The State of Florida has implemented a law which requires all faculty members to disclose their political affiliation. This is being done in the name of “intellectual diversity.” Presumably this will eventually lead to some kind of affirmative action for conservative scholars.
Attempts like this to police academia are not all that unusual. I remember having to sign a document testifying that I had never been a member of the Communist Party before I began graduate studies in the University of California system. But these attempts to regulate what professors think, what they teach and what they publish shows that politicians and the general public do not understand how an academic discipline works. They seem to think that in order to become a professor you must pass some kind of political loyalty test and then commit to inculcating students to the party’s beliefs.
In a way, that is just what we do, but rather than loyalty to a political party, we pledge our loyalty to the discipline and we teach our students that discipline. Let me illustrate this by examining my own discipline, history.
The first thing to understand about any academic discipline is that it is a cooperative enterprise. I cannot possibly be an expert on all of history. I have a small area that I study in depth. For all the rest of my understanding of the past, I need to rely on colleagues and their different areas of expertise. To make sure what we write is reliable, we all agree to a set of standards. These standards are not designed to make sure we are all in agreement; in fact, at the highest level, much of the discipline of history consists of arguments over different interpretations of events.
Charges of indoctrination are, therefore, very disconcerting for us in the history profession. Indoctrinating is the last thing we want to do. In 2013 the American Historical society adopted a history discipline core as part of its Tuning Project. This was a set of competencies that colleges and university were to expect from their undergraduate history majors. The tone of the document can be gleaned from its preamble:
“History is a set of evolving rules and tools that allows us to interpret the past with clarity, rigor, and an appreciation for interpretative debate. It requires evidence, sophisticated use of information, and a deliberative stance to explain change and continuity over time. As a profoundly public pursuit, history is essential to active and empathetic citizenship and requires effective communication to make the past accessible to multiple audiences. As a discipline, history entails a set of professional ethics and standards that demand peer review, citation, and toleration for the provisional nature of knowledge.”
Notice a few things about this statement. The first is that the statement does not prescribe any particular interpretation of any particular event. It does not prescribe any particular method or political orientation that a historian must take. In fact, it makes it clear that debate over interpretations is central to the enterprise. What is prescribed is a method that involves the use of evidence and standards, such as peer review, which binds the historian to the discipline as a whole. Notice also that there is no mention about finding “the truth” about the past. There is instead an admonishment to regard conclusions as “provisional.” It is difficult to see how this leads to uniformity of political belief.
If there is little desire to indoctrinate within the historical profession, why are so many professors left-leaning? I think the answer can be found in the 1983 film Educating Rita. It is the story of Rita (Julia Walters), a woman from the working class, who hires a grizzled old professor (played by Michael Caine) to tutor her. There is a scene where Rita, after spending some time at college studying literature, goes back home and spends an evening in a pub with her friends. It is a disaster. She is bored with their talk of local gossip and she is unable to discuss with them what she has learned.
The study of history frequently leads to similar results. The need to support your opinions with evidence makes it difficult to support a position simply by saying this is how we have always done it. The historical imagination encourages you to think sympathetically about people who are not like you. Holding knowledge tentatively opens possibilities for changing one’s position. These are all traits more typical of the left than the right. In other words, by providing students with the tools for critical thinking, it makes it difficult to go back to the beliefs you had before you went to college.
So if we look at DeSantis’s faculty survey we can see how ridiculous it is as a way to intellectually diversify the faculty. The survey begins with a series of questions about how open the campus is to a variety of viewpoints. One question, for example, one of the questions is “My institution is equally tolerant and welcoming of liberal and conservative beliefs.” The five possible answers are: strongly agree. Agree, neither agree not disagree, disagree and strongly disagree. First, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are not defined anywhere in the survey. But more importantly, there are more than liberal or conservative points of view. Do you really have intellectual diversity if the only two points of view are liberal and conservative?
Then there is a series of questions about how political beliefs shape pedagogy, tenure and promotion decisions and research and publication. Again, the political points of view under consideration are limited too liberal or conservative. What the survey clearly doesn’t understand is that one of the key elements of promotion and publishing decisions is not political orientation, but reputation in the discipline. It would be hard to deny that politics doesn’t play a role here, but it is more of the “Who do you know?” and “Whose work have you favorably reviewed?” than anything having to do with tax policy or immigration.
DeSantis’s survey is not serious attempt to promote academic debate by encouraging differing points of view. It is attempt to rile his base by convincing them that an education that opens minds is dangerous.