One of my favorite higher-education blogs is Tenured Radical, by Claire Potter, a history professor at a top liberal-arts college in the Northeast. Her latest entry takes up the issue of intellectual diversity — specifically, the hiring of conservatives — in academic searches. She looks at that issue with a characteristic combination of thoughtfulness, analytical rigor, and lack of dogma that is perhaps at odds with the title of her blog.
As I’ve said before, I’m in English, and came of age academically during the “canon wars” and the debates over “political correctness.” I am, by personal inclination, what you might call a pragmatic leftist (if my conservative friends and colleagues will grant that such a category exists at all), and “should,” by the predictive models of some critics of higher education, be an exemplar of exclusionary hiring practices that strongly favor liberals or radicals.
I have overseen a tremendous number of faculty searches, and have been party to a huge number of discussions about search parameters and desiderata, as well as conversations about particular candidates at various points in the process. The surprising thing about those experiences is actually how little “politics,” in the sense of dividing up the pool into left and right, has ever come into play.
There have certainly been a few instances where dogma of some kind (and it’s not always been leftist dogma) has had some impact on a search process. But in general, I’m pleased to say that my colleagues have genuinely looked for the best teacher, scholar, and colleague according to professionally reasonable measures rather than ideology. As a result, we’ve hired a mix of people with a mix of political positions and attitudes.
Something that Tenured Radical’s entry doesn’t really bring up is the interesting dichotomy between “political” conservatism and “academic” conservatism, and I think that distinction is worth probing. I don’t think, for example, that a strong interest in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton necessarily makes one a political reactionary even if one’s approach to those texts is traditional in the extreme. Similarly, I have known some quite conservative colleagues who have had pretty radical scholarly and pedagogical programs in areas like Queer Theory. I’ve even known a couple of leftist bibliographers!
The point really is that academic politics — in the macro sense rather than institutionally — are pretty complex. We tell our students to avoid simplistic dichotomies and to develop comfort with ambiguity, inconclusiveness, and honest debate. When it comes to the politics of our colleagues, I think we ought to model that approach ourselves.
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11 Responses to Hiring for Political Diversity?
jowime - October 21, 2009 at 3:43 pm
No one admits ideological bias in hiring practices and yet the results of hiring practices are clearly biased. Where is the disconnect? Although the author states that “in general, I’m pleased to say that my colleagues have genuinely looked for the best teacher, scholar, and colleague according to professionally reasonable measures rather than ideology,” precisely therein lies the rub. Is is really possible to separate “professionally reasonable measures” from ideology? Subjective, ideologically tainted definitions of “the best teacher, scholar and colleague” are likely to consist of criteria that approximates ones own ideological position. Did she publish in the right journals, did she get recommendations from the right people? Is her scholarship “acceptable” to her peers? The entire edifice leans against the conservative scholar. So, nice try, Mr. Evans, but a bit to facile for this conservative.
gmd1057 - October 21, 2009 at 3:57 pm
“Not sufficiently theoretically informed” = not aggressively leftist social-critical enough. In other words, the politics is disguised by having theoretical vocabulary basically function as disguised political/ideological analysis.
_perplexed_ - October 21, 2009 at 4:30 pm
In my 25+ years in academe I’ve only known the political beliefs of one candidate who made it to a campus interview. While more probably leaned left than right, I can’t imagine how it would have been relevant to know one way or another about a particular candidate. In the one case I was sure because the candidate made it clear: That left-leaning applicant didn’t get the job– another applicant had a superior publication record. Four years later, I still don’t know the political beliefs of that successful applicant. Some faculty don’t worry much about the politics of their colleagues, left or right.
gmd1057 - October 21, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I don’t always notice people’s clothing styles in any detail, because those things are not that crucial, to me. That doesn’t mean a lot of other people don’t care a lot about what fashion status they sense in others, and aspire to for themselves. Many people are in fact paying more attention to that than to almost anything else.And often the things that people feel the most powerfully about are precisely the things they are leery to talk about directly, or even acknowledge the existence of.
laoshi - October 22, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Though this article gives me some hope, I still remember asking for advice of a political science professor whilst considering a PhD path. He frankly told me that as a conservative I haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of being a professor of political science. If the tenured faculty know of these biases, then how come the hiring powers-that-be keep pulling the wool over our eyes with editorial pap like this article?
gmd1057 - October 22, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Because they don’t want to make it even harder than it is now to maintain their specious claim to moral superiority and intellectual evenhandedness.
samueloulrey - October 22, 2009 at 3:49 pm
The Chronicle should devote at least 20 times as much space to defining “professionally reasonable measures”, and doing a little investigative journalism on the topic, digging 4 or 6 layers deeper. And it would also be better to have a wider representation of fields. Some of the radical leftist and right-wing extremist biases can be found in departments of physics, biology, engineering, computer science, agriculture, as well as anthropology, economics, sociology, humanities, purple people studies and the B-school.
erikjensen - October 22, 2009 at 5:05 pm
There was an excellent study by Bertrand and Mullainathan that exposed racial bias in hiring:http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.htmlPerhaps someone could adapt this study to test political bias in academic hiring.
david_r_evans - October 23, 2009 at 10:53 am
#5, in my four jobs (all at relatively small, teaching-oriented schools, admittedly), between a third (literally, 1 out of 3) and more than half (if I recall correctly, 5 out of 7) tenure-track political science faculty have been identifiable conservatives. Small sample size to be taken as such, but in all these instances conservatives were fully represented on the faculty of political science.I doubt the same is true of some other fields (for example, I don’t think I’ve ever met a conservative sociologist, though I am sure there are some somewhere).I was at a conference yesterday where a colleague from religious studies at a nearby small college gave a talk extolling the virtues of Leo Strauss. I suspect he’s a conservative as well. There are huge issues of selection bias and other factors in academic hiring, there is no doubt. But as far as active discrimination against conservatives–in my career I have seen no more of that than I have active discrimination against liberals, queer theorists, feminists, or others. I am reasonably sure that at some institutions (unfortunately probably moreso higher up the scale of prestige) there probably is some discrimination against conservatives. But as a structural matter, at the institutions where I’ve worked, it really hasn’t been the case. In my own discipline, I don’t think a lot of conservatives get Ph.D.s. I knew a few in my very large grad program at Virginia, which was itself a pretty conservative program and of course tilted some by its location, so if that was the case there, it’s not terribly surprising that the Ivies, Berkeley, and Stanford don’t produce a lot of conservative English Ph.D.s. Might be worth looking at Chicago, however. And I’d love to have a Chicago Ph.D. on our faculty no matter what that person’s political positions might turn out to be. The values of contemporary conservatism (as opposed to the Edmund Burke kind) don’t line up very well with the economic possibilities of a Ph.D. in English. But that’s a different issue from active discrimination in the market.
laoshi - October 30, 2009 at 9:19 am
Were the 5 out of 7 tenure-track faculty identifiable as conservatives before or after they were hired?
david_r_evans - October 30, 2009 at 10:04 am
#10, I don’t know, since they were all hired before I got there. However, the chair was a conservative for sure, and one of the other senior members of the faculty was ex-CIA, so I’m reasonably sure being a conservative wasn’t a barrier to either hiring or success in that particular program–which was very good, by the way.