Academic Freedom at UIUC: Freedom to Pursue Viewpoints and Positions That Reflect the Values of the State

As ugly and stupid as this is, there are a large number of state legislators here and elsewhere, that think that is exactly what it should be at a state institution. That is quite likely why our university system has the lowest paid faculty in the nation.

Surely the mockery would lose none of its well-justified edge if it left people’s names alone.

A question for people who know UIUC: Wise confidantes Burbules and Tolliver led both the anti-union and anti-Salaita drives; the other three members of the anti-Salaita “gang of five” (R.H. Campbell, Kim Graber, Matthew Wheeler) also signed a 2014 anti-union statement. To what degree did faculty (or admin) response re Salaita follow polarization re faculty unionization?

I agree with Vance that Burbules should get his second “u” back. I assume that was an autocorrect error.

[T]here are some things that are not consistent with our values.

Is that even vaguely controversial in cases where the values are more widely shared among the professoriate than anti-Semitism? For example, would it be at all likely that a racialist (Steve Sailer – like) would be hired to teach human genetics? Or an open advocate of criminalizing homosexual behavior hired to teach political science?

This is an excuse to re-post a letter I circulated after the statements from WIse and the Trustees were publicized.

In their recent MassMails, Chancellor Wise and the University Trustees, led by Chris Kennedy, have clarified some poorly understood points about free speech in the University and in the United States. Chancellor Wise explains
“What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.” Trustee Kennedy further elaborates “Disrespectful and demeaning speech that promotes malice is not an acceptable form of civil argument …. There can be no place for that in our democracy, and therefore, there will be no place for it in our university.”

In light of these clarifications, I would urge that certain texts often taught and discussed here should be properly modified to a form allowable in our democracy. Here are some examples to start what may be a lengthy process.

1. Admittedly this first example should probably just be omitted altogether, since the original quote is from an illegal group engaged in violence, including terrorism.

Old form: “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”

Acceptable form: “In our opinion he has at times exceeded the proportionate use of force.”

2. This next quote gives strong support to the corrections suggested by Kennedy and Wise to our old Bill of Rights, since the demeaning rhetoric of the old quote led directly to massive bloodshed.

Old Form: “Your wickedness and cruelty committed in this respect on your fellow creatures, are greater than all the stripes you have laid upon my back or theirs. It is an outrage upon the soul, a war upon the immortal spirit, and one for which you must give account at the bar of our common Father and Creator.”

Acceptable form: “You have not taken full consideration of the feelings of myself and other people. That would seem inconsistent with the tenets of our religion.”

3. The viewpoint represented in the next quote is obviously irrelevant to our modern world, but perhaps still should be allowed in proper form.

Old Form: “We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred.”

Acceptable Form: “At times money has led to what might be regarded as improper influence. I oppose that, although of course respecting those who might disagree.”

Or an open advocate of criminalizing homosexual behavior hired to teach political science?

Huh, I must have missed Robby George getting his tenure revoked.

Oops, messed up the blockquote from the link above, where NB receives a Faculty Leadership Award:

Celebration of Academic Service and Leadership Excellence on May 13 at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Each award consists of a recurring salary increase of $2,000, a $2,500 honorarium for the personal use of the recipient and a personalized commemorative plaque…. Burbules has worked relentlessly to protect the integrity and strength of the campus’ shared governance processes and to improve campus conditions for faculty and staff members, and students. For more than 25 years, he has given selflessly of his time and spearheaded shared governance initiatives designed to advance the Illinois missions and to enhance the campus’ stature as a world-class research university.

Re 11 and 12, see also: “Four faculty members are the inaugural recipients of the Campus Award for Excellence in Faculty Leadership. The three annual awards for excellence in faculty leadership, given by the Office of the Provost …”

Now, I assume some kind of committee was involved in the selection of award recipients. Nonetheless, let’s note “given by the Office of the Provost” (i.e. not the Faculty Senate) and remember that the Provost, Ilesanmi Adesida, was a participant in most of the just-released private correspondence between Wise and Burbules, including Burbules’ helpful suggestions on how to restrict academic freedom. Note the timing. Note the generosity of the award.

If you don’t want to play by the state’s rules, don’t take the state’s money. The golden rule (he who has the gold makes the rules) is not a suggestion, it’s a fact of life.

18: Dear Troll: it is precisely the impossibility of making “value-free judgments” that requires the university to make its judgments free of the State’s values. The State has no royal road to truth.

@17-20 Yeah, there’s no sharp line about whose values count in hiring, and no clear formulation of the the many contradictory values of any big entity such as the state. What we thought we had an agreement on, as stated in the standard UIUC contract offers, is that once a tenured job was offered, it wouldn’t be taken away on the grounds of offensive speech. Kennedy, with Wise’s assistance, chose to take away a tenured job on the grounds of offensive speech. Even more astoundingly, instead of trying to make the case that the speech went way beyond universally accepted bounds (e.g. by advocating genocide) they chose to make the statements which I quote in #9, which amount to a complete rejection of the notion of academic freedom and (in Kennedy’s case) of free speech in a democracy. The import of these statements was described well by U. Chicago law professor Brian Leiter:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-leiter/university-of-illinois-re_1_b_5703038.html

I think the challenge Cory is there are a number of folks who don’t trust the hiring process to be focused on that search for the truth or the best. There is not a diversity of political opinions found among faculty members at large R1 universities. You might think it doesn’t impact their teaching, BUT, no one would accept in this day and age a faculty department made up entirely of white males (ok, ex-philosophy). Yet no one will think twice about a department, school or university that has 100% of their tenured faculty donating to the democratic candidate for president.

it rubs me wrong too, especially since I’ve found academia to have as much nepotism, tribalism and discrimination as “the real world” … just couched in terms that in-groups can understand and digest.

I’m all in favor of hiring the best people and doing it objectively. I just doing think is really possible—I agree that the fairness in the process is important but I don’t see how it’s possible to actually do that. My point, then, is simply that the objects of all of this vituperation aren’t doing anything different from what I suspect most academics (and everybody else) does in hiring—we select capable but like-minded people whose hiring won’t bring down the wrath of people who wouldn’t otherwise pay much attention.

By the way, if you do find a way to eliminate all subjectivity and “values” from the hiring processes, please let me know. I’m sure that the “neutral principles” I’ve been searching for since I was an undergraduate are sure to be somewhere nearby.

I’ll sign off for the night by copying over what’s possibly the best thing in the Wise e-mails, a protest document quoted in an e-mail by Robert Warrior. See pp. 116-119 of https://academeblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/salaita_ocr.pdf for more context.

—–

Dear [Academic HR]

I am on a hiring committee this year in the Department of _____. We have some questions, in light of the Chancellor’s recent mass-mail about civility.

1. Should we review the social media postings of all job applicants, or only those we wish to interview, or only those we wish to make offers to?

2. Which social media should we check? The internet develops so quickly. We know about Facebook and Twitter. Are there other sites we need to monitor? A complete list would be most welcome (see point 6 below).

3. Should we review social media postings written only in English, or should we also consider postings in foreign languages? Our department lacks fluent speakers of many major languages – could campus help out with resources? We feel we cannot rely on Google Translate, since the difference between civility and incivility cannot be reliably preserved by machine translation.

4. How should we recognize incivility? e.g. Which expletives are markers of likely incivility? Is there a campus guidebook to which we could refer?

5. Could you offer guidance on situations that are likely to arise, such as: does the use of irony or satire mitigate against a judgment of incivility? For example, if Jonathan Swift applied for a position in my department, should his baby-eating manifesto “A Modest Proposal” be regarded as uncivil? Regrettably, many readers interpret everything in print literally, and hence get offended, which can lead to claims of an “unwelcoming environment”.

6. If campus does not intend for all job candidates to be assessed on uniform criteria of civility, then we fear we might be at risk of acting capriciously, and hence incurring a discrimination lawsuit. Could you please advise as to how we can minimize that risk?

7. If instead we are to run civility checks only on those job candidates about whom we receive complaints, then could you tell us what sort of complaints or complainants deserve investigation? e.g. how should we prioritize and investigate complaints from faculty, students, donors, … ? What sort of documentation should we keep of such complaints, and of our subsequent investigations?

With thanks for your help in navigating these uncharted waters.

30: If you think the academy doesn’t have outspoken racist, sexists, or homophobes, you need to get out more.

A long time ago I represented a professor who was denied reappointment after she had charged the department and the University with sex discrimination. One of those who voted against her explained that she wasn’t fired for complaining about sex discrimination, but because she wasn’t “collegial.” And the evidence that she wasn’t collegial? The sex discrimination complaint.

And, on a more general plane, let’s remember what Ronald Reagan said when he was Governor of California: the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.” Professor Burbules isn’t saying that, of course, only that the State shouldn’t subsidize those who disagree with it. Or its “values,” whatever they are.

Mitch Guthman 08.11.15 at 2:43 am

“The state may not have a “royal road to truth,” but then, really, who does? What’s undeniable is that it’s the state’s university so why shouldn’t the decisions made in the state’s name also reflect its values?”

Ah, yes. The old ‘nobody really *knows* anything, so we should do what I want!’.

Mitch Guthman 08.11.15 at 2:20 am

“It’s a state university. Unless you think that your values are the ones that must be applied universally or you know of some method for making value free judgments, whose values should be reflected in hiring decisions at a state university if not those of the state?

So – all administrators should be corrupt, the campus police should torture and kill with total impunity, and no Republicans are to be hired?

novakant @32, It is indeed a counterargument in relation to the Salaita case, since Salaita was already hired, and the only question here is whether being racist is just cause for firing/summary dismissal. The most charitable way I can interpret the position of those who still think his summary dismissal was justified is that Salaita’s supposed antisemitism was worse than the overt racism, sexism, or homophobia of a lot of people who they never made a peep about.

I am very surprised to learn that an institution like UIUC is not an organ of the state, reflecting the state’s values (which may include a certain amount of tame dissidence in certain locations, possibly for its immunological value). As an example of my thinking, I think the case of David Graeber is instructive. One noticeable difference between Graeber and a large number of other supposed radicals in the academic system is that Graeber was and is an activist, by which I mean someone who might go into the streets on occasion, and not collegially but with scruffy people. But in any case, given the way in which academic institutions are structured financially and politically (including the ‘private’ ones), how could they not be organs of the state?

The notion that a state university must reflect “the values of the state” is hogwash. Consider California’s constitution, which provides with respect to the University of California that “the university shall be entirely independent of all political and sectarian influence and kept free therefrom in the appointment of its Regents and in the administration of its affairs.” If there’s a “value” here of which UC is a reflection, it’s a value free from political and sectarian influence, or what one might describe as no value whatsoever. The notion that hiring, research, and curricular decisions at UC must satisfy some preordained measure of “values” is exactly backwards. We can only infer values after those decisions have been made and UC has done its job.

This post is annoying because it draws the conclusions far too broadly. Maybe, in theory, lots of other hiring professors wouldn’t use a “values” screen on hiring. But the idea that Corey Robins, master of snarkfest and the man who uses five degrees of Kevin Bacon methodologies as his favorite method of talking about conservatism wouldn’t? Come on.

You use values analysis when hiring professors. The question is which values and whose. The answer is “the values of the already existing professors”. There isn’t really much of a self correction valve for that system so like all systems that don’t self-correct (see for example the Tea Party) you get absurdities after time (see Trump). The always existing problem is that when you get a correcting reaction to that, it is almost always a vast over-correction.

Academic freedom is important and shouldn’t be squashed. That isn’t at all the same as saying that there are values (including very political ones) aren’t selected for at universities. You use defensive arguments that you would never accept in any other venue (see especially “there aren’t ANY ANY ANY qualified candidates of that underrepresented group, I SWEAR!”)

That tired old myth trotted out again and again.
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/18/is_there_a_liberal_bias_in_academia_partner/

“Reading these comments, including Sebastian’s, you’d never know that many departments come to blows over hiring decisions — that many members of the same department won’t talk to each other for years — precisely because individual faculty have different visions of what their discipline is all about, what their department’s needs are, what kind of intellectual values they are seeking to instill, and so on.”

And by that you mean “which brand of left”.

“But since Sebastian claims to know how I act on a hiring committee based on how he perceives me to act online…I don’t really expect any facts to get in his way.”

Well let’s see facts then. Name say three strongly conservative hires you have personally championed in the last three years.

re Novokant @30, you’re hiring people to do specific work, and you hire based on the track record doing that work. Here’s an example that might get to your concern. We have a student population diverse in multiple dimensions, and we’re interested in people’s demonstrated capacity to teach across difference. “Demonstrated” might include student course feedback, peer teaching observations, course design, and mentoring successes. We’re always interested in folks who have chosen to teach in institutions serving a lot of first-generation students and who can show success doing that.

I’m listing details of process to insist on a distinction between practice and ideology. We’re not interested in your ideology as a job candidate and I mean “not interested” both in the sense that the search process doesn’t ask for it, and in the sense that people’s ideologies are boring as hell. Can you teach the students? Can you get work out to an audience that respects it? This is what matters. So on your main question, I really, truly, don’t know what political engagements most of the colleagues I’ve helped hire get up to in their spare time, and I’d rather not know. (Relatedly SH @47 is talking through his hat re “values analysis.”)

This gets to what is absurd about the UIUC civility standards. To address Trader Joe @40, yes, indeed, Steven Salaita was hired, as the new e-mails further demonstrate. But, aided by Professor Burbules, Chancellor Wise *then* tried both to justify his firing and to avoid further controversial cases by promulgating a new civility standard. That is what the thing I copied mocked. One thing the mockery points out is that if you are serious about a standard you have to operationalize it, consistently. And of course UIUC had no intention of setting up the requisite machinery of review. Indeed Burbules’ key intellectual contribution to the suppression of free inquiry is the development of a two-tiered standard by which the outlandish could be sidetracked while everyone else got on with being good little faculty. So there’s more than one issue! Justice for Steven Salaita matters. What also matters is the chilling effect on other folks, and “chilling effect” is not a tendentious extrapolation when you can see administrators plotting it.

Anyone interested in academic freedom should read the John K. Wilson piece Corey links up top.

52, just to point out that 27% self-described conservatives and 19% moderates is a far cry from the claims made in 25 and 47. There just isn’t a shred of evidence for bias against conservatives in academic hiring (*). There is substantial evidence for self-selection, including but not limited to the fact that conservatives are far more likely to reject science than liberals. The article I linked to is worth reading except that you are clearly not actually interested in the subject, therefore I don’t think there is any gain in continuing to debate these tired old right-wing talking points.

(*) And it’s worth pointing out that some of the very right-wing academics claiming bias have by their own admission benefited from right-wing affirmative action.
http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/fighting-the-leftist-lean/Content?oid=1269358

Corey, are you suggesting that we should be treating UIUC (the university in the post) as more of a community college? I didn’t normally think of it that way, but I’m willing to trust your expert opinion on it if you think so.

SH, you can’t name a concrete case. You can’t name a single conservative equivalent of Salaita or El-Haj or any of the other left-leaning academics whose jobs were attacked because of their (real or imputed) politics. And yet we should believe that conservatives are victims of bias on the strength of the evidence that people who by their own statement reject science are relatively less likely to be teaching science than those who do not reject science. Very convincing.

And to be very clear. I’m not arguing that the UIUC was right to try to fire Salaita in this case. They clearly weren’t on even basic employment law concepts–without even invoking tenure.

I’m pushing back on the idea that ideology and values aren’t used in the hiring process. They clearly are, and all the defenses you are using to pretend they aren’t (up to and including the ‘confidentiality’ game) are defenses you would mock openly if tried in defending disparate impact for computer programmers, firefighters, or corporate board members.

Sebastian: I meant what I said about teaching @53 and have ample experience with that criterion in hiring renewal and promotion decisions re lecturers and tenure track faculty.

I’ll also add that confidentiality is not a game but a legal requirement. You have no clue how rule-bound and procedural academic hiring is.

“Sebastian – I recently participated in an evaluation process at Brooklyn College, Corey’s home institution. Without revealing anything specific about the process or our findings, which were intended for internal deliberations within the College, I can say that you really, really don’t have any idea of what you are talking about.”

Argh. The subject of the post is UIUC. Am I wrong about that?

Burbules and Tolliver are politically liberal (about most issues). Burbules has a blog in which he mocks Republicans. I know Joyce (slightly) and she doesn’t strike me as a Republican either.

Here is some intelligent research reflection (by a conservative) about conservatives in higher education.

http://www.aaup.org/article/rethinking-plight-conservatives-higher-education#.VcqLlii6ZHE

Most academic searches are not political in the crude sense, in that most academic competence is orthogonal to political positions, which only intrude into instruction on a few hot-button issues. Of course, those few issues will dominate media coverage of the politics of academe. Doh!

Or the fact that women are rarely hired as programmers is probably just self selection because programming is not really among the “fundamentally [female] liberal values” to use Fuzzy’s terminology.

How absurd. What are you even saying here? Technology is not a female value? What is that supposed to mean? Obviously, “female” is not comparable to “liberal/free inquiry/distrust of authority/etc.” Female is not a value, it is a biological and social state. It does not have any direct bearing on one’s interest in doing academic work. Whether one values free inquiry (etc.) over scriptural authority (etc.) obviously does.

I’ll go further than Sebastian H.

It’s not just that the end result is very obviously disparate. It’s that outside the context of discussing hiring, academics are overwhelmingly hostile to conservatives. It’s like the police department where there’s a dozen letters to the editors from officers about how lazy and violence-prone blacks are, and whose “scrupulously non-discriminatory” hiring policy always hires white officers (except for one Brazilian). I don’t have to know the details of the interview process to be fairly sure that the non-discriminatory policy isn’t.

Or, to name names–I find it extremely difficult to imagine Scott Lemieux championing a professor of American history who was Dunning-school versus the current “state values” version of history.

SamChevre @75 It’s that outside the context of discussing hiring, academics are overwhelmingly hostile to conservatives.

What are you basing this on? Hopefully not the writings of liberal academic bloggers?

Your comparison with police departments makes the same mistake as Sebastian H.’s example about programmers. Black ethnicity is not a personally-held value that has any necessary bearing on one’s desire to do police work. Having a strong pro-Southern ethno-nationalist commitment does, on the other hand, have a bearing on one’s desire to do high-quality, professional historical scholarship, and if that commitment shows up too much in one’s scholarship (which is to say, interferes with it), and that is penalized in the profession, there is no scandal there. How is it a scandal that Scott Lemieux would be unlikely to champion a Dunning-school historian? Are the Dunning school views as well accepted by American historians as the more mainstream views? Most academic disciplines are based on the premise that some views are more correct than others, so of course there’s going to be ‘bias’ in favor of prevailing views. That sounds like a bad thing, but I’m not sure how that could be avoided without embracing an extreme form of relativism.

Academics being more liberal than the general population is not like police departments not hiring many blacks, it’s like investment banks and other finance-related professions not hiring as many socialists and communists as are in the general population.

This whole thing is idiotic, though. Look, what’s the political affiliation breakdown in B-schools? And if it turns out to lean significantly more conservative than the rest of academia, should we conclude that business schools discriminate against liberals? (The suggestion seems mildly idiotic.)

@76 Ok, but what does that have to do with whether conservative political values are indifferent/neutral to academic values? They’re not at all indifferent to them, as far as I can see (and I’m not of course making an appeal to authority here). That of course doesn’t prove that there is no discrimination against conservatives on the job market, but it does mean you need to show much more than just that professors are more liberal than the general population, and many professors are outspoken about their political views, to make that case.

“[O]utside the context of discussing hiring, academics are overwhelmingly hostile to conservatives.” Where’s the problem? If academics are going to be “hostile” to political points of view, isn’t it salutary that they are so “outside the context of discussing hiring”?

‘In data from 2006, about 9 percent identify as radical (meaning they call for the redistribution of wealth)….’

I would think ‘radical’ would mean someone who believed in a redistribution of power, not just wealth (which can be said of social democracy, in other words, shoring up the existing power system). A hankering for a significant redistribution of power would appear to call into question the role of the education industry, including universities, colleges, and so on, in our present set of states. People working within it, and people contemplating taking jobs within it, would therefore be troubled by radicalism (their own or others’) and would tend to act accordingly. The fact that the conversation soon devolved into talk about ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ indicates to me that my point went ungrasped, even though I gave a concrete example of it. Oh, well. Let me just suggest that there are other perspectives which some of you might try on for a minute or two sometime.

Sebastian H., currently @ 86

I want to be clear. Unlike SamChevre, I’m making a systemic critique.

Nonsense. You’re doing nothing of this sort. You’re making sweeping statements about a sector you know nothing about and fight back tooth and nail against the multiple corrections you’ve received in tones ranging from friendly via polite to exasperated. You’re pursuing a bizarre ad-hominem attack on Corey, and apparently believe you can decide this thread is about whatever you’d like it to be.

But you can’t. This thread, for example, is not about hiring. And even if it were, I completely reject the notion that sexist bias against women in technical, scientific and academic fields is in any way a parallel to what you imagine is anti-conservative bias (without being able to provide any evidence to this effect) in academic hiring. I’m only going to point upthread for why this is so and register my strenuous objection. (And for the record, women in tech/science fields *is* a topic I have personal experience with.)

But given that this is not about hiring in the first place, here’s another aspect that the enlightening perusal of the Academe post & linked emails evokes. I, too, am affiliated with a US public university, a smaller one, in a more conservative state, and I, too, have no doubt whatsoever that a majority of state legislators would entertain a Bubules-style notion of academic “freedom”. It’s unlikely that either the institutional leadership or the Board is any more steadfast on these concept. I’ve up to now thought that our institution might be exceptionally shakey on that, but am beginning to doubt. Yet, for all the hand-wringing in the early emails about “damage to the institution” from things like uncivil tweets by a tenured faculty member, sensationalist reporting about an ex-felon instructor etc. — feelings I am sad to suspect would be shared by leadership teams and boards elsewhere — it’s the Board’s/leadership’s own faint-hearted, jumpy attitude that creates the damage in the first place, if it doesn’t multiply it out of control as in the Salita case. Even in cases where there’s a clear problem that needs addressing (and apparently UIUC has seen those, too, in the last years) it’s typically leadership’s reaction that makes them much more damaging problems than they would have been if handled in a firm, principled way.

Take the Dr. Kilmore situation — a quick check into this particular hiring process, followed by a statement to the effect that his background had been disclosed from the outset and that his qualifications and qualities, blah, blah, blah, and all’s good. Instead there’s pious bloviating about how of course everyone who has paid their debt (ugh!) to society deserves a second chance, but it needn’t be *us* who provide that second chance, so let’s wash our hands of the ugly duckling and kick him out of our organization. (I know it hasn’t happened, mostly because they seemed to be practicing damage control over the *other* matters.) What a pack of spineless toads!

No. I’m making very narrow statements

Just because you affirm it it doesn’t make it true.

about something I know ALOT about

That remains to be seen. At this stage, I’d like to see credentials.

You seem to completely miss the fact that people here may not be dancing after your whistle because this bloody thread isn’t bloody about bloody hiring. So you conveniently neglect to admit that no one in the thread has ever claimed that hiring decisions are completely free of cultural bias.

At the very outset of the parallel you attempt to be making we have a bit of a breakdown here: Unlike for highly qualified women who work or wish to work in tech/science fields we don’t see the hordes of highly qualified conservatives who complain that they were unable to secure an academic post. It was suggested above by Fuzzy Dunlop that a better analogy would be the equally rare pacifists who complain about being passed over for military jobs. You conveniently neglected that argument as well.

I happen to be in my office right now. (Model run doesn’t work. Long story.) The professors’ offices along the corridor belong to a wide mix of political attitudes. One has a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker. One is an out gay man of European extraction who’s an unabashed liberal. Most are moderate of some stripe. Some are tight with the extractive industries. Some are close to conservation movements. ::shrug::

No one doubts that. However, it doesn’t address the point.

There are manymanymany highly qualified technical women with eloquent and telling stories of bias. There are very very very few conservatives who complain about the same, provided similarly stellar qualifications. Indeed, stories about employment bias against academics appear to be at least as commonly targetting lefty academics as conservative academics (2, maybe 3 examples in this thread, zero counterexamples provided by you). Anecdata from my conservative acquaintances tends towards disdain for the pursuit of relatively (compared to qualification level) underpaid academic occupations in favour of much better-paying appointments in the private sector (or, apparently, cushy government or governance jobs).

Yikes, I have typed ‘here’ for ‘hear’ like four times today. I should probably be worried.

There are a number of high profile cases in tech which get publicized because discrimination on the basis of gender is illegal, while discrimination on the basis of political orientation isn’t while discrimination on the basis of political orientation isn’t

Right. Which is why back when it was legal to discriminate against black people it never got reported, and the various anti-sex-discrimination acts sprung unprompted from the forehead of Zeus and certainly media reports and social discussion about the plight of legally-discriminated-against women had nothing to do with it. And people getting sacked for being gay was never reported until after that sort of behaviour had been prohibited.

Sebastian: it is not regarded as a significant social problem if the fucking stupid are discriminated against in academic hiring.

You have the denial that ENORMOUS disparities from the underlying population mean anything

It might, but it doesn’t have to, see? You need other evidence. If 2/3 of the population believed the earth is flat… (and that has nothing to do with conservatives being psychologically or otherwise incapable of doing the job–it’s purely a matter of attachment to certain ideas discouraging people from following a career in which challenging those ideas is fundamental–ideas like young earth creationism–not all conservatives believe in it, but enough do that if we take all the young earthers out of the pool, academics look quite a bit more like what’s left of the general population. And so on for other strongly-held beliefs…

Your argument that this is evidence of discrimination reminds me of Louis C.K.’s routine about feeling superior to parents who tell their kids “shut up and eat your fries”. He tries arguing with his kid instead…
[long argument…]
“But, daddy, whyyyyyy?”
“Because some things are and some things aren’t, and that’s just how it is!”
“But, daddy, whyyyyyy?”
“Because otherwise we’d have all sorts of crazy things like giant ants walking around with tophats, and…”
“But, daddy, whyyyyyy?”
“Shut up and eat your fries!”

Academic work is based on the premise that some statements are true and some aren’t, and if that means academics tend to have different political views from the rest of the population, it need not have anything to do with bias. (Maybe it does, but again, you need evidence other than just the fact that academics diverge from the population!)

My anecdatal experience with academia (both when I was in it and since as most of my social circle are still in it) is that, yes, academics tend to be democrats (not universally of course) but are, as a group, not especially liberal and not comfortable with outspoken liberal/activist politics, even in the departments of fields which have a (wrong) reputation of being very political. My time in a tenure track position was fairly brief, but while there the department was on a hiring binge and so I went to more job talks and interviews than my fingers and toes can keep track of. Nobody (including me) cared at all about the political views, actual or inferred, of the job candidates. I suppose someone with a swastika tatooed on his/her forehead might have faced problems, but it would have taken something that extreme for anyone to take note.

SH,

I’m in the hard sciences and have served on multiple hiring committees. For candidates we look at 1) how much have they published and in what journals have they published it? 2) What techniques/systems do they work with (if we already have 9 faculty members working on X but none working on Y, a candidate working on Y will probably be favored)? 3) What are the prospects that they will be able to attract outside funding to support their research? In no cases have I ever been aware of what a candidate’s political leanings are.

Nevertheless, scientists now skew heavily Dem or Independent. I can’t find the numbers, but I recall seeing a poll showing that things were much more evenly distributed in 1990 than today. What do you suppose could have happened in the intervening decades to cause conservatives to avoid careers in science? Maybe massive reality denial (evolution, global warming, & etc.) being a major part of the platform of the major conservative political party has something to do with it? Maybe people who think that massive harassment campaigns against researchers whose conclusions they don’t like are A-OK are unlikely to be interested in research as a career?

Not to mention, hating “pointy headed professors” is practically a core conservative value at this point. Who could guess that an ideology that makes a point of hating the academy wouldn’t produce many people who want to become academics?

Corey Robin,

“I’ve been working at CUNY since 1999. We’ve had four governors: Pataki, Spitzer, Patterson, and now Cuomo. Let’s just assume for the sake of the argument that their values are the state’s values (you see, I hope, how ludicrous this notion is: what about the Assembly, the Senate, etc.?) So for the seven or so years Pataki was governor while I was here, we should have hired only people sympathetic with Pataki’s values? ”

I don’t think you should assume that the governor’s values are the values of the State at all — or else you would get changing values all the time.

I was just reading an article on the history of the public trust doctrine for an assignment on climate change governance.

This article shows how in the colonial settlement of States in America and then in the constitutional conventions for the Republic, it was largely agreed that the State and officers of the State were under fiduciary obligations to the people. Partly this was as people didn’t have many books to choose from in those days, so they all got this idea from their reading of Plato and Aristotle and Cicero and The Bible etc.

“By the time of the American Revolution, therefore, both defenders and opponents of the Crown had adopted public trust views of government. Both sides agreed that public officials were bound by fiduciary-style obligations. Their chief disagreement was on the question, “To whom are malfeasant officials accountable?” ”

There were two options — either derelict officials were accountable to God or to the public. I don’t see why they didn’t just settle on God and the public together, and that would have settled the debate entirely.

But anyway, there were around 5 main sorts of fiduciary obligations for State officials ” (1) the duty to follow instructions, (2) the duty of reasonable care, (3) the duty of loyalty, (4) the duty of impartiality, and (5) the duty to account.”

As you can see, if the University is a State university, then it is under these fiduciary obligations. But in some cases they might come into conflict and then you have to weigh up the right thing to do — like following instructions from an unfair Governor might conflict with the duty of reasonable care and the duty of impartiality, so it is better not to follow the Governor.

And that is why you can not equate the values of the State with the differing values of the Governors you have had since 1999.

Source: The Constitution and the Public Trust by Robert G. Natelson

Those of us who write about politics on the internet (and, to an extent, political theorists more generally) are a significant outlier in political science, but I think it would startle many people, for understandable reasons, to discover just how apolitical most of political science is.

In this regard, the case of Salaita is interesting because it seems to indicate some kind of falling-out between different elite factions.

Speaking of which…

http://capitolfax.com/2015/08/11/rauner-admin-turns-thumbs-down-on-wise-deal/

Atrios @ 99

Of course a woman who wants certain kinds of jobs, including, I assume, many in academia, is immediately identiable as a feminist of some sort, unless she takes steps to hide it. The same is true, for some people, of a person who is black. (While a man wearing earlocks, long beard, and black fedora, I have to assume, is immediately understood to be conservative.)

TM@100

A quibble, but I doubt anyone assumes engineering departments are mostly left leaning, in fact, quite the opposite. Scientists often skew liberal when that means opposing creationists and Republican defunding of science, but engineering departments in particular are not especially political, and I’d expect them to be somewhat authoritarian and very pro-business and pro-military.

Plume@104, it’s worth noting, would seem to be in contradiction to the many posters here who’ve been asserting that academia, being the pursuit of some variety of science or knowledge, is inherently liberal or left-leaning. Which is it? Are liberal professors liberal because academia is inherently liberal, or because they’re opposing its essentially conservative character? This has puzzled me greatly in recent years.

I’m frankly less interested in why there are few women in programming these days, and more in where all the openly female CT commenters have gone. I suppose it could be we’re treated the same as men and simply don’t enjoy the back and forth, like that between SH and HF, as much. It could be they’re hassled more but only because we women are dumb. It could be that women generally aren’t unfitted for discussion, but we have an especially dumb lot here. Or it could be that our male commenters are especially brilliant and we women are failing to recognize them. It would really only matter if, say, we thought we we’re running short of commenters and needed to graduate more, when in fact half were just dropping out of the system after graduation.

TM, sure. My somewhat distant sense is consistent with that statistic. It seems to me scientists (and actual working engineers) are often liberal in the sense of being opposed to superstition and traditionalist authoritarianism, but confronted with CT style real lefties, soon enough shift toward more of a market authoritarianism and defense of the status quo, and may start to think of themselves more as libertarians, which means as pro-business class righties, with maybe a little populism thrown in and some light social liberalism where it doesn’t inconvenience them too much.

@109 Bianca
“I’m frankly less interested in why there are few women in programming these days, and more in where all the openly female CT commenters have gone. I suppose it could be we’re treated the same as men and simply don’t enjoy the back and forth”

I don’t know the answer to this, but share your curiousity. Belle, Indrid and Maria are the most frequent, but apart from a flurry of music posts last year from Belle, far less routine than some of the men – I always read their threads and usually find them among the most distinctive and interesting.

My sense is that in the preponderance of casses the tone is reasonably civil and supportive – indeed their are routinely exhortations for them to post more – although it is perhaps the minority of cases, or at least the minority of posters, which discourage more activity. I’d be curious of their views – perhaps they all just have more gainful activities to pursue.

TJ,

Your own tone is reasonable, civil, and supportive, yet if I were feeling prickly and defensive, whether about your intentions or about how readers with sexist assumptions would understand your comment, (and noting that I don’t remember discussing any topic before with you, for a context I could put your comment in), I might notice that you quoted me out of context in a way that misrepresents what I said, you started by saying that you don’t have any ideas about what I asked about and suggesting that we’re in the same boat in that regard but that you’re somehow being helpful by being an ally to me in my cluelessness, then bring in up something (front page posters) that was different from what I asked about (commenters), and finally insult women who may still be here by suggesting (as you haven’t wrt the men) that we don’t have anything worthwhile to do with their time. But nevertheless civil and supportive and not objectionable without looking like a b-h, and I do apologize if you didn’t intend to be read that way.

I think it is instructive to explore in detail the case of one conservative professor I mentioned in 57. It is Dr. Robert Maranto, ’21st Century Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas’ (that’s his exact title). Full disclosure: I don’t know Maranto personally and have no conflict of interest concerning him. For all I know, he’s a nice, likeable person.

The Department of Education Reform at UA was founded by the Walton family (of Walmart fortune) with a $20 million endowment. While this is a lot of money, it probably doesn’t cover the full expenses (there are seven endowed chairs making twice what pother professors make) so tax-payer money is still involved. Worth noting further that the UA has classified certain documents relating to the department as trade secrets and managed to get this past a judge, despite the fact that this is a state university and Arkansas has a very strong FOIA law. So the public cannot find out what the University promised the Waltons in return for the money but the purpose of the department is no secret: to further charter schools and other aspects of the corporate education reform agenda underwritten by Walton (together with Gates and Broad and some other billionaires) money.

In the article linked above (http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/fighting-the-leftist-lean/Content?oid=1269358), which appeared in the left-leaning weekly Arkansas Times, Maranto practically admits that he got his job (*) thanks to Walton influence and due to his conservative credentials. That doesn’t in the least prevent him from complaining about liberal bias and anti-conservative discrimination (he has cowritten a book published by AEI to that effect). Now the Arkansas Times author is exceedingly nice to Maranto (perhaps he didn’t want to be accused of liberal media bias), granting he and his far right colleagues have “impressive resumes”. In fact, Maranto and several of the others have hardly any peer-reviewed research to their name. His publication list (http://www.uaedreform.org/robert-maranto-phd/) is not up to date but gives a good impression: Maranto lists a whole lot of “opinion” but not a single peer-reviewed journal article. Most of his recent work appears in Journal of School Choice (mostly editorials and book reviews, he’s the editor) and Academic Questions, a conservative advocacy journal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Scholars). The few actual peer-reviewed journals where he publishes have low impact factors. Professors with better research records have been denied tenure at the same university.

I think one has to admire this guy’s chutzpah: despite a second rate research record, he managed to get a very plush endowed chair at a public university through the right-wing think-tank network and perhaps direct donor patronage, yet he won’t stop feeling victimized by liberal bias bohoo.

Also nice irony: being hired for life on an endowed chair outside of the normal hiring process and absent normal tenure review and writing that public teacher tenure hurts students, as some of Maranto’s colleagues do.

(*) I don’t know the details of the hiring process for the endowed chairs. I do know that the Geosciences department at the same university has an endowed chair in petroleum science and representatives of the petroleum industry were directly involved in the search. In that case, the endowment agreement explicitly specifies that the research must benefit the industry. Many people actually think there’s nothing wrong with that.

Also, imagine the brouhaha if a state university were to create a whole department with a predefined left-leaning political agenda, handpicking professors at least in part based on their political reliability. The right-wing echo chamber would be all over it. It would be a first rate scandal. When conservatives do it, it hardly raises an eyebrow. Liberals are just too nice and mild-mannered – or maybe they fear retaliation if they speak out – to make a fuss about the shenanigans of right-wing academia.

TM: Also, imagine the brouhaha if a state university were to create a whole department with a predefined left-leaning political agenda, handpicking professors at least in part based on their political reliability.

I think a lot of conservatives would consider programs like Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, and postcolonial studies jobs in various departments to fit that description to a tee–they would surely claim that the fields themselves have a liberal bias so political reliability of hires is a moot point, because anyone who works in them is committed to a leftist agenda.

The problem with this is that the very idea of devoting serious scholarly attention to women or ethnic minorities serves a left-liberal agenda. The conservative response here, as with a lot of areas of scholarship boils down to ‘we don’t think this is as important as you think it is’. The things that conservatives might want to devote more attention to, like reminding everybody how great America is, or certain brands of Christian theology, are either already there (American history) or have serious 1st amendment issues. So there’s just no way to make work in the field or hiring neutral to one’s liberal-conservative leanings. This is not comparable to the example you gave with a chair of petroleum science, which makes a specific demand that the scholar’s work benefit not a population (any expectation that women’s studies scholarship benefit women is *at most* implicit) but a particular partisan interest. So to try and enforce liberal-conservative balance (or “greater political diversity” as conservatives call it) fundamentally perverts the purpose of modern academic institutions. This is why certain kinds of conservatives are waging all-out war on higher ed: they are aware of this fundamental conflict between their values and the whole enterprise of scholarly inquiry.

Yes, any department studying any subject that the extreme right doesn’t consider worthwhile studying – women, minorities, education unless it’s charter schools, anything related to labor, really – let’s be honest – almost any department involving the study of society, ethics, or philosophy – has a left-leaning political agenda. Oh, forgot to mention, environmental science, climate science, sustainability, biology, they all have an inbuilt liberal agenda. They are biased by definition. Just like the mainstream media are biased by definition because facts have a well-known liberal bias.

Have I forgotten anything? Maybe this: When a liberal professor hangs on to his or her job despite a weak publication record, that’s evidence of liberal bias in academia. When a conservative professor is appointed to an endowed chair despite a weak publication record, that too is evidence of liberal bias in academia because academic publishing tilts liberal.

The scandal is we have gotten so used to this BS we don’t think it’s a scandal any more.

Have you heard of the University of Colorado Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy? (http://artsandsciences.colorado.edu/ctp/) If you think this worthy initiative is about the scholarly study of conservative thought and policy, you must be totally delusional – only hard-core right-wingers need apply. Yep, that’s how far it has gotten with the liberal hegemony over academia.

@al #101 You took the words right out of my keyboard. Exactly the same blurb, from UIUC.

@124Johnson was a conservative, but he embraced many liberal positions.

+. As a person with formal linguistic training my attitude to the prescriptive linguistic tradition can be summed up pretty adequately in the word “contempt”, both for the activity and its participants. To say I regard prescriptive linguistics as “stupid” is to significantly understate the strength of my feelings.

+. I am beyond that not familiar with Johnson’s other work — or, importantly for literary criticism, the literature that’s being critiqued — so I won’t comment.

+. Samuel Johnson died two hundred and thirty years ago. While my statements are framed as absolutes, that you’re reaching back more than two centuries to find a possible counterexample suggests pretty strongly that I’ve identified a very strong tendency, even if my absolute claims are falsified.

Thanks Cranky. Certainly fits the John K. Wilson analysis linked up top. More here
http://academeblog.org/2015/08/12/university-of-illinois-trustees-reject-wise-resignation-and-400000-payout/ just in case anyone is still interested in the OP.

Wow. I thought there was no turn of events that could lead me to sympathize with Phyllis Wise. But then the Trustees–with the help of the Governor’s office–went and found a way.

How common is it to rescind a negotiated bonus? No–that’s not the right question.

How common is it for a group of wealthy white males to rescind a negotiated bonus going to a wealthy white male?

Poor Wise–she thought she was part of the club. She did their bidding. She covered for them. And when the crunch came, they said, “you’re not one of us. You’re an Asian woman. You’re on your own.”

I hope she sues every member of the board of trustees. I hope she hires the same lawyer that Salaita has. And I hope that lawyer makes them both rich, and the trustees poor.

You are always surprised to find out you are not part of the club. The guys in the club kept saying that you were one of “us” now, not one of “them.” They kept saying you were different, not like those other minorities, not like those other women. You were different because you were cool, and you got it, and you made the tough decisions (i.e., to screw over minorities and women).

So you knew they were scum, sure, but they were only scummy to *those* sort of people. They always screw over *those* people, and they always honor their commitments to their *own* sort of people. Among their own sort, they are highly, highly honorable gentlemen.

And they told you that you were part of the club.

Meh. Maybe I’m giving her more sympathy than she deserves. I’m sure that the trustees don’t deserve any.

From the link above, the trustees have announced a dismissal hearing and a statement of the causes for dismissal to come soon. This will be interesting – obeying a unanimous board decision as cause for dismissal?

TM @136,

Not familiar with those particular trustees but typically it seems, the trustees are the (>90% white, male) lawyer and banker friends of the governor. It’s a very peculiar way of guarding the “autonomy” of the university (and not common outside the US afaik).

It’s been done already in a scattershot way, but I wish someone would write a book all about the way America set things up. The way it teaches kids. The way it writes its history. The way every single aspect of our society is overwhelmingly affected by a top-down, business-interest perspective. This runs the gamut from “influence” to outright control, from “suggestiveness” to outright brainwashing. It is conscious and subconscious, covert and overt.

You’re correct. I don’t think any other nation has so thoroughly embraced the idea that “business leaders” should control freakin’ everything, regardless of how far away those things really are to their supposed expertise. Like Education, Health Care, the Arts, our political system, etc. etc. Some would like to believe that this is something quite new . . . . because the political right and the GOP talk openly about how awesome business owners are. But it’s always been this way. They’ve always run everything, which is too bizarre for words on the page.

In a sense, the GOP has done us a major service. It’s brought out into the open the cult that has always been the most pervasive ground/structure/machine of state: Business interests rule every single aspect of American life. As Norman Mailer said in the 1950s, Capitalism follows us everywhere, including home.

And that other right-wing meme? That it’s the government that we must fear, because of its desire for total control? Well, to the extent this is the case, it’s always in the service of those business interests, and no one else. So the right has it, at best, half right, and they leave out the folks really pulling the strings.

In the all too complex modern world, where “specialization” and the division of labor constantly accelerate beyond previous levels, the grip business interests have on the whole enchilada is nothing short of amazing, and nothing short of a catastrophe. Their “expertise” is extremely limited, but their control is virtually totalitarian.

It is hard to imagine how the trustees can pull this off (hearings and all) without damaging themselves. Giving Wise here severance would have been the easier path. It will be interesting and maybe delicious.

Lynne@142: Yeah, it’s not so much that Wise got thrown under a bus (she choose which side to go to bat for, after all), but that the Trustees are clearly the bigger villains in all of this, and they’ll probably get away without any consequences at all.

No, no and no. The trustees are not accountable to anybody, and it would be very hard to stick any personal liability for their actions as trustees. But they should by now be embarrassed enough to resign.

…because of the deep shame and mortification they feel when they read anonymous commenters on left-wing blogs.

These guys are no more capable of embarrassment than Donald Trump is, and for the same reason: they are surrounded with like-minded people who constantly assure them of their wisdom, virtue, and general wonderfulness. They are the winners of the world. Embarrassment (like anonymous commenting on left-wing blogs) is for losers.

Lynne, yeah, I didn’t mean to be hard on you, or suggest that you are blind to issues of sexism and racism. Chances are you know more about them than I do.

Wait, how did I do that?

“I enjoy schadenfreude as much as the next troll”–that only implicates me, not you.

And I have independent evidence to show for my own troll-ish status. I don’t know anything about yours, and did not intend to imply anything of the sort.

You’re right; I shouldn’t have apologized. Sorry about that.

“Does the state have, theoretically or actually, the power to punish these wealthy, mostly white, mostly male Trustees? Or, would they suffer any consequences should Salaita win his court case?”

While it is factually true that the board of Trustees is mostly white and mostly male, it kinda overstates the case a bit. There are any number of problems with this board but its racial and gender composition isn’t really the biggest. Of the 11 voting members there are 3 women and 3 African Americans (one being both). Its not a terribly old board either with a clear majority of the members under 6o.

While this isn’t perfect, its far from the picture painted by the description which sorta conjures the image of 12 angry old white men. I say this to suggest that what has been happening is far more indicative of a conservative mindset and rampant butt-covering rather than something that is inherently racial or gender biased. I’m not going to go to bat for any of them, to be sure, but I think the situation is ugly enough without finding yet another reason to introduce additional prejudices.

Also, a final note, the board and its members like virtually all large organizations is going to have Directors & Officers insurance coverage to protect any liability they may ultimately incurr for anything short of gross negligence, which I doubt could be proved here as much as I might think otherwise.

Trader Joe, thanks for that information. I agree that the ugliness of the situation does not need to be…enhanced, as I was inadvertently doing.

Booker T and Fred D are dead. You assume that their positions on things wouldn’t change. Were they alive today, would they hold the same positions or would that have changed those in response to all the stuff that happened between then and now? Up thread, I think, someone mentioned Johnson as a “smart” conservative. If he were alive now and made common cause with Jeb Bush, Chris Christy et al, then yes, I would say, he’s dumb.

Ditto Adam Smith. If he were alive and he he argued that Brownback’s Kansas was exactly what he envision, then I’d say he’s dumb. But, I don’t think he would. Smith, as for an example, thought that tar water was the royal road to good health. I like to think that were he alive now he would realize that he was wrong about the way to good health.

The same his notion that merchants of food would sell clean food absent tough regulations. Given the recent peanut scandal and the host of related events that show merchants less than interested in the well being of their customers, I like to think, because Smith was a smart guy, he would change his mind. His overarching concern, as i read him, was to create a system that provided the greatest good to the greatest many. Seeing as what he thought would happen didn’t I suspect he would try something new.

The dead can’t speak to the current state of the world, because, ta da, they haven’t seen it. Why just the other day over tot he NRO’s corner, some guy admitted as much about some other guy who predicted that laptops would never catch on: the guy was wrong but not dumb just unable, like the owl of Minerva, to see clearly what he and we can only see through a glass darkly.

If all of your allies haven’t taken part in the messes in which we are currently enmeshed, their arguments really aren’t germane are they. I mean it’s possible that everybody who was ever wrong about how things would play out played out would double down, but jeez that seems to be insisting that they were, you know, dumb.

“Ditto Adam Smith. If he were alive and he he argued that Brownback’s Kansas was exactly what he envision, then I’d say he’s dumb.” [argument repeated repeatedly]

I’m not sure ‘conservative’ and “willing to go along with current Republican craziness” is the same thing.

SH 154, the fantasy world you live in must be very comfortable – too comfortable to leave behind. Not much anybody here can do about it.

Sebastian H 08.14.15 at 6:29 am @ 159:
‘I’m not sure ‘conservative’ and “willing to go along with current Republican craziness” is the same thing.

Yes, if Dr. Johnson were alive today he’d be a lonely man.

Anarcissie,
Thanks for the Burke update; however, I meant contemporary Conservatism if it is not, per Sebastian H, people who call themselves Conservative and then prove to be dimbulbs enraptured of policies that make most of us worse off then we were. like Wisconsin’s and Kansas’s horrid little governors , the Republican presidential candidates horrid little men and lone horrid little woman, all of whom promise to do to the USA what Brownback and Walker did in their little laboratories of democracy.

“If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.”
Boswell