a nasty anti-intellectual streak. In my field, biology, the Republican party can’t avoid being seen as vividly anti-science, with painful examples like the Bush policies on global warming and stem cell research, and their affiliation with the religious right and their insane beliefs about evolution. Even scientists with conservative leanings (and there are many), are rarely going to want to label themselves as conservative, not because it would harm their career or irritate their peers, but because the conservatives in this country are dragging around a lot of lunatic baggage with which they profoundly disagree.

By: Admiral Waugh

Admiral Waugh — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 06:27:14 +0000

People… there are a lot of conservative student publications, put up by the Republican or libertarian groups on campuses, that actually check voter registrations and such for people, then publish the results. In spring 2002, an article divulging just such information was published in The Gator Standard, which served the University of Florida. What they found was that out of something like 40 political science faculty (professors, assoc. professors, etc.) 1 was Republican, 30 were Democrat, 1 was Green, and the rest were independent/unaffiliated. Now, since we were all familiar with the faculty, the 1 Republican was easily identifiable, and since that excluded everyone else, it was easy to assess the relative leanings of the faculty… and it was/is not moderate—that is to say, out of the 40, maybe 3 could be called conservative. It’s a joke to say there’s any equality represented in personal beliefs at UF, and I suspect the same goes for the a good many universities. At the same time, I believe it was at Vanderbilt, they showed a conservative majority. So obviously it varies around the country, but let’s not stick our heads in the mud—these jobs will tend to be taken by the left. But the big deal shouldn’t be their voter registration or their voting records. The big deal should be what they teach and how they teach it. If they’re good teachers, they’ll frame the questions right, and the students will go from there.

By: Michael Blowhard

Michael Blowhard — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 03:47:23 +0000

What strikes me about these discussions is a repeated pattern—righties will point out that academia or the media tend strongly left, and then lefties will say, no way. Back and forth, and back and forth, all mutual incomprehension. I wonder if this might not have to do with the “compared to what” factor. Many people I know in the American media consider themselves quite moderate. Many others feel like they’re really quite left or radical but have to, for professional reasons, behave and perform like moderates. Many of them know someone at (say) the Voice or the Nation, and feel both “to the right of” a real lefty, and secretly envious that the Voice or Nation person gets the chance to openly strike such genuinely lefty attitudes. So they’re amazed if anyone says, Hey, y’all are a bunch of lefties—they don’t feel like lefties, and they know people who are really lefties … Yet by common American standards, these media people (all of whom feel moderate) are all left-ish—devoted feminists, multiculturalists and Democrats. Another element I notice is that many of these media lefties are very Eurocentric. They compare the States to Europe all the time; they seem to think it a tragedy that America isn’t constantly doing its best to become a social democracy. Heck, over in Europe there are actual Socialists-with-a-capital-S! Back here in the States, gosh, the best you get is Clinton. So again, despite the fact that in American terms these media people are lefties (feminists, Democrats, affirmative-action buffs, etc), they don’t feel leftish—because they know what real leftism is, and they aren’t that. They just think that the righties who are accusing them of leftism are a bunch of rubes who don’t really known what leftism is. Yet, by gosh, the media people all do vote Democratic. And on and on…

By: Chun the Unavoidable

Chun the Unavoidable — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 20:32:10 +0000

Timothy,

Explanation is not dismissal. The idea patterns of abstract reasoning tend to support the material interests of the reasoners goes a long way.

Speaking of dismissal, it’s very arguable that Greenspan is the most powerful organism ever to exist, in any dimension, ever (even more powerful than Galactus), and he’s a dedicated Randian.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 20:11:24 +0000

Actually, I wouldn’t say that anti-historicist deconstruction is still the “au courant” position in literary theory; these days, some flavor of historicism clearly rules the roost. Whatever “explains” libertarianism on the right, it cannot be dismissed by a sociological or psychological explanation, or even by a simple philosophical slogan. It calls for a response at least as complicated as one might make to Foucault or Nietzsche. We all get our rocks off by slamming Ayn Rand (with some degree of justification) but Rand is not a meaningful synecdoche for conservative libertarianism as a whole, which is one part Burkean skepticism about power and unintended consequences and one part systematic skepticism about the state. I can certainly say why I think most conservative libertarianism is wrong both empirically and ethically, but that is not a casual undertaking—and I think I and my students would both benefit greatly if I had several colleagues prepared to reasonably defend that general position. At most selective colleges and universities, I would have few or no colleagues who could do so; if I did, they’d almost certainly be in economics rather than in the humanities or in history. The Bellesiles case sort of had two meanings. The first was that peer assessment is too narrow ideologically: many (including myself) delighted in the reviews of the book because the thesis was attractive in certain ways. (Contrary to Pathos’ point, it also seemed plausible precisely because it is often quite true that our received wisdom about the past, American or otherwise, doesn’t stand up to inquiry). But secondly it just revealed something more broadly about specialization and academic knowledge and the work-process of peer review. There are very few people qualified to review the specifics of a specialized monograph, in general. To do so absolutely thoroughly is a huge, exacting job for which the reviewer receives virtually no compensation. The pace of publication easily outstrips the supply of people who can and will do this kind of peer review. At some level, the production and consumption of academic knowledge relies on trust. What’s striking in that regard is that for the most part, that trust is well-vested, given that anybody who could sound reasonably credible could probably put a fast one over on his/her fellow academics. So again here we have something that one could explain in terms of left/right ideology, and construct a victim’s brief the way Brooks does, but where the deeper truth has to do with a much less political and much more institutional truth about how academia functions. The complaint about ideology has some validity to it, but it’s ultimately superficial: it mistakes a single manifestation of a complex pattern for the whole of it.

By: pathos

pathos — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 19:50:47 +0000

The problem, though, is that no good academic progress can be made when there is not a critical mass of academics willing to criticize falsified liberal studies. Of course, most liberals are completely up front, and would never consciously bias a study, but the Bellesiles issue alone is enough to practically prove the issue by itself. His book wins a prize before anyone stops to say, “Hey, it’s ridiculous to claim that guns were rare in early America.” If there were more Conservative gun-nuts in academia, there would have been a realistic chance that his lies would have been exposed before he had been granted an award. The more recent Australian genocide hubbub shows that this was not an isolated issue: http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,6564722%255E25717,00.html Viewpoint diversity should be the primary concern of any academic institution. When it is absent, everyone suffers, and the truth most of all.

By: Chun the Unavoidable

Chun the Unavoidable — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 19:12:08 +0000

Timothy,

Brian Leiter’s point, which I agreed with in my comments on this piece, was that “American nationalist conservatism” and the “evangelically inspired religious right” (with possibly a dash of the others thrown in—his example was Tom DeLay and Bush), were weeded out by educational selection.

I don’t think anyone would deny that left libertarianism is a cogent position, and right libertarianism can be explained by a lack of what’s called “moral intelligence.”

Since you mentioned community colleges and the ilk, I’ll point out that your earlier example about the hypothetical “anti-historicist” English candidate would be (and is) welcomed at such places, up to and including regional comprehensive universities (we also should note that the most au courant literary theory is itself radically anti-historicist).

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 17:36:43 +0000

Zizka: I have to say that I agree that there is no better confirmation that Brooks may have a valid point of sorts than the suggestion that maybe conservatives aren’t smart enough to be academics, or that the study of history demonstrates a truth that repudiates all conservatism, or that the disciplines which lack conservatives lack them because conservatives are more unerringly drawn to money and pursue more lucrative disciplines as a result. Each one of these ideas involves a composite stereotype that I think is just flatly and profoundly incorrect, not to mention morally dubious. Part of the problem here is the term “conservative” itself. People on the left often rightfully resist right-wing stereotyping that insists that Al Gore and Enver Hoxha are ideological twins, that criticizing liberals or leftists is just a matter of finding the looniest person who seems to hold views characterizable at the left and taking that person as emblematic. Well, the same thing is surely going on here in a quite a few of the replies in this thread about conservatives. What are we talking about here? Milton Friedman-style neo-Burkean conservatism, with its pessimism about the uses of state power and the law of unintended consequences? Cato Institute-style libertarianism? “Prudential” fiscal conservatism? American nationalist conservatism? Buckley-style Catholic moralism? The evangelically-inspired “religious right”? I could see someone suggesting that someone who was a member of the religious right would have trouble operating within the humanities or the social sciences (or even the sciences) because of a fundamental incompatiblity with the intellectual and institutional premises of their practices and the core philosophical and political assumptions of the US religious right. You wouldn’t even have to say a thing about the intelligence or worth of the person involved: it’s about deep-seated incompatibilities. On the other hand, individuals sometimes negoatiate such contradictions with surprising ease and grace. There are strong forms of poststructuralist or postmodernist claims which also ought to be fundamentally incompatible with the current architecture of academic life, but somehow there are a decent number of people who muddle along through. But suggesting that taken as a whole, all of those varieties of conservatism are necessarily scorned by the bright folks who become academics, or that history intrinsically repudiates their general validity, is lazy and just plain incorrect. Come on! I may profoundly disagree with a great many conservative intellectuals, some of them in the academy, but there’s quite a number of them that any serious person has to take seriously. The idea that the incentive structure in other disciplines draws conservatives since they are better at utility-maximizing is also inattentive to the the actual landscape of economic opportunity in the academy. First off, it gets us off the hook of admitting that the basic incentive of academic life in economic terms is tenure, and that is equally possessed by leftist English professors and conservative economists alike. Second, it overlooks that if conservative academics exist in sizeable numbers anywhere, it’s probably at community colleges and third-tier religious schools rather than much more economically rewarding elite, selective institutions. Third, within the social sciences and the humanities in general, the landscape of compensation is pretty even: the only difference is opportunities for work outside the academy. The main compensation difference is between professional schools and schools of arts & humanities. Following Zizka’s theory, we’d therefore expect that medical schools, law schools, business programs and other professional schools would be absolutely livid with academic conservatism, since that’s where the salary money is. But that doesn’t appear to be the case, maybe not even with MBA programs, let alone the wider landscape. Brooks may be exaggerating, he may be parochial, he may not be talking about a problem of burning import, but most of the criticisms directed at him here are arguably even more distorted and livid with double-standards and dubious logic.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 28 Sep 2003 10:10:48 +0000

I can’t really comment from first-hand experience about the politics of the US academy (though I do look forward, as I’m sure Australian and Canadian academics do too, to the chance to employ some of those rootless cosmopolitan emigres in British institutions if you insist on employing, say, more sociologists like Ronald Reagan and fewer like Karl Marx!). Over here, the political profile of the academy shifted far to the left during the Thatcher years. This can’t have been because of preferential hiring for leftists because, thanks to cutbacks, hardly anyone got hired for about 10 years. The reason, then, for a shift in the political opinions of academics is left as an exercise for the reader.