In discussions of ideological bias in academe, critics have often made the mistake of exaggerating the radicalism of faculty members. When they claim that the professoriate, at least in the softer fields (humanities, arts, less-empirical of the social sciences, ed schools), is a bunch of Marxists, feminists, and identity politicians, they miss a crucial component of a faculty career: conformity. To make it through graduate seminars, hit the job market, get published, join a department, serve on committees, and win tenure, you can’t be an independent, outspoken mind. Or rather, whatever outspokenness you possess, it must follow the standard pieties, which means that it isn’t outspoken at all.

Too much depends on the opinion of peers and superiors — readers’ reports on submitted manuscripts, teaching evaluations, “collegiality,” tenure votes. This is a formula for groupthink, not for political activism.

And so, when we examine the biases and tendencies of the campus climate, we do better by analyzing the psycho-political dynamics of closed, deliberative groups than we do by raising culture-wars topics.

On that approach, here is a paper by Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern from the Independent Institute. Whether you agree or not with the assumptions and inferences (such as that there is, indeed, an unfortunate ideological slant to the faculty), it’s worth reading for the many insights into faculty dynamics. Such as:

“The most important departmental decisions involve the hiring, firing, and promotion of tenure-track faculty. Such decisions come down to majority vote. Although the chair exercises certain powers, committees control agendas, and so on the central and final procedure for rendering the most important decisions is democracy among the tenure-track professors — or departmental majoritarianism.”

“In academia, the beliefs are deep-seated and connected to selfhood and identity. For that reason, protecting and preserving them have high personal stakes. The existential significance of ideological beliefs in some respects compensates for the fact that personnel and other decisions in academia are otherwise mundane and socially inconsequential.”

“The principal explanation of the uniformity across campuses lies in understanding what the individual history department is at an existential level. The XYU history department, for example, is not so much a subunit of XYU as it is a village of the larger tribe, history as a profession. History the profession has a settlement at XYU, the XYU history department. As professional researchers, members of that department find much of their meaning and validation in belonging to and serving the history profession. They may share a roof with philosophers, linguists, and so on, but they almost never engage in scholarly discourse with them. Rather, their scholarly life takes place within the tribe of history, which resides in settlements situated laterally across geography and physical institutions (see figure 1). History is the ‘invisible college’ to which most historians principally belong. The department is more a creature of history as a profession than of XYU.”

“The academic job market is unlike the market for waiters or cab drivers. In all but the literal sense, one history department ‘sells’ its newly minted Ph.D. holders to other history departments. The consumers (history departments), the producers (other history departments), and the products (newly minted history Ph.D. holders) are all historians. Waiters and cab drivers are accountable to their employers, who are accountable to consumers. Historians are accountable for the most part only to other historians.”

“Reliance on the tribe’s standards to decide on jobs, pay, security, teaching loads, grants, research assistants, and so forth is so entrenched and ingrained that the players come to value the standards for their own sake. Having an article accepted at a top journal brings concrete gains and prestige, regardless of the article’s or journal’s intrinsic value. Functionality depends on internalizing the discipline’s norms.”

“Yet these results do not fully capture the domination by the top departments, which also have vastly disproportionate influence in regard to journals, grants, second-generation degrees, and so on (Klein 2005, 144–45). In sociology, for instance, Val Burris documents the extraordinary power that the leading U.S. departments exercise:

‘Graduates from the top 5 departments account for roughly one-third of all faculty hired in all 94 departments. The top 20 departments account for roughly 70 percent of the total. Boundaries to upward mobility are extremely rigid. Sociologists with degrees from non–top 20 departments are rarely hired at top 20 departments and almost never hired at top 5 departments. …

‘The hiring of senior faculty by prestigious departments is even more incestuous than the hiring of new Ph.D.‘s. … Of the 430 full-time faculty employed by the top 20 sociology departments … only 7 (less than 2 percent) received their Ph.D. from a non–top 20 department, worked for three or more years in a non–top 20 department, and, after building their scholarly reputations, advanced to a faculty position in one of the top 20 departments. (2004, 247–49, 251)’”

Go to the conclusion of the paper for a dismaying list of “Symptoms of Groupthink,” including “Illusion of Invulnerability,” “Stereotypes of Out-Groups,” “Self-Censorship,” and “Collective Rationalizations.”

(Photo by Flickr user khrawlings)