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On monoculture
In the current issue of Academic Questions, UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor John Ellis revisits the issue of academia's political one-sidedness, arguing that the problem is not one-sidedness itself, but what imbalance means for the quality of higher education in this country. Those who defend the status quo by arguing that faculties have always been one-sided, that professors are responsible professionals who approach their jobs conscientiously, and that cases demonstrating otherwise are isolated exceptions to the rule, Ellis notes, are not demonstrating "disciplined thinking." He goes on to observe that the one-sidedness of faculties has intensified in recent years, and that the campus culture has shifted substantially to accommodate a new norm of politicized teaching and scholarship.
"It is in the nature of a political monoculture that it will automatically lead to extremism and thus to a degradation of academic competence and responsibility," Ellis argues. The trouble, as he sees it, lies not in ideological imbalance itself, but in what happens when political homogeneity of any sort is the rule in an intellectual setting. "We can still miss the point here if we focus too much on those absent right-of-center professors. The problem lies not in those who are not there, but in those who are."
Citing John Stuart Mill, Ellis rehearses the foundational premises of free inquiry. "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that." "They do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess." "Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field." Students must "be able to hear [the arguments] from people who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form." If they don't, "All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to."
For Ellis, academia's pervasive failure to recognize and nurture the need for genuine intellectual diversity marks a profound loss of individual and institutional competence. As advocacy has become a guiding purpose for a growing number of academics, the genuinely academic temperament has been lost. In a political and intellectual monoculture, he writes, "The academic's focus on careful analysis of and abstraction from all relevant evidence gradually gives way to the zealot's selective use of partial evidence to bolster trains of thought fathered by political wishes and even fantasies, not by fact." As proof that this degeneration into zealotry is happening, Ellis cites the growing archive of campus horror stories that have appeared in the news in recent years. Cases abound of speakers getting shouted down for their views, print runs of alternative student newspapers being stolen, students feeling pressed to parrot their professors' views, course descriptions that presuppose specific political positions, students and faculty being harassed and punished for expressing dissenting views. Together, Ellis says, they mark the "symptoms" of the "systemic … sickness" that is academe's political monoculture.
Ellis' analysis is particularly strong when he discusses what administrations do when confronted with evidence of a problem. In case after case, they rationalize it away--or even redefine the problem as a positive asset. This, he notes, is what the University of California did when a graduate instructor offered a pro-Palestinian course and advised prospective students that "Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." Instead of "reaffirming" UCs rule forbidding teachers to allow passion, rather than intellect, to shape their teaching and "abolishing the course," UC responded by "reaffirming the course and abolishing the rule." Such decisions, he argues, demonstrate a systemic inability on the part of academics to understand and uphold an essentially academic ideal of inquiry: "University administrators used to be quality-control agents, but as is evident from the example of UC's capitulation, they are that no longer. Most have been intimidated into silence."
Ellis' conclusion? In his own words:
Remediation is urgent, and this must not be thought of as action against a political group, but rather as a return to enforcing genuinely academic standards of competence once more. Campus administrative quality control has long since broken down, and so the ball now seems to be in the court of governing boards. They have the responsibility of appointing and supervising senior campus administrators, and their task now is to appoint and support presidents who will do their traditional job of quality control by appointing deans who will make it their business to weed out teachers and courses that are academically incompetent. The first thing they would need to do would be to tackle absurdities like political monocultures in subject areas that deal directly with politics. But to make that possible, they would need to make the case publicly for an end to incompetent one-party politics and sociology departments, incompetent anti-academic courses, and anti-academic behavior in public meetings or in classrooms. A governing board that explains very carefully what it is doing to a general public that ultimately pays the academy's bills both as taxpayers and parents will find that it has more than enough support for its actions.
ACTA has been making similar arguments for years. In the absence of faculty-based or administrative will to acknowledge a problem--let alone to address it--trustees have an obligation to step up
Posted by acta online on June 06, 2007 at June 6, 2007 05:58 PM
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Comments
"But to make that possible, they would need to make the case publicly for an end to incompetent one-party politics and sociology departments"
The rub is how you go about doing this. He doesn't say. Do you impose quotas by politial affiliation or ideology? If not that, then what? If you follow political affiliation, what do you when you find the physics department has a 3-1 or 5-1 or 7-1 predominance of leftists or Democrats, as you will at most major universities? Do you grill faculty candidates on their politics? Forget about quantum mechanics and ask them how they feel about handling al-Qaeda? Or if you leave the physics department alone, what do you do with the sociology department?
John Ellis absolutely raises questions about terribly important problems in academia. The solutions are far from evident. Unfortunately, they are not to be found in his article.
Posted by: Mike at June 7, 2007 10:11 AM
The main problem with Ellis's article is its conflation of two different issues:
a) university departments are staffed by faculty overwhelmingly identifying with one political party over another
b) some professors indoctrinate rather than teach
The two issues are no doubt related, but solving (a) has no necessary effect on solving (b). We see this in so many conservative replies to left-wing scholarship and teaching, which accuse lefties of hating Western culture and demanding that students learn to love Western culture. This suggests that many of today's conservatives would indoctrinate their own students if they were in the classroom.
It's wrong if hiring committees give out jobs based on political views. It's also wrong for professors to try to convince students to accept one position on a controversial issue. But hiring more conservatives won't necessarily stop indoctrination, while stopping indoctrination will not stop unfair hiring practices.
Posted by: Linval Thompson at June 8, 2007 10:52 AM
One possible solution is terminating positions and whole departments like ethnic and "gender" studies, which amount to little more than leftist social and political advocacy clubs. (A university at which I taught at nearly two decades ago (Portland State University) has, perversely, recently established a PhD programme in "Social Inequality"!) Also rid literature departments of so-called specialist positions in comic books, flicks, fotos, bezball, rap noise, adverts, porn, politicised theorrhea--in short, all pop "culture" (surely an oxymoron). Hire more specialists with the ancient and modern languages and bib skills to do real, not fake, scholarship--I mean textual editors, translators, linguists, glossators. Teach the early specialties far more, for these are the areas students need most help in--not in "trans-gendering literature" courses and the like.
And I, like others on the Right, don´t really care what the political affiliations of these reformed lit departments´'faculties may be qua professors--not qua superannuated hippie or leftie protesters--in their legitimate specialties.
Posted by: Jacques Albert at June 22, 2007 07:46 AM