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Telling it like it is
Mark Bauerlein--who KC Johnson rightly notes has written some spectacular short critiques of the contemporary academy--tells it like it is at Phi Beta Cons:
As the intellectual-diversity movement unfolds in state legislatures and in the media, a pattern of resistance has developed, and it's a potent one. It came up in questions posed during the hearings in Pennsylvania, and it was echoed in news stories .... In those cases, the focus swerved from the actual locus of the bias. Bias was postulated in the wrong places, and when they didn't find it there, legislators and skeptical journalists declared the whole issue a false problem.
Here is where went gone wrong. The inquiry was set up to focus on specific events and actions. Have professors punished conservative students at grading time? Have partisan incidents spread through classrooms? Are there intimidated professors and harassed students lurking underground? In these cases, the attention fell on individual teachers and episodes. It was the personal contact that counted.
For an inquiry into bias in an institution the size and complexity of the university, this is a dead end. Academia is a subculture, an insider's universe. People join it by undergoing a slow and selective process, over many years learning to give lectures, conduct research, and handle students. At each stage, they're judged by people who have already passed through the system. This makes for a social component in the training. What happens is what happens in any closed group over time. A set of mores, protocols, attitudes, and norms develops. In its better forms, it goes by the name of professionalism. But how easily do those attitudes and norms slide into cliquish, parochial, or ideological behavior, especially when professionals talk only to themselves. Bias, then, operates more systematically, less overtly than in a rant against George Bush in the classroom, less individualistically than in one person's exercise of power. It becomes proper to the whole discipline.
Here's an example. Among the general goals listed in the College of Education at Penn State is this: "Enhance the commitment of faculty, staff, and students to the centrality of diversity, social justice, and democratic citizenship." This is an ideological demand. "Social justice" is a loaded political term, and its range of meanings includes government policies to redistribute wealth and resources down the income ladder. It may, and should, be part of the curriculum, a practice to be studied. But to insert social justice into a mission statement is to make it an entrance requirement. If you subscribe to it, you may join.
When prospective students who don't share the social-justice outlook encounter such statements, they don't file complaints. They walk away. When professors in the program assume the rightness of social justice, they don't think they're acting partisan. They're merely abiding by the standards of their field. What is a political position is made to look like a professional one. The habit has become so ingrained in academic behavior that liberal bias proceeds in professional-looking ways--in the books selected for a syllabus, in the topics considered relevant and cutting-edge in a field, in the themes chosen for conferences. Nobody needs to say, "We don't want any conservative or libertarian views around here!" The system already takes care of it.
Here is where attention should go. Which programs and departments make an ideological belief definitive of responsible academic conduct? Professors who blatantly push an ideological agenda are far outnumbered by those who don't, and individual cases of discrimination may be cast as exceptions. But the norms that preside over the humanities, schools of education, and many social-science departments are there for the exposure--if one wishes to take the time and trouble to chart them.
Former FIRE president and Alliance Defense League attorney David French concurs.
Critics of the contemporary campus climate have made it easy for naysayers within academe to dismiss their arguments by, as Bauerlein notes, failing to frame their case in a manner that both accurately describes the problem and that makes it possible to analyze the problem in a constructive, informative way. There is a great deal of growing momentum surrounding the idea that something must be done to restore genuine intellectual pluralism to college and university campuses. But that energy is going to have to be harnessed more effectively than it has so far if real understanding is to be cultivated, and if substantive changes are to be made. As Bauerlein points out, too much of the public attention to this issue thus far has been analytically flawed, focussed more on specific interpersonal interactions than on systemic ideological expectations and trends. While the former is certainly easier to document than the latter, the power of the latter has minimized the need for the former. That's how ideology works. It doesn't have to be imposed or enforced when it is at its most effective. It's simply there in the air we breathe.
Posted by acta online on May 07, 2006 at May 7, 2006 08:54 AM
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Comments
The real problem with faculties being almost completely one-sided in their political and cultural sympathies is the attendant decline in their ability to factually and logically address viewpoints that do not strictly conform to their own. I have witnessed this on very many (too many) occasions, and the problem has become distinctly aggravated over the past decade or so. I have literally seen full tenured professors completely incapable of responding to opposing viewpoints with a structured rebuttal grounded in facts and logic. On the contrary: Pitched emotions rule virtually every aspect of academic life, and anyone who disagrees with prevailing academic orthodoxies can expect differing degrees of hysteria if that dissent is actually expressed.
How can students learn how to marshal facts and logic in intellectual exchange when the people "instructing" them completely lack such skills themselves? The echo chamber effect has all but killed off education, and the way that tenure and the hiring process work means reform from within will never be possible.
Posted by: Federal Dog at May 9, 2006 01:04 PM
It's amusing to set up an inquiry into very specific types of incidents when the anecdotal evidence of politicization are all around us. Ask any student, "Do you like studying X? Why didn't you join the Psychology/Sociology/English/other department?" You'll get a ton of responses, I know, because I'm one of them.
Posted by: . at May 12, 2006 11:06 PM