Yesterday's New York Times piece
"Professors' Politics Draw Lawmakers Into the Fray" was another Horowitz-inspired piece of propaganda (for more on the millions of dollars Scaife and others channel into his anti-academia foundations, see Dale145's
diary earlier this month). The piece pits students claiming bias against academics who say they can police themselves. It sounds like a malpractice issue, and adopting this frame is, I think, exactly what the Horowitz forces want the media to do. As I will show below, the implied leap from a handful of instances of criticism of George Bush in lectures, to the assertion of widespread liberal bias in academia, is misleading. What the article misses, and what liberals had better start saying more loudly, is that this leap is dangerous, and that the notion of ideological quotas for professors is simply foolish. And if we need historical proof of this, we have to go no further than David Horowitz's historical soul mate, Mao Zedong.
(continued below)
First, the background to the Times piece
The Times article is about a Penn State student who complained about a Physics prof's derogatory comments about President Bush and the invasion of Iraq. A result of the complaint is a state inquiry into whether such remarks amounted to discrimination:
The encounter has blossomed into an official legislative inquiry, putting Pennsylvania in the middle of a national debate spurred by conservatives over whether public universities are promoting largely liberal positions and discriminating against students who disagree with them.
Recognizing that genuine discrimination is wrong, most universities have explicit language that balances free speech against that possibility. The University of Wisconsin, where tenure was born, specifically prohibits expressions "that clearly derogate and debase a student or students in the class on the basis of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability." This is not a conservative or a liberal value, it is the responsibility that comes with the rights that are part of academic freedom. But, while universities recognize that there must be such a balance, the Times article only provides examples of student complaints about discrimination, and none of the chilling effects of "enemies lists" compiled by the likes of Lynne Cheney and David Horowitz, and physical intimidation like the assault on Paul Mirecki have on the free exchange of ideas. That's a formulation guaranteed to make the professors look like the bad guys, even if the complaints are on the level of the student "who said a philosophy teacher he had during his junior year referred often to his own homosexuality. . ." If revealing one's sexual orientation amounts to discriminating against students with different sexual orientations, then perhaps I should wear a burka to keep from revealing my gender and race.
But the conservative slant of the Times piece goes even deeper. The Times only includes examples of speech that were allegedly anti-Bush or anti-heterosexual, thereby supporting the idea that "liberal bias" is the outcome of having more registered democrats in academia. But if you think about it, that connection doesn't make sense.
What constitutes intellectual diversity?
There is an important difference between the university's notion of responsible academic speech and the one that the article fosters. The article is built on the idea that "intellectual diversity" is a matter of liberal versus conservative:
While Mr. Horowitz insists his campaign for intellectual diversity is nonpartisan, it is fueled, in large measure, by studies that show the number of Democratic professors is generally much larger than the number of Republicans.
Regardless of the reliability of the study in question, it is worth asking whether a balance in party registration is important for academia. Certainly, we prefer professors to be educated. As a society, we have also generally sought to integrate faculties with respect to gender and race. What many people are asking for is a similar type of affirmative action for Republicans. But does party affiliation result in discrimination against certain students?
My area of specialty is the history of Asian religions, I simply can't see where my party affiliation makes a lot of difference about how I teach the material. Certainly, when I teach how the Dalai Lama condemns materialism and violence, it is a message whose radical implications would be critical of both Democratic and Republican party platforms. When I teach how Confucius promoted ritual propriety as the cornerstone of proper social interactions, the implications for the rhetoric of both Rush Limbaugh and Stephanie Miller are plain to everyone in the classroom. Can I teach about those East Asian religious traditions without relating them to contemporary politics and today's society? Perhaps, but I don't think I would be doing a good job if I did. But the crucial point is that I am teaching about traditions, not telling students what to think.
What about qualifying everything I say with caveats like: "while the writer we have read explicitly condemns the first Gulf War, that is wrong"? I think that would certainly run the risk of "derogating students in the class on the basis of religion."
My party affiliation, like my sexual orientation, is simply not relevant to the content of what I teach. Sometimes, when it is a relevant illustration of the content of what I was lecturing about, I have told my students about participating in anti-war marches, and I have told them stories about my kids, thereby perhaps revealing something about my political affiliation and my sexual orientation. But I'm not preaching being a Green or being Straight any more than I am preaching Buddhism or Confucianism, and that's where the fallacy of this whole line of reasoning lies.
If party affiliation justified affirmative action for teachers, then certainly we should do the same thing for priests, for social workers, for network executives, and for CEO's. These are all jobs that influence the lives and thoughts of young people. But if you choose your teachers by their party affiliations, you run the risk of doing to American Academia what Mao did to the Chinese education system during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960's and 1970's.
Chairman Mao's Academic Purge
Let me draw a parallel between the Horowitz program for the politicization of academics and one that I am familiar with from history. One of the transformations of the Chinese educational system in the early 1960's was the "great educational revolution," which promoted the enrollment of the children of workers and peasants. By the late 1960's entrance examinations for schools were abandoned in favor of admitting people based on their "political virtue." This led to the rise in students and faculty drawn from the class of "gong nong bing" or "worker, farmer, solider" students. The result of this and other Cultural Revolution reforms was, in Immanuel Hsü's words, a "disruption in education [that] caused the loss of a generation of trained manpower" (The Rise of Modern China, 703).
One might say that parallel doesn't apply because Maoism was leftist and Horowitz, these days, is a rightist. But both are arguing that there should be more representatives of the politically dominant group at the university, effectively trying to end its independence. They both use reasonable and even noble rationales - who would not be in favor of equality of access to education, or representing a diversity of viewpoints in the classroom? And both are using those rationales as a fig leaf for trying to bring the university personnel decisions under state control.
Here, I want to be very clear that I don't think professors should be able to say anything whatsoever in class. Not only would yelling fire when there is no fire be out of bounds, but the University of Wisconsin's rules I quoted above make good sense to me. I also don't want to imply that universities make ideal choices about curriculum and tenure. But at least they are not subject to quotas based on political affiliations. What I am trying to show is that the New York Times article is a great example of the Horowitz bait-and-switch, from a few student anecdotes to a call for state control over who should be tenured at the university. And both liberals and conservatives should know better.