Recently the Chronicle reported on a survey showing that the less time people spend on college campuses, the more they think that professors get political in the classroom. A George Mason professor provided the obvious conclusion: “If you have never been in a college classroom, the fantasies and hyped-up expectations promulgated by David Horowitz and others may seem plausible descriptions of the typical American campus.”
There you are. Attributions of bias stem from ignorance mixed with the actions of opportunists and fantasists such Horowitz.
There may be, however, another explanation that doesn’t treat the public as so gullible and credulous. While distant folks do observe little of the nuts and bolts activities of the faculty, they do see and hear things about the university, often when professors talk about their work in their own words in op-eds and other writings. Often enough, the ideological bias in them is obvious.
One of them passed by me in the gym the other day, an op-ed in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Harvard professor Mahzarin R. Banaji, in collaboration with two Ohio State professors. (I can’t find it on-line, but it appeared in the Sunday, April 6, issue under the title “What Are the Costs of Being Black? And if they can be established, does that mean reparations are in order?”) The article argues the case for reparations for slavery, and it begins by citing how blacks lag well behind whites on crucial social indicators (infant mortality, homicides, incarceration, wealth …). “The inequities could not be clearer,” Banaji says. “Yet there is near universal opposition to slave-descendant reparations among whites.”
Thoroughly objective and factual, but the next phrase gives it all away: “To understand this paradox. …” A paradox? How blithely Banaji utters the term, and how easily she converts the responses of whites, which are perfectly sensible to them, into an inscrutible attitude. What odd mixture of irrationality do these white people suffer? That’s the implication. The connection between inequity and reparations is a patent truth — that’s what makes resistance a paradox — and so we can move on to diagnosing the malady of the resisters.
Banaji proceeds to describe survey research designed to open white people’s minds, asking them to put themselves in slave descendants’ shoes. She rejects the conclusion that “white Americans are prejudiced, mean-spirited bigots,” however. Rather, it is that “White Americans are sufficiently ignorant of their history and the effects of longstanding inequality that they simply don’t understand the need for reparations.” In short, whites just don’t get it.
In truth, reparations is a complex issue — morally, historically, and practically. But this article places all the difficulty in the heads of ignorant white people. Reading such tendentious and arrogant statements, and hearing about the loaded and leading-question style research behind them, can off-campus people be wrong to question the ideological make-up of faculty?
