Thanks for the many comments – many long comments – to my academic groupthink posts, particularly the second. Having dutifully read through, I’m too tired to respond point by point to any more points. I do feel that this exercise – which threatened to be a bit of the old same old/same old – did me much good, writing and reading.
I hope those who followed along feel the same. Otherwise you must be seething.
One commenter requested – for the benefit of those with day jobs, or whose time is valuable – a dsquared-style shorter Holbo for all this.
So I thought to myself: how can I pithily muster proper disdain for the indulgent character of my highly characteristic blather? My tendency to roll and on without coming to a point or a halt. To repeat myself. To say the same thing with slight variations. A proper ‘shorter Holbo’ should make me feel pinned by some English term of abuse, like ‘bloody pillock’; but I’m seldom more than approximately sure what proportions of idiocy + fatuousness such terms index. And maybe I need a certain sort of shirt or shoes? The English, being a sort of European people, are sophisticated. Also, class-conscious. To feel English and badly about myself I tried listening to Louder Than Bombs inside on a sunny day after sleeping too late. Probably Daniel Davies doesn’t like The Smiths. Plus isn’t he Irish or something? But it rained, then it stopped. Then I went swimming, with perked me up.
Belle read the posts and said: look, you know you think sections of the humanites are in a sort of bad way and this is connected to political narrowness of a sort. So why get all clever with the Millian fancy footwork, dancing around it rather than saying it?
But, honey, I always.
I guess I wanted to kill three birds with one stone. Which requires me to throw it several times. (Have you ever tried to hit a bird with a stone?)
1) I agree with Bauerlein’s Millian analysis and say so.
2) The Millian questions about tolerance and diversity – although they may seem top-heavy in their construction relative to the case at hand – seem to me fine openers for cracking a general case: the mystery of what universities should be like, and what they should do. I have my eye on that big ball as well.
3) As I wrote in comments, I want conservatives to pay a toll of personal philosophical
improvement if they want to earn the right to criticize the academy. If they want to tut-tut on Millian grounds, they must turn Millian. In general, if they want to say there is something wrong, they have to be able to articulate what it is. Conservatives think it is quite easy for them to do this. I think it is actually extremely difficult. Either they give reasons no one else has any reason to accept (since they are private and mysterious or simply partisan); or reasons that are not clearly academically suitable (since they are anti-intellectual or irrationalist); or they say things that are hypocritical, at any rate deeply inconsistent with other things they believe.
So the fancy footwork was needed to shuttle me back and forth between 2) and 3), which required taking up perspectives not my own, to see how things look from there.
I won’t go through the argument(s) to 3) again. I have failed to convince quite a number of you. If I try again, I’ll try to do better.
One final point, since there’s nothing I love more than a good MODOK joke.
Sebastian Holsclaw surprised me by commenting to my second post: "Here and elsewhere you dismiss the question of the lefty who thinks
that the conservative is smart, and nevertheless chooses not to hire
him. Do you think that case is highly unlikely?" I said that I do indeed find it quite unlikely – so much so that, it’s true, I completely neglected to talk about it. (Michael Bérubé is making fun of the very notion, and I think his post is kinda funny.) I take the standard problem case to be one in which the lefty sincerely takes the candidate righty to be intellectually incompetent, due to his political beliefs. So the decision not to hire or promote is, in a sense, made in clean conscience. The decision is felt by the maker to be made on just the sort of grounds you would want: intellectual achievement.
On reflection, it could be that I am wrong about the rarity of the type of case Sebastian raises. (I don’t want to say it never happens, obviously. I’m not a total idiot.) One reason I don’t really want to consider these case is that – hey, I only know what I read in the papers. I read lit studies journals. I’m no fly on the wall in their hiring committee meetings. So I’m not going to go making wild accusations. It’s impolite. (Not that I’m polite, but sometimes I am.) But it just so happens that just today prof. Bainbridge is hopping mad about the case of Jack Goldsmith, a law prof at Harvard whose liberal colleagues are apparently … oh, just go read the Boston Globe article. Basically the concern, in some quarters, is that the man is brainy enough but of low moral character.
Now Bainbridge, as per the tail end of my first post, seems to me a picture perfect example of a conservative intellectual who will have hopeless difficulty explaining what is wrong here, by his lights. His attachment to Russell Kirk will be extremely awkward. And it will only get worse. Bainbridge is officially a fusionist. Social conservative + libertarianism. But every confusion is a form of fusion if you just … oh, never mind. We won’t go there just right now. Let’s look at one corner of the problem only. Consider Bainbridge’s allegation that the case is one not just of instutitional bias but of manifest ‘actual bias’. No one thinks Goldsmith is intellectually inadequate, or insufficiently credentialed and published. Ergo, it must be bias.
But it seems fair to assume that the faculty who oppose Goldsmith’s appointment are sincere in their suspicion that he holds wrong moral values (by their lights). It isn’t really right to say they are biased against the views he is thought to have. They oppose them, on principle. Having values doesn’t = bad bias.They are saying that a man of such low moral character should not be promoted by a school like Harvard.
Of course, there is a perfectly good liberal response: ”I so much like the idea of somebody who thinks differently than I do, who is smart and open-minded," [vice dean] Alford said of Goldsmith. ”You can have debates about ideas, and that’s what this place is supposed to be about."
But why should a conservative think that it is wrong to insist on good moral character, in a teacher? I should think this is one of the most standard conservative positions there is: mere intellectual brilliance – especially brilliance on behalf of unorthodox ideas – is essentially a shallow, unsustaining virtue. Yes, the man has scribbled many books. But look what they contain! Dangerous ideas! Ideas that would overturn our traditional moral notions! Character and proper moral outlook are the true foundation on which one builds. We must look to those in all we do. We have the young to think of. What poison might this man pour into their ears, let loose in the classroom!
Isn’t this the Kirkian-Burkean view (perhaps I’m stating it a bit too strongly, but haven’t I got the outlines right)? So why call this view ‘bias’? Are all conservative arguments of this form biased? (Have we quietly dropped conservative arguments of this form? If so, there are consequences for conservatism.)
I take it Bainbridge’s answer is: look, I’m a libertarian about this stuff. I’m a Kirkian when it is a matter of me imposing my elite moral views on others. I’m obviously not going to stand for others – liberal elites – imposing their moral views on me. That would be intolerable. This is wise fusionism.
Bainbridge writes (see link above): "The American people want their laws to reflect their morals and values." Isn’t it likely that those faculty opposing Goldsmith sincerely believe that they are upholding American morals and values? Bainbridge: "Conservatives thus agree with Edmund Burke’s argument that "Man’s rights exist only when man obeys God’s law," towards which we admittedly grope feebly and imperfectly. Hence, conservatives believe our laws should reflect the moral norms embodied in the natural law." Isn’t it likely that the faculty opposing Goldsmith sincerely believe that – however feebly and gropingly – they are doing so on behalf of moral imperatives that go deeper than the law?
How is Bainbridge sure they are ‘biased’ rather than Burkean? Burke speaks of the wisdom of ‘prejudice’. What is prejudice but bias? Again, obviously the answer is that Bainbridge will say he is libertarian about this stuff. But why should anyone take his opportunistic slides back and forth – Mill or Kirk as suits his partisan convenience – remotely seriously?
I think Goldsmith should probably get to keep his job for all the standard reasons the vice-dean gives (unless there’s something truly horrible going on, of course.) But I’m a liberal Millian. And I promised you a MODOK joke.
I told Sebastian that I don’t think people get refused academic jobs because the hiring committees think they are smart but intolerably evil. But everyone has their limit, surely. MODOK is a Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing by the brilliant scientists of A.I.M. You can just see the hiring committee discussion. "But he’s brilliant! Look at the size of his head! And he killed the interviewers with beams of pure thought! On the other hand, we have also to consider the uses to which a being designed only for killing might put its great intellect." So let’s say that you have reached your MODOK point when you see a candidate whose intellect has clearly been Designed Only for Something Really Bad. It’s narrow and sinister. No, really. There is a serious and a genuine problem deciding what role character should play in the hiring process. I think righties will tend to be more worried about character than liberals, except in the academy, where maybe liberals will be more worried about it than righties.
I think this falls properly under the ‘constituent service’ rubric I outlined in my first post. Universities should look like America, and profs should not viciously assault ordinary Americans – certainly not Captain America – with their minds. I don’t see America with a cubic head zipping around in a floating chair. Ergo, we may refuse MODOK the professorship.
This is not a trivial admission, since it may commit me to some sort of fusionism. But I hope I don’t get too badly fused. (This post is dedicated to Jacob Levy. Libertarian and fanboy.)
{ 43 comments }
Adam Kotsko 12.11.04 at 6:31 pm
Speaking of “character,” I wonder whether a Martin Heidegger or a Carl Schmitt could make it in today’s academic world. (Let’s assume that they’re brilliant, since everyone but the British and British-wannabes agrees that they are.) And no matter what the answer is, I wonder what that answer says about our current system.
Adam Kotsko 12.11.04 at 6:35 pm
Oh wow — your comment box generates “curly quotes” automatically! As if my techo-lust wasn’t piqued enough by Kieran’s last post!
Sebastian Holsclaw 12.11.04 at 6:44 pm
Just to be clear, I’m don’t know how many lefties think conservative candidates are smart and choose not to hire them anyway. It just seems to me that it would be very easy to get away with such a thing. There are always differences between candidates that you could seize hold of as an excuse even if you really just didn’t like conservatives. And often it wouldn’t have to be as strong a thought as “Conservatives are evil” it could be “Conservatives make me vaguely uncomfortable and I’ll go with the candidate who is smart (perhaps not AS smart) but who makes me comfortable.” But even if we had people SAYING things like “I would never hire a conservative”, I suspect that we on the outside would rarely hear about it.
I think your juxtaposition of the Goldsmith case with the MODOK joke is more revealing than you think. The problem is that I suspect many liberals believe that conservatives really are evil (though of course a good leftist would have trouble with using that word) so in many cases they ridiculously believe themselves to be in a MODOK situation. Conservatives very rarely (Horowitz perhaps being an exception) believe that their liberal counterparts are evil. Typically we believe that they are astonishingly naive, but not evil. This makes it easier to hire someone smart who disagrees with you. Conservatives are more likely (perhaps naively isn’t that an irony) to believe that their smart leftist counterpart will at least partially come to his senses later while their leftist-in-charge counterparts who believe that the conservative is just wrong and should be kept out on moral principle.
This would all be especially amusing if it weren’t so serious, because it involves both sides taking positions that their rhetoric formally has problems with.
PZ Myers 12.11.04 at 6:44 pm
Just to take the MODOK analogy down a notch and make it a little closer to reality, what about:
– a biology candidate who uses his great brain and knowledge of embryos to argue that abortion is reasonable and justifiable?
– a biology candidate who uses his great brain and knowledge of embryos to argue that abortion is indefensible, and all women must bear their babies to term, even at risk of their life?
They aren’t quite squirting death rays out of their foreheads, but you can see where each might get the hiring committee a bit edgy. How does your “candidate should look like America” criterion resolve this? And doesn’t it ignore the fact that most professors don’t look like your average American?
I think, in my experience, what would happen is that we’d resolve the problem by looking at only the quality of the work done, not the conclusions drawn. At least in the hiring committees I’ve been on, we’d find MODOK to be an incredibly good candidate: very smart, using amazing technologies, and clearly able to bring in external funds.
PZ Myers 12.11.04 at 6:50 pm
Adam: have you seen the SmartyPants initiative? Smart typography for the masses!
Sebastian Holsclaw 12.11.04 at 6:55 pm
I got so caught up in my own little subset of the discussion that I forgot my point about your larger discussion. I think you are wrong both in identifing the Millian view on academic freedom as being prevalant on the left and on it being logically excluded from ‘conservatives’. I think (but I’m speculating so I’m open to correction) you do this because you use the term ‘conservative’ in a very European/aritocratic sense which ignores the strong dose of what in the 1940s and 1950s would be called ‘liberalism’ in the modern conservative movement. So you are setting up a false contradiction between being ‘conservative’ and wanting Millian tolerance for ideas. If you translate that into the ‘marketplace of ideas’ concept, it doesn’t change much. But it suddenly becomes very easy for conservatives to embrace.
Henry 12.11.04 at 7:11 pm
When reading Bainbridge’s post, I was thinking about the Goldsmith example more or less along the lines that John was (btw I use Goldsmith’s work a lot, and assign it in my courses). But there is an issue there – is there a point at which bad moral character would be enough to make you not want to hire somebody in your Dept? My personal answer is yes, where there’s clear and unambiguous evidence of the person in question having unrepentantly engaged in morally unconscionable behaviour. If Goldsmith had indeed been the author of one of the torture memos and I was in Harvard law school, I would have had problems with his candidacy. The same would be true if I were in a Dept which was considering hiring Henry Kissinger – while his intellectual contribution to IR is first rate, I would have real difficulties in having him as a colleague because of what he did in Laos, supporting Pinochet’s coup etc. But this isn’t, or so it seems to me, a conservative-versus-liberal thing, unless torture and the encouragement of human rights abuses are conservative causes, which I don’t think they are. If, say, I was in a department considering hiring a leftist intellectual who had a similarly nasty past, I’d have exactly the same reaction. Toni Negri for example – I think he was stitched up by the Italian government – I also think that he gave active support and encouragement to some very nasty people indeed.
bob mcmanus 12.11.04 at 7:22 pm
Bainbridge and Holbo are the …astonishing… bloggers.
I don’t think Conservatives are evil, but have really met very few outside of history and literature. True conservatism doesn’t get a fair shake in today’s environment, and my actual position is that stuff like hereditary aristocracy and religious intolerance worked pretty good for a couple thousand years, and maybe we should take another look at them. But I find no respectable advocates.
Now “fusionists”. Well, I read Lukacs, and I forgive those afflicted with false conciousness. Bainbridge surely doesn’t realize he is an ass.
And those conservatives who profess some sort of fusionism as a duplicitous tactic (hard to imagine a Libertarian pretending to be a conservative as a strategy), well if I grant that Kirkianism is a defensible position, yet the environment is utterly inhospitable to neo-Feudalists, then I guess I must forgive the Straussians also.
I wish Holsclaw would give those examples of Conservative (not Libertarian) Schools hiring radfems, marxists, and militant atheists, for I am sure he has many. I am in a magnaminous mood.
KCinDC 12.11.04 at 7:40 pm
Adam: Just don’t try writing ‘Twas the night before Christmas or class of ’85, or you’ll see the horrors of dumb “smart” quotes, which have nearly eliminated the initial apostrophe nowadays. I blame Microsoft Word.
Russell Arben Fox 12.11.04 at 7:51 pm
This is one of the great (and not really sought after, but indisputable nonetheless) advantages of getting to practice and work through one’s “elitism,” and the issues of intellectual diversity and ideological character and consistency which it entails, in a financially and socially non-elite academic environment; the MODOKs of the world are usually only capable making a stink about their applications when it involves a first- or second-tier institution.
bob mcmanus 12.11.04 at 7:53 pm
“So you are setting up a false contradiction between being ‘conservative’ and wanting Millian tolerance for ideas.”
Holsclaw, words simply don’t mean whatever you want them to mean, especially if you want to take political advantage from the confusion. A lefty who wishes to exclude some ideas from the markeyplace is betraying liberalism; a conservative believes that certain ideas should be advantaged over others, with non-instrumental justification.
The Libertarian Elision
Jasper Milvain 12.11.04 at 8:26 pm
To continue down one of the side alleys:
It’s probably correct that a conservative would not reach for a MODOK joke if confronted by a very smart person who made their flesh creep. Something from C.S. Lewis might be more appropriate.
But conservatives seem to me as likely as liberals to treat disagreeing with them as a character flaw. A conversation full of disagreements is always likely to be delicate, whichever direction you disagree in; you might even feel less bad about dismissing awkward customers if upholding traditional courtesy was a campaign of yours.
BIgMacAttack 12.11.04 at 8:32 pm
Does any of this really matter to anyone other than those applying for the positions? I think the secondary effects might be exaggerated.
I think a lot of comments made an excellent point about conservatives as Millians.
Almost everyone except a few nut cases are conviently Millian.(Include me and from what little I know maybe even Mills.) I think that perhaps you are being a bit convient in denying conservatives as Millians.
Are Randy Barnett, David Bernstein, and Tyler Cowen Millian enough. Or are they just being hyprocites when they express concern about bias against conservatives?(Though it might be they have just indicated that there is bias but not expressed a good deal of concern about it.)
I read a lot of comments but I didn’t see many people asking, WTF do these conservative ideas really have anything to do with teaching?
Take your example from above.
If the answer is they don’t, a very obvious case can be made for not engaging in such practices, for placing processes in place to prevent such practices, out of enlightened self interest. The pendelum can swing.
Though I guess the problem with that, is that moral degenerates will tear down those processes, in an eye blink, after the pendelum has swung. So why bother? Just make hay(shove ‘liberal’ ideas down throats) while the sun shines in the hopes it will keep the pendelum from swinging.
Your right, it is difficult to make case for hiring evil scum to teach our children.
robbo 12.11.04 at 8:46 pm
If I might again snipe in from somewhere in the moat around the ivory tower, it seems likely to me that the very popularity of today’s aggressively anti-intellectual “Conservatism” puts the “intelligent” conservative in a bind when it comes to the problems of getting hired at institutions that arguably prize intellectualism above all else.
William F. Buckley is not the public face of today’s “Conservative,” it’s Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, George Bush, Jerry Falwell, and David Brooks. They have demonstrated the money-making and election-winning power of reality-bending, lowest-common-denominator-seeking, religion-based, fear-based, fag-hating Conservatism. Not that each of the named people engages in each of these vices–though the most popular icons, like Limbaugh, do–but they all play nice under the same tent and they all share in the spoils of their “movement’s” recent political successes.
Moreover, the anti-intellectuals are not making nice with the old guard. They are kicking them to the curb with gleeful abandon. We can all see Conservatism careening down a crazy path that places religion above science, and that seems to be prepping America for some kind of Armageddon-like military showdown with Islam, as though this were somehow inevitable. Whatever the case, my daddy’s a very smart man, and an old-timey Conservative, and he’s pretty appalled at the state of his political identity.
Intelligent Conservatives, here’s an argument you may be open to hearing: It will be to your own long-term advantage to take the anti-intellectuals down a couple pegs, so that the rest of us don’t take you for (a) one of them, or (b) an intellectual subjugating himself to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell for whatever reason.
Matt Weiner 12.11.04 at 10:26 pm
kcindc: My Microsoft Word autocorrects the smart quote on “‘Tis” to an initial apostrophe. (That’s not going to look right–pretend it does.)
But I’ve got to disagree with Adam–the automatic curly-quotes in comment boxes blow. At Certain Doubts whenever you copy the curly quotes from someone else’s comments into your own, the comment software chokes on it and generates that awful â?? garbage. Turrible.
ben wolfson 12.11.04 at 11:24 pm
The automatic conversion would work if people normally used
`and'in pairs, because those are unambiguous. The winter of `85 (I see whatever system this is doesn’t autoconvert backticks). But using matched'and"pairs doesn’t fly. (LaTeX has a similar problem, actually, in that if you have nested quotes of the form``foo said`baz''', it parses the “'''” wrong. You need to use an \mbox{} or something to force the order you want.Back to the regularly scheduled post, now.
ben wolfson 12.11.04 at 11:26 pm
)
chris 12.12.04 at 1:40 am
Bob McManus: I’m not sure a conservative has to believe that “certain ideas should be advantaged over others, with non-instrumental justification.” The conservative justification for priviliging certain ideas is often: they’ve worked well for hundreds, maybe thousands of years; if some rationalist system tells us to change them, well, people have come up with lots of rationalist systems before that seemed right but later proved wrong, so let’s trust the wisdom of tradition over the logical entailments of the now-prevailing ideology. That’s an instrumental justification and a conservative one too.
bob mcmanus 12.12.04 at 3:08 am
“That’s an instrumental justification and a conservative one too.”
I don’t think so. Ultimately I think that this is what distinguishes conservatives from liberals and libertarians, that ultimate values, traditions, practices are not subject to conseqentialist tests and Popper falsification.
Proving that Christianity is bad for society or that gay marriage might actually strengthen hetero marriage is not a discussion a conservative will even begin.
Slavery had been a pretty good thing for a couple thousand years, and then became a bad thing that had been a bad thing all along. The utilitarian or consequentialist value of slavery was never allowed to be in question among conservatives.
….
Scratch the above, it is partly wrong, but I won’t delete it. I wrote this yesterday as a justification of a very conservative society:
“The disadvantage of social and political mobility and instability in times of economic scarcity and/or internal/external military threats has been understood for millenia. A pliable labor force, an unshakable aristocracy and heirarchy, fixed and immutable social/religious values with militarism near the top, an economy based on wealth and rents….the Old South understood that Sparta had defeated Athens, and had read their Thucydides in the cradle (the Hobbes translation).”
But I think there is a danger in publicly admitting that social values, like abhorrence of torture or social definition of sexual norms, are instrumentally justified. The peasants could get ideas about property rights.
John Emerson 12.12.04 at 3:32 am
Why are conservatives so whiny? They’re winning, aren’t they?
And now we have to like them too. But I just can’t. It’s just too hard.
Eventually they will have mopped up all resistance in every area, whining all the way. But will they be happy then?
No, because then they’ll be forced to realize that they’ve inflicted the worst President in American history on us, and they’ll have to live with the consequences themselves.
And by then there won’t be any liberals left to blame. I really feel sorry for those guys.
(Second try, ten minutes later)
Matt 12.12.04 at 4:40 am
Man- and to this this was to be “shorter Holbo”!
jholbo 12.12.04 at 5:00 am
Sebastian writes: “I think you are wrong both in identifing the Millian view on academic freedom as being prevalant on the left and on it being logically excluded from ‘conservatives’.”
I probably could have emphasized this more but it is an extremely important component of my overall view that really accepting Millianism would be extremely uncomfortable for many lefty academics. I wish them this discomfort. This is what I’m saying when I say ‘I agree with Bauerlein’. As to the logical exclusion of conservatives from Millianism: I grant it isn’t so tight, although I may have made it sound so in overheated moments. What I think is that if they were to explain how, why and to what extent they are Millians – sufficient unto the purpose of being able to gripe about the academy – this would cause them great discomfort. To avoid flagrant self-contradiction, they would have to disavow lots of things they like to say. I wish that on them.
Lefties academics like to talk about being in favor of freedom of thought and critical inquiry, but are often dogmatic and hidebound and narrow and insufficiently respectful of folks whose values are different than theirs. Righty critics of the academy like to talk about being in favor of freedom of thought and critical inquiry, but are often dogmatic and hidebound and insufficiently considerate of folks whose values are different than theirs.
Paul Cella 12.12.04 at 6:29 am
I couldn’t figure out why I received so many hits from this blog entry until I checked the comments section — and found a link to one of my essays by my old friend Mr. McManus.
Allow me to wade in with a few remarks.
Mr. McManus writes, “A conservative believes that certain ideas should be advantaged over others, with non-instrumental justification”; to which Chris replies, “The conservative justification for priviliging certain ideas is often: they’ve worked well for hundreds, maybe thousands of years; if some rationalist system tells us to change them, well, people have come up with lots of rationalist systems before that seemed right but later proved wrong, so let’s trust the wisdom of tradition over the logical entailments of the now-prevailing ideology.”
Mr. McManus is closer to the “true” Conservative view (though I am not wedded to the term “conservative”: if semantic pedants insist on some binding definition of the term, they can have it). A Conservative does indeed believe that certain ideas should be advantaged or privileged; and this because certain ideas are true and others are not.
In this belief the American Conservative finds unique and emphatic support in his own national political tradition, which began with the following statement: “We hold these truths.”
Contained in that phrase (a phrase of marvelous rhetorical economy) is a philosophical commitment of the first importance. “We,” that is, in another marvelous phrase from our great founding documents, “We the people of the United States,” believe that there is such a thing as Truth; that there a certain particular truths, discernable by man’s natural reason, that make up Truth; and that these truths (and, a fortiori, this Truth) command our obedience.
In the face of this philosophical commitment, which is, again, the commitment of American political philosophy, modern Liberalism is trussed. Mill — I assume that the term Millian appearing around here refers to J. S. Mill — and his philosophy are alien to our tradition. Mill’s commitment to the proposition that all questions are open questions (except, of course, the question of whether all questions are open) is confuted by the very words with which we became a nation.
Dan Simon 12.12.04 at 8:33 am
This discussion of the deep epistemological meaning of “conservative” would be quite relevant if accusations were flying to the effect that academics with particular approaches to truth were being discriminated against. In fact, the standard accusation is that academics who come to particular, concrete political conclusions are discriminated against, irrespective of their epistemological leanings. (Legal scholars routinely play this same game, slamming each other for their “reasoning”, by which, of course, they mean the results reached, irrespective of the reasoning.)
As for “what role character should play in the hiring process”, it’s very simple: those in power always want “character” to play a major role in judging people, because as the people in power, they get to define “character”. Those who are out of power correspondingly prefer more objective criteria.
Finally, claiming that academics exhibit a leftward bias confuses cause and effect. “Left” and “right” mean very little beyond what positions certain demographic, socioeconomic and cultural coalitions happen to embrace at a given moment. The “left” coalition happens to have prominently featured academics, and people of a similar socioeconomic and cultural orientation, for some decades now, with the result that the positions defined as “of the left” have been shaped largely by academics and people similar to them. That’s why so many mutually contradictory positions have fallen under the same label (“left” or “right”) at different times. (More here.)
Mark Shawhan 12.12.04 at 8:46 am
Tell me, Mr. Cella: where does the First Amendment fit into the intellectual picture that you paint?
Paul Cella 12.12.04 at 9:28 am
Mr. Shawhan: It fits in where it was first attached: as an addendum to a larger and more comprehensive document; an addendum that bound the actions of Congress alone (“Congress shall make no law”) and that cannot be wrenched free from the larger document itself, to be deployed as if it were the single binding Legislation of the country.
Recall that the Constitution tells us the ends to which “We the People” have set ourselves: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Unity, Justice, Prosperity, Liberty, etc.: these things we have set before us a goods. It is our job as republican citizens to work out precisely how they will be refined, balanced, perfected.
I do not deny that the First Amendment is part of the Constitution; but I do deny that it should be given a prominence it never properly enjoyed until about 1960.
nic 12.12.04 at 9:37 am
You describe the controversy over Goldsmith as an issue of objections to moral character. I went and read the Boston Globe article, and it seems to me the objections are a lot more specific than that. An interesting clue is how they’re described even there: the Goldsmith memo advising the CIA that it was legally acceptable to transfer prisoners out of Iraq to other countries is described as
bq. a practice less controversial than torture, but still troubling to many specialists on international law, who consider such transfers a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
So far, it would seem it’s a matter of views. Are the Geneva conventions really that open to interpretation? Further below, we get:
bq. The CIA has since come under fire for holding ”ghost detainees” — people who were captured in Iraq and taken elsewhere, and others whose status was not disclosed to the Red Cross as required under the Geneva Conventions.
So, no, it’s not a matter of views. It’s a matter of what those conventions clearly require. But Goldsmith doesn’t think so:
bq. Several law professors interviewed for this story said Goldsmith is a highly respected scholar known for his position that international law should not always be binding on the United States.
So, perhaps the objections are to a law professor teaching laws as if they were a matter of interpretation, no?
Forgive me for being so unsophisticated, but in the end, laws can either apply or not apply, in the case of international treaties, be signed, or not; once they are, they are binding. They cannot be “not always binding”. Who decides when it’s time for “not” and when it’s time for “always”? The laws themselves. If you don’t want them to be binding, you should abolish them – in the case of international conventions, retract your adherence to them.
Is Goldsmith advocating that? In that case, the core of the objections is indeed about the moral judgement of such a position. If he’s “only” saying that the US should pull out of those international treaties, then of course that’s still a highly objectionable stance, but it’s technically legitimate, for a law professor.
But if he’s just saying – as in the memos – that even without the US pulling out of the conventions, there’s room for adaptation and interpretation of what is binding and what is not, despite that room being clearly denied in those laws, then the objections have a lot more weight than a mere difference of views on what is moral. They are about a technical inconsistency.
Would there be no objections to a criminal law professor taking the view that certain crimes are acceptable, even when existing laws clearly say they are not?
(This is not to say he should have been refused his post, I have no basis or intention to judge that. I’m just saying, there seems to be a more precise aspect to consider than only his views on certain issues or his collaboration with the government and participation in those memos.)
nic 12.12.04 at 9:50 am
PS – again, relevant part also for the hypothetical criminal law professor would be that he wouldn’t be advocating repealing or changing those laws, only circumventing them. ie. both morally and technically objectionable.
Dan Simon 12.12.04 at 10:24 am
[T]he objections have a lot more weight than a mere difference of views on what is moral. They are about a technical inconsistency.
Would there be no objections to a criminal law professor taking the view that certain crimes are acceptable, even when existing laws clearly say they are not?
Thanks for making my point. The law schools are in fact jam-packed full of law professors who take precisely such a view with respect to certain crimes. (For example, I’d bet you’d be hard-pressed to find a law school without several professors willing to take that position with respect to, say, marijuana use.)
But because those particular crimes are of the kind that it is more socially acceptable in legal academic circles to consider non-crimes, the gross technical error of which you speak is glossed over. The issue, in other words, is Goldsmith’s particular political, rather than legal, point of view, and the non-partisan technical argument against him is simply a cover for naked political bias.
nic 12.12.04 at 12:47 pm
Yes, Dan Simon, I would guess marjuana use is probably more “socially acceptable” than torture. What a morally decadent world, eh?
I was thinking precisely of someone supporting legalisation of marjuana when I wrote the PS. Maybe you didn’t get that point. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that that position is morally equal to supporting torture, so we do away with the nature of moral objections. (I don’t think anyone needs a discussion on which issue is more morally “troubling” and not just to “some specialists”). We just observe there are different positions on both issues, so they both raise objections. The difference I was pointing out is between advocating changing or abolishing laws, and circumventing them.
Let’s suppose further that your academic world is really packed with law professors supporting legalisation of all drugs. Yeah. Are these thousands and thousands of drug apologist professors saying the laws should be changed, or are they producing memos and manuals on how to fool the cops and get away with growing marjuana and opium in your back garden? I was under the weird impression that that kind of material was distributed by far more underground “institutions” than American universities, but I’ve never been in a law class in a US college so, what do I know, maybe they do teach that too. While everyone is asleep.
The issue, in other words, is Goldsmith’s particular political, rather than legal, point of view, and the non-partisan technical argument against him is simply a cover for naked political bias.
Yes, of course, it’s not like the Geneva conventions are laws, after all, they’re just political pamphlets that anyone can re-interpret at will, without going through the unnecessary and counterproductive trouble of formally revoking the existing obligation to adhere to them to the letter. That’s precisely how they were devised. Compliance with laws is a matter of opinion. That’s exactly what law professors are supposed to teach.
Funny, from the reputation those conventions are enjoying among right wingers, you’d think they were put together by Mao and Stalin.
nic 12.12.04 at 12:52 pm
Goldsmith still got the job, didn’t he? Only three people objected, right? Is that all it takes for a governing right wing to complain about being discriminated by partisan opponents?
Mike 12.12.04 at 2:33 pm
Shorter John Holbo: There ought to be more conservatives in academia, so it’s a shame that poetic justice as fairness isn’t a deductively valid form of argument.
jholbo 12.12.04 at 2:39 pm
Since he hasn’t checked in so far, I suppose it might be worth mentioning that I reall do know that Daniel Davies is Welsh. Or whatever.
Barry 12.12.04 at 3:00 pm
“Why are conservatives so whiny? They’re winning, aren’t they?
And now we have to like them too. But I just can’t. It’s just too hard.
Eventually they will have mopped up all resistance in every area, whining all the way. But will they be happy then?
No, because then they’ll be forced to realize that they’ve inflicted the worst President in American history on us, and they’ll have to live with the consequences themselves.
And by then there won’t be any liberals left to blame. I really feel sorry for those guys.
(Second try, ten minutes later)”
Posted by John Emerson ·
John, sometimes I think that that is why the right is winning the political/economic struggles (the cultural one is the one that they are losing, slowly and with some temporary victories).
The right figures that when they lose, it’s right and proper to put the boot to the fallen foe. When they win, a backstab of their victorious (doubtless through cheating) foe is called for. When Clinton was elected, they didn’t spend one second ‘getting over it’. They attacked him from the beginning, and will still blame things on him. This had the advantage of putting him on the defensive, and getting a lot of people used to the idea that Clinton must be guilty of something serious, otherwise why would they always be hearing bad things about him?
Then, when Bush became president, we heard the right chanting ‘get over it’, and praising him to the skies. Opposition to Bush was equated to treason.
It’s a winning formula.
Walt Pohl 12.12.04 at 5:08 pm
You might be right, Barry, but Jesus, what a repulsive thought.
Mark Shawhan 12.12.04 at 5:49 pm
See, what I don’t quite understand about your position on the First Amendment vs. the Declaration of Independence is how you can assert the overriding philosophical importance of the latter while maintaining (AFAICT) the virtual philosophical irrelevance of the latter. To put it more plainly: if the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that there are definite Truths in the world, the First Amendment argues that the federal government should not be in the business of prohibiting certain ideas because it has concluded that they are not True.
It may be only an “addendum” to the Constitution, but it’s definitely worth pointing out that it was only by the promise to add such an “addendum” that the Federalists were able to get the Constitution ratified in the first place. The First Amendment does, after all, derive precisely from the classic republican concern with liberty and the dangers of tyrannical government.
If Millian/liberal ideas _are_ alien to our political tradition, why do we have a First Amendment at all? Why shouldn’t the government be able to prohibit certain ideas, if those ideas are False. Why shouldn’t we have one state religion, if that religion is the one True faith?
Your position seems to be that the Declaration of Independence said that certain ideas are True and others are false, and that therefore JS Mill (who held that, while certain things are true and certain things are false, the government should not be in the business of telling us what Truth is) is alien to our political tradition. I don’t see how you get from one to the other, or how, in making that logical leap you also hurdle the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Dan Simon 12.12.04 at 6:29 pm
Yes, Dan Simon, I would guess marjuana use is probably more “socially acceptable†than torture. What a morally decadent world, eh?
Look, I wasn’t the one taking such pains to claim that the issue at hand was a matter of technical legal validity, not moral or political judgment. If you want to join those defending the fundamental moral superiority of left-wing politics (whatever that might mean at the moment) as an argument for maintaining the left’s dominance in academia, then go ahead. Just don’t pretend your criteria are non-political.
Let’s suppose further that your academic world is really packed with law professors supporting legalisation of all drugs. Yeah. Are these thousands and thousands of drug apologist professors saying the laws should be changed, or are they producing memos and manuals on how to fool the cops and get away with growing marjuana and opium in your back garden?
Goldsmith did nothing at all comparable to advising how to break the law undetected. (For pity’s sake, the US government hardly needs a law professor to advise it on how to hide things from nonexistent “international police officers”.) Rather, Goldsmith did the equivalent of what countless law professors do all the time: devise elaborate legal theories, many of them of extremely dubious validity, under which marijuana cultivation and use might be argued to be, in fact, legal.
Now, you may think that engaging in this sort of exercise with respect to marijuana is morally respectable, whereas doing so with respect to torture is not. (I was under the impression that the legal community as a whole tended to be extremely tolerant of this sort of thing, regardless of the cause being embraced, on the grounds that everyone deserves representation in court, including morally indefensible people for whom harebrained legal theories are the only hope.)
But please don’t pretend that your position is a matter of technical competence or professional ethics. It’s your position–that is, your political position, pure and simple, and you are making agreement with you on it a litmus test for admission into academia.
cbl 12.12.04 at 7:19 pm
To interrupt the current direction of the thread a bit, it seems the current round of griping by conservatives is a bit of a red herring.
How so? Consider the plight Berkeley prof. Ignacio Chapela, who was recently denied tenure and dismissed from the faculty for obviously political reasons, despite the vocal support of hundreds of fellow faculty and students. He dared to criticize the increasingly corporate nature of academic research in the sciences, exemplified at Berkeley by a $25 million deal between Novartis and the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. As I’m sure many of you bloggers here know, he also published research indicating the presence of GM-corn DNA in native strains in Mexico – research which is appropriately bothersome to corporate bioindustrialists who produce GMO seeds and related pesticides. This research was roundly dismissed in a smear campaign, again politically rather than scientifically motivated. I guess from the corporate point of view Capela himself is a MODOK. Or a MODOKP (P for Profits).
So this highlights the real discrimination going on in academia, in departments that now depend on corporate dollars because of an ever-shrinking public commitment to research (thanks to a certain “oppressed” academic minority). It is discrimination against anyone who speaks too loudly against the interests related to these dollars, and political pressure comes mainly from the administrators who mind the departmental budgets.
So who really cares if there are too many liberals in philosophy and sociology? Conservatives don’t – their complaints seem more like a cynical ploy to deflect attention from the corporate manufacture of truth in disciplines closely connected to the marketplace.
JRoth 12.12.04 at 7:51 pm
Since d-squared hasn’t shown up to defend his Welsh ancestry, we can’t assume he’ll come ’round to tell dan to shove off, so I’ll try to step up in his stead.
The simple fact that dan feels the need to get defensive about an off-hand joke about the relative morality of torture and pot-smoking shows just how strong he thinks his position is.
Furthermore, his 6:29 post seems little more than a lengthy “NA-NA-NA I can’t hear you.” I don’t see anything in it that acknowledges a simple distinction that nic clearly drew: Goldsmith officially advocated secretly ignoring laws that he does not advocate publicly abrogating. This is NOT a morally or ethically defensible position for anyone, much less a law professor.
In contrast, I doubt there’s any meaningful number of law profs who advocate pot smoking without advocating its legalization (or decriminalization, at least). There’s simply no comparison, even if one thinks that pot smoking and torture are moral equivalents.
nic 12.12.04 at 8:09 pm
Dan Simon, although I should have learnt from the torture apology thread that it’s a waste of time to reply to you, here’s quickly: no, I’m not arguing for the left’s superiority in academia blah blah, I’m only talking of this case, and no, I wasn’t taking pains to claim that the issue with Goldsmith was only to do with a little technicality. It’s *obviously* a moral and political issue since we’re talking writing memos and generally supporting the view that international law can be *circumvented* without adherence to it (and enjoyment of the protection it offers, mind you) being formally revoked. Now *that* is also a “technical” problem for someone teaching law. *Obviously* the moral, political, technical aspects are all intertwined, and moral objections have weight in themselves, I was pointing out something that I find frustrating and quite depressing, ie. the failure (in this case, in the article) to state clearly that something being advocated is explicitely outside of the bounds of those conventions the US is supposed to adhere to (and which it has ratified with national laws, too).
In the case of a law professor, the hypocrisy becomes very obvious. If he was “only” advocating the US repeal its membership to the GC, then _at least_ there would be some technical coherence with his professional role, even if the obvious moral and political objections would still remain.
But why am I bothering, you were busy defending torture yourself in the other thread, in ways that probably Goldsmith hasn’t quite dared to.
Goldsmith did nothing at all comparable to advising how to break the law undetected.
The memos. The whole Rumsfeldian position on the conventions. Sometimes they apply (ie. during press conferences to deal with cosmetic damage control for Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo), sometimes they don’t (ie. anywhere outside of press conferences).
It’s got nothing to do with “hiding things from international policemen”, ugh. It’s got to do with either sticking to a law, or abolishing it, not violating it against other parties while formally demanding the benefit it offers to yourself. Especially for a government, doh.
Now, you may think that engaging in this sort of exercise with respect to marijuana is morally respectable, whereas doing so with respect to torture is not.
No, you completely missed the point. Oh well. What did I say. Waste of time.
But please don’t pretend that your position is a matter of technical competence or professional ethics.
It’s about all of those factors, competence and ethics, technical and principle-wise, political and legal etc. It just is amazing that someone advocating the use of torture should teach law. Even more amazing when he is advocating ways to breach an international convention devised after WWII (and again, it wasn’t Mao and Stalin) without even the coherence to renounce its protections.
But all of this is not so amazing to you, obviously, Dan Simon.
It’s your position—that is, your political position, pure and simple, and you are making agreement with you on it a litmus test for admission into academia.
Yes. Me and Berube are busy preparing exactly that kind of screening test for torturophiles, in order to deny them the privilege Goldsmith got.
Hearing CIA advisors on torture whine about being discriminated has got to be worth the effort, in terms of fun. Oh so much fun this is.
Doug 12.13.04 at 10:55 am
Jhn Hlb, Thanks for the brief summary. I thought that’s what you meant at 1), 2) and 3), and I am grateful for the confirmation.
May I suggest, as I did over at Kvn Drm’s, a title for a proposed academic paper — Toward a Quantum Theory of Blogometrics: How Many Holbovian Lengths Comprise a Sagan?
nic 12.13.04 at 11:53 am
Goldsmith officially advocated secretly ignoring laws that he does not advocate publicly abrogating. This is NOT a morally or ethically defensible position for anyone, much less a law professor.
jroth, thanks for summing up my point so well.
In contrast, I doubt there’s any meaningful number of law profs who advocate pot smoking without advocating its legalization (or decriminalization, at least). There’s simply no comparison, even if one thinks that pot smoking and torture are moral equivalents.
Yeah, not to mention, unlike pot smoking, there’s no country in the world where torture is officially legal, and no US state where it’s allowed for medical purposes. But I just knew someone was going to come up with such a ridiculous comparison anyway.
What barry says about the winning formula, that’s exactly how it works. An even more outrageous example of the whining from the right wing about the left wing domination in everything from academia to media would be in Italy, the prime minister owns the main tv networks and controls the national tv ones, owns publishing companies and newspapers, his government allies control telecommunications and the postal service, they have their own “intellectuals” and professor spokesmen and apologists, and yet, surprise surprise, you hear the same refrain about there being a disproportionate influence of the left in public life – academics, magistrates, journalists, filmmakers, a cabal of dangerous communists more threatening than Stalin. The message works on the target audience by absolving the government from any responsibility, as everything it does is like a battle won against the worst odds, and everything that it fails to do or does wrong can be blamed on the terrible persecution from the opposition. Which has actually only caved in and is as weak as pathetic as it can get, at political level at least, but reality doesn’t matter, what matters is that the message is hammered into public debate hard enough to stick.
Yesenixan 12.13.04 at 8:42 pm
“Man’s rights exist only when man obeys God’s law”? Really. Rights are universal–to borrow an adjective, inalienable. Let’s try a restatement: “Only citizens who obey the govenment shall enjoy human and civil rights.” It’s practically the motto of generic totalitarianism. A ‘right’ that is contingent on obedience is not a right at all. It’s a privilege. I wonder if this Bainbridge person knows the difference.
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