April 2010
In
1980, when Ronald Reagan won the U.S. presidency in a 44-state landslide,
academics at Dartmouth College were so incensed by the electorate’s perceived
misconduct that a faculty meeting passed a formal motion condemning it.
Though not mentioned in the book under review, this absurd incident exemplifies
the problem with which it deals. Indeed, the book contains evidence that since
the 1980s the ideological imbalance in American universities has increased,
giving liberals — along with those left of liberal — an overwhelming numerical
advantage over conservatives. The imbalance is especially extreme in such
departments as history, psychology, sociology and English literature. In one
survey more than a quarter of the respondents in sociology classified themselves
as "Marxists," as did more than 17 per cent in the social sciences as a whole.
Departments of economics appear to be intellectually more diverse, but not
sufficiently so for advocates of a free market to achieve anything close to
parity.
In
this environment, even academics who portray themselves in surveys as "middle of
the road" or "right of centre" may be giving the terms a meaning different from
those attached to them in normal political discourse. In the opening chapter,
Larry Summers (treasury secretary under Bill Clinton) is quoted as saying that
in Washington he was on "the right half of the left," whereas at Harvard —
where his term as president was cut short by controversy — he was on "the right
half of the right." In the eyes of those who regard the legitimate political
spectrum as extending from Karl Marx on one side to Barack Obama on the other —
Summers now serves in the Obama Administration — true conservatives may
be relegated to a frightening zone of darkness, the habitat of imagined
monsters.
Problems of political terminology are only one of many complexities with which
contributors to this book must contend. The sixteen chapters — the work of
various authors or teams of co-authors — focus on topics ranging from the
damage inflicted on particular disciplines (history, English and political
science, the last of which has apparently suffered least) to an argument that
trustees and alumni can and should prevent repressive professors from
improperly exploiting their academic freedom to curtail the academic freedom of
students and dissident colleagues.
In
Chapter 7, Peter Wood — president of the National Association of Scholars —
examines the threat posed to "diversity of ideas" by the "idea of diversity,"
which he calls "an aggressive ideology that stigmatizes and attempts to drive
out anyone who does not actively support it." Diversity in this sense — meaning
collective entitlements for "victim" groups — is a logical consequence of
liberal thought. The author might have cited Kenneth R. Minogue’s book The
Liberal Mind (published in 1963). Writing before the current obsession with
"diversity" developed, Minogue pointed out that ideological liberals (like
Marxists) divide society into suffering "victim" classes on the one hand and
"oppressors" on the other. Moreover, if they belong to perceived "oppressor"
classes, such as the white race, liberals experience a sense of shared guilt
that impels them to do something to make amends, and to separate themselves from
the "guilty entities." Thus the underlying motivation for "diversity" may be
less to assist the favoured minorities than to make the enforcers of group
preferences feel better about themselves — a possibility raised explicitly by
William O’Donohue and Richard E. Redding in Chapter 6 of the volume under
review.
Why
have liberals and the far left been able to achieve such supremacy? In Chapter
3, by Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, we find evidence that the
academic performance of conservative students is very similar to that of
liberals, while "moderates" do less well than either. But, although there
appears to be a correlation between political commitment and greater academic
ability, conservatives are less likely than either liberals or moderates to seek
the doctoral degree normally required for an academic career. Conservatives seem
to have other priorities, such as starting a family and making money. To some
extent, therefore, the paucity of conservative professors may result from
self-exclusion rather than discrimination; but that explanation is less than
fully adequate. In Chapter 6, for example, we are told that "conservative
students may feel alienated when few (often none) of their professors share or
respect their views and when conservative perspectives are excluded from
pedagogy."
Moreover, conservatives may have realistic fears that the "groupthink" examined
in Chapter 5 (by Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern) would impair their
prospects for success in the academic job market; the authors explain how the
principle of majority rule within departments enables a small ideological
majority to become over time a larger majority, simply by hiring only (or
mostly) those who share the dominant orthodoxy.
It
is not exclusively in universities that left-of-centre opinion prevails to an
extent far exceeding its support among the public. American conservatives have
long made the same complaint about other "elites" — those of Hollywood and the
"mainstream" media. It would have been interesting to see an essay placing the
political leanings of the academic world in this wider context. It might also
have been desirable in places for authors to use a livelier literary style, more
appealing to the general reader. In Chapter 6, for instance, we read that some
of the people who claim to be "offended" by something or other "may be
psychologically constituted in problematic ways." I think this means that they
may have psychological problems, or (more colloquially) that they may need to
have their heads examined — an impression confirmed by the unattractive
"personality disorders" that O’Donohue and Redding go on to describe.
One
further criticism: Supporters of the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education may be disappointed by the book’s failure to
recognize the value of FIRE’s efforts, through publicity and actual or
threatened legal action, to defeat "speech codes" and other repressive
manifestations of the "politically correct" mentality. The admirable American
Council of Trustees and Alumni is treated more fairly, since
its president, Anne D. Neal, is the author of Chapter 14.
These are relatively minor points. The book makes an important contribution to
our understanding of what has gone wrong in higher education. Some chapters
include proposals for reform, such as the creation of new academic units outside
the control of entrenched departmental majorities, to pursue the study of
"politically incorrect" subjects like Western civilization and the institutions
associated with political and economic freedom. In a few universities units of
this kind have already been successfully established, but the road to
comprehensive reform will clearly be long and difficult.
Kenneth H.W. Hilborn, a
professor emeritus of history at the University of Western Ontario, is a former member of the University Senate and of the SAFS Board of Directors<.
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