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Parsing the culture wars
Last week, Inside Higher Ed published two interlocking pieces on academic politics, "Rethinking the Culture Wars -- 1," by University of Tennessee English professor Donald Lazere, and "Rethinking the Culture Wars -- 2," by Colby College professor Joseph Reisart. Written by a staunch self-proclaimed liberal and an equally staunch self-proclaimed conservative, the articles appear at first to be offering a sort of "point / counterpoint" take on the present state of the endlessly involuted ongoing argument about the political climate of contemporary academe. First impressions in this case--as in so many cases--are misleading, however. Far from offering a rich clash of viewpoints, the articles actually operate in tandem to send the message that all is well with the academic status quo, and that the conservative critique of academe is the trumped-up issue of politically motivated whiners with an axe to grind.
Lazere's essay, which mentions ACTA, defends the notion that academics do not need to be accountable to the public because they are smarter and better educated than the public is: "academic discourse should stand independent from government pressure and public opinion, in a similar manner to the ideal of a free, independent press. That is why taxpayers should be willing to support the autonomy of the academy, within reasonable limits, whether or not it agrees with their personal views." Lazere's essay drips with condescension toward both non-academics and toward those who dare to criticize academic ways and means; it also drips with peculiar and telling leaps of logic that betray his underlying agenda. His commenters dismantle his argument quite handily, as does David French at Phi Beta Cons. I'll have more to say about Lazere's article in a subsequent post; for now, I'd like to look more closely at Reisart's essay.
Reisart is the sort of conservative liberal academics who wish to deny the problems faced by conservative students and faculty love to find. As far as he is concerned, he not only has never experienced any professional hardship or discrimination for being a conservative, but, with rare exeptions, neither has anyone else; because he has not had such experiences, he implies, the patterns of discrimination outlined by conservative critics must not exist:
Although some vocal conservatives complain that liberal faculty members use their classrooms to indoctrinate students and to punish dissenting students by giving them poor grades, my own experience suggests that such incidents are quite rare. In my 20-plus years as a conservative student and teacher at three strongly left-leaning institutions (Princeton, Harvard, and Colby), I have never felt discriminated against. I have only once witnessed an overtly propagandizing classroom presentation, and have I only once heard a student complain about being graded unfairly for not hewing to the professor's party line.Overt discrimination against conservatives is not a widespread problem, I suspect, because the overwhelming majority of faculty and administrators at places like Colby are, in fact, deeply committed to the ideals of free inquiry and fair treatment for all. Like most other institutions of higher learning in the United States, Colby accepts the American Association of University Professors' Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. That statement explicitly affirms the freedom of researchers and teachers to seek the truth and of students freely to pursue the truth. That statement explicitly warns that classroom teachers "should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject."
In order to make his argument, Reisart ignores broad, established patterns of discrimination against campus conservatives--speech codes that are used to punish expression that falls afoul of campus orthodoxy, denial of funds to conservative and Christian student groups, administrators who censor such protected conservative expression as affirmative action bake sales and who tolerate the theft of conservative newspapers. He also ignores specific, documented cases of conservative students and faculty who were persecuted--threatened with expulsion, denied promotion, stripped of administrative positions, even fired--for their views (Steve Hinkle comes to mind, as do Stephen Kershnar, Laura Freberg, and KC Johnson).
Instead, Reisart cites the AAUP's admonition to faculty not to proselytize as proof that they don't (it's worth noting that by that logic, the fact that we have laws forbidding murder must mean that there are no murderers). He also suggests that conservative and religious students should bear the responsibility for changing the ideological composition of an academy that locks them out: "To those conservative and religious students who feel marginalized at college, I say: Stop complaining and start studying; become professors, and teach the classes you wish had been offered when you were in college."
Generalizing outward from his own experience, Reisart thus concludes that there really is no legitimate conservative critique of academe to be made. The resulting analysis is a thoroughly bizarre instance of egocentrically-rationalized doublethink in which Reisart can both recognize higher ed's institutionalization of liberal bias and pretend that it doesn't exist (or, at least, that it has no effects because it has not, in his opinion, affected him).
While acknowledging that academe has become disproportionately populated by liberals, and while acknowledging, too, that this has some measurable knock-on effects when it comes to hiring and teaching--liberals hire likeminded liberals, he notes; scholarship and teaching thus take on a distinctly liberal cast in choice of topics and treatment of issues; conservative-minded students are bored or discouraged by this and look elsewhere for career prospects--Reisart manages to argue that the real issue plaguing academe is its self-marginalization with respect to the American public.
Even as he concedes that the academy is leaning ever further leftward, he sees its principal problem as one of insularity:
The central problem with academe today is that we overwhelmingly speak professionally only to other academics, who share our sense of what questions are important and our wider range of values and commitments. Academe has continued to move ever further to the cultural and political left not through any overt discrimination against conservatives but through a decades-long process of self-selection.
The suggestion here is that the left-leaning academy needs to learn to speak to an implicitly conservative public that does not necessarily share the professoriate's politics. In other words, for Reisart, the academy's leftward tilt is not a problem of knowledge production, but of public relations. There is no sense in the article that academic knowledge production--and, by extension, transmission--is harmed when scholars all think alike, all want to work on the same problems, and all want to work on them in largely the same ways. Free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and vibrant debate are less important to Reisart, it seems, than an academy that can package its one-sided intellectual pursuits for public consumption.
Reisart's point about the academy's tendency to indulge in scholarly navel-gazing is apt and timely. But his attempt to hitch his argument about academic insularity to a callow denial of the very real problems posed by the academic institutionalization of leftist politics is misguided, to say the least. It's possible to urge academics to learn to speak to a wider, non-academic audience without dismissing problems within academe; it's even possible to urge leftist academics to learn to address a public that is, on the whole, more conservative than academe without denying that conservatives who wish to enter academe face some distinct challenges having to do with the way their interests and methods depart from those of the left-leaning academic status quo. In failing to build such simple but essential nuances into his argument, Reisart not only denies a very real problem, but also, in so doing, damages his argument about academic marginalization.
Posted by acta online on August 27, 2006 at August 27, 2006 04:49 PM
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If nothing else, both pieces prove beyond all doubt that academics cannot reform their own corruption and will desperately fight any attempt to make them accountable to the public that funds them. Since they are entirely dependent on over $150B a year of tax revenues, they are fighting a losing battle. They just lack the cognitive acuity and common sense to realize that fact.
Posted by: Federal Dog at August 28, 2006 07:36 AM
This ACTA reply assumes that being left-wing in one's politics means being "one-sided" in one's intellectual pursuits. Logically, that's a non-sequiter, unless one thinks that voting for John Kerry also means that one is more likely to study one branch of chemistry over another, to study one nation's literature more than another.
The writer also assumes this intellectual one-sidedness -- there's no evidence for intellectual one-sidedness given. Instead, we're offered recycled evidence that there's a one-sidedness of political affiliation.
What's amazing is that this logic totally apes the worst logical errors of a certain kind of supposedly left-wing relativism. It begins with the generic fallacy -- that one's biography (say, voting registration records) determines the truth or falsehood of one's knowledge claims. Never do we read a reasoned critique of the *ideas* of a scholar or scholarly movement here. Instead, we're told that uniformity of political affiliation somehow puts the clamp down on free inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge. Notice that ACTA's critique holds no interest in truth or falsehood. No: we're offered the worst kind of pseudo-pluralist justification for the assault on professors' political affiliations. So that hiring comes to mean hiring someone holding any available position on a subject, and teaching becomes teaching "all sides" of an issue, without regard to the truth or falsehood of any of these "sides." This is the Fox News version of thinking: if someone can disagree, then the issue is "open for interpretation."
The generic fallacy of this argument leads conservative critics of the academy to argue, for example, that registered-Democratic literature scholars interested in the relationship between literature and race are "brainwashing students." The ACTA folks don't mount any reasoned debate over whether literature is tied to racial social dynamics. They just assume that teaching about "race" (or "class" or "gender") emerges from someone's political standpoint -- that the the latter determines the former and determines the "hidden" goal behind that scholar's pedagogy. Of course, to argue that American literature *isn't* almost obsessed with issues of race -- from Rowlandson's indian captors to Melville's motley crew to Twain's raft brotherhood to Pound's anti-Semitism to Berryman's poetry in dialect to Philip Roth's hilarious assaults on, and love affair with, WASPiness -- would simply be wrong. And if you examine the scholarship on these works, you'll notice that there is no "one-sided" perspective on how such novels represent race or how social factors of race influenced the forms and language of these narratives.
Someone might respond by saying: "OK, granted that studying race and literature isn't necessarily left-wing brainwashing. But the discipline is too one-sided in its interest in only race, class, and gender."
My first reply would be: wrong. Look at the new publications section under English and Comp Lit in the *Chronicle* and you'll see a wide variety of issues and methodologies at play in these fields.
Now that conservatives are aping old-school affirmative action arguments, perhaps it's time to reply with old-school conservative anti-affirmative action arguments (which is what Reisart did). If all blacks need to do is work as well as their white counterparts in order to get into schools and jobs and housing, then all conservatives need to do is work as well as their liberal counterparts.
But the bottom line is this: how one votes -- especially in an America where the voting spectrum runs the gamut from A to B -- is no clear determinant of how one pursues one's knowledge.
Posted by: Karen Eliot at August 28, 2006 12:19 PM
Point of order: Mr. Lazare is not a liberal -- he is a self-admitted socialist, with a TIAA-CREF nearing $1 million. Which begs the question: if he really belives in what he says -- why doesn't he spend his own money first? At least Michael Moore does.
As always -- if Lazare, Eliot, et al., are so sure of their superior abilities -- why don't they go charter and prove it? Let's see them have to turn away applicants to their College of Socialist Thumb-Sucking? Or are they really afraid to release their lip-lock on the public teat? The answer to that is obvious.
Charter higher-ed now. Let it prove its claims.
Posted by: L.L. at August 28, 2006 09:54 PM
Meanwhile, the truly disturbing issue -- and one ignored by ACTA, apparently -- involves State oversight of classroom material. Michael Berube provides the link to *Inside Higher Ed*:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/17/ariz
Arizona state legislator, Thayer Verschoor, wants to force professors to provide alternative readings whenever a student finds a particular assigned text "personally offensive" for reasons of morality, religion, or sexuality/gender.
As the article shows, Verschoor has clearly not read his one example, Rick Moody's *The Ice Storm*, a novel that -- far moreso than the gorgeous movie adaptation -- viciously lashes out at the selfishness of divorce, extra-marital affairs, sexual exploitation, hollow popular culture and defends fairly traditional family values. (I actually think the movie is more successful, because more subdued and even-handed, whereas the novel is a classic American jeremiad against the 1970s and its nostalgic fans.)
Verschoor should get locked in a room with Henry Miller, Kathy Acker, and the Marquid de Sade -- actually, that would make a great part of a core college curriculum.
Posted by: Karen Eliot at August 29, 2006 09:55 AM
"Parsing the culture wars" rightly panned Joseph Reisart's blithely and sleekly self-satisfied, Sganarellesque--"when I have had enough to eat and drink, everyone ought to be satisfied"--nod of "there, there, not to worry" approval to the academic status quo. But I'm keen to read your forthcoming analysis of Professor Lazere's politically disingenuous article ("Culture Wars--I"), on which I delivered a half-dozen blogs to "Inside Higher Education". May I add that in characterizing my fellow academics' "ne sutor ultra crepidam" arrogance (tempered only by venality), "Karen Eliot"'s crisply succinct "lip lock on the public teat" quite vanquishes my swinishly vulgar "snouts in the public trough" or my invocation of the familiar description of academic (im)posture before the public or donors who pay them as "on their kness shaking their fists".
Posted by: jacques albert at August 30, 2006 01:54 AM
correction (mea culpa): read: "knees" of course; and read (sua culpa) FedDog's "non-sequiter" as "non-sequitur" (in this correction a non-non sequitur, non e vero, FedDog?). How's your latinity coming along? I see after reading your reading of the ACTA essay above that veritas odium parit. . . .
Posted by: jacques albert at August 30, 2006 12:46 PM
"LL": you should have gotten the hat tip in my above post--not "Karen Eliot"--sorry for the mis-attribution. Cheers
Posted by: Jacques Albert at August 31, 2006 09:21 AM
YIKES! Jacques, my man, please don't hang bad Latin on me: "Karen Elliot" is the one who does not understand third person deponant verb forms.
I'm no Cicero, but I'm not THAT bad.
Posted by: Federal Dog at September 4, 2006 07:21 AM