Meanwhile, the NYT has a bunch of letters responding to that Nicholas Kristof piece about the lack of political diversity in academia. This one's my favorite, maybe because it's from a lawprof (William H. Simon of Columbia Law School):
Nicholas Kristof exaggerates the problem of liberal bias in the academy. It is not the job of the university to represent all the views held in the surrounding society. The commitment to critical inquiry requires it to disfavor some views based on religious dogma, social convention or superstition. The goal of a community of mutual respect requires it to disfavor others, including those that are explicitly racist, misogynist or homophobic. Such views can be expressed in the university, but it is not a cause for concern that academics do not espouse them in their teaching and research. Much of the disparity between views in the academy and in the Republican Party is attributable to their varying social bases. Academics tend to be educated and middle class. The current Republican Party is constituted disproportionately of the undereducated and the wealthy.
That education leads people to different views is neither surprising nor, on its face, disturbing. And if it is a problem that the views of rich people are underrepresented in the academy, they have had little trouble making up for this disadvantage in the media and the political system.
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76 comments:
They explore all possible hypotheses that attempt to hide the truth that the academic left is fascist just like the students they are indoctrinating.
They do not tolerate dissenting points of view. Period.
I assume that Professor Simon "said" that with a straight face.
Priceless.
Shorter Prof. Simon: It's okay if we shut them out of academia because they're a bunch of bitter people, clinging to racism, religion and other things that we don't believe in. And, privilege. They're privileged because they have to work and keep their jobs, they aren't basically guaranteed jobs for life like us critical thinkers in our ivory towers.
The views of the Boys Down at the Pool Hall belong in any properly "diverse" Law School.
Simon is more than a little insular. They just don't make liberals as they did in classical times. His counsel should plea for leniency because of entrapment.
William H. Simon is a penis.
I'm sure Professor Simon is very tolerant and fair to everyone, excepting of course the intolerant and unfair, who just happen to include his political opponents, which is their fault and not in any way his.
The fun thing to remember is that if he ever runs afoul of the campus left, protesting that he hates Republicans as much as they do will count for nothing.
"The views of the Boys Down at the Pool Hall belong in any properly "diverse" Law School."
They do actually. Law without popular legitimacy is a bit difficult to enforce.
Speaking as a third-world native.
Simon probably supports class diversity, female chauvinism, and selective exclusion. Reconciliation of moral and natural imperatives is a hard problem.
Nothing about spontaneous conception, gods in the twilight zone, and their high priests in the judiciary. Perhaps he will include it in volume 2 of his autobiography.
That Prof Simon is writing a parody of the insular Leftist academic who personally despises and dismisses out-of-hand anyone not of his tribe.
Right?
Simon says bend over, put your head up your own ass and keep it there.
Is Simon for real? Yikes! Things are even worse in academia today than are dreamt of in my imagination.
I'm looking for the /s on that...
anybody? can anybody help me here?
The Slightly-Less-Than-Average-Intelligence Althouse Reader says:
I know you Smart People.
You believe the goal of a community of mutual respect requires it to disfavor others. This will certainly achieve a community of agreement, perhaps, but I am not so sure the first part isn't just high-sounding self-serving exclusion. To be Inclusive you must Exclude: I get it.
And even when Smart People agree it doesn't seem like any Agreement lasts that long, because the goalposts will always move onward.
You are Wise in eschewing those that are explicitly racist, misogynist or homophobic. By 'Explicit' it means they said something you don't agree with: I get it.
Except I think you left out 'implicit', because that seems to be a problem, too. Those that are not Explicit are assumed to be Implicit until you deign to bestow a Favor otherwise.
I also see that 'intolerant' didn't get included in the list of what to eschew. Because it is okay to be intolerant of those you will not tolerate, if those who you do not tolerate are, say, intolerable. Or undereducated. That, too: I get it.
And the sign of undereducation is not mimicking the things the Educated say. Only the Educated say Educated things. The Uneducated are supposed to at least repeat them.
And only the Educated think Educated is the same as Smart.
I get it.
And I figure you don't get it.
Because you're Smart.
Meanwhile, when I go to the Men's Room it is because I have a penis. Explicitly.
I am Laslo.
The current Republican Party is constituted disproportionately of the undereducated and the wealthy.
I find it so strange that Democrats can on the one hand extol the fact that they are the party of minority voters, & that those "minority voters" need affirmative action to help them up the educational ladder, to simultaneously not understand that this means there are lots of "undereducated" citizens in the Democratic Party.
Actually, I do think they know this. It just happens to be "hate speech" to point out that the blue collar, non-urban Republicans that the Left so despises are, by any measure, quite a bit brighter than their minority counterparts.
The professor only addresses the issue through the prism of his on bias, i.e., social and cultural. What about conservatives who believe in limited government, federalism, a literal interpretation of the Commerce Clause, separation of powers, concern with the growing power of the unelected "Fourth Branch of Government" and even a disagreement with Roe v. Wade (the opinion of which was and remains a legal abortion). Does the Good Professor believe that my position on these issues and others, positions that almost certainly clash with his own, are somehow intellectually inferior?
That Simon letter -- that's from The Onion, right? Right?
The premise of the letter is invalid, i.e., that the Democrat Party is middle-class and the Republican poor and wealthy. The Democrats get their votes primarily from inner cities (very poor) with additional votes from areas of above average wealth: liberal enclaves (university towns, Hollywood) and government towns (Washington). The GOP strength is suburban areas and rural areas. The Democrats more closely fit the pattern of a combination of the rich and the very poor.
I sometimes wonder how the Onion gets away with it......../s.
Those republican voters sure sound dangerous...why is the government still allowing them to run around wild? Surely we can round them up and place them on refuges? At the very least can't we start a spay and release program?
Many years ago, I found it odd that whenever I took some 'life, liberty & property' position in a discussion, Hobbes' 'Leviathan' always came up.
I mean, yeah, I get the relevance, but this was disproportionate.
In many interlocutors, I came to suspect it was the combination of Hobbes prevelance at the time + a lot of psychological projection.
I still think one of the purposes of education happens at a desk or computer one night, or after you've been bested in a debate, or after you put down a book that speaks to something in you and ask: 'Can I do better?'' What about that is true?'
That's where the real work begins.
Most of us are quite accustomed to the water in which we swim.
That water, however, has enormous importance for the institutions that can truly make or break a civilization.
Because the legal profession doesn't attract people who want to restrict individual rights (cons) or political rights (glibs) so that they can instead expand "social rights".
Wow, I would hate to be in Simon's class. Actually, though, I was pretty canny in law school, and if I had had a teacher as bigoted as Simon, I would have carefully tailored my answers to his moronic preconceptions, and walked off with an easy High Honors.
"The Democrats more closely fit the pattern of a combination of the rich and the very poor."
Correct. This has been true for decades in the US. Its also typical of British politics, where the Tories were the party of the middle class (including the minor gentry).
Its one of those inconvenient truths.
Every few generations a Party must be allowed to lay fallow in order to recover its productive capacity.
"Rhythm and Balls":
Your bigotry is showing. You might want to see to that.
Rights necessarily balance against other interests. Expanding in one area necessarily means intruding on another. After that we are only discussing policy preferences, not right and wrong.
Simon's argument is self-refuting if he believes that conservative/libertarian viewpoints are based on "religious dogma, social convention or superstition."
Libertarians and conservatives can hardly be classed together, these days. Randian Libertarians are as much a creation modernity as Marxists. Conservatives value tradition. Libertarians do not value tradition anymore than progressives do. Randian man is as much a creation of economic determinism as Marxist man.
Rhythm and Balls said...
"Because the legal profession doesn't attract people who want to restrict individual rights (cons) or political rights (glibs) so that they can instead expand "social rights"."
Yeah. Progressives have been all about individual freedom lately. Your limitation right now is a lack of self awareness, mostly about your fellow travelers.
Your bigotry is showing. You might want to see to that.
Lol. Bigotry? You make me laugh. Yes, I see to your novel application of the word "bigotry" to political categories. Hilarious.
Rights necessarily balance against other interests.
Right. Tell that to the post-Heller NRA.
Expanding in one area necessarily means intruding on another.
Not necessarily. Sometimes expanding a right intrudes on an imaginary countervailing sentiment, that never existed formally as a right. But that's because you're a conservative. You think traditions or precedents are synonymous with rights.
But they aren't, at least not in America. In Britain, maybe. But that's why their construction of rights is so much more limited than ours. Just watch what sorts of speech they're not able to get away with, for instance. It's rather chilling and makes it obvious why 1984 took place in Orwell's country.
Yeah. Progressives have been all about individual freedom lately.
Exactly so. My individual freedom to have my voice heard no more prejudice than that to which any other billionaire's voice is treated. My individual freedom to fight for my own voting rights. Rights to free expression, bodily autonomy, etc.
Your limitation right now is a lack of self awareness, mostly about your fellow travelers.
I can and do very easily say the same thing about you and your own fellow travelers.
You need to travel with them to Hypocrisy Lane.
"My individual freedom to have my voice heard no more prejudice than that to which any other billionaire's voice is treated."
You don't want the freedom to speak, you want the power to force people to listen to you.
The goal of a community of mutual respect requires it to disfavor others, including those that are explicitly racist, misogynist or homophobic.
If by "community of mutual respect", one means "echo chamber", then, bien sûr.
Petitio principii, the motto by which mediocre intellects worm their way to power and reign.
For a time, anyway.
sean,
"if I had had a teacher as bigoted as Simon, I would have carefully tailored my answers to his moronic preconceptions,"
It's the rational thing to do. I never did pretend to be a liberal, and I was blessed with very liberal professors who could argue hard without becoming personally hostile. I did learn later in my career to shut up though. It turns out there's a very fine line, in the corner of academia where I found myself, between someone asking your opinion, and someone asking your opinion so he can hate you for it.
Reading Professor Simon's letter reminded me a faculty dinner where a colleague asked for my take on the issue under discussion - I was the only one who hadn't spoken up - and before I answered a very senior colleague (with make-or-break power over my career) said, "Great, now we have to hear what he thinks." Afterward another senior colleague mused, "These dinners were so much more enjoyable back when we all agreed."
So I am amused when liberals argue in the alternative on this one: a) There's no bias against conservatives in academia, there just aren't as many conservatives there because of course liberals are smarter; b) it may look like there is, but that's because conservatives in academia are such aggressive assholes toward liberals; c) OK, there is, but you all deserve it because your positions in themselves are offensive; d) Why do conservatives whine so much?
You don't want the freedom to speak,
Oh no? I don't? Last I heard I wasn't trying to undo the 1st amendment.
Maybe you were. But i wasn't.
...you want the power to force people to listen to you.
Among elected officials? I think I legitimately have that power, actually - and should do my best to make use of it. If they want to ignore my voice or that of the people, I reserve the right to organize and vote them out of power.
But because you are a serf and borderline fascist I realize that these rights might sound strange to you.
Prof Simon does not slice the political baloney quite right.
In my observation, the Dems have chosen group identity politics as their brand, and their voters in presidential elections are blacks, hispanics, unmarried women, academics, and government workers. The Dems' money comes from unions (often with the dues of GOP-voting members), the entertainment industry, senior players in the investment and money management business, supporters of the environmental movement and trial lawyers.
The GOP gets substantial majorities of white men and married women. GOP money comes from senior executives, business owners, and legions of middle management and executive salaried workers.
This analysis does not support Simon's assertion that the GOP is the party of the under-educated and the wealthy. The snobbishness of Simon's claim is overwhelming. It says a lot about the world that he lives in.
How are things in Madison, Ann?
Shorter Simon: we disagree with bigotry. Bigotry is defined as whatever we disagree with.
Nothing enhances the mutual respect of a community quite like getting together to talk trash about the outsiders.
My browser was acting up.
"I can't be a bigot because that word doesn't apply to me!" - Steel trap logic from R&B.
The letter all but proves discrimination. It's a way of knowing that doesn't include consideration of the idea that one may possibly be wrong and academia is full of it. Thus endeth the Enlightenment.
Prof Simon says (say! Isn’t “Simon says” a kids’ game? Oh never mind): “The commitment to critical inquiry requires it [the academy] to disfavor some views based on religious dogma, social convention or superstition.” If you take that literally (and shouldn’t you expect clarity of expression from a lawprof?) he seems to be saying that it’s OK for the academy to disfavor views based on the academy’s dogma, convention, or superstition. I THINK he means to say that it’s OK for the academy to disfavor the views of others that are based on the others’ dogma, convention, or superstition. Even read that way, he’s justifying disfavoring views with which the academy disagrees – dogma, convention, and superstition mean beliefs with which one disagrees. What this comes down to is the same in either reading: It’s proper for the academy to disfavor views with which it disagrees. That’s not what I have always understood academic freedom is about.
And by the way, when I was a student at Columbia Law School in the late ‘60’s, I don’t recall any faculty member “disfavoring” my conservative political views, although the faculty was largely “liberal”. Perhaps that’s because the faculty at that time wasn’t EXCLUSIVELY leftist, so conservative students couldn’t so easily be discounted as freaks and bigots.
Racist of course means that you disagree with policy proposals that in my opinion will help blacks.
So liberals are classified as 'poor', while conservatives are classified as 'under-educated.'
Considering that there is a very good correlation between the poor and the under-educated,that is about as clear a case for bigotry as it is possible to make.
All the assholes are on the other side. It's evergreen.
Two quotes. The first, from Professor William H. Simon, and pulled from the Althouse post:
"The goal of a community of mutual respect requires it to disfavor others, including those that are explicitly racist, misogynist or homophobic."
And second, from the late Justice Scalia, and his dissent in Lawrence v Texas
Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. I noted in an earlier opinion the fact that the American Association of Law Schools (to which any reputable law school must seek to belong) excludes from membership any school that refuses to ban from its job-interview facilities a law firm (no matter how small) that does not wish to hire as a prospective partner a person who openly engages in homosexual conduct. See Romer, supra, at 653.
I'm not sure that it is an overstatement to suggest that formal institutionalized policy of law schools compelled the result in Lawrence, Windsor and Obergefell. That just about all of the institutions of the legal profession -- schools, bar associations, large firms, corporate law departments, the inside workings of the U.S. Department of Justice, federal judicial chambers, etc. -- made it quasi-criminal to espouse traditional marriage as a societal norm that could be enforced by law if individual states chose to do so.
Look through the letters at Althouse's NYT link. One writer cites recent litigation and state initiatives concerning voting as "disenfranchisement." Similar veins run through the other letters.
The liberal letter-writers prove everything that Nicholas Kristof could have hoped for.
I've read very widely and thought very deeply to become as mean and stupid as I am, along with a fair number of economists.
Rich and undereducated. No student debt.
I've read nearly all of Derrida, which contributes to my undereducation.
Brimming with ignorance.
One notes that there were few American-style conservative thinkers in the Soviet Academy either.
What a completely "unexpected" similarity.
Not to worry, someone will be along to tell us all those marxist-leninists were really just tea-pertiers.
Surely the ideas behind our founding as a nation are so completely contemptible as to not merit discussion.
Derrida is quite possibly the least valuable, but widely respected (if never read) academic bull shit artist.
Other academics pretend he matters.
The Kim Fucking Kardashian of academics.
Famous for being famous.
tim in vermont:
The Founders are hated for having so much success. How dare experience disagree with our theories!
If only there were a way to "Hide the Decline", as it were.
There actually are ways to "hide the decline", at least for awhile. Of course, as our Latin American friends have discovered, not permanently.
Derrida is quite possibly the least valuable, but widely respected (if never read) academic bull shit artist.
Other academics pretend he matters.
The Kim Fucking Kardashian of academics.
Famous for being famous.
I read him for pleasure.
Quine expressed some frustration that people thought he was any good.
Cavell pointed out that Derrida misread Austin, which was probably true, but agreed in silence that Derrida's put-down of Searle was right on. A studied failure to understand, I think he said.
On the other hand, I pointed Vicki Hearne to Derrida and Levinas, and she used both of them. So a poet gets Derrida. A logician (Quine) is baffled.
I recommend Derrida's _Spurs_ as an easy beginning text, but skip the preface written by somebody else for God's sake.
"This one's my favorite, maybe because it's from a lawprof" Very subtle. You mean, because only a lawprof windbag could so perfectly sum up all the phony Prog BS on the subject?
"I read him for pleasure." Well, I wouldn't go that far. Maybe next time I put on some nice, soothing Messiaen organ music . . .
Even if we were to agree that all professor Simon says is true, why exactly should conservatives fund such enclaves?
It is not as if liberals are funding similar conservative group-think reservations.
Professor Simon sounds like someone who used to live nearby who had it as a criterion for his house-search that he could not live in a place where there were "too many" Republicans nearby, as apparently he was incapable of living in the vicinity of people who espoused different political views. Sounds rather much like his criteria for a university - better that there be no offending speech than actually trying to defeat said speech through debate and scholarship.
When it comes to universities, the criteria for hiring should be on the ability to do scholarship, which presumably is demonstrated by earning a doctorate in the first place. If it makes the university community "uncomfortable" by having someone with heterodox personal views on the faculty, then maybe they're not very committed to critical inquiry so much as their own dogmas. It's rather a bizarre irony when the Roman Church of today is more tolerant of dissenting views than the university.
I had professors in college from a range of different schools of belief - outright atheists, evangelical fundamentalists, mainline Christians, Jews, devout Catholics, not-so-devout Catholics, agnostics, Buddhists, spiritualists, and probably some others. There aren't any of them that didn't have something worthwhile to say, and despite our obvious differences in the religious outlook, one of the outright atheists was among my favorites. I don't think the educational experience would have been enhanced had all the professors been lock-step secular progressives.
And sorry to Professor Simon, but education moved me from left to right during my days at university. I know that's not very common, particularly in state schools, but that was the way the cards played out. It may be blamed in part on some aforementioned professors who sparked an interest in theology, but it may also be blamed in part on Bush-haters, who convinced me by their lack of charity that truth was not to be found within the progressive movement.
In truth, no political movement or theory of governance will ever be without error. Likewise, none of them are ever without some truth - something Professor Simon appears to be too smart to grasp. I am of the opinion that the current right is less fundamentally wrong about what is right than the current left. Even so, salvation does not and never will come through politics.
Then said professor would have no problems doing away with ALL money from the Feds then. If he isnt...tough.
And in regards to these uneducated clods, the prof is free to handle his own electrical work. And plumbing. Car repair. Contracting work on his property. Because he must be good at these, being smarter than the guys who do it.
Are all academic lawyers as overtly fascistic as this Simon creep?
If so there needs to be an earthquake.
It has long been my observation that liberals--'progressives', if you will--are far less tolerant of differing opinions than are conservatives. In fact, they are usually quite incapable of civilized discourse with anyone not on their very narrow [and getting narrower] sliver of the cultural/political spectrum.
"It is not the job of the university to represent all the views held in the surrounding society"
LOL. Diversity only where you want it. Hypocrites.
"The goal of a community of mutual respect requires it to disfavor others, including those that are explicitly racist, misogynist or homophobic." ----- pure Marcuseian strategy.
Power corrupts and arrogance comes before the fall. All part of the human landscape.
Simon describes liberals as being what political science types call a "high-low" coalition. They are arrayed, of course, against the middle. There is nothing good or bad about a high-low coalition. It's contextual. The goal of a high-low coalition is to transfer privilege from the middle to the high and the low. The low gets more material goods, the high get to ignore middle class social mores. Also, they get assets. They aren't called the high for nothing.
Before the late 1960s, in the US we had a high-middle coalition, mostly because of trade unionism and the New Deal. Europeans tend to be much more high-low coalition oriented.
All this is elementary. It amazes me that people actually convince themselves that revolutionary politics are about an inprecise, value laden term like 'justice.' Lenin was pointing out the obvious when he came up with the slogan "who, whom?"
It's late. Did anything deviate from the long-standing "Those who can do. Those who can't teach"?
I think when my generation was coming out of college, starting in the late 1960s, onward, it seemed like only the leftists wanted to stay in college and get PhDs. We seemed more interested in JDs, MDs, and MBAs. Part of it could have been that they wanted to indoctrinate the next generation, and part maybe not wanting to grow up, but stay with the drugs and free love. In my school, definitely not the brightest kids in the class, with some notable exceptions. And, it turns out that PhDs really are not smarter (on average) than MDs or JDs.
But, after taking over their departments, as my generation aged, and ascended the hierarchy, academia became ever more intolerant of anything that was different, and that included most anything to the right of a moderate Democrat. Anyone who didn't conform was ostracized, and in department after department, the faculty turned inward, only hiring true believers. Indeed, non-believers are often weeded out as undergraduates, or when applying to graduate school. There, it is fairly simple - for a PhD these days, you typically need some sort of funding and an advisor (who is key in obtaining the funding). And if the entire department is filled with group think leftists, a conservative applicant isn't likely to get either an advisor or funding. Which just means that that discipline gets even more insular, and, ofen, irrelevant. Unless you are one of the Lesbians with a degree in gender studies, and you can now get a job as an administrator charged by the Dept of Education with policing consent in drunken heterosexual hookups. Or Black Studies grads helping to provide safe spaces for students of color after Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown were both killed in justified self defense. Which may not be irrelevance, but should be for those degrees (which departments are typically some of the most bigoted and closed minded, with often the lowest IQ faculty).
So, now the answer is that conservatives have a much harder time getting the gateway PhD in many disciplines, even if they wanted to, because entire academic disciplines have become close minded echo chambers, where only like minded fellow travelers are welcome. And without the PhD, you can't get in the door, unless you can convince everyone you are an authentic minority, and esp a Native American, etc. (you don't have to actually be an Indian - you just have to be good at pretending as evidenced by Ward Churchill and Lizzie Warren). Or, you have won some prestigious award, like a Nobel Prize. And, even if you can get the requisite entry credentials, there is active discrimination against those who are anywhere near conservative in many departments, thanks to the near universal close mindedness of the faculty in those departments.
I am surprised no one has brought it up yet, but surely one of the most insulting parts if these people's argument is that they insist we all pay for their "scholarship." The are happy to say they don't represent nor respect the views of the non-Left, but they simultaneously demand that everyone, including the non-Left, and their work. With taxes, of course. So the same Professors who say they were morally correct to discriminate against non-Left views/ideas also insist they are morally correct to force non-Left people to pay for the Professors' work.
The data show that in 1997 women and minorities were underrepresented compared to some populations, but Republicans and Christians were usually more underrepresented. For example, by the late 1990s, the proportion of the U.S. population that was neither Republican nor Christian was only 9%, but the majority of law professors (51%) was drawn from that small minority. Further, though women were strongly underrepresented compared to the full-time working population, all of that underrepresentation was among Republican women, who were—and are—almost missing from law teaching.
Please note that it's not bigotry to claim that all Christians and Republicans are stupid, especially Republican Women.
The tenor of the Prof. Simon's comments reminds me of how William Buckley responded to the followers of Ayn Rand, when the conservative columnist called her a fascist. When Buckley appropriately labeled Rand for what she was, he was subjected to an avalanche of vicious, self-righteous vitriol. To which Buckley responded: Rand's followers, "Dotted the "I's," and crossed the "T's," of my point."
The professor should become a "Q.E.D" footnote to Kristoff's accurate take on the hostility of the modern academic left to any dissonance-a demonstration of the weakness of their worldv
iew.
Success in business normally requires the humiliating step of working your way to the top say over 20 years of service. That H word eliminates about half of them.
Mr. Simon, simplified: I'm/we're smart, they're not; end of statement. (Note: Not discussion.)
I think that was helpful of Simon to write a bit of evidence of discrimination that could be appended to or footnoted in articles about this ideological discrimination.
Unbelievable. He really feels immune to public funding consequences for the academy. He'll just come right out and say "it's not that higher education is biased and only people who conform to our herdthink can easily obtain an academic career; it's that we're right and you're wrong and oh well you're just not educated enough to get it".
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