I realize that arguments like this are nothing new, but they still annoy me:
Are university faculties biased toward the left? And is this diminishing universities' role in American public life? Conservatives have been saying so since William F. Buckley Jr. wrote "God and Man at Yale" -- in 1951. But lately criticism is coming from others -- making universities face some hard questions.
At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are "the third group," far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was "the right half of the left," while at Harvard he found himself "on the right half of the right."I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I've been on the "far right" as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.
All these views -- commonplace in American society and among the political class -- are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I've taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.
Two thoughts:
First, Robert Maranto, the author of this piece, is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University. As a political scientist, he is no doubt well aware that argument by anecdote is a worthless strategy. "A perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore" convinced him. What wonderfully sound research methodology he has employed here.
And no, the "real data" from the "real studies" completed by "real scholars" that he presents later in the article doesn't save him. Take, for example, this claim:
...academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.Despite that bad job-hunting experience I had, I doubt that legions of leftist professors have set out to purge academia of Republican dissenters. I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.
That's human behavior 101. It has nothing whatsoever to do with partisan politics. Worse - and this is my second point - partisan politics is a red herring that distracts us from the real issues. Universities should be about the pursuit of knowledge and truth, not about achieving partisan balance. They should be about following the facts wherever they lead, not about making sure that we represent "both sides" in every political debate. Intellectual diversity is what matters. Partisan diversity is utterly irrelevant.
And let's be honest here... what could possibly be more PC than attempting to "balance" ideologies? I thought the whole forced diversity thing was what conservatives hated most about political correctness? Amazing how their arguments change when they find themselves in the minority, isn't it? Suddenly they start asking for intellectual affirmative action!
In the second half of the piece Maranto tries to climb out of the hole he has dug for himself, but to no avail.
Take, for example, this anecdote:
In my own area, public administration, it took years for bureaucracy-defending professors to realize that then-Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review (aka Reinventing Government) was not a reactionary attempt to destroy government agencies, but rather a centrist attempt to revitalize them. Most of the critics of the academy are conservatives or libertarians, but even the left-of-center E.D. Hirsch argues in "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" that academics in schools of education have harmed young people by promoting progressive dogma rather than examining what works in real classrooms.
As a scientist, he should know this sort of behavior should both be expected and encouraged. Of course people defended their previous assumptions. Of course it was an uphill battle to convince them to adopt to new ideas. This is how the scientific method works! The alternative is for people to give up on old ideas without a fight, abandoning previous explanations in favor of whatever is most popular today. Surely that's not what he is suggesting, is it?
And please... as someone who received funding from AEI, does he really want to go down the whole "promoting dogma rather than examining what works" line of thought? Really?
Maranto complains that his ideas are unpopular, and that as a result he's had a hard time finding a place for himself in the academic world. Boo hoo. I'm sure Galileo, Copernicus, and Aristotle weep for him.
Grow up. Having unpopular ideas isn't supposed to be easy. Breaking new intellectual ground isn't supposed to be painless. Shut up, fight the good fight, and stop complaining. You chose this life for yourself. No one required you to walk this path. So what if it is hard? What right do you have to expect everything to come easy?
His conclusion is not to be missed:
Ultimately, universities will have to clean their own houses. Professors need to re-embrace a culture of reasoned inquiry and debate. And since debate requires disagreement, higher education needs to encourage intellectual diversity in its hiring and promotion decisions with something like the fervor it shows for ethnic and racial diversity. It's the only way universities will earn back society's respect and reclaim their role at the center of public life
I'd love to see his evidence for this. You know, "real data from real scholars" demonstrating that universities have lost society's respect, and that professors - not some of them, mind you, but all of them - have abandoned a "culture of reasoned inquiry and debate." I just can't wait to see his forthcoming book.
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