Category Archives: academia

ideology and the professoriate

I’m in New Brunswick, NJ, for the Imagining America national conference. I’ll speak tomorrow. My assigned theme is “difficult dialogues.” The other panelists will discuss a large, Ford-funded initiative by that name that seeks to “promote pluralism and academic freedom on campus.”

When I think about “difficult dialogues” in relation to the arts and humanities, the dialogue that strikes me as the most difficult and most necessary of all is a conversation between academics–who tend to be liberal or radical–and the 62 million Americans who voted for George W. Bush last November. I plan to argue that:

1. Academics are overwhelmingly liberal, especially in the arts and humanities. (I’ll cite some data to this effect.)

2. The gulf in attitudes between academics and the median US voters is causing tangible problems for intellectual culture and academia.

3. We can take some constructive steps to improve the situation.

I’ve covered several of those points on this blog before. However, I haven’t previously considered the following explanation for the gulf in attitudes between academics and median American voters. In global perspective, it is the US electorate, not the American professoriate, that is out of the mainstream. American professors are cosmopolitan, and thus share more with foreign peers and colleagues than with the ideological outliers back home.

Indeed, on a one-dimensional ideological scale from left to right, the median American voter is quite far to the right compared to the world’s population, and the median American academic is closer to the global middle. But this one-dimensional scale conceals all kinds of complexities. There are ways in which American voters-?populist, anti-authoritarian, libertarian, multiculturalist, and rights-oriented?-can be more “radical” than Europeans. There are certainly homegrown traditions of radicalism that are concealed if one applies the international definition of the “left.”

Besides, even if it’s true that American academics are centrists in the global dialogue and outliers only in our own country, that’s still a problem. Our country is where we live, earn our salaries, find our students, and?-in many cases?-hold citizenship. The gap may not be out fault, but it is our problem, because no one else is going to solve it for us.

I believe that a solution lies in an idea that Harry Boyte is developing. Boyte wants us to see ourselves as “culture makers” in a democratic society. Many Americans consider mass culture to be coarse, commercial, celebrity-driven, and violent. It’s very slick and doesn’t provide openings for ordinary people to create anything for a public audience. Culture also feels dangerously uncontrollable. You can’t shield yourself or your children from the vulgar aspects of mass culture without also insulating yourself from the news and public life. Hollywood and the music industry occasionally respond to targeted protest campaigns, but they don’t seem in general to care about people’s thoughtful and deliberative opinions about quality.

Democratic action through the state probably can’t make much difference. The First Amendment rightly protects media companies, even if they create coarse and violent material. But there is great potential for partnerships between lay citizens and professional “culture-makers” who want to create alternatives that are more responsible, ethical, and serious. Academics, along with clergypeople, entertainers, journalists, and other professionals in the knowledge and communications business, can exercise powerful leverage.

I don’t imagine that there is consensus about what’s wrong with pop culture. For some people, it’s the pervasive anti-gay prejudice; for others, it’s the increasingly tolerant representation of homosexuality. But we don’t need consensus; we just need more chances to reason together about what culture should mean and to create things–not in one big, homogeneous group, but in diverse and sometimes overlapping communities. Universities should be at the heart of this work.

autonomous youth culture

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Darragh Johnson has a long article about 14-year-old Calixto Salgado, a devout altar boy, first-generation American of Salvadoran ancestry, nice, soft-spoken guy, and C student. He attends Gaithersburg High School, a large suburban school in a fairly affluent Maryland community (median household income: $60k), where the overall graduation rate is 87.2% (pdf, p. 189), 72% of seniors take the SAT (pdf, p. 40), and college is expected, at least for the White kids. The Latino kids, however, face a lot more challenges. About one third of them score “proficient” on the state exams, compared to 61% of whites (pdf). As for Calixto, he is under intense pressure to join a gang. I feel that I almost know him, since he resembles some of the Salvadoran and Mexican kids I have worked with at Hyattsville’s Northwestern High School, which is 23 miles to the southeast across Washington’s suburbs.

To varying degrees, adolescents live in their own world, separated from adult life. This is especially true for a person like Calixto, whose parents immigrated from El Salvador and lack knowledge or experience relevant to his life. Besides, gangs like MS-13 try to make youth culture as opaque as possible to parents and other adults, going so far as to require their recruits to commit violent crimes so that they will be tied together in a secret conspiracy. But such tactics are in some ways just extreme versions of the general (modern) adolescent urge to have a separate culture.

It matters enormously what that culture is like and how each student navigates it. According to the Post article, White/Anglo students at Gaithersburg High School recruit youth for groups like Key Club by saying, “It looks great on applications!” There is presumably a fair amount of pressure to do well in school, and respect for those who do. Students who belong to that culture are very likely to go to college and then live another 6-8 decades in affluence, safety, and good health. (In Gaithersburg as a whole, almost half of adults have college degrees–compared to 36% for the US.) But Calixto is “at risk” of entering an alternative gang culture, in which case his future will be far bleaker. The stakes are extremely high.

There are things that parents and schools can do to improve young people’s odds. (For example, I’m still enthusiastic about making high schools smaller than Gaithersburg’s 2,200 enrollment.) However, to a considerable extent, Calixto and his peers have a problem that only only they can address–collectively. For any individual kid, the pressure to join a gang (for self-respect, for safety, to impress the opposite sex, to satisfy the older brother who’s already in) may be overpowering. It’s a lot easier to resist pressure if you have company. Most of the school’s clubs appear to be dominated by Whites, and Calixto doesn’t have the grades to play sports. But if there were groups within the school that were created and led by Latinos, they could become safe havens. Ideally, Latino students could work together to change school policies so that the official anti-gang efforts were more effective.

This is a tall order. I’m suggesting that Latino kids in the DC suburbs should do something harder than anything I have ever done–create an alternative youth culture in the face of MS-13. But that may be their best hope, and it requires civic skills and habits that adults may be able to teach and model. (Indeed, Calixto is a member of an after-school group called Identity that seems to be helping him.) Kids instinctively understand the need to organize, but some have responded to MS-13 by creating rival gangs like Cien Por Ciento Latino and Sangre Pura. Somehow, they need to steer a course between those groups and the Key Club, which is unlikely to help them–or even to admit kids like Calixto.

Calixto’s situation underlines why we should care about what people in my business clunkily call “youth civic engagement” and “civic education.” Teaching kids to work together effectively can be a deadly serious business. It’s for that reason, and not merely because I want young people to know the three branches of government, that I’m in this business.

ideology in academia and elsewhere

In September, I am supposed to give a talk that’s essentially about the relationship between academics and other citizens. Based on anecdotal experience, I assumed that professors tended to be secular, internationalist, and skeptical of capitalism, whereas the median American was religiously Christian, nationalist, and pro-market. That gap in opinion would affect debates about spending on higher education, academic freedom, and the role of scholarship.

I wanted to go beyond personal impressions, if possible. The General Social Survey allows us to compare the political views of people by their profession. In order to include enough “post-secondary teachers” in the sample to get statistically meaningful results, I had to combine all years from 1980 to 2002. That is a misleading method if there were big changes in the professoriat over those 22 years. However, I still find the results interesting.

The first graph (above) shows the distribution of self-reported ideology among professors and everybody else. Non-professors formed a bell curve during the period 1980-2002, with the median at “moderate” and roughly symmetrical tails in either direction. Professors were far more liberal.

This comparison could be misleading if professors defined “liberal” differently from other people. However, a second graph provides direct evidence about opinion on issues.

Professors had about the same views of gun control as everyone else (presumably because most people favored it). On all other issues, professors were more liberal–although not by gigantic margins.

[Update, 9/29: Chris Uggen offers better data than I provide above–although my data are also relevant–and he scores some good points in arguing that the ideological tilt in sociology is a real problem.]

academic freedom

In my usual style, here is a very belated comment on two once-“hot” news stories: Larry Summers and Ward Churchill. For all their differences, these men are both university employees who got into trouble for their public speech. In both cases, “academic freedom” has been cited as a defense.

In my opinion, “academic freedom” is not an individual civil right that academics can wield in conflicts with their employers. Academics, like everyone else, have First Amendment rights, but those are rights against the state. The First Amendment does not require a university to pay us to say anything we like, nor must it grant us academic credit or preferment for our speech. Universities carefully and intensively regulate the speech of their students, professors, and administrators. You can’t receive credit or a degree for your writing unless it fulfills a professor’s assignment and meets all kinds of canonical standards of relevance and rigor. You can’t get tenure unless your work is acceptable to the mainstream discipline in which you work. Even once you have tenure, you can’t win grants, promotions, or opportunities to publish without subjecting your “speech” to peer review for content. Thus if academic freedom were a right of individuals, it would be a myth.

Academic freedom is not an individual civil right, but rather an institutional prerogative. When we support academic freedom, we mean that colleges and universities, scholarly associations, journals, and presses should be free to set their own standards for expression without (much) state interference. In other words, the ideal is autonomy for certain professional associations, not rights for their employees as individuals.

Tenure causes confusion: it makes us think that the central commitment of a university is to the individual autonomy of professors. But tenure only applies to senior faculty (not to students, junior faculty, or administrators). Moreover, it is part of a larger system. It is aimed against one problem–invidious political pressure on professors not to teach or publish unpopular ideas. That is a real threat, but universities also worry about “free speech” that is incompetent, undisciplined, or irrelevant. To address that problem, they put academics through a lengthy and grueling socialization process before they grant tenure. And even after tenure, they apply all kinds of pressure to make faculty express themselves in particular ways.

Which brings me to the two cases of recent weeks. I haven’t made a study of Ward Churchill’s writing, nor do I have time to do so. But there are tenured professors–possibly including Dr. Churchill–who are radical blowhards: offensive and totally lacking in rigor and discipline. Such people are one price we pay for the tenure system. (Some other costs are the burnouts and timeservers on our faculties.) If tenure makes sense, it’s because the advantage of protecting trenchant, insighful radicals outweighs the cost of all those blowhards and timeservers. I don’t know for sure that this price is worth paying–it probably is. In any case, we should evaluate tenure overall, and not let particular cases dominate our thinking. Thus Churchill may have to be allowed to speak offensively and foolishly in order to uphold an institutional rule that is valuable, overall.

As for Larry Summers: some have said that he “modeled” free speech by making a politically incorrect statement about women in science. I would reply that he modeled free speech but without rigor or discipline. Moreover, he is an administrator, and as such his primary duty is to shape and implement policies. Harvard ostensibly has a policy of attracting more female scientists. Summers’ comment undermined Harvard’s policy. As such, it was damaging. He was like a corporate executive who criticizes his company’s product, or a U.S. ambassador who attacks American foreign policy in public. The First Amendment covers his speech, but that only means that he can’t be prosecuted for it. He has no right to be paid for it. If Harvard chooses to retain him, which seems very likely, it will be because Summers’ talents outweigh his mistakes. But his comment about women was a mistake, and “academic freedom” is no excuse.

[Added Feb. 17: It can be courageous and honorable for an employee to attack the policies of his or her organization, if the criticism is valid. However, such a critic must also be prepared to face the consequences. For instance, a US diplomat who criticizes American foreign policy may deserve public praise but ought to submit his or her resignation letter along with the critique. The same applies to a university president who undermines the institution’s policies. But see Andrew Canter’s challenging response in the comments.]

By the way, I don’t have tenure and have never been on a tenure track. I’m fairly grateful not to have gone through the socialization process that tenure would have entailed.

academia as a liberal bastion

A lot of people are talking about the dominance of liberals in academia. (See, for instance, Timothy Burke). Some of this discussion was prompted by campaign finance data suggesting that professors at prestigious universities had preferred Kerry by huge margins and, indeed, represented the Democrats’ single strongest financial base. Not only comp-lit professors and ethnographers tend to be leftists. The eminent Harvard biologist (and left-liberal) Richard Lewontin writes:

Most scientists are, at a minimum, liberals, although it is by no means obvious why this should be so. Despite the fact that all of the molecular biologists of my acquaintance are shareholders in or advisers to biotechnology firms, the chief political controversy in the scientific community seems to be whether it is wise to vote for Ralph Nader this time.

My own observations of social scientists and humanists support Lewontin’s claim about natural scientists. But why should liberals predominate in academia? I’ll offer five hypotheses for your consideration and invite you to think of more:

1. Faculty discriminate (consciously or unconsciously) against conservatives when they hire and promote peers. This is a widespread charge from the right; it usually provokes an ad hominem reply from liberals, namely: “How can you believe that decision-makers in a competitive, decentralized business routinely discriminate on the basis of political ideology (even in fields like molecular biology), yet you deny that employers discriminate on the basis of race and gender? If they do discriminate on these grounds, then don’t we need affirmative action for women, minorities, and (possibly) conservatives?” That’s a good debating point, but it doesn’t rule out the possibility that there is some ideological discrimination in academic hiring. The next question is whether some of that (alleged) discrimination is acceptable. For example, biology departments surely “discriminate” against Creationists, thereby excluding one category of conservatives from their ranks. Is that wrong? To what extent does such defensible bias explain the dominance of liberals across the academy?

2. Perhaps academics are a class–not a great stratum of society like the bourgeoisie or the peasantry, but a social/economic group akin to the clergy or the landed gentry in olden times. They make a living in a particular context (competitive but non-profit, secular, globalized, specialized, and very dependent on state subsidies); and this context affects their interests and colors their perspectives. If this is true, we must ask whether the academic “class” is merely biased in its own interests or whether it brings an enlightened perspective to American politics. Other American groups are profoundly influenced by industry and commerce and/or religion, usually Christianity. These powerful forces make us more conservative than any other developed nation. Perhaps a class that is insulated from the market and religion offers a valuable corrective, much as monks countered the dominance of feudal lords in medieval Europe.

3. Perhaps it’s the Schlegels versus the Wilcoxes (the two families in Howard’s End). In other words, perhaps middle class business-people believe that you should make products and meet a payroll. They think it is always problematic to live on tax money or charity and produce products without market value. They know that some people must work in the public sector, but they doubt the efficiency, motives, and merits of public employees. In contrast, academics (along with some writers, teachers, and social workers) believe that business people merely pursue their own narrow, economic interests and manipulate people into consuming disposable “stuff.” Business has no intrinsic merit. The highest calling is education, or scholarship, or creativity. These two perspectives are most consistent with conservatism and liberalism, respectively. (There are other perspectives too, such as the attitude of the military officer class, some of whom believe that their subjection to discipline and physical danger make them more moral than either business people or professors.) In my view, there is truth in the perspectives of both the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes.

4. Perhaps something other than academic culture underlies the tendency for academics to vote Democratic. Maybe the people who dominate universities are (for complex reasons) more likely than average Americans to be Jewish or Asian, to come from big East-coast cities, and to have graduated from college between 1965 and 1975. Perhaps these factors explain a large portion of the correlation between academic employment and partisan identification. On the other hand, professors seem less likely than other Americans to be Black, Latino, or female.

5. Or perhaps conservatives who are seriously interested in politics are happier out of academia, because universities are not very influential compared to think-tanks and Congressional staffs. In September 2003, David Brooks told a now-famous story about the conservative professor Harvey Mansfield: “Last week the professors at Harvard’s government department reviewed the placement records of last year’s doctoral students. Two had not been able to find academic jobs, both of them Mansfield’s students. ‘Well,’ Mansfield quipped, ‘I guess they’ll have to go to Washington and run the country.'”