26 February 2006

Debating the Status of Conservatives in US Higher Education

The Objectivist
ARE CONSERVATIVES BEING SHUT OUT OF THE ACADEMY?
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
2/15/06


At colleges and universities, conservatives are present in surprisingly few numbers. For example, in one 2004 survey of six academic fields (Anthropology, Economics, History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology), the author found that Democrats outnumber Republicans 15 to 1 and estimated that there was an 8 to 1 ratio overall in the social sciences and humanities. The ratio in some fields is much higher: 30.2 to 1 in Anthropology and 28 to 1 in Sociology. This one-sided distribution of professors is also present at elite schools. For example, in 2000 the popular vote in America was roughly evenly divided with George W. Bush and Al Gore each getting 48% of the vote. In contrast, at Ivy League Schools, 80% voted for Gore whereas only 9% voted for Bush.

This effect is probably strengthened in part by features of these colleges or universities that tend to appeal to a leftist worldview. By a leftist worldview, I mean support for higher taxes and larger government, race and gender preferences, gun control, etc. Consider SUNY Fredonia. It has balkanized fields of studies, such as women’s studies, American Indian Studies, and multi-ethnic studies, and administrative departments, such as multicultural affairs and affirmative action, that will not appeal to the political right. It also offers classes such as Education 313: Cultural and Linguistic Diversity Field Experience (where students “incorporate multicultural concepts, including cultural awareness; tolerance and acceptance …”) and English 349: Feminist Theory. Any student in these classes who states his opposition to homosexuality, abortion, or welfare will undoubtedly get a chilly reception.

In addition, there is a strong push to diversify the faculty. This is sometimes implemented by hiring women and minority (specifically black and Hispanic) candidates who are not as good as their competitors. Since these same candidates tend, on average, to be farther left than their competitors, the hiring process tends to push the faculty to the left. So strong is the concern for white-male bias that the University Senate decided last academic year to require that the search committees have adequate numbers of women and racial/ethnic minorities. Apparently, members of the senate thought that a committee made up of only white males can’t be trusted to be fair.

The invited speakers have the same political orientation. This year, for example, Robert Kennedy spoke on environmentalism, but trashed Republicans and corporations along the way. The part of the Fredonia website in which faculty discuss ideas regularly features articles and emails arguing for leftist politics and promoting leftist causes. For example, this year there were calls to join protests of the Iraq War and constant criticisms of Bush for trying to cut taxes and restructure social security.

There is an important issue as to whether the lopsided distribution of leftist faculty and speakers and the presence of academic concentrations with clear-cut political agendas results from the intentional exclusion of conservatives or merely reflects the pool who choose to go into academia or academic administration. My guess is that both effects are present, so in the end it’s not clear whether conservatives are being shut out of the academy. Either way, this pattern hinders the free discussion of ideas and shows the concern for diversity to be nothing more than a mask for a political agenda.

***

The Constructivist
CONSERVATIVES SHUT OUT OF THE ACADEMY? PLEASE!
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
2/15/06


There’s a story going around that conservatives are being unfairly excluded from the U.S. higher education system. Such stories have been making the rounds for decades. Have you heard the one that “tenured radicals” have taken over American colleges and universities? Or the one that “thought police” are patrolling the groves of academe enforcing “political correctness”? Even before the days of Fox News and the conservative blogosphere, these stories were spread by conservative organizations like Accuracy in Academia, the Madison Center for Education Affairs, and the National Association of Scholars, journals like National Review, Commentary, and New Criterion, politicians like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, authors like Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, and Roger Kimball, and pundits like George Will and Rush Limbaugh, most with help from conservative foundations like Olin, Bradley, Smith-Richardson, and Coors (see The Myth of Political Correctness and Higher Education under Fire for the details). The latest conservative to make a splash with such stories is David Horowitz, who leads a campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights.

As in all good stories, ironies abound. Just look at the ones on “discrimination against conservatives” and “lack of intellectual diversity” in higher education. Conservatives who have spent two generations fulminating against the rhetoric of victimization and raising the evidentiary bar on race- or gender-based discrimination have spent the last generation portraying themselves as victims of discrimination by leftist academics. Conservatives who supposedly believe in limited government, the benefits of competition, and the dangers of regulation are calling for government intervention on behalf of their ideas and careers. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if long-time conservative opponents of affirmative action are building a case for affirmative action on their own behalf. As Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, points out in a recent issue of Academe, to set up a system whereby conservative professors are hired on the basis of “their political party preference…smacks of Iraqi universities under Saddam Hussein, Soviet universities under Stalin, or Chinese universities today.” Yet this is precisely what the bill reauthorizing the Higher Education Act that’s coming before Congress this year would put into place. Clearly, the conservatives running the federal government today (and their business and media allies) find stories like Horowitz’s quite compelling.

But are they true? Despite the methodological problems with many recent surveys of professors’ politics, it is true that on most faculties and in many academic disciplines there are more card-carrying Democrats than Republicans, more self-identified liberals than conservatives, and more Gore or Kerry voters than Bush voters. Potential causes for these numbers besides discrimination abound, however, from culture to individual choice to market forces to disciplinary history. And for pernicious effects to follow from them, professors would have to be regularly acting unprofessionally and students would have to be brainless, spineless, and/or gutless. Yet as William Scheuerman, president of United University Professions, recently pointed out in testimony before the Pennsylvania legislature, no student in the entire SUNY system has submitted a formal complaint over political bias among the faculty.

So the next time you hear stories about conservatives being shut out of American higher education, check some facts. If people, programs, and policies at SUNY Fredonia are so hopelessly leftist, how is it that we graduate so many moderate and conservative students? How is it that the Objectivist himself has gained tenure and won both campus- and system-wide awards at Fredonia? If conservatives are dissatisfied with their numbers and influence in the American academy, they should follow his example and join him. To do that, of course, they’ll have to demonstrate the same commitment to intellectual rigor, fairness toward opposing evidence, and consideration of multiple arguments so evident in his research and teaching—as it is among his colleagues.

22 comments:

The Constructivist said...

Wondering what the Objectivist thinks of the Academic Bill of Rights and Horowitz's new book--honestly.

The Constructivist said...

Am hanging my head in shame that I allowed a Columbia undergrad to post a better critique of the politics of the intellectual diversity movement than me. Way to go, Jacob McKean. Objectivist, a riposte to this re-post?

The Constructivist said...

Horowitz is losing it, lashing out at people who are way more consistent and truthful than he is. Check out Ralph Luker's response to a recent FrontPage attack. You're losing time to distinguish yourself from Horowitz, Objectivist!

The Constructivist said...

Wondering if the closing of the Olin Foundation is influencing any high-profile think tank conservatives to start looking for a golden parachute in academia. This could help explain why they're focusing their attention on influencing the really rich schools, rather than doing what the rest of us have to do: get the best academic job we can earn! I wonder if living on the adjunct track would radicalize conservatives in the other direction....

The Constructivist said...

Just want to share Sophia McLennan's expose of the conservative assault on higher education and wish The Objectivist luck in landing a 700 Club gig like D'Ho (as the bloggerati have taken to calling he of ABOR infamy) did.

The Constructivist said...

Hey, Objectivist, Michael Berube is among the best at getting D'Ho's goat, in such recent classics as Study finds bias on American campuses, Autocratic but fun Friday, On Civility, Warning! Warning! Danger! Danger! (what, no "Will Robinson"?--you're slipping, Berube), and From the desk of David Horowitz--all in the last four months! Please, please, please, take an opportunity to distinguish yourself from D'Ho!

The Constructivist said...

There's an intellectual diversity seedling growing at Oxblog begun by Patrick Porter that deserves some watering and sunlight. Someone pissed on it in their very first comment and apparently distracted people from taking it seriously. Hoping my little post helps clarify some issues by raising some pertinent questions.

The Objectivist said...

Dear Constructivist:

In your view, how many conservative faculty are there in the English Department (e.g., one who would vote for a conservative Republican like Ronald Reagan)? My count has one.

I suspect that that is one more than the Art Department, Sociology/Anthropology, and Psychology departments have (I haven't checked this closely - just gone through the names I know).

What do you think account for this? The chance of this happening in a population randomly chosen from the U.S. population is next to nothing.

If the underrepresentation of conservatives isn't a problem, why is the underrepresentation of certain minorities in philosophy, physics, and CEOs a problem?

The Constructivist said...

To tell you the truth, I have no idea whether my colleagues are registered Republican, Democrat, Green, Working Families Party, or whatever, or whether they vote lockstep for their party or vote for the individual they think is the best candidate or have some other voting strategy. I don't much care, either. What matters in English are debates within and about the discipline--questions of what to read and why, how to read and why, why to read, and so on. By that standard, there's a great amount of intellectual diversity within the department, because people answer those questions in all sorts of ways. We've managed to avoid the worst excesses of the culture wars (to assume it's 'the west OR the rest,' that is, to assume that the distinction is valid and that you must choose one or the other 'side') not least because we like debating each other and enjoy engaging each other's perspectives on the issues.

In response to your last question, it's been interesting to observe the three-track conservative response over the decades to well-sustantiated claims that specific groups in America have been victimized by public policy and private action.

(1) Accuse the groups of making it up, of "playing the victim," of "revelling in their victimhood status," of deserving what they got, of not being sufficiently x (smart, tough, hard-working, entrepreneurial, etc.) to avoid being victimized, and so on. In short, a variety of 'blame the victim' strategies in an effort to obfuscate the truth and avoid responsibility for redressing wrongs.

(2) When this fails, jumping on the victimhood bandwagon by arguing that liberal elites in media and academia have been misrepresenting them, harbor a bias against them, are discriminating against them, are excluding them, are stereotyping them, are refusing to acknowledge their victimhood, etc.

(3) When exposed as cynical victim-card-dealing con men, they accuse their critics of being overly harsh on them and not nearly harsh enough on groups that have actually been victimized.

Your question is a neat variation on this strategy. Let me respond with some questions of my own.

Is one born or made a conservative? Is 'conservative' a chosen or ascribed identity? Is 'conservative' an identity at all, or is it more of an affiliation (say to a movement or a party), or is it more of a commitment to a set of ideas? What might those ideas be? Is it possible for one's ideas to differ from one's political affiliations? (Are phrases like 'liberal Republican' or 'conservative Democrat' oxymorons? How about 'fiscally conservative but socially liberal'?) Where precisely are conservatives and/or their ideas 'underrepresented' in American society? If higher education has been monopolized by liberal and leftist ideas and professors with the power to brainwash their students, how did so many prominent conservatives get through their higher educations with their ideas intact and even strengthened? How did you? Moreover, is it true that conservatives are underrepresented on Boards of Trustees, on endowment management committees, and other 'power of the purse' arenas of universities? Are conservatives underrepresented in NY state politics (the legislature, the governor's office, the judicial system, etc.)? Don't they have a say in how SUNY is run?

Hate to do the stereotypical respond to your question with a question thing, but I think you will get my point if you answer the questions honestly and then do your cute little substitution move from your question and answer the revised questions just as honestly. How's that for a constructivist approach to debating? You make my arguments for me!

The Objectivist said...

Dear Constructivist:

The Democrat and Republican labels are useful because they are, however crude, a publicly available guide to where persons lie on the political spectrum. I'm not sure what to say about whether the Fredonia departments that are entirely comprised of liberal democrats or ones that haven't hired a conservative in over 10 years discriminate. I would guess that it varies with the different departments.

Note in other areas, we use maldistribution of race or gender as evidence of discrimination, although this might be countered by other evidence. E.g., testimony by those who do the hiring. For example, it is this policy that disallows the use of IQ tests in hiring. I'm not quite sure why the maldistribution doesn't at least raise these issues.

I'm not sure that anything should be done about the pro-left dominance of education or even that it's the result of discrimination, but this is separate issue.

The Constructivist said...

Um, O, in your post from the end of March, you go out of your way to argue that inequality is a result of individual choices, not evidence of inequity. So what's the diff between "status of women" and "status of conservatives"?

The Constructivist said...

Berube, you've done it again!

The Constructivist said...

O, here's something from a critic of both ABOR and lack of intellectual diversity in US higher education. Your thoughts?

The Constructivist said...

O, would you care to define "conservative"? Especially in light of books like John Dean's which try to reclaim conservatism from Bush?

The Constructivist said...

O, philosopher Kurt Smith has a good critique of the ABOR in the latest issue of Academe. Unfortunately, the AAUUP is redesigning their web site and they haven't put new content in the online version of the journal online in a while. In any case, I'd love to see you respond to Smith's reasoning!

The Constructivist said...

O, just became aware of this classic Michael Berube post called Keeping Conservatives Out of Academe from 2004. It was in his current interview with Free Exchange on Campus. Hope you find both interesting--and worth a response.

The Constructivist said...

Yo, O, nowadays it's not just conservative critiques of academia that rely on the victimization strategy, it's also conservative critiques of the Democrats. Here's Glenn Greenwald takign down Peggy Noonan's recent attempt at this kind of move.

The Constructivist said...

O, would you care to take a shot at responding to Michael Berube's latest critique of the conservative victimization argument?

The Constructivist said...

A must-read from A White Bear on teaching conservatives.

The Constructivist said...

O, the AFT has refuted all the studies you rely on and as SEK shows, attempted counter-rebuttals so far have been laughably stupid. Care to take a shot?

The Constructivist said...

O, The Little Professor takes apart ACTA's latest badly-designed "study"--this time on the disappearance of Shakespeare

The Constructivist said...

Heh! Indeed.