I recently read an essay about academic freedom, by Michael Berube on Le Blog. I'd like to address some of what I think are flaws in his argument, but I appreciate the fact that he has gone to the trouble of expressing his thesis in a form that's accessible to the blogosphere. The first issue I'd like to raise is that I think he understates the problem of bias in the academy:
I'll make the obvious argument first. Academic freedom is under attack for pretty much the same reasons that liberalism itself is under attack. American universities tend to be somewhat left of center of the American mainstream, particularly with regard to cultural issues that have to do with gender roles and sexuality: the combination of a largely liberal, secular professoriate and a generally under-25 student body tends to give you a campus population that, by and large, does not see gay marriage as a serious threat to the Republic. And after 9/11 again, for obvious reasons many forms of mainstream liberalism have been denounced as anti-American. There is, as you know, a cottage industry of popular right-wing books in which liberalism is equated with treason (that would be Ann Coulter), with mental disorders (Michael Savage), and with fascism (Jonah Goldberg). Coulters book [sic] also mounts a vigorous defense of Joe McCarthy, and Michelle Malkin has written a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. In that kind of climate, it should come as no surprise that we would be seeing attacks on one of the few remaining institutions in American life that is often though not completely dominated by liberals.
Simply put, be begins by understating the bias and misrepresenting the opposition as a bunch of right-wing kooks. No doubt there's a little hyperbole in the submissions of the three critics he mentions (though at this point he omits more credible critiques, such as Alan Kors' The Shadow University), but sometimes a little hyperbolics are necessary to get the boulder rolling. Recent polls indicate that left self-identification in the humanities within American universities varies from a high of 88% (English) to a low of 77% (Sociology and History), while less than 10% identify with the right in those disciplines. More to the point, there are no longer any reliably conservative disciplines anywhere in academia. Even campus departments traditionally viewed as conservative tend to be more "liberal" than the general population, including business and engineering. According to Stan Rothman's recent testimony to the "Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on American Faculty Ideology", 49% of business and 51% of engineering faculty self-identify as "on the left or liberal" while a minority of 39% in both disciplines self-identify as "on the right or conservative". Moreover, the major shift leftward has been relatively recent. In 1969 the Carnegie Commission found that 45% of faculty identified as left/liberal and 28% as right/conservative. Over the next two decades the situation didn't change much, but then by 1999 72% identified as on the left with only 15% on the right. What changed?
It's difficult to imagine how this change could have been effected without the "piling on" of a cultural orientation that generally attempts to reward like-minded people, and either inadvertently or deliberately excludes oppositional voices. And the shift also coincides with the emergence and rapid ascendance of the multiculturalism theme in academia, which provided effective "cover" for this "piling on" approach. Most people believe "diversity" and "multiculturalism" are simply synonyms for "variety", rather than products of the cultural remapping of Marxist ideology produced by the Frankfurt School. But not only have multiculturalism and diversity become wildly popular concepts (mostly within academia, however) but the concepts have even displaced tried and true leftist iconic prescriptions like "equality of condition". According to the new campus ideology traditional ideological watchwords such as"equality", "freedom", and "liberty" no longer apply to individuals, but to groups. Group rights now not only trump individual rights in nearly every corner of society, but they even trump "academic freedom"! If you doubt this go to any university website and enter these words to compare the number of hits produced. You'll find that there are almost no exceptions to the rule that "diversity" trumps everything. Now try it with a few other institutional website search engines, and compare.
Given these apparent preferences it seems reasonable to at least consider the possibility that such commitments to group rights undermine the set of commitments that, according to Ladd, Lipset, and others define an American Identity. How does it not amount to slander to label this equivalent to racism, and what sort of weak substitute for such a robust rights orientation does "multiculturalism" really represent?
But the second issue is probably more important, though a great deal more difficult to nail down. Ironically it involves the same confusion that sometimes afflicts people on the libertarian right. This involves the notion that freedom is an apparently infinitely extensible attribute, and that absolute freedom is something that one ought to aspire toward or desire, like being rich or thin. In fact, if academia is able to convince both itself, and others, of the truth of this conceptual meme they're liable to find themselves stranded in an airless wasteland where the only movement they'll be able to produce is a helpless Brownian agitation. As the great economist from the London School of Economics, Ralf Dahrendorf, once observed in his book Life Chances (paraphrasing) "Freedom without obligation might as well be obligation without freedom."
Even if we completely discount the "social contract" concept that Berube argues isn't applicable to academic freedom it's nonetheless a fact that failure of the academy to obligate itself in some realistic way will lead to complete ineffectiveness and marginalization, like a weightless untethered astronaut in outer space. That's not the fault of the kooky right. It's just the effect of bad judgment.
In his essay Berube betrays no awareness of this danger at all. The argument is simply that academic freedom is, by definition, without obligation (or that all freedom is, by definition, unobstructed by obligation). If this is freedom, it'll prove useless and powerless. And if achieved it'll feed radicalization on the theory that powerlessness must be someone else's fault.
Michael then addresses the testimony of National Association of Scholars President, Stephen Balch, to the Select Committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (Nov. 9, 2005):
More seriously, Balch is drawing on the history of affirmative action and employment discrimination law in order to argue that universities should make good faith efforts to hire people more to his ideological liking. This is a common theme in right-wing attacks on universities, especially among those critics who have become alarmed that affirmative action has gone too far, insofar as fully five percent of all doctorates are now awarded to black people.
The implication that racism is attributable exclusively to the conservative opposition is a meme so dear to the left that it inevitably proves irresistible. So perhaps we can excuse Michael for being "in the tank." But I think Dr. Balch was employing irony to make the point that there are distinctly credible arguments against such notions as "multiculturalism" that have been effectively silenced within the academy due to the dominance of a contrived ideological formulation, insisting on the "inherent racism" of privileged cultures. S.M. Lipset, who with Everett Ladd produced one of the seminal studies of academic bias, The Divided Academy, once said that in the 1960s and '70s, when he and Ladd conducted their analysis, the ends of the competence spectrum were relatively immune to social pressure in hiring, tenure and promotion. That is, people of extremely high ability were hired and promoted irrespective of their ideological views or race, while those of manifestly low ability simply didn't make the grade no matter how ideologically servile or white they were. But for the vast majority in the middle their "ability to fit in" was the primary determinant of hiring, tenure, and promotion.
This suggests that, at least at the time, people of extraordinary gifts tended to really be free of the threat of social pressure. And if there's a rationale for academic freedom, providing the benefit of independence in research and education, it was only this smallish group that achieved such an absence of limitation during that post-Vietnam era. More recently, another analysis conducted by Stan Rothman suggests that the situation has become worse rather than better, though descrimination is no longer on the basis of race. In other words, not even people of exceptional talent can depend on their abilities to see them through the ideological gauntlet. In such a situation "academic freedom" is starved of significance. It might as well be a straight jacket.
And again, Berube suggests that concerns about bias in the academy are being fomented by the "radical right":
There is a sense, then, in which traditional conservatives are procedural liberals, as are liberals themselves; but members of the radical right, and the radical left, are not. The radical rights contempt for procedural liberalism, with its checks, balances, and guarantees that minority reports will be incorporated into the body politic, can be seen in recent defenses of the theory that the President has the power to set aside certainlaws and provisions of the Constitution at will, and in the religious rights increasingly venomous and hallucinatory attacks on a judicial branch most of whose members were in fact appointed by Republicans.
The first sentence suggests that at least the principle of liberalism is intact for some members of the academy. But I think Berube misrepresents the problem. He'll first have to address the issue of whether or not we're at war; since in most wars certain liberties have been interrupted for the sake of preserving the context responsible for maintaining freedom in general, not by the "radical right" but by the President who emancipated the slaves and by a number of Democrats, most notably Wilson and Roosevelt. It isn't clear to me, for instance, why we'd support a demand for MIT to pay the salary of Noam Chomsky if he persists in giving aid and comfort to sworn enemies of the US, including those who decapitated Daniel Pearl, any more than we'd allow the German/American Bund to schedule campus demonstrations during WWII. Tolerating such activity during wartime may simply be too much to ask. One needn't be a "wing nut" to scratch one's head over the wisdom of such masochistic tolerance.
It seems to me that until the ideology of multiculturalism began to infuse the universities in the early '80s, academia was more or less capable of self-correction, simply because it was able to recognize that its bread wasn't buttered on the edge. But the doctrinally relativist commitments involved in the new ideology apparently undermine even that kind of pragmatic judgment. Nonetheless, there are some decent models for dissensus within academia that could contest this now-pervasive ideology, if we opened the door a little--to a new degree of freedom.
In summary, I can conceive of but three methods to correct the dysfunctions noted above: open or veiled quotas based on ideology that attempt to ensure ideological diversity; some abrogation or alteration of the common conception of "academic freedom" to include revocation of tenure; or some institutional arrangement that allows the creation of new departments or programs that can open career paths for competent people of more traditional classical liberal values. Or perhaps some combination.
Of course, anyone who is liberal, in the classical sense, will oppose quotas and will recognize the dangerous precedent they set. That leaves the latter two. It's important to recognize that freedom must be balanced by obligation of some sort, and that this is less a matter of principle than necessity. If academia were populated by people wise enough to perceive this necessity themselves there'd be no problem. But since it apparently isn't, we may need to open the door to markets by ending or attenuating the practice of tenure. I regard this as a loss, so perhaps we could try something else first?
We may need institutional arrangements that at least establish the conditions for a credible contest between the "multi-culti left" and the classically liberal or even theo-conservative right, in order to infuse a little wisdom into the self-satisfied academy. If academia wants relevance, this may be the price.
Posted by Demosophist at June 14, 2006 03:58 PM