Phoebe Maltz takes on the right-wing critique of academia, explaining why it's demeaning to the very principles the right purports to be defending.
My favorite part was when she mentioned how the "reforms" the right plea for echo classic liberal call for diversity, "verging on demands for affirmative action." I, good liberal that I am, have been sympathetic to the idea of ideological affirmative action in academia for awhile (and not only as a tactical stance to chide conservatives for their hypocrisy). But I do seem rather alone in explicitly and consistently calling for it.
In any event, the article is very good, and I highly recommend it.
UPDATE: Phoebe responds to critiques of her article at the National Review's Phi Beta Cons blog. Who would have thought that the National Review would be terrible at this sort of thing?
CU seeks right-wing prof
ReplyDelete"The University of Colorado is considering a $9 million program to bring high-profile political conservatives to teach on the left-leaning campus...
"CU officials want to create an endowment for a Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy..."
Any of us, whether student, alumnus, faculty member, or whatever, see only part of the picture. It's like the story of the blind men and the elephant.
ReplyDeleteMy best indication of the state of things at Carleton comes from the Hurricane Katrina seminar in the Spring of 2006. I attended that, when I was back for an Alumni Council meeting.
The speakers at that seminar were uniformly left-wing. I pointed that out to Rob Oden (president of Carleton), and he agreed that that was the case, and that more needed to be done to achieve his stated goal of ideological diversity, as part of the College's overall diversity goals.
Are there no conservative professors at Carleton, or do the conservative professors tend to be uninterested in things like a seminar on Hurricane Katrina? I went to a relatively politically moderate university (University of Virginia), yet I remember the discussion panel after 9/11 featured only liberal professors. I don't remember any of my conservative economics professors showing up. Perhaps they just hadn't been invited because conservatives were being deliberately excluded, but I think it more likely that conservative college professors are more likely to go into the hard sciences, economics and business, and less likely to go into fields where they'd have insights to share about every sociopolitical event (although I bet if Carleton had a seminar about the subprime crisis, there would be some conservative profs on the panel). Certainly conservative professors like Ken Elzinga were popular, highly respected and honored on campus; they just didn't have much to say about some subjects. Though with increasing cross-disciplinary tendencies in the academy, perhaps there's now someone doing the freakonomics of terrorism or disaster planning/relief who gets invited to these panels.
ReplyDeleteP.G., that's a good question and I'm not sure of the answer. I know there are conservative students at Carleton; they've published their writings, and David has commented on them. I didn't hear their voices at the Katrina seminar. My guess was that they stayed away. Of course I can only guess at the reasons. They may have been uninterested. They may have been interested, but not up to confronting the left-wing consensus.
ReplyDeleteI've heard talk among conservative alumni of faculty leaving Carleton because they felt dissenting voices weren't tolerated. For instance, one husband-and-wife pair of political science professors left for Notre Dame.
"They may have been interested, but not up to confronting the left-wing consensus."
ReplyDeleteI don't know how you figure that, since they *do* publish their views-- as you point out and as I can attest as a recent Carl grad.
As for the lack of conservatives in academia, I can't help but wonder if many of their views just don't hold up in a marketplace of ideas where rigorous and rational inquiry is prized. (That said I don't particularly mind the idea of colleges promoting some measure of viewpoint diversity.)
a marketplace of ideas where rigorous and rational inquiry is prized.
ReplyDeleteBut that's the whole question: is such inquiry prized, or is academia an echo chamber in which only one view is spoken and heard, now that dissent has been suppressed?
I suspect that, as is generally the case with such dichotomies, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and I don't pretend to know how far to one side or the other the truth sits.