I was away for a week and it looks like I missed a lot. So let’s start with Stanley Fish’s New York Times commentary, explaining why he changed his mind on the issue of unions. The idea, put forward by one of the commenters, that I sent him over the edge on this issue does warm my heart a bit. But I think he misconstrues at least part of my argument when he says, “it’s easy to see that the unions aren’t what’s destroying the public colleges and universities.”
I didn’t say that. And so far, I don’t think that faculty unions are largely responsible for any decline in quality of higher education. The decline in teaching and learning on many campuses are due—in no particular order—to a loss of a core curriculum, an overemphasis on research, the least experienced and lowest-paid professors being tasked with most of the teaching, a third-party-payer system in which taxpayers are footing rising costs, a desire of students and parents to just have a credential without understanding or caring about real education, an administration that cares more about campus social lives and a host of educationally irrelevant issues like diversity, athletics and service, etc.
That being said I do think unions have pretty much destroyed K-12 education and I’d be sorry to see unions add to the already long list of problems undermining higher education.
As for Fish’s claim that the only thing I really care about is getting “rid of lefties,” I disagree. I do think that university campuses are too liberal. But I mostly think they are simply too political. I wrote this piece for The Chronicle several years ago and I still stand by it.
During my undergraduate career at Harvard University, I found that older faculty members tended to leave their political views at the door more than their younger counterparts. Even Harvey C. Mansfield, that famous conservative firebrand, had nothing to say about contemporary politics in the courses I took from him. On the first day of his lecture on “Manliness,” several young women came prepared to wage a feminist battle. When they found that Mansfield just talked about the Platonic understanding of courage for two hours, they were disappointed and never returned.
I also took two classes, on Shakepeare and William Faulkner, with the late Richard Marius, a brilliant Reformation scholar and literary critic. When an acquaintance found out that he was my thesis adviser, he accusingly asked whether I knew that Marius had once been a speechwriter for Al Gore. I didn’t. Looking back, I suspect Marius knew that I was the editor of the campus conservative paper, but during all our long conversations, we never talked about politics. I probably would have considered it a waste if we had. I felt able to navigate contemporary American politics on my own, but Faulkner was another story.
Harvard might not make it on anyone’s list of top 10 conservative colleges, but the education I got there was certainly in keeping with the principles that drove the conservative culture warriors of a previous generation. The push and pull of politics, both liberal and conservative, may change such an academic landscape for the worse.
Sometimes, when I read Stanley Fish, I think he might agree with that perspective.
Before we get off the subject, I’d also like to address one or two of Marc Bousquet’s points. Thinking of unions as just a tool that can be used for good or ill seems to me something of a cop out. Academics are just bad, selfish people and that’s why unions haven’t worked? Really?
I agree with him that unions have screwed over younger workers in favor of older ones. But under what union system would that not be the case? I don’t think you have to be a cynic about human nature to believe that the individual members of unions will do what’s in their own best interests.
Finally I realize that publishing in Bousquet’s words “in that newspaper you find under your door in cheap motel rooms,” might not be as prestigious as, say, writing for The Chronicle, or the Peace Studies Journal. But many of the working stiffs that he likes to defend do dip in to USA Today from time to time.
