NAS Blog

Professor Daphne Patai of UMass-Amherst has a good post at Minding the Campus. She writes about the uniformity of thought she encounters among her fellow academics, which of course ranges from Marxist to “progressive.” One result, she observes, is that students absorb statist cliches, such as the notion that the Tea Party is rooted in racism, and rarely hear any arguments to challenge them. But when a conservative or libertarian tries to add programs, professors or speakers to provide the case for liberalism (in its original meaning) and to show how damaging the concentration of government power is, he is sure to be vilified for “undermining academic freedom” and “trying to buy the curriculum.”

Over at the leading libertarian magazine, Reason, writer Shikha Dalmia attacks conservatives for using FOIA laws to invade the privacy of historian William Cronon. At the same time, Dalmia defends Open Records laws while noting that groups may abuse their rights by going after individuals. On that score, the Left comes in for a tongue lashing for politicizing the process (and so much else in academia).

This week Neil Gross and his colleagues released two new studies analyzing clues as to why the majority of professors are politically liberal. They focus on graduate school. What sort of person goes to graduate school? Does a certain political orientation boost a person’s chances of getting in? Of wanting to go in the first place?

Peter Wood discusses both reports in articles at the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Innovations blog.

In one study, which Peter called “well-intentioned” but “essentially worthless,” the authors sent fake letters to graduate admissions officers expressing interest in attending the programs. Some letters mentioned working in either the Obama or the McCain campaign. Gross and his co-authors wanted to see whether these letters would get responses that indicated encouragement or discouragement according to which candidate was mentioned.

The other study sought to analyze the reasons people have for seeking Ph.D.s. Peter wrote:

Why is the professoriate predominantly liberal?

A. Because “There is an intrinsic link between liberalism and intelligence such that the more liberal views of those with advanced degrees reflect liberals’ greater academic potential.” [The liberals-are-smarter theory]

B. “Because cognitive development occurs with additional years of schooling, leading the intelligentsia to find fault with what they see as simplistic conservative ideologies.” [The more-learning-makes-profs-liberal theory]

C. Because the professoriate seeks a way to differentiate itself “from both the middle class and business elites.” [The profs-turn-liberal-because-they-resent-the-middle-classtheory]

D. Because the entrenched liberals who dominate “knowledge work fields…refuse to hire colleagues with dissenting opinions.” [The liberals-are-biased-against-conservativestheory]

E. Because “The professoriate acquired a reputation as a liberal occupation” and liberals today “acting on the basis of this reputation and seeking careers that accord with their political identities, are more likely than conservatives to aspire to become academics.” [The self-selection theory]

F. Because conservatives are dogmatic and turn away from disciplines that require open-mindedness. [The liberals-are-more-open-minded theory]

G. Because professors tend more than most Americans to reside in cities and have fewer children, which favors their embracing liberal political views. [The lifestyle-liberalismtheory]

H. Because professors are, on average, less religious than other Americans, which corresponds with their being more liberal. [The grad-school-appeals-to-seculariststheory]

I. Because conservatives are more materialistic and are drawn to private-sector jobs; while liberals, concerned more with their “sense of meaning,” are more likely to be drawn to academic work. [The conservatives-prefer-money-to-learning theory]

This catalog of explanations is to be found in the first 11 pages of a new working paper by Ethan Fosse, Jeremy Freese, and Neil Gross, released yesterday. Their answer is an emphatic E. “Self-selection” in their view is the only answer for which they can find robust empirical support. If they are right, this should change one of the longest-running and often most bitter debates in contemporary higher education.

Peter concludes that self-selection by no means rules out the possibility of bias: “The most effective way to keep out a whole class of people who are unwelcome isn’t to bar entry, but to make sure that very few in that class will want to enter.”

John Tierney’s article in Sunday’s New York Times describes the most-talked about speech from the recent annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Jonathan Haidt gave a talk in which he asked members of the audience to raise their hands to identify themselves politically. When he asked for conservatives, only three hands went up.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

Haidt characterized the current situation as a problem of ideological diversity. He called for “post-partisan” social psychology and recommended that the Society adopt an affirmative action goal to have a 10 percent conservative membership by the year 2020.

While I disagree with the idea of affirmative action for conservatives, I’m glad to know that someone is calling attention to the “tribal” mentality in scholarship, and that, according to Tierney, “the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument.”

It would not serve the discipline of social psychology to try to simulate an artificial balance by recruiting members on the basis of their conservatism – but neither does it serve the discipline to exclude conservatives, as now seems to be the case. Dr. Haidt took a bold step in suggesting there might be a problem with social psychology’s political monopoly, and the conversations he provoked may be help diminish liberalism’s domination in the field.

Wayne State University recently junked its Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity in Media award after the former White House correspondent, in a workshop on anti-Arab bias, said that the U.S. Congress, the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street are owned by the Zionists. She also claimed that Jewish influence made it impossible to criticize Israel in the U.S.

More of the same from Thomas. Last summer, she publicly ranted that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go home to “Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else.”

Robert Cohen, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit, commented that it was “very ironic that she made these comments at an event, the purpose of which was to address stereotyping.”

Ironic, yes, but hardly surprising in today’s academy which, as David Solway writes, is busily and “invidiously programming its students with … a misplaced tolerance for radical Islamic thought and practice.”

Neither does it astonish, for the same reason, that Thomas received a standing ovation from workshop attendees.

Nor that she has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists and awarded more than 30 honorary degrees.

But we should commend Wayne State for seeing the error of its ways.

Former student “Lamar” transferred to a University of California campus this semester and was surprised to find himself ordered to attend two mandatory “workshops,” one on alcohol abuse and the other on sexual assault.  “Lamar,” an adult in his 30s, Iraq War veteran, and parent, bridled at the paternalism/maternalism.  “State law,” explained the school, referring him to AB 1088 (a compilation of cooked data, murky definitions, and propaganda which does not mandate “workshops”).

What next?” asked “Lamar.”  “An anti-tobacco workshop, a recycling workshop, an obesity workshop, a vegetarianism workshop?  Already PETA made the college dining halls start a `Meatless Monday.’”

It may come to that.  One neighboring community college just took an institutional position condemning the immigration law in another state.  Apparently, embedding the progressive agenda in textbooks and curriculum is not enough in our postmodern world.  Walter Truett Anderson says, “In education, postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason . . . .  [Instead, postmodern education] is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity.”  Mandatory workshops, it seems, are intended to bring that “indeterminate being” into conformance with “the campus culture” and “principles of community.”  The sign on this clubhouse reads “No Unprogressives Allowed.”

Just yesterday, “Jennifer” came to me desperate to get out of her Women’s History class.  “I admit, I thought it would be an easy A,” she said, “but I also wanted to learn about the Enlightenment, and all I heard was how the Enlightenment  oppressed women.  Help!”

Sorry, “Lamar” and “Jennifer;” you might have thought it died with the millennium but the baleful Political Correctness Zombie still stalks the halls of academe.

Over at Pajamasmedia, “Zombie” is in the midst of a five part analysis of the Texas textbook battle.  In The Language Police (2004), Diane Ravitch argued that to avoid offending any conceivable sensibility, publishers produce absurd textbooks in which men cannot be depicted as larger than women, Asians cannot appear studious, and the elderly must not be ill or infirm.  In a word:  pablum.  Zombie, however, sees the Texas smackdown as a significant rebellion against the Left’s Gramscian “long march through the institutions” which has necessitated speech codes, historical revisionism, and dubious curriculum standards.  One recalls the noxious National Standards for U.S. and World History exposed by Lynne Cheney here and National Council of the Teachers of English “standards” that include expectations such as “Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes . . . .”  Oh, the rigor!  American education may wear the face of Alfred E. Neuman, but he has a globalist, multiculturalist, social justice lovin’ grin.

Zombie lambasts both Right and Left in the Texas shoot-out but he also notes that

. . . activists [once] denounced nationwide educational standards which prevented teachers from presenting `alternative’ facts and viewpoints. But now that the once-alternative progressive framework has become ascendent [sic] and dominates the education landscape, the left (or at least the Obama wing of the left) has flipped policies, and these days they insist on imposing nationwide educational standards to prevent any local schoolboards or states from sneaking off the political plantation and exposing students to conservative values.

Running through Friday; check it out.

In April, Hamilton College American history professor Robert Paquette published an NAS article describing how the campus left insulates itself and bullies dissenters. As evidence, he cited the case of his former colleague Chris Hill, a libertarian teacher/scholar who was eliminated early from consideration for a tenure-track position.

A few weeks later, Hamilton’s Dean of the Faculty Joseph Urgo wrote Paquette a letter reprimanding him, demanding that the article be removed from the NAS website, and denying Paquette the right to serve on faculty search committees.

National media took notice of the controversy this summer. Mark Bauerlein has a multi-part series at The Chronicle on questions surrounding the incident, and Scott Jaschik published “When Faculty Aren’t Supposed to Talk” at Inside Higher Ed.

Yesterday Professor Robert Paquette responded to the controversy in a new article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards, Part II.”

He gives his side of what happened, sets a few things straight, and provides evidence of further double standards at Hamilton. His story is well worth reading.

Is there a strong bias against conservatives in higher education? Researchers have produced numerous studies to examine this question. They have sought to measure bias quantitatively through various surveys. Usually they conclude that there is little evidence of bias, and that people who say there is are merely crying wolf.

In a new in-depth essay at NAS.org, NAS Chairman Steve Balch argues that the burden of proof should rest with those who deny bias: they must prove that it does not exist rather than demanding proof that it does.

Dr. Balch’s timely essay comes the week after NAS published “They So Despise Her Politics – Do Conservative Faculty Members Get a Fair Shake?. That article describes the case of Teresa Wagner, who believes she was denied a teaching position because of her conservative politics. There we published documents from Wagner’s lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law.

What do you think? How can we know for sure whether conservatives face systemic discrimination in the Ivory Tower?

Education needs a manifesto for a new humanism; sadly, Martha Nussbaum’s new book is not that manifesto.  I had high hopes for Not for Profit but Dr. Nussbaum’s argument quickly becomes a tangle of faulty logic and ideology and notably stale seventies feminism.  Why is she still pumping the wells of female victimization (while referencing the female president of Harvard) and the plight of African American children who lack role models (while noting the African American President of the United States)?  At one point, she praises Mr. Obama’s personal values as developed by the progressive education she endorses.  Then she indicts him for not supporting such education for others, raising the question of just what sort of person her recommended liberal education actually produces.  When  Nussbaum pleads for progressive schools (wherein teachers sagely guide students to discover and construct knowledge themselves), I think of Geoffrey Pyke [pictured] and his Malting House School (John Dewey meets William Golding).

Although Dr. Nussbaum embraces Socratic self-examination, ideology blinds her to her own biases.  She is pedantic when attacking pedantry, and she abhors “the dead hand of authority” yet repeatedly invokes the authority of Nobel Prize credentials.  She advocates critical thinking to combat “demeaning stereotypes,” then proceeds to stereotype men, women, whites, and Southerners.  Masculinity comes off badly unless it is “maternal” which, she implies, is the true essence of human nature (making masculine behavior an aberration, less than human).  In this book, women are saintly and victimized (unless they are named Margaret Thatcher).  Nussbaum scorns the image of the self-reliant cowboy, then, on the next page, explains that every child must develop “less need to call on others.”  Decrying education that involves mere inculcation of facts (more Seventies flotsam), she later admits to the necessity for “a lot of factual knowledge.”

Worse, Dr. Nussbaum extols the individual but avoids any mention of the tribalizing effects of multiculturalism and its diminution of . . . the individual.  Among several straw man arguments, she condemns “the facile equation of Islam with terrorism” without mentioning just who ever assumed that equivalence.  The values she prizes are particularly Western, giving her desire to spread them globally a whiff of cultural imperialism.  And Dr. Nussbaum recommends role-playing to develop sympathy for “the other.”  I met an eyewitness from one progressive school in Northern California that did just that:  to develop sympathy for slaves on a ship, teachers locked students in a Quonset hut, chained to their desks surrounded by rotting fish.

In fact, Dr. Nussbaum’s book is a call not for a new humanism but for an old political correctness.  She even warns that because artworks are so effective at creating empathy, teachers must exercise “careful selectivity” so that students do not read “defective forms of `literature’” which evoke unsocial feelings and “uneven sympathies.”  Yikes!  Goodbye Salinger, Twain, Poe, O’Conner, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka.  With friends like Dr. Nussbaum, liberal arts education doesn’t need enemies.