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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
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Recent Posts
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Featured Articles By the Author
Liberal Professors and The New York Times
Last week, The New York Times published an article about liberal Baby Boomer professors retiring and the campus becoming a less polarized place (“The Sixties Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire,” by Patricia Cohen). In the comments section, Cohen weighed in on reasons why conservatives are such a minority in the university, and she stated:
“The question of why the faculty has been dominated by liberals is an interesting one that a lot of researchers have tried to explain. The study I find most revealing is one done by Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, both political scientists whom I mention at the end of my article. He is a conservative, so many of the accusations of bias that have been thrown around at other studies are not relevant here. He tried to examine all of the explanations that have been proposed: that there is outright discrimination against conservatives; that liberals have superior intelligence and abilities; that the minority status of conservatives makes college a less attractive environment and leads to a less satisfying college experience; that conservatives don’t earn as good grades because of their political views; that faculty do a better job of mentoring liberals and develop closer relationship with them and so on.
“They conclude that NONE of these explanations are valid, and argue that a person’s ideology is wrapped up with much more than simply voting preferences but also with certain personality characteristics and sensibilities.”
That’s a strangely absolute assertion—“NONE”—about the complex issue of bias. The reporter mentions “other studies,” yes, but doesn’t give them any credence in the article. In fact, if you look at that final sentence, you see that the second part of it is a modest statement that conservatives would agree to, and that it doesn’t support the “no validity” assertion at all. Who would disagree that ideology doesn’t involve personality and taste? Surveys of voter registration are crude measures of ideological position, and they are intended by the researchers as starting points, not end points. They are newsworthy, but superficial.
Furthermore, in the list of explanations, we don’t have anything about curriculum such as “The curriculum in the humanities and social sciences is heavy with liberal and progressivist assumptions that cast conservative ideas and approaches as wrong-headed or irrelevant or anti-intellectual . . .” Everything is about people and personalities.
We need more discussion of deep premises in, say, general education requirements, disciplinary boundaries, academic respectability. If liberal and progressive assumptions have become so customary that they have come to be identified with disciplinary foundations and academic etiquette, then the passing on of the Sixties generation may not have much difference at all in the real setting of ideological bias: the classroom.
Posted at 11:31:30 AM on July 8, 2008 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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The explanation that academic culture subtly or blatantly thrusts potential professors with conservative views out of academic life doesn’t seem to me to hold water. At least, it contravenes my experience of teaching at universities for forty years or so.
In my field, mathematics, and, specifically in my department, meritocratic principles are enforced with almost fanatical rigor so far as hiring and promotion at all levels is concerned. I’ve lost count of the number of such decisions I’ve participated in—well over 100, I’m sure—and I’ve never heard one word about a candidate’s political or social views (nor about religion, ethnicity, or any other category irrelevant to scholarly merit). For much the same reasons, calls for increased “diversity” or affirmative-action based hiring have not made any impression on my colleagues.
Yet, at the end of the day, on an empirical basis one can say that the great majority of my colleagues cluster well to the left of the standard political spectrum. Even those who were somewhat conservative early in their careers seem to gravitate, ultimately, to a left-of-center position. That doesn’t, of course, imply that they are much attracted by the shibboleths of the vociferous left or to the “theoretical” folderol that is the stamp of postmodern radicalism. It merely means that they tend overwhelmingly to prefer conventional liberal Democrats and their policies to conservatives of any kind, neo or not.
Since there was no political selection pressure in hiring or retaining these people, one must ask why the statistical preponderence of liberal views, of which conservatives like David Horowitz complain so bitterly, has taken hold. The best answer I can come up with, one of the possibilities cited above, is not one which will bring much comfort to the Right: People who are smart enough to do research-level mathematics are too smart to fall for the blandishments of conservative apologists.
Just to make clear my own stake in the matter, I’m in a somewhat anomalous position. I consider myself well left of center—a left Social Democrat rather than a standard Democratic-leaning liberal. But, to my wry amusement, I have found myself repeatedly denounced in certain academic precincts as a rabid conservative. It all comes, I suppose, of greatly prefering E.V. Debs and Rosa Luxembourg to Michel Foucault and Barbara Herrnstein Smith.
— Fossil · Jul 8, 03:31 PM · #
I wish I could find the citation, but there was a study a while back that found that one of the top predictors for going to graduate school was being friends with one or more of your professors. This would certainly lead to a trend of like begetting like in academia.
To the previous poster: I’d be more hesitant about the phrase “people who are smart enough to do research-level mathematics.” Pursuing a career in research of any kind is the result of many factors, intelligence being only one. Considering the amount of student loan debt accrued by many undergrads today, and the level of pay in many faculty positions, one would have to wonder about the “intelligence” of anyone pursuing that line of work. Something other than mere smarts is surely at work, since there are many fields that provide an intelligent mind with constant challenge and stimulation.
You also admit to finding yourself “repeatedly denounced” for your political views (albeit because your political views were misunderstood). Doesn’t this negate your statements that your department is a meritocracy? Forget about whether the tenure process is politically influenced. It would take a person made of pretty strong stuff to pursue and remain in a career in which one knew they would be “repeatedly denounced” for something that had nothing to do with the work itself. I would certainly think twice about a job like that.
— Mike · Jul 9, 08:44 AM · #
This is regarding Mike’s comment that “I wish I could find the citation, but there was a study a while back that found that one of the top predictors for going to graduate school was being friends with one or more of your professors.” Possibly that study is a report by Marisol Arredondo titled “Faculty-Student Interaction: Uncovering the Types of Interactions That Raise Undergraduate Degree Aspirations” which is a paper that was presented at the 20th annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, 1995. Here’s a quote from the abstract: “Students who spent more hours with faculty, who were invited to professors’ homes, or who worked on a professor’s research project were more likely to aspire to graduate study than those students who did not.” This paper is in the ERIC database with accession number ED391423.
— Charles · Jul 9, 10:29 AM · #
Perhaps some confusion can be avoided if we acknowledge that in many universities currently, the majority of humanities and social science faculty view conventional liberalism as hopeless “conservatism,” and that they now not only generally stand to the left of the Democratic Party but have drifted off the edge of the political spectrum into a kind of postmodern group think. For an interesting argument along these lines, see Paul
Gottfried’s see “http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/trying_to_make_sense_of_the_meaningless/”
— rb · Jul 13, 10:22 AM · #