Burke’s bitch about disciplines is one of my main ideas, and I’ve started my own site — at my URL — to develop and promote my point of view. Crooked Timber is welcome to link to it as “Eclectic”.
While it is true that all academics are somewhat interdisciplinary, almost all claim the right to ignore extradisciplinary thinking whenever they feel like it. An economist might say “Of course, as an economist I don’t deal with the psychology of behavior” or something ike that. (This is according to heierarchy, of course; psychologists are less able to speak this way).
In cases like this, the effect is often to turn personal blindspots into aspects of professionalism, and to make the interlocuter look stupid for even asking the question. I’ve embarrassed myself dozens of times by asking a better-credentialed scholar whether they’d read a certain book which they felt they didn’t need to have read.
Contrary to Burke’s elder, I think that this is a national or world problem, and not just a matter of certain local departments. To my mind philosophy has become stunted by an enforced agreement on methods and topics, and an opening to continental philosophy or to post-modernism wouldn’t help much because post-modern academics play exactly the same “enforce the paradigm” game that analytic philosopher do, and I don’t usually like them either.
I don’t know the professional status of Quine’s “incommensurable conceptual schemes” these days, but many seem to think that extradisciplinary thought is impossible and undesirable. It just plain isn’t. It’s always possible to take two schemes back toward their pragmatic origins until you find that what they’re talking about more or less the same thing, and then see how the two compare and contrast. It’s very difficult and different than normal science, but it can always be done and it can be very fruitful and liberating. (For example, I’ve spent much of my adult life reading Chinese philosophy from a Western point of view, and Western philosophy from a Chinese point of view).
Both Locke and Descartes tried to reach a pre-schematic direct perception of reality by stripping away imposed doctrine and nomenclature. Of course, neither completely succeeded, and no one will ever completely succeed. But their attempts were fruitful.
I happen to be working on a reading of Descartes’s Discourse on Method from this angle, and I will post it today since it seems relevant.
Burke’s bitch about disciplines is one of my main ideas, and I’ve started my own site — at my URL — to develop and promote my point of view. Crooked Timber is welcome to link to it as “Eclectic”.
While it is true that all academics are somewhat interdisciplinary, almost all claim the right to ignore extradisciplinary thinking whenever they feel like it. An economist might say “Of course, as an economist I don’t deal with the psychology of behavior” or something ike that. (This is according to heierarchy, of course; psychologists are less able to speak this way).
In cases like this, the effect is often to turn personal blindspots into aspects of professionalism, and to make the interlocuter look stupid for even asking the question. I’ve embarrassed myself dozens of times by asking a better-credentialed scholar whether they’d read a certain book which they felt they didn’t need to have read.
Contrary to Burke’s elder, I think that this is a national or world problem, and not just a matter of certain local departments. To my mind philosophy has become stunted by an enforced agreement on methods and topics, and an opening to continental philosophy or to post-modernism wouldn’t help much because post-modern academics play exactly the same “enforce the paradigm” game that analytic philosopher do, and I don’t usually like them either.
I don’t know the professional status of Quine’s “incommensurable conceptual schemes” these days, but many seem to think that extradisciplinary thought is impossible and undesirable. It just plain isn’t. It’s always possible to take two schemes back toward their pragmatic origins until you find that what they’re talking about more or less the same thing, and then see how the two compare and contrast. It’s very difficult and different than normal science, but it can always be done and it can be very fruitful and liberating. (For example, I’ve spent much of my adult life reading Chinese philosophy from a Western point of view, and Western philosophy from a Chinese point of view).
Both Locke and Descartes tried to reach a pre-schematic direct perception of reality by stripping away imposed doctrine and nomenclature. Of course, neither completely succeeded, and no one will ever completely succeed. But their attempts were fruitful.
I happen to be working on a reading of Descartes’s Discourse on Method from this angle, and I will post it today since it seems relevant.
I strongly agree with Tim’s attempt to redirect the conversation from the question of the numbers of Republican voters. Red/blue is a deeply simplified idea of ‘politics’.
On the question of conservatives and dissenting voices within individual disciplines, I begin to doubt whether there is really a struggle for intellectually conservative scholars to get their work legitimated. Luther Blissett, in a debate on Mark Bauerlein on Erin O’Connor’s blog recently threw up his hands and said, roughly, “Remind me what conservative literary criticism is again?”
I don’t believe that there is a mother-lode of conservative ideas about literature (for example) that are being suppressed by groupthinking liberals. From what I’ve seen, conservatives are currently fighting primarily for the right to say that they are conservative, that they like great books and European civilization.
I’m trying to see the other side of the moon here (i.e., the conservative intellectual utopia that everyone is demanding, but no one is instantiating), and so far it doesn’t look all that different from this side.
Perhaps one could object that a book with overtly conservative tones can’t be written in the current climate. But why not? The great merit of being able to work in private is that you can type anything you want. And you can probably also publish it, if it’s good. (Look at Niall Ferguson. And Mark Bauerlein doesn’t seem to have too much trouble finding people to publish his thoughts…)
As I write I’m partly thinking of an entry on John and Belle from a couple of weeks ago, where the intellectual activity of the Literary Imagination was described as a little anemic. Is it anemic because of multiculturalist groupthink? I don’t believe it.
I am a non-academic biologist — a consultant — and I hang around a lot of birders and other biological consultants, very few of whom are intimately associated with any college or univeristy.
My wide circle of acquaintences — non-academic, but scientifically oriented, and not necessarily good friends of mine — tilts waaay to the left. Not that there aren’t any many exceptions, but I believe the proportion is around 80% left vs. 20% right.
It’s unimportant to explicate the reasons why these two unofficial “groups” — birders and biological consultants — tend to attract lefties. The fact is that they do, independent of any conscious or unconscious attempts by any person or institution to establish or maintain this leftward tilt. There is nothing keeping conservative-minded people out of either field of endeavor. In fact, that some of the very best birders are rather conservative.
This all seems obvious to me — and forgive me if it really is obvious and you’re all well beyond this point in the debate — but I continue to detect a notion among academics that that the imbalance of left vs. right in academia may be the result of some sort of “group-think” that insidiously excludes conservatives. I just want to reassure those of you in ivory towers that certain occupations tend to attract people of certain political orientations. They just do.
I don’t believe that there is a mother-lode of conservative ideas about literature (for example) that are being suppressed by groupthinking liberals. From what I’ve seen, conservatives are currently fighting primarily for the right to say that they are conservative, that they like great books and European civilization.
This comment made me laugh, and it makes an attractive argument. However, I think conservative literary criticism is distinguishable by a desire to avoid pulling in “non-literary” (yes, those are scare quotes – sue me) concerns when talking about literature. So areas of specialization like queer studies, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and feminist studies are anathema to some conservative literary scholars in part because they are approaches to literature that involve “pre-conceived ideas” that cloud interpretation. Check out the comments located here, for example.
Burke’s post is broadly aimed at academia in general, but I can only view it through the prism of my discipline, and it simply doesn’t work. It glosses over too many very real, concrete issues. Maybe there is a case that could be made in the humanities, but I can’t speak to that at all.
About groupthink: in the sciences, one bottom-line constraint has to be the raw data. That’s pretty remote from the political division of conservative/liberal in most cases, and I would think that it normally wouldn’t bias us one way or the other politically. But sometimes we do have a clear and unambiguous consensus. Take, for example, the recent Science article that reviewed the literature on the causes of global warming and found overwhelming support for human influence. That isn’t groupthink; that’s the way the data points.
Now that shouldn’t be a factor in our political views; there shouldn’t be a requirement that True Conservatives ignore reality. And I know some of my colleagues who actually are rather conservative (compared to me at least) on economic and social issues. But there are these key issues where our national so-called conservative party, the Republicans, have flamboyantly tied themselves to insane positions that are antagonistic to people in the sciences. Republicans have actually become a rather radical party and aren’t conservative at all.
I know biologists who are anti-abortion, anti-taxation conservatives, but when they see Republican policies that deny global warming, oppose contraception, and open up wilderness areas to logging and drilling and mining, all issues that strike at things near and dear to their hearts, they vote Democratic. Unhappily. They declare themselves Democrats. Reluctantly. They sit silently on most liberal issues, but when the topic of global diversity and conservation comes up, they speak out on the same side as us liberals.
And really, it’s not “groupthink” that compels the majority of biologists to favor biology. It’s why we’re biologists in the first place. If you want to pack our departments with ecologists that favor drilling in the ANWR, you’re going to have to somehow find ecologists who prioritize economics over ecology, which would be just plain weird.
So don’t blame academia for their bias towards the left. Blame the right for charging away from empirical reality, at least in the case of the sciences.
methinks that even the many scientists who sympathize with conservative economic theory and policies have a hard time siding with the party that panders to the religious right. My hunch is that the few ‘conservative’ scientists and academics inhabiting Academia are overwhelmingly socially liberal. Also, contrary to the tendencies of non-academic libertarians–who are willing to make concessions on cultural issues, in order to get lower taxes–academics are just too exposed to diversity to not care at all about gays, immigrants, etc., and much too indignant about the Jerry Falwells of the world not to reject the notion of voting republican.
I think what Tim Burke’s cogent post is asking us to do is to make a distinction: between (a) the degree of “groupthink” that is an inevitable, if regrettable, side-effect of disciplinarity — disciplinarity being necessary for knowledge production; and (b) exclusionary bias, whether overt or covert. But even if we just focus on the latter, there are other distinctions to be made — for instance, between exclusion on the basis of a person’s opinions about the discipline itself, and exclusions based on extra-disciplinary opinions. With that in mind, here’s a thought experiment within the U.S. context:
1) An applicant for a tenure-track assistant professorship in early American literature lists, on his vita, membership in Greenpeace. Most people will probably agree that this is irrelevant to his work, but will it hurt his candidacy?
2) An applicant for a tenure-track assistant professorship in early American literature lists, on his vita, membership in the National Rifle Association. Most people will probably agree that this is irrelevant to his work, but will it hurt his candidacy?
There probably aren’t a dozen schools in America — including religious colleges and universities, which I know intimately — where the Greenpeace guy would have a problem, and there probably aren’t forty colleges or universities where the NRA guy would not be ruled out immediately. But in my view, if someone is dumb or over-aggressive enough to put NRA membership on his vita, then he deserves what he gets. Is there bias there? Sure. There are far more NRA members than Greenpeace members, but in the American academy the latter falls well within the range of normalcy while the former is just wacked-out. But I don’t consider it a pernicious or even dangerous kind of bias; it’s just a natural function of the current demographics of academe (which, I would remind robbo, are only current, not everlasting — English departments used to be havens for social conservatives and religious believers).
However, there is some substance to the very different concern about insufficient “intellectual diversity” within disciplines. If you’re writing a dissertation on Kipling, you can say “he’s an imperialist and that’s bad” or “he’s not as much of an imperialist as most people think and therefore he’s not as bad as most people think”; but you can’t get away with arguing that, for example, “Kipling’s stories and poems make a stronger case for a morally legitimate colonial project than is usually thought possible” — even though even those (like me, of course) who despise British colonialism might profit from reading and responding to such an argument.
The chief question that remains, for me anyway, is why you can’t make that kind of argument. In many cases it would not be simply a case of hostility to conservative ideas. A dissertation advisor who was intrigued by the idea might very well reject the proposal because she didn’t think it could possibly get past other readers or the defense committee, or because she worried that the guy would never get a job with a dissertation like that. Intellectual conformity perpetuates itself in all sorts of ways that have nothing to do with overt hostility. But intellectual conformity is a problem all the same.
Err, wait a minute. Again speaking from the perspective of biology, the NRA listing on the CV wouldn’t really affect us at all. It would be a rather weird irrelevancy, but really — we don’t automatically have a bias against hunting. In my department, I’ve even seen a couple of our ecologists encourage students to get out there and blow away a few deer! Gun ownership is something neutral from my point of view.
Again speaking from the perspective of biology. . .
But pz myers, I wasn’t speaking from the perspective of biology, but was suggesting a thought experiment in English studies. If I said it is cold in Chicago, would you say, “Err, wait a minute, it’s warm in L.A.”? I made the thought experiment specific to one discipline precisely because I don’t believe that on this matter you can make useful generalizations about “academia” — though there’s an unfortunate degree of generalization inherent in the whole conversation.
And I have to smile at djw’s comment. In working up my little thought experiment, I asked myself, what would be a conservative organization that would obviously be anathema in English departments, and I thought the NRA would be a safe bet. But djw finds “astonishing” the very idea that English professors would be seriously uncomfortable with NRA membership. Really? “Astonishing”? I can certainly imagine someone responding, “oh, sure, people would have some concerns, but they probably wouldn’t rule the guy out on that basis” — but to be unable to take the possibility seriously? That’s like Captain Renault being shocked — shocked! — that there’s gambling going on at Rick’s Place. . . .
Just a quick clarification in response to Amardeep. My main objection to “Literary Imagination” is not so much ‘anemia’ as ‘failure to point the way forward’. The MLA has 30,000 members (or whatever it is), a large proportion of them young and in dire need of publishing stuff. What are they going to publish? How can this superfluity of critics over-produce with dignity? (Defenders of ‘theory’ often stand on its difficulty. If they were more honest, they would stand in its ease. Theory allowed lots and lots and lots of people to produce on a regular basis, from the superstars down to the regular guys and gals. And for a while it looked dignified. Well, what now? Just an example. It’s not all about ‘theory’.) It is easy for Roger Kimball to rage against the machine of academia. But if we had 30,000 Roger Kimballs all repeating themselves, that wouldn’t be so nice either. I think those who stick with the status quo in literary studies do so not because they are blind to its absurd inadequacies and general ossification. (How could one miss it?) I think folks are in a holding pattern, waiting for something new for them ALL to do. Now in a way that’s a trick request. Everyone isn’t going to do anything. There will always be just a huge ecology of individual niches. Yet there needs to be a model of the ecology, some vision of it. It seems to me that “Literary Imagination” is clearly a niche publication. If the ALSC thinks it is in the business of critiquing the ecology of literary studies as a whole – as it should – it needs to offer people something that looks a little more like a realistic, appealing general model of how it could actually go well. (This is why I like Burke, of course.) This is hard to do. But it is important to try. Negative critique is inefficacious if you don’t offer people a practical way to accept the critique, i.e. a new way for them to change their ways to. Of course, you can always choose to retreat Timonically into your niche and say ‘at least I won’t do anything bad’, but then it is no good raging against everyone else, because they wouldn’t ALL fit into your niche.
It is worth noting as well that the utopian alternative to the status quo is not supposed to be a conservative utopia, per se, although may be thought to be a place where conservatives would be more welcome. (The ALSC is not exclusively populated by conservatives, for example.)
More to follow (I hear a baby crying, and another kid who sounds like she just woke up.)
For people in academics, I’m sure Burke’s post helps to bring up an important issue, but the furor over liberal exclusivity in universities isn’t meant to scare academics into self-reflection – it’s to point out to everyone else that if you’re not liberal, social sciences professors and their pet theories and projects won’t typically represent your beliefs.
The reason that people would bring up a subject like biology (when the original discussion might focus on the humanities) is to serve as a control group.
In my experiences (and the comments of most of the people who’ve posted to threads like this, here and on other blogs) academics in the sciences tend to be far more liberal than the mainstream US population. Ideological selection is a plausible explanation for why humanities people would be this way, but why would the physical scientists be this way? It suggests that there is another mechanism at work.
You can’t argue from wildly improbable hypotheticals, ayjay. No one would ever list NRA or Greenpeace membership on their vita, unless they were into gun or conservation studies, which might make it somewhat relevant.
jonathan goodwin: I wasn’t making an argument, I was trying a thought experiment. Moreover, I clearly said that even if this kind of “bias” were to occur, it wouldn’t be significant. I was drawing a contrast between, on the one hand, a misbegotten concern with trivial prejudices and, on the other hand, the potentially more serious consequences of a loss of intellectual diversity within disciplinary work. (It’s usually a good idea to read posts before commenting on them. . . .)
I agree with Barry. I doubt that membership to the NRA has anything to do with whether a mathematician or physicist gets hired at a research university. On the other hand, I am confident that liberal mathematicians and physicists outnumber conservative ones by a significant–if not overwhelming–margin.
Heck, I even boldly speculate that it is largely not economic reasons that makes scientists tilt to the left end of the political spectrum. If one maps political tendencies onto a three-dimensional space, two of which are the standard ones from the libertarian two-dimensional model, and one which encodes degree of nationalism, then scientists are likely to score high marks on social progressivism (as opposed to social authoritarianism), and on cosmopolitanism (as opposed to nationalism). The marks on the economic policy dimension may be slightly more normally distributed.
I think I set this thread going in a bad direction by some injudicious wording, and while it’s probably too late to fix it, I’m going to paste in here something that I wrote to Tim Burke about “groupthink”:
Tim wrote: “Academics are not motivated to groupthink out of a loyalty to liberal causes, left-wing politics or registration in the Democratic Party, though in many disciplines at the moment, they may end up predominantly having those affiliations in a smug, uninterrogated manner. They’re motivated to groupthink by the institutional organization of academic life.”
I think that “loyalty to liberal causes” plays some role, not no role at all; but surely he’s right to say that “the institutional organization of academic life” is more important. However, I think a third consideration is more important still, and that’s the shortage of good jobs, or what most graduate students think are good jobs. Every graduate student in the humanities and the social sciences is thoroughly socialized into assumptions of scarcity — for good reason — and as a result graduate students and their advisors alike become extremely risk-averse. Now, when you’re talking about food or water, scarcity can (at least when extreme) increase risk-taking; but in academia this just doesn’t happen: when it’s not a life-or-death matter, the risk/reward ratios don’t encourage adventurousness. The more a discipline is concerned about the shortage of jobs, the more reluctant advisors are to suggest or allow any dissertation proposal that stands a good chance of being ruled out for unorthodoxy, and the more reluctant even the most adventurous students are to push the point. If this analysis is correct, then the worse the job situation is in a given discipline the more completely groupthink will reign; and I think that is indeed the case.
Also relevant to this whole discussion is an article Mark Bauerlein wrote for the _Partisan Review_ a few years back entitled, “Social Constructionism: Philosophy for the Academic Workplace.” Whatever your views on social constructionism, it’s worth reading for what Bauerlein has to say about “the institutional organization of academic life.” He is particularly critical of the intensification of publication requirements for tenure.
Ayjay, if the thread really is “going in a bad direction” maybe it’s because you’ve put up a quarter of the posts. As others have pointed out, your “thought experiment” is not particularly realistic or useful. An academic who’s CV was so thin that he had to list membership in Greenpeace or the NRA would be on shaky ground to begin with. He might as well note that he posts frequently on CT!
And it’s funny that you pedantically lecture me that “English departments used to be havens for social conservatives and religious believers.” That may be true, but it seems that you’ve gone on a tangent from what I wrote and what PZ Myers reinforced — that there are precious few biologists who can support the pervasive and obvious anti-ecological and anti-science stance of the modern Republican Party.
Naturally this could easily change in the future, but only if Republicans themselves were to change in a fundamental way, by approaching science and ecology in a way that would allow more self-respecting ecologists to support them. There’s no reason why Republicans can’t do this, but it would likely mean supporting increased regulation of polluting and otherwise ecologically damaging activities, and there’s every indication that Republicans are charging hard in the opposite direction.
In the meantime, the phenomenon of biologists tilting consistently to the left will not change, no matter what happened in English departments.
{ 21 comments }
John Emerson 12.04.04 at 5:56 pm
Burke’s bitch about disciplines is one of my main ideas, and I’ve started my own site — at my URL — to develop and promote my point of view. Crooked Timber is welcome to link to it as “Eclectic”.
While it is true that all academics are somewhat interdisciplinary, almost all claim the right to ignore extradisciplinary thinking whenever they feel like it. An economist might say “Of course, as an economist I don’t deal with the psychology of behavior” or something ike that. (This is according to heierarchy, of course; psychologists are less able to speak this way).
In cases like this, the effect is often to turn personal blindspots into aspects of professionalism, and to make the interlocuter look stupid for even asking the question. I’ve embarrassed myself dozens of times by asking a better-credentialed scholar whether they’d read a certain book which they felt they didn’t need to have read.
Contrary to Burke’s elder, I think that this is a national or world problem, and not just a matter of certain local departments. To my mind philosophy has become stunted by an enforced agreement on methods and topics, and an opening to continental philosophy or to post-modernism wouldn’t help much because post-modern academics play exactly the same “enforce the paradigm” game that analytic philosopher do, and I don’t usually like them either.
I don’t know the professional status of Quine’s “incommensurable conceptual schemes” these days, but many seem to think that extradisciplinary thought is impossible and undesirable. It just plain isn’t. It’s always possible to take two schemes back toward their pragmatic origins until you find that what they’re talking about more or less the same thing, and then see how the two compare and contrast. It’s very difficult and different than normal science, but it can always be done and it can be very fruitful and liberating. (For example, I’ve spent much of my adult life reading Chinese philosophy from a Western point of view, and Western philosophy from a Chinese point of view).
Both Locke and Descartes tried to reach a pre-schematic direct perception of reality by stripping away imposed doctrine and nomenclature. Of course, neither completely succeeded, and no one will ever completely succeed. But their attempts were fruitful.
I happen to be working on a reading of Descartes’s Discourse on Method from this angle, and I will post it today since it seems relevant.
P.S. This is my second try after ten minutes.
John Emerson 12.04.04 at 6:02 pm
Burke’s bitch about disciplines is one of my main ideas, and I’ve started my own site — at my URL — to develop and promote my point of view. Crooked Timber is welcome to link to it as “Eclectic”.
While it is true that all academics are somewhat interdisciplinary, almost all claim the right to ignore extradisciplinary thinking whenever they feel like it. An economist might say “Of course, as an economist I don’t deal with the psychology of behavior” or something ike that. (This is according to heierarchy, of course; psychologists are less able to speak this way).
In cases like this, the effect is often to turn personal blindspots into aspects of professionalism, and to make the interlocuter look stupid for even asking the question. I’ve embarrassed myself dozens of times by asking a better-credentialed scholar whether they’d read a certain book which they felt they didn’t need to have read.
Contrary to Burke’s elder, I think that this is a national or world problem, and not just a matter of certain local departments. To my mind philosophy has become stunted by an enforced agreement on methods and topics, and an opening to continental philosophy or to post-modernism wouldn’t help much because post-modern academics play exactly the same “enforce the paradigm” game that analytic philosopher do, and I don’t usually like them either.
I don’t know the professional status of Quine’s “incommensurable conceptual schemes” these days, but many seem to think that extradisciplinary thought is impossible and undesirable. It just plain isn’t. It’s always possible to take two schemes back toward their pragmatic origins until you find that what they’re talking about more or less the same thing, and then see how the two compare and contrast. It’s very difficult and different than normal science, but it can always be done and it can be very fruitful and liberating. (For example, I’ve spent much of my adult life reading Chinese philosophy from a Western point of view, and Western philosophy from a Chinese point of view).
Both Locke and Descartes tried to reach a pre-schematic direct perception of reality by stripping away imposed doctrine and nomenclature. Of course, neither completely succeeded, and no one will ever completely succeed. But their attempts were fruitful.
I happen to be working on a reading of Descartes’s Discourse on Method from this angle, and I will post it today since it seems relevant.
Third try after 20 minutes
Amardeep 12.04.04 at 6:04 pm
I strongly agree with Tim’s attempt to redirect the conversation from the question of the numbers of Republican voters. Red/blue is a deeply simplified idea of ‘politics’.
On the question of conservatives and dissenting voices within individual disciplines, I begin to doubt whether there is really a struggle for intellectually conservative scholars to get their work legitimated. Luther Blissett, in a debate on Mark Bauerlein on Erin O’Connor’s blog recently threw up his hands and said, roughly, “Remind me what conservative literary criticism is again?”
I don’t believe that there is a mother-lode of conservative ideas about literature (for example) that are being suppressed by groupthinking liberals. From what I’ve seen, conservatives are currently fighting primarily for the right to say that they are conservative, that they like great books and European civilization.
I’m trying to see the other side of the moon here (i.e., the conservative intellectual utopia that everyone is demanding, but no one is instantiating), and so far it doesn’t look all that different from this side.
Perhaps one could object that a book with overtly conservative tones can’t be written in the current climate. But why not? The great merit of being able to work in private is that you can type anything you want. And you can probably also publish it, if it’s good. (Look at Niall Ferguson. And Mark Bauerlein doesn’t seem to have too much trouble finding people to publish his thoughts…)
As I write I’m partly thinking of an entry on John and Belle from a couple of weeks ago, where the intellectual activity of the Literary Imagination was described as a little anemic. Is it anemic because of multiculturalist groupthink? I don’t believe it.
robbo 12.04.04 at 8:04 pm
I am a non-academic biologist — a consultant — and I hang around a lot of birders and other biological consultants, very few of whom are intimately associated with any college or univeristy.
My wide circle of acquaintences — non-academic, but scientifically oriented, and not necessarily good friends of mine — tilts waaay to the left. Not that there aren’t any many exceptions, but I believe the proportion is around 80% left vs. 20% right.
It’s unimportant to explicate the reasons why these two unofficial “groups” — birders and biological consultants — tend to attract lefties. The fact is that they do, independent of any conscious or unconscious attempts by any person or institution to establish or maintain this leftward tilt. There is nothing keeping conservative-minded people out of either field of endeavor. In fact, that some of the very best birders are rather conservative.
This all seems obvious to me — and forgive me if it really is obvious and you’re all well beyond this point in the debate — but I continue to detect a notion among academics that that the imbalance of left vs. right in academia may be the result of some sort of “group-think” that insidiously excludes conservatives. I just want to reassure those of you in ivory towers that certain occupations tend to attract people of certain political orientations. They just do.
George Williams 12.04.04 at 8:29 pm
I don’t believe that there is a mother-lode of conservative ideas about literature (for example) that are being suppressed by groupthinking liberals. From what I’ve seen, conservatives are currently fighting primarily for the right to say that they are conservative, that they like great books and European civilization.
This comment made me laugh, and it makes an attractive argument. However, I think conservative literary criticism is distinguishable by a desire to avoid pulling in “non-literary” (yes, those are scare quotes – sue me) concerns when talking about literature. So areas of specialization like queer studies, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and feminist studies are anathema to some conservative literary scholars in part because they are approaches to literature that involve “pre-conceived ideas” that cloud interpretation. Check out the comments located here, for example.
PZ Myers 12.04.04 at 9:46 pm
Burke’s post is broadly aimed at academia in general, but I can only view it through the prism of my discipline, and it simply doesn’t work. It glosses over too many very real, concrete issues. Maybe there is a case that could be made in the humanities, but I can’t speak to that at all.
About groupthink: in the sciences, one bottom-line constraint has to be the raw data. That’s pretty remote from the political division of conservative/liberal in most cases, and I would think that it normally wouldn’t bias us one way or the other politically. But sometimes we do have a clear and unambiguous consensus. Take, for example, the recent Science article that reviewed the literature on the causes of global warming and found overwhelming support for human influence. That isn’t groupthink; that’s the way the data points.
Now that shouldn’t be a factor in our political views; there shouldn’t be a requirement that True Conservatives ignore reality. And I know some of my colleagues who actually are rather conservative (compared to me at least) on economic and social issues. But there are these key issues where our national so-called conservative party, the Republicans, have flamboyantly tied themselves to insane positions that are antagonistic to people in the sciences. Republicans have actually become a rather radical party and aren’t conservative at all.
I know biologists who are anti-abortion, anti-taxation conservatives, but when they see Republican policies that deny global warming, oppose contraception, and open up wilderness areas to logging and drilling and mining, all issues that strike at things near and dear to their hearts, they vote Democratic. Unhappily. They declare themselves Democrats. Reluctantly. They sit silently on most liberal issues, but when the topic of global diversity and conservation comes up, they speak out on the same side as us liberals.
And really, it’s not “groupthink” that compels the majority of biologists to favor biology. It’s why we’re biologists in the first place. If you want to pack our departments with ecologists that favor drilling in the ANWR, you’re going to have to somehow find ecologists who prioritize economics over ecology, which would be just plain weird.
So don’t blame academia for their bias towards the left. Blame the right for charging away from empirical reality, at least in the case of the sciences.
pedro 12.04.04 at 10:29 pm
methinks that even the many scientists who sympathize with conservative economic theory and policies have a hard time siding with the party that panders to the religious right. My hunch is that the few ‘conservative’ scientists and academics inhabiting Academia are overwhelmingly socially liberal. Also, contrary to the tendencies of non-academic libertarians–who are willing to make concessions on cultural issues, in order to get lower taxes–academics are just too exposed to diversity to not care at all about gays, immigrants, etc., and much too indignant about the Jerry Falwells of the world not to reject the notion of voting republican.
Ayjay 12.04.04 at 10:53 pm
I think what Tim Burke’s cogent post is asking us to do is to make a distinction: between (a) the degree of “groupthink” that is an inevitable, if regrettable, side-effect of disciplinarity — disciplinarity being necessary for knowledge production; and (b) exclusionary bias, whether overt or covert. But even if we just focus on the latter, there are other distinctions to be made — for instance, between exclusion on the basis of a person’s opinions about the discipline itself, and exclusions based on extra-disciplinary opinions. With that in mind, here’s a thought experiment within the U.S. context:
1) An applicant for a tenure-track assistant professorship in early American literature lists, on his vita, membership in Greenpeace. Most people will probably agree that this is irrelevant to his work, but will it hurt his candidacy?
2) An applicant for a tenure-track assistant professorship in early American literature lists, on his vita, membership in the National Rifle Association. Most people will probably agree that this is irrelevant to his work, but will it hurt his candidacy?
There probably aren’t a dozen schools in America — including religious colleges and universities, which I know intimately — where the Greenpeace guy would have a problem, and there probably aren’t forty colleges or universities where the NRA guy would not be ruled out immediately. But in my view, if someone is dumb or over-aggressive enough to put NRA membership on his vita, then he deserves what he gets. Is there bias there? Sure. There are far more NRA members than Greenpeace members, but in the American academy the latter falls well within the range of normalcy while the former is just wacked-out. But I don’t consider it a pernicious or even dangerous kind of bias; it’s just a natural function of the current demographics of academe (which, I would remind robbo, are only current, not everlasting — English departments used to be havens for social conservatives and religious believers).
However, there is some substance to the very different concern about insufficient “intellectual diversity” within disciplines. If you’re writing a dissertation on Kipling, you can say “he’s an imperialist and that’s bad” or “he’s not as much of an imperialist as most people think and therefore he’s not as bad as most people think”; but you can’t get away with arguing that, for example, “Kipling’s stories and poems make a stronger case for a morally legitimate colonial project than is usually thought possible” — even though even those (like me, of course) who despise British colonialism might profit from reading and responding to such an argument.
The chief question that remains, for me anyway, is why you can’t make that kind of argument. In many cases it would not be simply a case of hostility to conservative ideas. A dissertation advisor who was intrigued by the idea might very well reject the proposal because she didn’t think it could possibly get past other readers or the defense committee, or because she worried that the guy would never get a job with a dissertation like that. Intellectual conformity perpetuates itself in all sorts of ways that have nothing to do with overt hostility. But intellectual conformity is a problem all the same.
djw 12.04.04 at 11:12 pm
there probably aren’t forty colleges or universities where the NRA guy would not be ruled out immediately.
That’s an astonishing assertion, which you can’t possibly support. It makes you rather difficult to take seriously.
PZ Myers 12.04.04 at 11:36 pm
Err, wait a minute. Again speaking from the perspective of biology, the NRA listing on the CV wouldn’t really affect us at all. It would be a rather weird irrelevancy, but really — we don’t automatically have a bias against hunting. In my department, I’ve even seen a couple of our ecologists encourage students to get out there and blow away a few deer! Gun ownership is something neutral from my point of view.
Ayjay 12.05.04 at 12:16 am
Again speaking from the perspective of biology. . .
But pz myers, I wasn’t speaking from the perspective of biology, but was suggesting a thought experiment in English studies. If I said it is cold in Chicago, would you say, “Err, wait a minute, it’s warm in L.A.”? I made the thought experiment specific to one discipline precisely because I don’t believe that on this matter you can make useful generalizations about “academia” — though there’s an unfortunate degree of generalization inherent in the whole conversation.
And I have to smile at djw’s comment. In working up my little thought experiment, I asked myself, what would be a conservative organization that would obviously be anathema in English departments, and I thought the NRA would be a safe bet. But djw finds “astonishing” the very idea that English professors would be seriously uncomfortable with NRA membership. Really? “Astonishing”? I can certainly imagine someone responding, “oh, sure, people would have some concerns, but they probably wouldn’t rule the guy out on that basis” — but to be unable to take the possibility seriously? That’s like Captain Renault being shocked — shocked! — that there’s gambling going on at Rick’s Place. . . .
jholbo 12.05.04 at 12:48 am
Sorry for the slow comments, John.
Just a quick clarification in response to Amardeep. My main objection to “Literary Imagination” is not so much ‘anemia’ as ‘failure to point the way forward’. The MLA has 30,000 members (or whatever it is), a large proportion of them young and in dire need of publishing stuff. What are they going to publish? How can this superfluity of critics over-produce with dignity? (Defenders of ‘theory’ often stand on its difficulty. If they were more honest, they would stand in its ease. Theory allowed lots and lots and lots of people to produce on a regular basis, from the superstars down to the regular guys and gals. And for a while it looked dignified. Well, what now? Just an example. It’s not all about ‘theory’.) It is easy for Roger Kimball to rage against the machine of academia. But if we had 30,000 Roger Kimballs all repeating themselves, that wouldn’t be so nice either. I think those who stick with the status quo in literary studies do so not because they are blind to its absurd inadequacies and general ossification. (How could one miss it?) I think folks are in a holding pattern, waiting for something new for them ALL to do. Now in a way that’s a trick request. Everyone isn’t going to do anything. There will always be just a huge ecology of individual niches. Yet there needs to be a model of the ecology, some vision of it. It seems to me that “Literary Imagination” is clearly a niche publication. If the ALSC thinks it is in the business of critiquing the ecology of literary studies as a whole – as it should – it needs to offer people something that looks a little more like a realistic, appealing general model of how it could actually go well. (This is why I like Burke, of course.) This is hard to do. But it is important to try. Negative critique is inefficacious if you don’t offer people a practical way to accept the critique, i.e. a new way for them to change their ways to. Of course, you can always choose to retreat Timonically into your niche and say ‘at least I won’t do anything bad’, but then it is no good raging against everyone else, because they wouldn’t ALL fit into your niche.
It is worth noting as well that the utopian alternative to the status quo is not supposed to be a conservative utopia, per se, although may be thought to be a place where conservatives would be more welcome. (The ALSC is not exclusively populated by conservatives, for example.)
More to follow (I hear a baby crying, and another kid who sounds like she just woke up.)
Nick Caldwell 12.05.04 at 2:15 am
Ayjay,
It might be that you’re taking flack for this sentence:
because it’s fairly hard to parse.
I don’t know about other people, but my brain jams really, really hard on double negatives.
Paul N. 12.05.04 at 9:19 am
For people in academics, I’m sure Burke’s post helps to bring up an important issue, but the furor over liberal exclusivity in universities isn’t meant to scare academics into self-reflection – it’s to point out to everyone else that if you’re not liberal, social sciences professors and their pet theories and projects won’t typically represent your beliefs.
Barry 12.05.04 at 3:15 pm
The reason that people would bring up a subject like biology (when the original discussion might focus on the humanities) is to serve as a control group.
In my experiences (and the comments of most of the people who’ve posted to threads like this, here and on other blogs) academics in the sciences tend to be far more liberal than the mainstream US population. Ideological selection is a plausible explanation for why humanities people would be this way, but why would the physical scientists be this way? It suggests that there is another mechanism at work.
Jonathan Goodwin 12.05.04 at 3:55 pm
You can’t argue from wildly improbable hypotheticals, ayjay. No one would ever list NRA or Greenpeace membership on their vita, unless they were into gun or conservation studies, which might make it somewhat relevant.
Ayjay 12.05.04 at 4:46 pm
jonathan goodwin: I wasn’t making an argument, I was trying a thought experiment. Moreover, I clearly said that even if this kind of “bias” were to occur, it wouldn’t be significant. I was drawing a contrast between, on the one hand, a misbegotten concern with trivial prejudices and, on the other hand, the potentially more serious consequences of a loss of intellectual diversity within disciplinary work. (It’s usually a good idea to read posts before commenting on them. . . .)
pedro 12.05.04 at 6:18 pm
I agree with Barry. I doubt that membership to the NRA has anything to do with whether a mathematician or physicist gets hired at a research university. On the other hand, I am confident that liberal mathematicians and physicists outnumber conservative ones by a significant–if not overwhelming–margin.
Heck, I even boldly speculate that it is largely not economic reasons that makes scientists tilt to the left end of the political spectrum. If one maps political tendencies onto a three-dimensional space, two of which are the standard ones from the libertarian two-dimensional model, and one which encodes degree of nationalism, then scientists are likely to score high marks on social progressivism (as opposed to social authoritarianism), and on cosmopolitanism (as opposed to nationalism). The marks on the economic policy dimension may be slightly more normally distributed.
ayjay 12.06.04 at 3:00 am
I think I set this thread going in a bad direction by some injudicious wording, and while it’s probably too late to fix it, I’m going to paste in here something that I wrote to Tim Burke about “groupthink”:
Tim wrote: “Academics are not motivated to groupthink out of a loyalty to liberal causes, left-wing politics or registration in the Democratic Party, though in many disciplines at the moment, they may end up predominantly having those affiliations in a smug, uninterrogated manner. They’re motivated to groupthink by the institutional organization of academic life.”
I think that “loyalty to liberal causes” plays some role, not no role at all; but surely he’s right to say that “the institutional organization of academic life” is more important. However, I think a third consideration is more important still, and that’s the shortage of good jobs, or what most graduate students think are good jobs. Every graduate student in the humanities and the social sciences is thoroughly socialized into assumptions of scarcity — for good reason — and as a result graduate students and their advisors alike become extremely risk-averse. Now, when you’re talking about food or water, scarcity can (at least when extreme) increase risk-taking; but in academia this just doesn’t happen: when it’s not a life-or-death matter, the risk/reward ratios don’t encourage adventurousness. The more a discipline is concerned about the shortage of jobs, the more reluctant advisors are to suggest or allow any dissertation proposal that stands a good chance of being ruled out for unorthodoxy, and the more reluctant even the most adventurous students are to push the point. If this analysis is correct, then the worse the job situation is in a given discipline the more completely groupthink will reign; and I think that is indeed the case.
aj 12.06.04 at 4:44 am
Also relevant to this whole discussion is an article Mark Bauerlein wrote for the _Partisan Review_ a few years back entitled, “Social Constructionism: Philosophy for the Academic Workplace.” Whatever your views on social constructionism, it’s worth reading for what Bauerlein has to say about “the institutional organization of academic life.” He is particularly critical of the intensification of publication requirements for tenure.
robbo 12.06.04 at 5:50 am
Ayjay, if the thread really is “going in a bad direction” maybe it’s because you’ve put up a quarter of the posts. As others have pointed out, your “thought experiment” is not particularly realistic or useful. An academic who’s CV was so thin that he had to list membership in Greenpeace or the NRA would be on shaky ground to begin with. He might as well note that he posts frequently on CT!
And it’s funny that you pedantically lecture me that “English departments used to be havens for social conservatives and religious believers.” That may be true, but it seems that you’ve gone on a tangent from what I wrote and what PZ Myers reinforced — that there are precious few biologists who can support the pervasive and obvious anti-ecological and anti-science stance of the modern Republican Party.
Naturally this could easily change in the future, but only if Republicans themselves were to change in a fundamental way, by approaching science and ecology in a way that would allow more self-respecting ecologists to support them. There’s no reason why Republicans can’t do this, but it would likely mean supporting increased regulation of polluting and otherwise ecologically damaging activities, and there’s every indication that Republicans are charging hard in the opposite direction.
In the meantime, the phenomenon of biologists tilting consistently to the left will not change, no matter what happened in English departments.
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