An interesting argument is breaking out all over about diversity on campus. No, no, not that diversity (usually referred to here as “diversity”), which has become nothing more than a code word for the number of minorities. That argument is more broken down than breaking out, and if truth be told is not even so interesting any more.
The new diversity argument deals with the often stifling political uniformity of many faculties, particularly in the humanities, and its point man is ideological provocateur par excellence David Horowitz, who is leading the charge for an Academic Bill of Rights to promote and protect, well, diversity.
Horowitz is a master of needling the lefties, of getting under their skin, and one of his most infuriating (to them) tactics is appropriating their language. Thus he has written (“The Campus Blacklist,” April 2003) that
[t]he most successful and pervasive blacklist in American history is the blacklist of conservatives on American college campuses, their marginalization in undergraduate life and their virtual exclusion from liberal arts faculties, particularly those that deal with the study of society itself….
And yet these outrages have only begun to elicit a remedial reaction from the public at large, and that largely because of the war. This is why I have undertaken the task of organizing conservative students myself and urging them to protest a situation that has become intolerable. I encourage them to use the language that the left has deployed so effectively in behalf of its own agendas. Radical professors have created a “hostile learning environment for conservative students. There is a lack of “intellectual diversity” on college faculties and in academic classrooms. The conservative viewpoint is “under-represented” in the curriculum and on its reading lists. The university should be an “inclusive” and intellectually “diverse” community.
I have encouraged students to demand that their schools adopt an “academic bill of rights” that stresses intellectual diversity, that demands balance in their reading lists, that recognizes that political partisanship by professors in the classroom is an abuse of students’ academic freedom, that the inequity in funding of student organizations and visiting speakers is unacceptable, and that a learning environment hostile to conservatives is unacceptable.
To the liberal academic establishment it is Horowitz who is gearing up to engage in blacklisting, with hordes of right wingers policing reading lists for balance and demanding the hiring of faculty based on their conservative views. For a good exposition of this debate, see Horowitz’s presentation of his position a few days ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education (reprinted here) and a critique by the deanly liberal gadfly, Stanley Fish (reprinted here).
I shall probably have more to say about this debate in the future, but for now what I find of primary interest is the extraordinary degree to which this argument tracks the debate over the other, more familiar “diversity,” with Fishian liberals hyperventilating over government invasion of Constitutional rights and the impending imposition of quotas and the Horowitzian conservatives insisting that they intend no such thing, that they are merely endorsing the goal of intellectual diversity.
Although he is not my main concern here, it is impossible to resist a small detour to observe the always amusing Fish in action. He gallantly acknowledges Horowitz’s sincerity, and continues:
For the record, and as one of those with whom he has consulted, I believe him, and I believe him, in part, because much of the Academic Bill of Rights is as apolitical and principled as he says it is. It begins by announcing that “the central purposes of a University are the pursuit of truth, the discovery of new knowledge through scholarship and research, the study and reasoned criticism of intellectual and cultural traditions … and the transmission of knowledge and learning to a society at large.” (I shall return to the clause deleted by my ellipsis.)
The bill goes on to define academic freedom as the policy of “protecting the intellectual independence of professors, researchers and students in the pursuit of knowledge and the expression of ideas from interference by legislators or authorities within the institution itself.”
In short, “no political, ideological or religious orthodoxy will be imposed on professors.” Nor shall a legislature “impose any orthodoxy through its control of the university budget,” and “no faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.” The document ends by declaring that academic institutions “should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.”
It’s hard to see how anyone who believes (as I do) that academic work is distinctive in its aims and goals and that its distinctiveness must be protected from political pressures (either external or internal) could find anything to disagree with here.
Aside from the fact that Fish here uses “principled” as a compliment even though he has written a book rejecting principles altogether (The Trouble With Principle, Harvard 1999, discussed here), it should be very easy for Fish to see how someone who believes as he does could disagree with Horowitz’s insistence on the necessity of strict neutrality for academic freedom … since Fish himself is on record arguing that academic freedom is bunk (quoting Fish below from my discussion here of one of Fish’s articles here).
I oppose the rhetoric that usually accompanies it, the rhetoric of evenhandedness, open-mindedness, neutrality in the face of substantive conflict, autonomy of thought and choice. It will be my contention that these honorific phrases are either empty and therefore incapable of generating a policy (academic freedom or any other) or are covertly filled with the very partisan objectives they supposedly disdain. I will argue, in short, that the vocabulary of academic freedom (or at least the vocabulary of its pious champions) is a sham and a cheat.
And what of neutrality?
This is where liberal neutrality, academic freedom, and the principle of “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” get you, to a forced inability to make distinctions that would be perfectly clear to any well-informed teenager….
But since he has candidly acknowledged (as discussed here) that he doesn’t necessarily believe his own arguments (or rather, that, whatever he says today, he may well argue the opposite tomorrow if his interests change), let’s throw Fish back and, as they say, move on.
In the original scheme of this post, conceived a couple of days ago after receipt of an email from Madison Kitchens, director of the Duke Conservative Union, with a link to a fascinating article about a huge diversity controversy at Duke, I was going to discuss Duke as a case study of the diversity debate outlined above. At any rate that was my intention, and it was a good one. But a day in blogdom can be the equivalent of an eon in real life (he who hesitates to blog is lost), and over the past day or so Duke’s marvelous diversity disaster has been picked up by a whole bunch of blogs that have done a far better job describing what’s going on there than I would have.
Not only do I particularly recommend the following several discussions of Duke, but if you don’t read them what follows here will appear even more selective and idiosyncratic than usual, since I’m leaving the background discussion to these others: Erin O’Connor who nails this down in her typically precise and penetrating manner; Ralph Luker at the History News Network, who also provides many more relevant links; and InstaPundit, which presents a particularly interesting long quote from Northwestern law professor Jim Lindgren.
Very briefly, the tempest in Duke’s teapot concerns a survey conducted by the Duke Conservative Union that involved checking the names of faculty members in eight humanities departments against publicly available voter registration information. The result, not surprisingly (and, of course, a result not unique to Duke), is that Democrats outnumbered Republicans over 17 to 1.
Now there is nothing surprising about this; similar results have been documented at other elite (and some not-so-elite) universities. Indeed, it would be just another dog-bites-man story were it not for the mind-bogglingly smug smog of denial that emanated from the upper reaches of Duke officialdom in response.
Erin O’Connor and others quote a number of examples so I will be brief here, but typical is head flack (“senior vice president for public affairs and government relations”) John Burness’s silly assertion that party affiliation “is largely irrelevant to intellectual diversity within the classroom.” Maureen Quilligan, English Dept. chair, said no one had ever complained to her about faculty bias (they have now) and “[b]esides, there are many differences within Republicans and within Democrats, and Republicans certainly are not the only conservatives.” History had the worst score — 32 Democrats, 4 unaffiliated, 0 Republicans — but History Chair John Thompson sounded almost befuddled. Noting that “the political spectrum is very narrow” in the U.S. (meaning what? that there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans anyway?), he seemed to challenge the survey results by noting that “Not only do we not have 36 members of the department, but three or four members are foreigners, so aren’t even registered to vote.” (A check of the web page of the Duke History Dept. reveals 34 professors, associate professors, or assistant professors; 1 visiting assistant professor; 8 “secondary appointments”; and 9 visitors or adjuncts. One can understand the DCU’s confusion about size.)
Most striking of all, and widely quoted by other bloggers (see Eugene Volokh for a sample) was Philosophy Chair Robert Brandon’s snide remark that “We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.”
According to Stephen Karlson, all this Duke bloviation (my characterization, not his) “is the kind of sophistry that gives b.s. a bad name.”
A constant refrain running throughout Duke’s heated insistence that partisan uniformity has nothing to do with intellectual diversity is that Duke specifically, and universities in general, should not and in fact do not inquire into the political views or affiliations of their prospective faculty hires. Indeed, as we saw above with Fish’s response to Horowitz, the very mention of political affiliation raises the red flag of imminent McCarthyite attacks on academic freedom. “Political perspective,” as dean of the faculty (and historian) William Chafe asserted, “should never be a consideration in faculty appointment.”
Now I myself happen to agree with that assertion, but then I don’t believe that “diversity” (or even actual diversity) is the fundamental value that trumps all others. Duke, on the other hand, like most other universities these days, does seem to believe that its mission requires achieving, or at least striving after, “diversity.” The older value of excellence, especially as defined in traditional meritocratic terms, has clearly been put in the back seat, as has the older prohibition against taking race into account. Both, the new consensus holds, can and should be compromised where necessary (and where isn’t it?) to promote “diversity.”
Thus I find it quite odd that Duke has so enthusiastically embraced “taking race into account” to produce “diversity” but is so horrified by the prospect of similarly taking “political perspective” into account. What’s the difference? Surely not the Constitution, which as we’ve seen is quite malleable in the hands of four determined justices + the O’Connor weather vane. The prohibition against racial discrimination, in any event, is more firmly grounded in our Constitutional text and history than is the concept of academic freedom (we didn’t fight a civil war to provide tenure to professors).
Recall that racial preferences are uniformly defended as a necessary means to produce “diversity,” which means little or nothing if it is not thought to include different values and, yes, perspectives. Why exactly is it legitimate — no, mandatory — to take race into account in order to welcome and include a black perspective but not to take “political perspective” into account to welcome and include at least some token conservatives? Especially now, when a good argument can be made that partisanship has hardened into something approaching two cultures (the Red and the Blue).
Certainly Duke’s official statements on “diversity” are framed in language that makes its political uniformity seem glaringly odd. According, for example, to the Office for Institutional Equity, “creating a climate of respect and inclusiveness for all is more important that ever.” Or take the Duke Annual Report for 2000-2001, which begins as follows:
Promote Diversity in All Aspects of University Life
A welcoming community built around diversity in all its dimensions — ethnic, international, and cultural — is critical to securing the greatest intellectual talent and hence to ensuring the quality and success of the contemporary university. The best living, learning, and working environment is one in which its members are heterogeneous, offering different perspectives from which all can gain knowledge and skills. Diversity in educational experience prepares students to live among, work with, and lead diverse groups of people.
Aside from the suggestion that “ethnic, international, and cultural” make up “all” the dimensions of diversity, one couldn’t ask for a better statement recognizing the value of “different perspectives” to the university. But when the airy rhetoric floats down to earth, it quickly becomes apparent that the OIE’s “inclusiveness for all” refers only to minorities; its tasks all revolve around promoting what it calls “cross-cultural communication.” Similarly, note what happens in the Duke Annual Report’s second paragraph:
To achieve this goal [“a welcoming community built around diversity in all its dimensions”] Duke continues to focus on increasing its racial, ethnic, and socio-economic diversity among faculty, students, and staff. We are also working to recruit greater numbers of women in areas such as social science, natural science, engineering, and business, where, in the past, women have been underrepresented.
We welcome “different perspectives,” that is, as long as they can be identified by race and sex. Too strong? Here are paragraphs three and four:
Though we are not satisfied with the pace, our efforts are producing results. The most recent comparative data, published in Black Issues in Higher Education, show Duke ranked fifteenth in the nation for total minority doctorates conferred in 1999-2000, 63, or 27 percent, a higher percentage than Stanford or Harvard. The same issue showed Duke ranked sixth in the number of Asian-American doctorates conferred (50), trailing only schools on the west coast such as Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.
An article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education published in the summer of 2001 entitled “Duke’s Ongoing Effort to Racially Diversify Its Campus,” stated that “(Duke) has taken more concrete steps to diversify its campus than almost any of the nation’s highest-ranked universities.” The article noted that while other universities leveled off their number of new black hires, Duke has continued to aggressively recruit black faculty, such as Houston Baker Jr., one of the nation’s most visible and preeminent scholars of African-American literature and culture. Since 1988, the number of blacks teaching at Duke more than doubled. It is now at 75. In addition, Duke almost tripled its number of African-American students from 56 in the freshman class in 1984 to 165 in the first-year class in 2000-2001. Duke also has one of the nation’s best black student graduation rates. Duke’s professional schools, including medicine, nursing, and law, are also achieving significantly more diverse student bodies.
At the risk of appearing to shoot Fish in a barrel, let me give just one more example of how Duke defines “diversity” in practice as extending no farther than race and ethnicity: the Duke Human Resources office’s Diversity Award.
Purpose
To recognize a staff or faculty member who has demonstrated, through his or her positive interactions with others, a respect and value for differing backgrounds and points of view within the University community. [Emphasis added]
Description
The Diversity Award will be given annually to a staff or faculty member who has actively and positively promoted the concept of diversity by enhancing or contributing to the overall environment of the University through improving a cross-cultural understanding.
Criteria
This recipient will have demonstrated a high regard for diversity by demonstrating one or more of the following:
- Demonstrated commitment to the spirit of diversity
- Leadership through positive interaction between persons of different cultural backgrounds
- Behavior which illustrates commitment to inclusion of persons within the institution who are members of traditionally under-represented groups.
My point here, as it was recently about Penn, concerns hypocrisy. Duke claims “diversity” is essential, and it further claims that a big part of what it means by “diversity” is “different perspectives,” differing “points of view,” but it doesn’t really mean that. It really means only racial and gender diversity (although it’s not clear if Duke believes that men and women come from different cultures, and thus need assistance in “cross-cultural understanding”). It is willing to compromise meritocratic excellence and the principle barring benefits or burdens based on race to produce a truncated version of “diversity,” but it regards any suggestion that a concern for diversity requires a concern about ideological uniformity as an attack on academic freedom.
Well, some might ask, aren’t the Duke Conservative Union and you equally hypocritical for criticizing race preferences while calling for taking politics into account to produce ideological diversity? The short answer is no, because we aren’t doing that. As Madison Kitchens, the DCU director, explained,
We’re not saying the University needs to hire more Republicans, but rather that it needs to be open to conservative perspectives in the hiring process.
In other words, the DCU argues that Duke should stop discriminating against conservative viewpoints and approaches, not that it should lower its standards or bus in conservatives to promote ideological balance. It applies, that is, the same “without regard” principle to politics as to race. At least that’s what I would argue.
To see how far apart those standards are at Duke today, all one need do is consider the fate of Philosophy chair Brandon if he had said the reason Duke doesn’t have more blacks is because more of them are stupid.
UPDATE
I wish I’d said what I said as well as Erin O’Connor just said what I said.
UPDATE II
Pointing to a newly published defense of his views by Duke Philosophy Chair Robert Brandon, Glenn Reynolds doubts that Brandon has helped himself very much. I am less charitable. It seems to me that Brandon’s attempt to explain himself, and to justify Duke’s untroubled acceptance of its leftish ideological uniformity as just the natural order of things, simply reinforces the wisdom of the old advice about how to extricate yourself from a hole: first, stop digging.
Let me supplement Glenn’s implicit invitation for you to go read this latest from Brandon and make up your own mind with one additional request: in keeping with the argument I made above, make note of what you would think of Brandon’s argument if he had substituted “minorities” for “conservatives.” That is, assume he is a defender of the academic status quo against critics who lament the paucity (in some departments, the virtual absence) of minorities. I think you’ll find doing that instructive.
Here’s a short list of some of his points that I come up with when I make that substitution. Your list may vary.
1. Diversity is irrelevant in many disciplines. What can skin color contribute to the teaching or learning of math or materials science?
2. Even in areas where race plays a role, the body of knowledge to be covered in class won’t look noticeably different no matter the color of the professor.
3. Students do not need professors who look like them in order for their work to be appreciated. Insofar as difference is real, the experience of it is a good thing and minority students will benefit from being exposed to professors who are different from themselves.
4. Since discrimination on the basis of race is evil, it is a good thing that we do not take race into account in hiring our faculty.
5. My humor about minority stupidity was “not much appreciated.” In any event, “I did not say that all [minorities] are stupid, nor even that most [minorities] are stupid.”
6. What I did say is that “[t]here is a statistical association between the qualities that make for good academics and those that [whites and Asians possess]. Said another way, a larger proportion of academics are likely to be [white or Asian], but certainly not all, and this may also vary by field and subfield because of the nature of knowledge, learning and the advancement of knowledge in that field.”
7. What can minority students at Duke do to increase their numbers in universities? Nothing quickly but over the long haul: “Study hard, do well in school, go on to get a Ph.D. and get yourself a job teaching at a university.”
I very much doubt that Prof. Brandon would make any of these comments about minorities, but I know that institutionally Duke has categorically rejected them. It has made the commitment to do whatever is necessary to promote diversity. But only racial diversity, not a diversity of perspectives and point of view.
For what it’s worth, I suspect I should affirm what I hope was clear in my original post — namely, that I don’t support preferences, regulated representation, or balance for political viewpoint any more than I do for race. I would apply a neutral non-discrimination standard in both areas. Duke, however, and other universities like it whose practices conflict with their pronouncements seem to me hopelessly entangled in a web of contradictions about matters of fundamental principle.
UPDATE III
Michael Friedman asks a good question, and provides more useful links.
UPDATE IV
The duking it out over diversity at Duke continues, with evidence of increasing awarenes of the tensions and contradictions surrounding Duke’s official pronouncements about diversity and the contrast between the way it regards racial and ethnic minorities, on one hand, and an embattled conservative minority on the other.
For example, in a letter to the Duke Chronicle Josh Johnston, a Duke undergraduate, observes:
Traditionally underrepresented professors are hired by this University, even when they are not the strongest teacher, with the idea that underrepresented students will have mentors and be more likely to succeed and enter academia. If this logic is sound for minority students, why not for conservative ones? I claim that [Duke president Nan] Keohane is not interested in having her prejudices confronted. Her actions indicate a belief in a phony, superficial diversity in which we all look different but think the same.
Aww, you conservatives are soo cute when you argue like liberals! Anyway how could you be a conservative historian when Bush has sold all of our historical sites to the oil companies?
Kidding…Kidding ;)
This Duke thing was surprising to me as well, not that professors tend to be liberal, but that so many would actually register with a party. I consider myself center-left but I would never register with either party. It seems kind of silly to almost ‘lock’ yourself in to a particular group, after all, shouldn’t people vote for a candidate and not a party? hmmm maybe i’m just outdated…
Jeff, that makes perfect sense, and I agree. But the partisans on college faculties are so strident that the idea of voting for any Republican, at any time, on any issue, is simply unthinkable. So most of them do in fact register with some party or other of the left.
In reality of course the difference in perspective between a white upper-middle class Nation-subscriber and a black upper-middle class Nation-subscriber is infinitesimal compared to that between a white Republican and a white Democrat. Therefore if Professor Brandon sincerely believed the logic of Grutter that diversity of perspective is critically important and that racial discrimination is only valuable insofar as it helps achieve perspective diversity, then he would be compelled to favor other, more direct, means to ensure perspective diversity, such as putting all those stupid conservatives ahead of their more competent liberal peers in job searches. (If Professor Brandon thinks that blacks are generally stupid, then I’ll think even less of him but at least I’ll grant him consistency).
If you take the logic of the diversiphiles — in which race is a proxy for perspective but perspective per se is irrelevant — the thing that makes Robert George of Princeton stand out from his peers is that he’s an Arab, not that he comes from the intellectual tradition of Catholic conservatives. And I think there actually is something to the notion that perspective diversity enhances learning and research. A political philosophy department for example would be a lot more interesting if it contained a Catholic conservative rather than just a bunch of Rawlsians.
However, that being said, I find it very disturbing that conservatives are so quick to hold that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Tempting as it may be in the short-term to gain affirmative action (either in the 1960s sense of conscious openness or in the post-1970 sense of a thumb on the scale) for conservatives, to do so undermines our very powerful case. Our argument against racial balancing rests on an empirical point and a principled point. The empirical point is that disparity is not necessarily evidence of discrimination. For instance, even if you assume (as I do) that intellect is relatively evenly distributed across the left and right, one could imagine a self-selection mechanism whereby most of the left’s intellectual cream opts to go into academia (or other parts of civil service and the third sector) and most of the right’s goes into business. I myself entered the academic track because at the time I was a leftist and wanted nothing to do with business.
The principled case is even simpler, de facto discrimination does not justify de juris discrimination, since conscious intentional blatant discrimination is more disgusting than the sort of unconscious unintentional subtle discrimination one tends to see these days.
As John often argues so well, race is special, being a constitutionally suspect category and the subject of a truly horrific war so one could in principle favor legacy or regional preferences and still oppose race preferences. Nonetheless, to make serious (as compared to rhetorical) arguments that perspective justifies discrimination on new criteria cedes far too much. John is absolutely right to say for interest, if perspective diversity justifies racial discrimination, why not religious discrimination? But what John does is bracket this as a purely rhetorical outcome since he desires neither the inefficient actual discrimination nor the efficient hypothetical discrimination he proposes. Such an argument is not actually a plea for a new kind of perspective-diversity-enhancing form of discrimination, but is rather evidence that aesthetic diversiphiles don’t believe their own nonsense, which any fool can see is just a screen for their true motivation of group outcome equality. Once we start seriously adopting their nonsense for our own purposes, we’ve lost principle, which is the main thing we have.
What Gabriel Rossman said.
What is labelled conservative and liberal in our liberal arts colleges is kinda goofy.
I would be labelled a conservative, although I am not. I oppose the quota systems precisely because, as a white, hetero man, those systems exclude me. And, in fact, this is precisely what the quota systems have done.
What cannot be argued within the humanities departments is the self-interest of a white, hetero man. To make that argument is to be labelled racist, sexist and homophobic. The enforcement wing of this labelling is the sexual harassment kangaroo courts. So, yes, a specific intellectual argument is deliberately banned from those departments. Demanding that my self-interest be considered labels me a conservative. Since I have worked all my life in the educational system, I can vouch for the fact that arguing my self-interest will exclude me from most jobs. In fact, when I last looked for a job, interviewers used not so subtle methods of letting me know that my self-interest was deliberately excluded from their workplace. They chose virulently anti-male diatribes as the demonstration pieces for my interview process.
Humanities departments are engaged in deliberate discrimination against hetero, white men. This discrimination is effected by labelling the self-interest of such men as evidence of pervasive bigotry.
And, so, viewpoint discrimination is a reality. The viewpoint that cannot be presented is the self-interest of a white, hetero man. (It is allowed to for a white, hetero man to present himself as a weasel. Thus a white, hetero man can win favor in a History or English department by championing the cause of women, gays and blacks and by ridiculing and disparaging white, hetero men. This type of weasel is, in fact, in great demand.)
Gabe, ease up a bit. We are privileged indeed to watch a bunch of pompous, jargon-spouting diversity acolytes unintentionally (and hilariously) expose the moral and intellectual corruption of the racial spoils system which is the heart and soul of their civic religion. Ridicule is a time-honored, wholly legitimate, highly satisfactory and most devastating way to undermine bad ideas and dangerous stupidity. Think Waugh and DeFoe and enjoy the spectacle. With friends like the Duke administrators and humanities faculty, “diversity” mavens need not fear John or Stu.
If Duke and other universities would simply stop discriminating against those with conservative viewpoints, a much better diversity of ideas would be achieved than exists now.
That is apparently too hard a concept, so the established order is frightened by the specter of an affirmative action for conservatives, a threat they deserve, but not one that is being considered by anyone.
Why are academics such hypocrites?
Excellent commentary Stu. That is exactly the point I wanted to make, but you beat me to it.
Not that it fooled anyone with a modicum of intelligence, but the Left’s championing of diversity is nothing but a sham. The last thing the Left wants is diversity of ideas. After all, when your side knows “the truth”, what is there to debate? As Stanley Fish so eloquently states:
“While questions of truth may be generally open, the truth of academic matters is not general but local; questions are posed and often they do have answers that can be established with certainty
So what if new truths are constantly being discovered in the sciences? Why should that give the Leftist professors of English and humanities pause? They already know the truth, so there is know need for any other ideas to be expressed.
To put it simply, intellectual diversity is not a stand-alone academic value, no more than is free speech; either can be a help in the pursuit of truth, but neither should be identified with it; the (occasional) means should not be confused with the end.
And as the Left has shown us, when they are in charge, neither diversity of though or free speech is allowed on campus.
I am outraged that the ubiquitous academic left have the audacity to suddenly object to this sort of social engineering. Its object is to promote a diverse learning environment for students–an interest so compelling that it justifies vitiating a student’s rights under the 14th Amendment, such that an entire race now stands unequal before the law.
How dare they suddenly oppose social engineering now that they are the “overrepresented group”! … But then again, why not? Hypocrisy is the very least of their sins.
Every student they teach is there either because of social engineering or in spite of it. As Lenin was found of saying: “You’ve got to break a few eggs to make a [diverse] omelet.” I gleefully await a quota system. The schadenfreude will be orgasmic.
I, for one, couldn’t even care less about whether or not they get any diversity of viewpoints in academia, as it is doubtful it will happen anytime soon. Granted, it would be nice, but I would be satisfied if they could simply cut out the ideological indoctrination that is so rampant in today’s college classroom. I would be perfectly happy to not have to listen to History professors explain why Republicans are evil (during lectures on ancient Mesopotamia), Art professors explain why Israel is terrorizing the Palestinians (during lessons on Roman architecture), or business professors declare that, when the Republicans take control of both houses of congress that it is a “bad day for democracy”. I say let the universities hire all communists, for all I care, as long as when I go to my economics class I get a legitimate lesson, and not a glorified stump speech for a particular ideological viewpoint.
Blind hiring at Duke?
As most of the blogosphere knows, the Duke Conservative Union unleashed a storm by buying an advertisement about political bias at Duke:In the ad, the DCU published the political affiliation of faculty from several departments, including history, liter…
Thanks for the link… I’m getting answers to my question already.
Damn it, John. I was just chomping at the bit waiting to post after I read Brandon’s response. But your commentary stole my thunder. Poor professor Brandon. He has been hoisted by his own petard.
In the ad, the DCU published the political affiliation of faculty from several departments, including history, literature, sociology and English. Its claim was that the departments had a ratio of 32-to-0, 11-to-0, 9-to-0 and 18-to-1, respectively, in favor of registered Democrats over Republicans.
Something has got to be done about this. We can’t let this pass. What were they thinking? This is outrageous. How dare the English department allow a conservative to be hired!
Actually, the market of ideas will likely work much better than a Bill of Rights. Setting aside the hypocrisy of faculty claiming academic freedom without assuming any academic responsibility, it seems that the steady drain of students away from these admittedly liberal subject areas will lead to a slow death for these chest-beating if short-sighted ‘disciplines’. That, and parents who have started asking why they are spending all this money to have the minds of their kids poisoned. More conservative, even career-minded students see through this stuff and move on to a real life.
I agree with Stu that we are privileged that with slight prodding the diversity establishment has gone into an orgy of hypocrisy, self-satire, and self-refutation. My main point was that we should limit ourselves to ridicule meant to amuse ourselves and achieve our negative policy concerns rather than undermine that goal by (seriously) introducing positive goals of our own.
As for the argument that we just want fair treatment not the “specter of an affirmative action for conservatives,” frankly it’s not that simple. Most social scientists, left or right, don’t believe that most of the disparity in black/white income can be explained by employer animosity to blacks, which is essentially a weighted average of “taste” discrimination and “statistical” discrimination. Rather, they tend to hold that a good part is explained by “structural” discrimination. (Of course conservatives also hold that a good part of it is explained by culture and agency). Structural discrimination can be things such as suburbanization of the labor market or draconian child support laws pushing black men out of the legitimate economy. These things aren’t meant to hurt blacks, they just do. In much the same way that avoiding sex discrimination has entailed massive restructuring of the whole labor market and HR practices (sexual harassment policies, flex time, sensitivity training, etc), ending discrimination against conservatives would radically change the university.
So to “just avoid discriminating against conservatives” would not be so simple as getting faculty hiring committees to be open-minded and that’s it, but would rather require a massive restructuring of the entire university. For instance, departments rarely just do an open junior job search but rather they tend to have specific positions in mind. For instance my sociology department just did three searches: culture, economic sociology, and social inequality. I think any of these could in principle be filled by a conservative, even social inequality (eg. Charles Murray or Nathan Glazer), but there are other roles including almost anything that has the prefix “post” in the description that simply cannot be filled by anyone to the right of Dennis Kucinich. As Dinesh D’Souza argues in Illiberal Education, there are entire departments, such as Womens’ Studies, where leftist ideology is effectively a job requirement. So avoiding discrimination against conservatives would require eliminating these jobs or balancing them with jobs with opposite ideological connotations. I personally think most of these positions are vacuous, but I think shutting them down would be greatly intolerant and counter-balancing them would create drivel of our own.
Some of these structural revisions might be desirable, or at least tempting, in of themselves, but others would basically create a new form of political correctness to prevent a “hostile learning/working environment” for conservatives. Inevitably, such a regime would provide just as many absurdities as the universities experienced in the 1980s when they made well-intentioned but ultimately ridiculous, unprincipled, and arguably even counter-productive efforts to make ethnic minorities and women comfortable. Don’t y’all realize that when we complain about people making insensitive jokes or going on inappropriate tangents in lecture we sound like second-wave feminist killjoys? Where does it end? A dean for conservative affairs and special counselors for conservatives who feel slighted? Burke Hall, an all-Republican dorm? Conservative orientation weekend? Mandatory sensitivity training for the faculty where they role-play how to not go on tangents about Bush? A requirement that all faculty committees include conservative faculty members?
That’s why for a long-time I’ve felt similarly to the final lines of Brandon’s follow-up (although I agree that in general he’s an ass). The only way to advance conservative thinkers in the academy without incurring massive unintended consequences is simply for conservatives to study hard, go to grad school, and publish. I’m doing it.
For the sake of consistency with our principles and the well-being of the university I basically think we should apply to ourselves the same solutions that most conservatives endorse for dealing with race or gender inequality:
1) fight truly blatant discrimination in court and in the press
2) either politely respond to or merely let pass asinine comments from colleagues
3) trust to the agency of individuals from the under-represented group to achieve within the sphere
4) accept that despite these efforts, appreciable disparity may persist
If this is good enough advice to give it’s good enough to take.
Also, not only am I a conservative and a registered Republican, but this is apparent in my dissertation — a rebuttal of political economy mass media theory. I’m going on the job market starting this summer. Anyone care to speculate how I’ll do? I should find out what offers, if any, I’m getting come November. I’ll be sure to apply at Duke if they’re hiring for culture or econ soc.
What Gabriel Rossman Said II
Ditto. I hope no one confuses my holding up the Left to ridicule that they so rightly deserve to be support for a Conservative affirmative action program. That would go against everything I believe in.
However, that being said, the issue of Conservative hiring is not the same as the issue of admitting minorities to universities. In the former case, there is a bias against hiring them irrespective of their scholarship. In the latter case, there is a bias for admitting them irrespective of their grades and SAT scores. Thus, I don’t believe for a minute that Conservatives will get a fair shake from the current Leftist faculty when it comes to hiring.
Good luck in your job search Gabriel. Unfortunately given the political climate, you are going to need all of the luck you can get.
Having retired from academe in 2001 after almost a half century in the biz, I can say that I’m quite familiar with the kind of deer-in-the-headlights looks on academic faces as they broach the diversity ideology while in the process displaying the most ardent forms of group-based animosity.
Diversity, e.g., is for females and skin colors other than white, but not for white males because they are guilty. Of what? Of having power, which is the most ubiqitous and uncritiqued lexeme in academic vocabulary these days.
Thus Women’s Studies mavens preach “diversity” while advancing over a quarter-century’s worth of anti-male hate rhetoric in their class lectures and publications.
The bubbling, steaming, overflowing contradictions which have been detected on this blog in Duke U’s diversity rhetoric can be matched on practically any campus you want to name in this country. It’s absolutely de rigueur in the mouths of career-minded university administrators, who know nothing of the life of the mind or ever heard of something called an ethic of truth-seeking, who will mouth any form of PR drivel if it allows them to squeak through the twisting mindfields of academic ideogical contention with their professional skins intact.
“Diversity” is an oppositional ideology–it’s that simple. It’s not so much that people like the Duke slugs believe in it, as rather what group do they believe in it against. In one way its another turn on Orwell’s famous example of double-think nonsense about some being “more equal” than others. The only way you can talk like this and not fall into stuttering, blithering silence in the process, is simply not to think at all about the words that you’re uttering.
The well-noted contradictions in S. Fish’s principled attack on principle and doctrinaire affirmations of relativism are another example, except that he manages the hire-wire act of actually getting whole books written, chapter after chapter, without the whole thing collapsing–a miracle somewhat like a suspension bridge maintaining itself aloft w/o the suspension.
This is comedy, folks, and the clowns have taken over the circus.
Michael,
I enjoyed your post. Academia is much the worse for your loss.
Party registration might be a poor proxy for viewpoint, as it is something that the superintendent of elections gathers on individuals who vote in the primary election (which is an attempt to make the parties more accessible to the people). I have asked a colleague at Duke about the voting procedures in North Carolina. Still no answer, but will provide it at Cold Spring Shops should it arrive.
Illinois allows people to declare a party on the day of the primary. (The party machines don’t like this, but tough noogies.) Some years I show up as a Donk, other years as a Pach, other years not at all.
What might prove rather more important to the case about viewpoint diversity or the lack thereof is the anecdotal evidence being collected by Andrew Sullivan.
As a good student at bad schools with no clue as to what to do in college, I enrolled at Miami of Ohio in their ultra-liberal Western College program. I opted out of the “interdisciplinary” course of study when I found out that the English class involved reading about the trials and tribulations of Lakota and Maori women. I still had my dorm assignment there, however. The big debate on campus was the moniker “Redskins” for sports teams; so the Western College brought in Wilma Mankiller to speak about the offensiveness of the name. I remember watching the Atlanta Braves vs. Cleveland Indians in the World Series, and conceding that Chief Yahoo was on the racist side. However, the dorm resident proceded to assert that “Braves” was also racist, I guess because it would be stereotypical to refer to all indians as “brave”.
I had been reading “Closing of the American Mind” at the time, and each day seemed to manifest a real world example of the blight infecting universities as discussed by Allan Bloom. I ended up transferring to St. John’s College, the Great Books school in Annapolis, MD. Whereas at Miami I felt I had “accomplished” something by demonstrating that “Truth is relative” is itself the universal it means to disprove, at SJC I found that no one cared necessarily about Truth, but about what the books we were reading had to say. Rare was the opportunity to break out my reductio ad absurdam and every day seemed to manifest to me how little I knew about anything (not necessarily in the Socratic sense).
I gave up alot at St. John’s–the opportuntity to study abroad, a complete and explicit ignorance of historic developments, perhaps even higher grades at another school that would give me the opportunity to write more papers and to focus on courses/a major that better suited me (at SJC there are no electives, and you also take 4 yrs of math and 3 yrs of lab science)–but it gave me my bearings. And what is interesting now is my discovery of how different my political views are from the friends and professors (tutors they’re called at SJC) I keep in contact with. this has not necessarily been a pleasant discovery, but it has been instructive. (That is, I tend to be on the conservative/libertarian side and plan to vote for Bush on foreign policy grounds)
No doubt this had something to do with my relative disinterest in politics (esp. back then) and what seems to be an exceptionally politically heated time, but it also has to do with an acknowledgement by both tutors and students at SJC that the process of discovery is not ideologically oriented, nor is ideology necessarily helpful in trying to understand and interpret a text which itself formulated or popularized an ideology. And while “refusing to take a position” constitutes a position in intself, it seems to me that such a stance, as a learning tool, is important within the public arena of college. What goes on in dorms or at professor’s dinner parties need not adhere to this standard, but what is needed all around is a respect for young minds and the need to inculcate sound principles rather than specific world views or policy positions.
All this and a quarter will still only get me one phone call…
The analogy between pursuing racial diversity in hiring and a hypothetical pursuit of ideological diversity would be more convincing if there were solid evidence of actual discrimination against conservatives. In the case of racial discrimination there are numerous examples of “tester” studies which document racial discrimination in employment, housing, etc. If there were some sort of similar evidence of ideological discrmination, conservative arguments on this issue would carry more weight.
Mark,
I suggest you closely reread Grutter.
There are many rationales for race preferences, and you’re right that not all of them parallel rationales for hypothetical ideological preferences. However, the only rationale endorsed by the courts for institutions not directly compensating for their own history of discrimination is diversity. The diversity rationale for race preferences is agnostic about the origins of racial disparity, it holds only that correcting race disparities benefits institutions. Therefore even if you think that universities discriminate against minorities but not conservatives, the argument for intellectual diversity still parallels racial diversity since discrimination is immaterial. Neither type of diversity would exist absent tinkering with the scale but both are pretty nice to have and those two conditions are all Grutter requires. Of course, as I’ve said several times on this thread, I think institutions should be blind to both race and ideology.
Also, I’m not aware of any audit studies addressing education, though your point is well taken that racial discrimination in hiring, housing, and lending is established by rock solid evidence.
What Gabriel Rossman said III. As both a legal and educational matter, the argument for the necessity of diversity has nothing to do with discrimination. But the fact that diversity is justified on such broad, non-compensatory grounds (you can’t get a good education unless you’re exposed to large doses of “difference,” etc.) when in practice diversifiles (diversiphiles?) concentrate all but exclusively on race and ignore both religion and politics/ideology is precisely what leads me to accuse them of hypocrisy.
There’s one annoying nit I’d like to pick out of Gabriel’s last comment. When he agrees that rock-solid evidence is available to substantiate racial discrimination in lending, he is either repeating orthodoxy or not referring to the standard variety.
Lenders are indeed keenly aware of applicant race, and do discriminate against blacks–in the very same manner that blacks are discriminated against at the University of Michigan.
Bear in mind that the underwriting process does not avail itself well to easy statistical formulation. When applying the “five Cs” of credit (character, capital, capacity, collateral,and conditions) conscientiously, racial disparities may occur which offer ready fodder for the race hustlers.
To forestall the inevitable visit from a rhyming reverend, lenders are obliged to make one of two choices: 1) maintain rigorous color-blind standards which may result in “rock solid evidence” of discrimination in the form of higher credit denials (let me assure you that sending an adverse action notice to a black applicant is the stuff of bankers’ nightmares) or 2) offer a preferential two-track process for members of the designated victim groups. Does this sound familiar?
Another item to note: Examiners do not search for discrimination against whites, and would not cite it even if found inadvertently. To offer a crude analogy, if state troopers only cited red cars for speeding tickets, what do you imagine the statistics would tell us about the correlation of owning a red car and speeding?
I’m not especially familiar with audit studies on lending so it may be that Stu is absolutely right and that affirmative action in lending is so strong that banks always err on the side of default. Other banks have removed human judgement from lending decisions, giving power to a literally race-blind computer, so when these banks are accused of discrimination, as they sometimes are, it’s obviously not ideal-type “I don’t like your kind” discrimination but some kind of disparate impact (though any well designed audit study avoids disparate impact). However, despite the existence of affirmative action and the threat of screaming reverends, audit studies continue to find anti-black discrimination in hiring (and yes, these research designs would capture anti-white discrimination). For instance, Devah Pager found just a couple years ago that Milwaukee employers prefer to give callbacks to otherwise identical white men with criminal records than to black men with clean records. (Note that this undermines the power of the “statistical discrimination” argument). In hiring it may very well be a class thing. Most affirmative action policies are for middle class jobs whereas most audit studies (and therefore the best evidence for anti-black discrimination) is from working class jobs.
What I was trying to address was the issue of whether there is ideological bias in hiring, as explicitly claimed by Horowitz in his “blacklisting” charge, and at least implied by Kitchens of the DCU. I can state positively that there is no such bias in my own field–in economics, if there is any bias, it’s in favor of those who lean to the right–so I tend to be very skeptical about such charges in general.
My own experience suggests that the reason for the absence of Republicans/conservatives from many social science departments has nothing to do with hiring bias, and a lot to do with basic standards of scholarship. One thing I learned in graduate school is that many of the claims made by conserative propagandists–such as supply-siders and hardcore libertarians in economics–simply do not stand up under critical, empirical analysis. It is this scholarly failure, not any supposed bias, that accounts for the total absence of supply-siders, or Cato Institute-style ideologues, from major university departments of economics. I would suggest that this is probably true in the other social sciences as well. I can’t address the situation in the humanities as I am much less informed about it.
If I’m right, and I think I am, at least partly, then this creates a problem for the “intellectual diversity” argument. In principle, it is perfectly sound to argue that students need exposure to many viewpoints as part of a complete education. But the question is what standard does a viewpoint have to meet to be included? I would suggest that many conservative viewpoints, at least in the social sciences, do not meet any reasonable standard of scholarship, and that those that do meet reasonable standards, such as those of Chicago school economists, are not excluded.
Mark: Fascinating. Conservative/Libertarians are propagandists and ideologues, while leftist/marxist economists are stately scholars–despite the rather spotty economic record of leftist/marxist economies. You just never stop learning in this life.
Gabriel: I’m certain the studies you note in hiring are sound, though I wonder to what extent (the answer being obviously none) other causal factors than malice were considered. To elaborate, I know many senior-level supervisors with personnel authority who often express similar sentiments paraphrased in order as follows:
1)We truly want to offer an open supportive working environment to all qualified employees regardless of race.
2)We would be happy to hire and promote any ethnic minority who meets our standards. (In at least one instance, it is a black supervisor reporting this to me.)
3) However, X% of our minority hires scream “racism” when and if they are not fast-tracked promptly.
4) Thus, we incur periodic legal and re-training expense at a rate and amount varying with X.
5) Resultingly, we must shoulder an additional expense factor in hiring, under the full knowledge that statistically, black employees will present a greater cost and disruption than whites.
Every single manager I know shrugs and accepts this as a cost of doing business. Though I have to assume many do not blithely accept it, and their hiring statistics reflect as much.
Is this Anti-black discrimination or a rational response to the labor environment?
“Mark: Fascinating. Conservative/Libertarians are propagandists and ideologues, while leftist/marxist economists are stately scholars–despite the rather spotty economic record of leftist/marxist economies. You just never stop learning in this life.”
Actually, Stuart, you also don’t find many Marxists in major univerisity econ departments, either, for the same reason that you don’t find many supply-siders. If anything, in economics, it’s probably a bit harder for Marxists. And I specifically noted the professional acceptance of Chicago school libertarians who do rigorous work–indeed, several have won Nobel Prizes in the field.
Stuart,
You’re making a false dichotomy. Something can be anti-black discrimination and a rational response to the labor environment. Irrational discrimination is known as taste discrimination and is theoretically distinguishable from statistical discrimination, which is to more or less rationally assume that members of groups have characteristics believed to be common to their group when those characteristics are difficult to observe directly in any given individual.
You’re right that avoiding wrongful termination suits (which tend to be more plaintiff-friendly than hiring suits) is one source of statistical
discrimination and could conceivably explain away much of what otherwise appears to be taste discrimination. You’re not quite right about Pager, she doesn’t address your statistical discrimination based on fear of torts hypothesis, but neither does she state or imply that the employer preference for whites she identifies is taste discrimination. She simply and accurately calls it “discrimination” and largely abstains from speculation about its causes. The only speculation she does engage in is the possibility that employers believe that even blacks who have avoided incarceration to date have greater latent criminal tendencies than whites and thus some component of what she observes may still be statistical discrimination based on fear of crime, despite a research design that tried to make criminality directly observable and therefore unnecessary to impute. Thus, while not digressing beyond the tightly focused scope of her paper to explore every possible theory, she nonetheless makes a good faith effort to, if anything, err on the side of discounting taste discrimination. If you care to discuss her article further, you can read it here:
http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/publications/papers/2003/pagerajs.pdf
When Pager gave her job talk here a few months ago, a colleague (a liberal for what it’s worth) raised your question. In the hallway afterwards he and I discussed it and concluded that it is an empirical question. For instance, one could do audit studies in relatively plaintiff-friendly states and relatively defendant-friendly states. Or one could compare the hiring behavior of firms with and without wrongful termination insurance based on the principle that moral hazard makes people risk-prone when the consequences are lessened.
In general I think it’s fair to say that on empirical questions in their respective areas of inquiry, my colleagues are neither stupid nor ideologues. For example, they are pretty consistently eager to seriously and with an open-mind grapple with theories of racial disparity other than taste discrimination, if for no other reason than that these alternate hypothesis are more theoretically interesting than simple bigotry.
Gabriel,
Thanks for your response, though I have at least one more nit to pick out of this one. First, the dichotomy is false only in light of how you re-framed it, not how I originally presented it (or meant to, at any rate). As you know, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. My initial point was that statistics can and are used improperly as ammunition to further political agendas—I know this to be the case in lending as surely as I know the sun to rise in the East. My second post was merely to ask whether other areas (hiring specifically) may not be subject to the same misinterpretation and reporting of similarly damning statistics. I understand fully that anti-black discrimination may also be rational in this context, though my point was that it is not, nor will ever be, reported as such beyond the footnotes of an academic journal. My concluding question was rhetorical with the subtext of “we both know exactly how this would be reported.” Though I probably wasn’t clear with this.
Further, whether I was not quite right (or entirely wrong) about Pager specifically is wholly coincidental, as I am utterly oblivious to the person’s work. But taking only the information you have provided, I would say I am much closer to right than wrong. You state that she doesn’t account for the hypothetical (that I know to be reality), and simply reports the conclusion as “discrimination,” in a quality-neutral context. Well, this borders on what I surmised in saying previously “though I wonder to what extent (the answer being obviously none) other causal factors than malice were considered.” I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the quality of Pager’s work, since what I am speaking of is not quantifiable and she only had the figures she had. Yet it does exist, and is surely a larger factor in her findings than what she or any of the media would represent. Let me say also that I understand it is not her responsibility to supervise what the media portrays, though to present a paper concluding rampant discrimination in hiring (if this was, in fact, her conclusion) when quite possibly very little “taste discrimination” exists, strikes me as either duplicitous or criminally ignorant in today’s political climate. This is, of course, just my own impression.
I’ll thank you again for your responses and conclude with the recognition that you have me at a disadvantage insofar as scholarly audit protocols are concerned. I know only what the real business environment entails and that this real environment does not seem to be accurately reflected in what your colleagues present to each other or the public. But who knows? In this, my dichotomy may truly be false.
Several of the above comments state that the writer will not believe conservatives need help until there is a verified hiring bias. The real problem here is a self-selection by conservatives. Is there any way I could stand to teach in a department at this university (Duke)? How about in a department like Cultural Anthropology, which last year purchased an anti-war advertisement with departmental funds?
Conservatives choose other paths. We enter the work force, or if we get our advanced degrees, join think tanks. Some kind of affirmative action for conservative professors will not gain much because there are so few applicants from the Right. This is where Dr. Brandon’s “survival of the fittest” logic fails. He assumes a wide pool of applicants from all backgrounds struggling to fill a few positions. In reality, very few academics are forced away from the Ivory Tower, and very few to begin with are conservative.
How to change this? The institutional bias must be demolished within departments, and the best way to do this is with the help of conservative students. With the proper protections of a clear policy (whether Horowitz’s statement or some other system) conservative students can safely challenge their professors in class, which will take the edge off of the intra-departmental liberalism.
If you are still not convinced about the institutional bias conservative students must deal with, visit http://www.thefire.org and read Drs. Kors and Silverglate’s book The Shadow University.
“In reality, very few academics are forced away from the Ivory Tower, and very few to begin with are conservative.”
Josh, there has been a surplus of job candidates in most fields for over a decade. Many people leave academia for that reason. Brandon is right on this point.
TGIF, but I still have little time to blog
Since I’m still trying to catch up on work while recovering from The Sinus Infection That Ate My Brain, I’ll post some links to other bloggers who, unlike me, have actually posted something worth reading recently: Jim over at ZeroIntelligence…
[…] quite as smug as a number of administrators and academics at Duke (discussed and quoted here) when presented with the ideological imbalance numbers there, most striking of which (though it was […]