1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.Tierney rejects all of that, and blames the disparity on "the structure of academia, where decisions about hiring are made by small independent groups of scholars":
2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.
3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.
4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.
They're subject to the law of group polarization, derived from studies of juries and other groups.
"If people are engaged in deliberation with like-minded others, they end up more confident, more homogenous and more extreme in their beliefs," said Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. "If you have an English or history department that leans left, their interactions will push them further left."
Once liberals dominate a department, they can increase their majority by voting to award tenure to like-minded scholars. As liberals dominate a field, conservatives' work comes to be seen as fringe scholarship.
"The filtering out of conservatives in the job pipeline rarely works by outright blackballing," said Mark Bauerlein, a conservative who is an English professor at Emory. "It doesn't have to. The intellectual focus of the disciplines does that by itself."
Suppose, he said, you were a conservative who wanted to do a sociology dissertation on the debilitating effects of the European welfare state, or an English dissertation arguing that anticommunist literature from the mid-20th century was as valuable as the procommunist literature.
"You'd have a hard time finding a dissertation adviser, an interested publisher and a receptive hiring committee," Bauerlein said. "Your work just wouldn't look like relevant scholarship, and would be quietly set aside."
That sounds accurate to me.
Tierney concludes that the phenomenon ultimately hurts liberals in the political sphere because they can't draw on the ideas of liberals in academia, who have veered too far left to produce ideas that are appealing to American voters.
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26 comments:
It doesn't stop at tenure decisions, students are also affected. My son, an excellent student at a first tier institution and a double history/French major, was denied honors at graduation because his senior thesis (NATO & France) did not reflect the history department's worldview. Luckily he had no interest in making academe his career and it didn't hurt him any in Silicon Valley.
Dave: I am a long time subscriber to the paper version and that entitles me to TimesSelect. So I paid nothing more for it. I think it is a mistake and expect it to be withdrawn.
Erp: Terrible. I imagine there are many stories like that. Probably more students just get the message of what they are supposed to say and cynically say it.
And in the humanities, much of what is termed "research" is just propaganda. They don't even see it. A Vietnam war literature class, for instance, is billed as "balanced" because it includes anti-US books from both the Communists and us! No anti-communist novels, though.
Occasionally, a student will write a thesis contra this world view or demand that the Communist Vietnam flag be taken down, but it's a struggle. The presence of a professor (or student) thinking outside this reality is just too threatening so they self-select their own.
The cluelessness of the standard justifications academics offer to explain the phenomenon suggests an appalling lack of self-knowledge.
The overbearing-campus-liberals meme is tired. I'm sure that college professors as a group do not mirror the American populace as a whole in _many_ ways (a statement which is almost certainly true when abstracted to any meaningful subset of the population). However, the notion that conservative students are pariahs unable to gain any traction in the university setting is overplayed. Every university (small, large, university, LAC, US News favorite, regional school) at which I've spent any time has had a significant conservative student population and relatively well-known conservative professors. The fact that the university is a social setting which requires people skills to negotiate is neither surprising nor improper.
It seems to me that this phenomenon (complaining of the liberal academy) is in some real sense a masterful turn of the right, using the left's programme and argument structures against it, in the very same way that, say, Hardt and Negri contend that the post-modernism has been used so effectively against the cultural left.
(Note, of course, that Professor Althouse, who may not be on the far right but is certainly not on the far left, is a tenured professor at a university that has as liberal a reputation as they come -- a university, I might add, that has active College Republicans - http://uwcr.rso.wisc.edu/, Objectivists - http://objectiv.rso.wisc.edu/.)
My ex was in a Womens Studies program and wanted to do a 'Women in the Military' thesis of some type. The only potential idea that was even tolerated was 'Women in the Soviet tank corps.' But what about those women anti-aircraft gunners in the SS?
They weren't hearing that! And writing about women in the US military would be viewed as 'active encouragement.' Sad, really...
Craig, you're so much of a type, I can actually hear your academic stutter in your prose.
How did our hostess get tenure despite her somewhat right of center views? Checking her profile offers no clues, so until she disabuses us, we may suppose that she kept her opinions to herself until she got tenure. Very politic of her.
You may be right that students today have a conservative presence on some college campuses, faculty I'm not that sure, certainly not in the humanities or soft sciences. My son graduated 25 years ago when there was a total blackout of non-leftwingery on college campuses.
cyfartal, research and asking questions are fine as long as the correct conclusions are reached, i.e., the received wisdom of the left is confirmed and being in a tenure track position implies nothing about the outcome of the tenure committee's recommendations.
Jonathan, now you know why my definition of a liberal is one who can hold opposite and opposing opinions at the same time.
Craig said:
"this phenomenon (complaining of the liberal academy) is in some real sense a masterful turn of the right, using the left's programme and argument structures against it..."
So... it's not really true that conservatives are marginalized in academia, it's actually some sort of strategy crafted by the propaganda machine of the Right.
We're all just imagining it, and John Tierney has even fallen for it! And conservatives must be really smart to come up with such a ruse! Or wait, no they're dumb... er... rather...
Thanks for telling your story, David Banner. As an undergraduate, I was more sympathetic to the left on campus than I am now, but I knew then that I could never be part of the academic left simply because my parents are very conservative, and the arrogance of asserting that that meant they were stupid always turned me off.
Despite my misgivings about academic leftism, I went on to get a PhD in English. During graduate school in the early 1990s, political criticism was on the ascendency in the guise of "cultural studies"--as a corrective for the seemingly more apolitical (but nevertheless always left-wing) postmodernism which had been so dominant in the '80s. The most influential texts and theorists always seemed to be variants of or offshoots of Marxist theory. In one seminar, I remember hearing a classmate remark that "there was no room for a Republican English department," and I got to wondering if such a thing existed anywhere in the country.
The more familiar I became with the world of academic leftism, though, the more I noticed another irony about academia. University Presidents are often criticized on the right for being left-of-center, but some of the most visible and successful ones are more conventional liberals than many academic leftists. They often talk of reason and selfhood in the sort of positive terms that the influential leftist academics would have excoriated.
Odd how this subject keeps coming up. When we hear that not many bankers (for example) are liberals, no one considers it worth their while to claim, or dany, that this somehow reflects badly on liberals. What's so special about academics?
I can think of at least two ways in which academics are "special". One is that as a group they are tasked with teaching receptive students their respective subjects. The concern would be that these topics would be taught in a one-sided or incomplete manner and eventually have a disproportionate effect on eventual public opinion. Obviously this would be a larger concern in the social sciences as opposed to physical.
The other is that academics have an implied, if not stated, goal of free expression of ideas and consideration of differing viewpoints. Bankers have no such goal, they just want to run their bank.
Paul Zrimsek wrote: "When we hear that not many bankers (for example) are liberals, no one considers it worth their while to claim, or dany, that this somehow reflects badly on liberals. What's so special about academics?"
Well, when I hear that not many bankers are liberals I regard the speaker as ill-informed and blinded by stereotypes. I have worked for banks--large banks--and have found that the political opinions are very similar to those of the community as a whole. I even knew a manager who donated money to the Sandinistas (oy.)
The businesss world is, in my experience, far more tolerant of diverse viewpoints than academia. For the vast majority of business people, the focus is on getting the job done, and somebody's personal opinions are irrelevant and largely not an appropriate matter of concern. In academia, however, I have met many "progressives" for whom one's ideology is a centrally defining question which has a great deal to do with whether one will be respected or despised, included or ostracized. There have been numerous reports recently on examples of ideology-based discrimination, from inappropriate treatment of dissenting students to hiring decisions. The problem is certainly not pervasive but it is real and documented.
For those who want to read the New York Times but not pay for a subscription, many libraries have not just print subscriptions but online access including complete searchable archives. Very handy.
My previous comments notwithstanding, I do agree with Tierney and Althouse: Although hostility and an uncomfortable social climate can be significant, the greatest single factor is the tendency of liberal academics to regard conservative ideas as simply irrelevant or intellectually inferior.
Short answer, yes.
If you're unconvinced, do some research into scientific research and you'll really be dismayed. Notice how many medical and other scientific breakthroughs are coming from Japan and elsewhere?
after four years of TAing in the social sciences, at UW I can tell you that some politically conservative students often take up this type of argument when they simply do not have the facts to back up their assertions, have not done the necessary research on their topic, and don't understand why they can't use a conservative talk-show's website as a scholarly source. their counterparts, the politically liberal students often take up the same argument (for the same reasons) - they usually say that i'm just too conservative to see their point as valid - an interesting point since all my student know I'm a socialist. the fact of the matter is that most undergrads are not politically active at all and those that are often use their political activism as an excuse for sloppy research. and, even though I "come out" as a socialist in my classes I've always had conservative students tell me what a constructive space I created in our discussion sections. it's not your politics that determines your worth as a teacher - it's your ability to let all sides have their say and respectfully discuss the issue as well-informed adults, not ideologues. failure to do so is a pedagogical crime, not a political one. if our universities spent more time teaching us how to be better teachers conservative and liberal academics would find a common home.
Gerry: Here's what Tierney says: "Conservatives complain about this imbalance in academia, but in some ways they've benefited from being outcasts. They've been toughened by confronting skeptics on campus and working at think tanks in Washington involved in the political fray. They've come up with ideas - welfare reform, school vouchers, all kinds of privatization schemes - that have been adopted around the country and the world."
color me skeptical as to erp's contention that his son was "denied honors at graduation because his senior thesis (NATO & France) did not reflect the history department's worldview."
extremely skeptical.
what was thesis of the paper?
what did the professors say or write that led you to the inexorable conclusion that it was the paper's slant that prevented the graduation with honors?
just stating it does not make it so.
the cases of so-called liberal bias affecting students that arise out of fox news type media outlets always turn out to be entirely false, so excuse me if i don't immediately buy what you are selling.
Why don't we know/care about the political leanings of bankers (or other private sector professionals)
Because in the private sector what matters most are results, not process and ideology. There is a definable rubric for success of profits and losses.
Very few government or academic sector employees seem to be judged on results and if an attempt is made to bring results oriented evaluations into their sector they often fight, complain and proclaim their exceptionalism (I'm thinking of the No Child Left Behind rigamorale as one example, the Katrina mess on all levels could be another).
I suspect that it's very difficult to be one of the few conservatives (if not the only one) on a faculty, and given how polarized the nation has become, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there isn't an effort to make sure that they are driven out.
I have to admit, reading the letters page of the New York Times last week, which included two letters from ConLaw profs (Manheim and Tomain, I think?), and I couldn't help but feel how absurd and sad it is that these people are in a position to indoctrinate young people, despite their self-evident ignorance of the entire founding purpose of the Constitution and the government it sets up. The imperative of removing these people from positions where they can poison academic discourse is keenly felt, but I appreciate how difficult it is to achieve.
I'm going to hazard a conjecture about the seeming unbalance amongst 'hard science' professors.
Though the groupthink and hostility towards competing viewpoints doesn't exist as virulently as it does in the humanities (I know, false assumption, there is no liberal bias in the academy, it's just that they are too smart to be conservative), I think we have a case of selection bias rearing its head.
Physicists, engineers and the like who are conservative politically are also more likely to be more business minded and therefore take advantage of the many commercial opportunities available to someone with their skill set, while those interested in theory, teaching and pure research are going to be more 'crunchy granola, recumbent bicycle (to recall an old thread)' types who enjoy the very different cadence and pace of the academic atmosphere. That those types would lean towards the Democrats should be no surprise and that the former group leans Republican also shouldn't shock anybody.
The reason that these issues seem foregrounded far more than they have ever been is a direct result of the increased polarization and demonization of those with opposing viewpoints.
The liberal side seeing the reins of power in the wrong hands are choosing to exert as much influence as possible in all the areas they still dominate (whether by design or unconsciously, doesn't matter), but the effect will only make the problems worse for them and make them seem like undemocratic sore losers and drive the moderate middle into the arms of the extremist on the other side.
xwl makes some good points. But I think it's also a cultural thing. If you're comfortable in the left-wing, pc environment that dominates most campuses, you're more likely to try to stay, and if you're not, you decide to get the hell out of there when you've finished your degree. Sometimes, I wonder how much it isn't a matter of conforming to expectations, as well. If everyone around you assumes that "all smart people think a certain way about politics" or even that "conservatives are just not cool," then you might be more inclined to start thinking that way, also, or at least to try to start thinking that way.
I have a friend from college who--during the first years of his undergraduate career--was conservative and bold enough to argue with very left-wing professors in public forums, no less. He majored in computer science, got a job in Silicon Valley, and then started graduate school at Stanford, first in computer science, and then in Electrical Engineering. And I've been intrigued to see how he has become increasingly more left-wing in his politics. He's pretty far left now, indeed.
During the years of the Clinton impeachment, I also taught for a while at a small liberal arts college in the midwest. I was no fan of Clinton, and I was watching the whole impeachment debacle with a certain amount of detached amusement. I was often interested to hear what my colleagues had to say about it. And though I didn't argue with them or tell them my perspective, I was often dismayed to see how poorly-formed and poorly-supported their arguments were. In my writing classes, I taught my students about reason and argument and how to avoid common logical fallacies. But I often found my colleagues' comments--no matter whether they taught in the humanities, the social sciences or the sciences--about Clinton or Ken Starr riddled with fallacies and with little evidence to support them. And naturally they assumed I agreed with them.
I also think that you're more likely to find conservatives teaching in law and business schools than in other fields. In those fields you often have to engage with conservative thinkers who are practitioners; in the humanities or the social sciences, or even in the sciences, you're less likely to have your assumptions about the world beyond your field of inquiry challenged with the same rigor.
Craig wrote:
However, the notion that conservative students are pariahs unable to gain any traction in the university setting is overplayed.
It's not played enough.
Especially not by the media, who would be outraged if academia were the preserve of Conservatives rather than those of left-leaning tendencies.
Then we wouldn't see the end of the stories about this sad, depressing phenomenon, which has personally affected me in both undergraduate and now post-graduate work.
erp wrote:
My son, an excellent student at a first tier institution and a double history/French major, was denied honors at graduation because his senior thesis (NATO & France) did not reflect the history department's worldview.
Which is exactly my case reading History at Oxford.
I had to rework my entire thesis to conform with the accepted Marxist dialectics of power structures etc.
Fortunately one of my 3 committee tutors gave me an extension to finish it.
Other students all over the world are not so fortunate, especially in the Sociology Departments, and other departments traditionally leftist (Literature, Philosophy, PoliSci, and Religion amonst them).
From the WaPo article on this topic in March:
By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans
And I thought when I reached Medical School, a field after all, not in the Social Sciences, that my professors would not be political.
I was wrong.
Cheers,
Victoria
I'm a conservative math adjunct professor. Politics never entered the picture in any of my math departments. Of course, we should also note that many math departments are so hard-up for talent that they can't afford to be picky. If you can fill a space on their teaching roster for Fall semester, you're in. I've never had trouble finding work.
The closest I've come to a political opinion in the math department is the department's sponsorship of an annual event to encourage girls (and only girls) to learn more about math. While I myself (being female) benefited from similar programs in the past, I'm frankly not picky about whether it be girls or boys going into math, as long as we keep the "fresh blood" flowing into the department. The opinion that girls need more encouragement to go into math appears to be a political one, as more than half of my fellow math undergrads were women, and my Master's program was evenly balanced. (True, there are many fewer female professors and doctoral students, but I think that the higher numbers in the lower-level programs prove that women are not in general intimidated by math nor discouraged by society from going into it. You don't invest 4-6 years in studying a subject you've been discouraged from taking. Rather, something else is going on here.)
My professors have never exhibited political bias. And while some of the professors ride recumbent bikes and eat granola, to this day I have no idea what their political leanings might be, and couldn't even hazard a guess.
Letters to the editor re Tierney column (link)
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Re "Where Cronies Dwell," by John Tierney (column, Oct. 11):
The liberal nature of journalism and academia (including law schools) is not so much the result of cronyism as of self-selection. The universities aren't hiring conservatives because conservatives aren't applying for the jobs.
People who choose those professions tend to be liberal because that is what those professions require.
Both journalism and academia attract people who have made it their business to observe human society, and both careers usually involve travel and exposure to a wide variety of individuals and viewpoints.
This travel and exposure teach important lessons: a variety of different government styles can work well; societies have destroyed themselves by consuming all environmental resources too fast; individual prosperity is as much a matter of lucky birth as of personal merit.
If you want to debate genuine political issues like the role of government in providing social services, the pros and cons of labor unions or the wisdom of imposing American values on foreign countries, you can find plenty of university and law school faculty members who would be willing to argue these points from a traditionally conservative viewpoint.
Amy Hackney Blackwell
Greenville, S.C., Oct. 11, 2005
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Is John Tierney concerned about monocultures or just liberal monocultures?
When I changed careers three years ago, I traded one monoculture (a corporate management team) for another (an independent high school faculty).
A more interesting question might be, "Why was I in the minority in my last career, and why am I in the majority now?"
If Mr. Tierney can shed light on that question, perhaps we will understand the clustering of common political and societal outlooks (and the effects of this clustering) a little better.
Mark Hammond
Middletown, Del., Oct. 11, 2005
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When John Tierney complains about the number of liberals in academia and suggests that this is somehow comparable to President Bush's hiring friends for important government jobs, he misses the point.
Academics aren't hired because they are loyal to a department chairman. Instead, they are hired because they fulfill certain needs and because - get this - they are extremely qualified.
Mr. Tierney hints that self-selection may play a role in the more liberal bent of academia. Would he expect anything different? Republicans and conservatives routinely disparage anything in academia that has no money-making application.
Government money spent on the humanities is anathema to the far right. Is it any wonder that people interested in advancing the understanding of the human condition might lean toward a political ideology that embraces their efforts?
Lance Allred
Baltimore, Oct. 11, 2005
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John Tierney tries to equate a preponderance of Democrats in academia with cronyism. If we take cronyism to mean favoritism shown to friends without regard to qualifications, it is obvious that preponderance does not logically imply the presence of cronyism.
There is a preponderance of right-handedness in academia, too.
Moreover, Mr. Tierney provides no evidence for his claim that "tenured radicals" have preferred to hire "ideological cronies" in academia. This may happen anecdotally, but it strains credulity to suggest that top universities, in their constant struggle for higher rankings, would not simply try to hire the best candidates.
Perhaps the more useful question to ask is why the products of top law schools and journalism schools who are interested in teaching future generations are disproportionately Democrats. Do Republicans simply value teaching less?
Maurits van der Veen
Athens, Ga., Oct. 11, 2005
The writer is an assistant professor in the department of international affairs, University of Georgia.
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As a graduate of both law school and journalism school, I find it hard to argue with John Tierney's premise that law professors and especially journalism professors tend toward liberalism. But it's harder to argue that either profession favors liberals outside the academy.
Indeed, conservative lawyers, if they are a minority, have a much better shot at judgeships or high-level government positions since it's conservatives who are doing the appointing more often than not.
More broadly, if liberals are channeling their own most brilliant acolytes into law and journalism, that just leaves more space in business schools, banks and corporations for young conservatives. Thus, the conservatives wind up wielding greater power, lacking only vague cultural influence.
If conservatives had concocted this arrangement deliberately, they could have hardly done better for themselves.
Daniel L. Ackman
Jersey City, Oct. 11, 2005
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If Democrats outnumber Republicans in elite university faculties by up to 8 to 1, as John Tierney writes, then academia indeed has a problem. But the culprit is not necessarily how universities "go about picking the professors to train the next generation."
Rather, Republicans themselves may choose to forgo academic penury for more lucrative careers in keeping with their party's self-help doctrine.
As a registered independent who stresses the teaching of diverse perspectives, I am troubled if students are hearing mainly from one side of the aisle. But let's not rush to blame demand when the culprit may be supply.
Alan J. Kuperman
Austin, Tex., Oct. 11, 2005
The writer is an assistant professor at the L.B.J. School of Public Affairs, University of Texas.
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There is an easy solution to John Tierney's concern about lack of ideological balance among journalism and law professors: Raise their pay enough to make them Republicans.
If those who go into professions "to right wrongs" did not have to take vows of poverty, some of them might show more interest in tax cuts for the rich and other acute conservative concerns.
Robert Stein
Weston, Conn., Oct. 11, 2005
The writer is the author of a new book about the media.
I would like one example. Just one:
Identify a qualified conservative lawyer who applied to teach at a number of elite law schools, but failed to land a job. Provide the lawyer's CV. Identify the law schools to which this lawyer applied, and the faculty members who were hired instead of him for purposes of comparison of qualification.
After all, surely there is one glaring example of discrimination to back up all of this innuendo.
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