Maybe it’s too early to be handing out the Koufax, but I’ll be surprised (pleasantly, to be sure!) if I read any post I think is better in the next 11 months. Here’s a small sample:
THE PRINCIPLE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM stipulates that “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties”; it expressly insists that professors should have autonomy from legislatures, trustees, alumni, parents, and ecclesiastical authorities with regard to their teaching and research. In this respect it is one of the legacies of the Enlightenment, which sought…successfully, in those nations most influenced by the Enlightenment…to free scientists and humanists from the dictates of church and state. And it is precisely that autonomy from legislative and religious oversight that helped to fuel the extraordinary scientific and intellectual efflorescence in the West over the past two centuries; it has also served as one of the cornerstones of the free and open society, in contrast to societies in which certain forms of research will not be pursued if they displease the General Secretary or the Council of Clerics. But today, the paradox of these legislative “academic bills of rights” is this: they claim to defend academic freedom precisely by promising to give the state direct oversight of course curricula, of departmental hiring practices, and of the intellectual direction of academic fields. In other words, by violating the very principle they claim to defend.
There’s more – much, much more. Sit down with a cup of coffee and read the whole thing.
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I read it. It was good, but you need to hold your horses before crowning it the best post of the year. LOL!
Thanks for the link, Amp, I read, I responded, I will be forwarding it along and posting it to my boards. Very, very timely.
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Sorry, Amp, but this guy’s analysis looks really sketch. At best, he hasn’t bothered to look up the facts he cites to support his argument, and it looks like he deliberately misrepresented facts at least once. There’s no way this is the best blog post of the last year.
I’m posting this here because (a) the original post is over a year old and (b) labeling this as the best blog post of the year essentially counts as an endorsement of everything he says.
Consider his approving quotation of this passage from an article in The American Prospect, where the author comments on a study (more likely a “study”) reported in The American Enterprise on the ratio of liberals to conservatives in academia:
UT Austin’s women’s studies faculty is enormous, with 206 faculty members listed on their webpage. Economics has 50; history, 88.
I haven’t been able to find a breakdown of how UT Austin’s faculty divide up among its various schools and programs, but it makes perfect sense to exclude business, law, medicine, and the sciences from this kind of study, which was presumably about undergraduate education and therefore must exclude professors in those schools that only have graduate students, such as professional schools. Excluding the sciences is also sound methodology: if your concern is about the ideological viewpoints students are being exposed to, why look at science departments?
Considering that Cornell’s Women Studies program has only 27 core faculty, it would be pretty tough for AEI to have sampled 33 of them, though it is possible, but unlikely, that Cornell has actually cut 6 “core faculty” since the study. The cited article must be counting “affiliated faculty,” who are members of other departments that “regularly teach” courses cross-listed in the women’s studies department, and of whom there are more than 100, as part of Women’s Studies. English is even bigger, with something like 200 – there were too many for me to count. By contrast, other departments you might expect to be large, such as history (42 faculty by my count) or economics (32 faculty) are not nearly as big. The only “cherry-picking” I see is by The American Prospect, selectively defining “Women’s Studies” as “any faculty member affiliated with the Women’s Studies program in any way” and neglecting to mention that the number of such faculty is enormous relative to the size of other departments.
I couldn’t find any figures on the total size of Cornell’s faculty in the humanities and social sciences, so it’s not clear what percentage of the humanities and social science faculty the ~150 women’s studies faculty comprise. The point about professional school and science faculty is the same as for UT Austin.
Then, on David Horowitz’s survey of commencement speakers, Berube writes:
Berube has selectively picked some of the most liberal schools Horowitz surveyed. Horowitz’s list of 32 schools includes Brown, Caltech, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Williams, and Yale. Tha’s not a selectively chosen list of “famously liberal campuses”: Horowitz practically copied the U.S. News rankings. Given that Berobe linked the original source, it’s hard to see how this could be anything other than deliberate misrepresentation.
Then we have:
So because one group of conservatives has made a certain argument against a legal doctrine, other conservatives are forbidden from making a seemingly contrary argument against university hiring practices? It’s not as though “conservatives” are some monolith who all believe the same things. Even if many of the conservatives who whine about liberalism in the academy are also opposed to the disparate impact doctrine (many, but not all, doubtlessly are), Berube hasn’t made any effort whatsoever to analyze their reasons for thinking it’s a valid inference in this particular case.
There are lots of good responses to conservative criticisms of the academy. Unfortunately, this is not one of them.
Ah, that was “of 2006,” not “of 2005,” so this is not, in fact, over a year old.
That would make sense if the schools you listed did only educate graduate students. However, the engineering school offers nine separate bachelors degrees, and UT’s business school offers a Bachelors of Business Administration. There are literally thousands of undergrads enrolled at UT’s business school. I can’t think of any reason, other than incompetence or deliberate misrepresentation, to exclude the business school from the survey. Can you?
Because students are also exposed to ideological viewpoints in science classes.
Empiricist, not that you’ve realized the post in question is only two days old, are you going to post your critique on Bérubé’s site? He’s better positioned to defend his research than I am.
Sally makes some good points.
Regarding the commencement speakers, I’m not sure what Horowitz’s point is. As Horowitz himself seems to admit, who is chosen as a commencement speaker “reflect[s] the preferences of the respective campus communities,” including students. Looking through the US News.com top colleges lists (here and here), it’s true that there are a lot of left-leaning campuses there.
Here’s what I don’t understand. In what way does the fact that a lot of top colleges have campus communities that lean left, prove – or even imply – unfair bias?
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In general, I think that even if you’re right in your critique of the statistical issues – and it’s not clear to me that you are – that still leaves many of M.B.’s substantive points untouched.
Academic freedom – including tenure – is established to help assure that inquiry is not burdened by public opinion, because the intellectually rigorous conclusion is not always the popular one. We have a somewhat similar system regarding federal judges. To help judges achieve independence from public opinion, we grant them a lifetime appointment – “tenure,” if you will. Yet public opinion still comes to bear in the nominating process.
We could completely insulate the process from politics by having the body of existing federal judges select new judges. Perhaps this would produce better results. Or perhaps it would produce a self-perpetuating entrenched judging class. I suspect that this fear prompted the Framers to avoid such a process.
Yet the system that the Framers rejected regarding judges is the system we have adopted regarding professors: Existing professors select new professors, and select which professors will receive tenure. We hope that existing professors make their choices on the basis of appropriate criteria, but I am not aware of any mechanisms to stop them from doing otherwise.
What evidence do we have that academia has shown a greater affinity for meritocracy than other aspects of society? Does academia have a history of being less racist? Less sexist? Less classist? (I’ve heard that the University of Chicago has managed to amass a huge number of Nobel Prizes by virtue of the fact that they were willing to admit and employ larger percentage of Jews that was fashionable last century, but I couldn’t find any quick corroboration.)
In short, I see structural reasons to suspect that self-perpetuating groups Рwhether churches, country clubs, or unions Рwill tend to select members in a manner that reinforces the groups world views, and I see little reason to believe that faculty transcend this dynamic. I understand Michael B̩rub̩ to argue that this suspicion has yet to be proved. He may well be right. I harbor the suspicion nonetheless.
One reason for the disparity between the numbers Empiricist cites is that Horowitz is not correctly representing his own data. It’s plausible that Berube looked at the results Horowitz gave, saw that 25% of the professors from one college were from women’s studies, which does not represent 25% of the faculty at any school I’m aware of, and concluded that this was not a good sampling method. This, along with the exclusion of departments that teach several thousand undergraduates (science and engineering are not as popular as English and psychology, but to say there are no undergraduates is a blatant lie), is a valid criterion for determining if the study is flawed.
The criticism of like groups perpetuating themselves is a more reasonable point. Still, many departments were all white and male 50 years ago, and even 30 years ago. Today, most departments have several female faculty and at least one minority or foreign. They are still not represented in accordance with the population, but the numbers have steadily improved since policies were put into place limiting the prejudice in the pipeline (undergrad & graduate education) and in hiring. Most departments’ research content is not related to politics. I would entertain your idea in histiry, political science, and women’s studies. But molecular biology, most subfields of English, engineering, etc. have no connection with politics.
Another salient point may be that people who lean more towards the right use their educations at lucrative think tanks or industrial jobs, whereas more left-leaning people use it for low-paying education jobs. Graduate school in the humanities is typically unpaid or below-subsistence whereas in science and engineering we can don’t usually have to go into debt after undergrad. Either way, you have to love what you do and the divide, as Berube notes in the AAUP survey, about 20% of academics describe themselves as conservative. This same divide can be seen in the splt between chemical engineering and chemistry, ostensibly similar fields, one of which is far more lucrative than the other (the middle-high starting salary as a bachelor of chemical engineering is what a PhD chemist may start at). My experience with fellow students in both fields (n = ca. 200) suggests more chemical engineers are conservative while chemists tend to be more liberal. Middle of the road people tend to go either way pretty equally. As I said above, it’s not exclusive, but it’s a noticable trend.
Do let me know when Empiricist gets around to dealing with the real data — that is, the very large sample of uncooked stuff I cited from the Higher Education Research Institute — and stops carrying water for the notoriously truth-challenged David Horowitz. So far I haven’t heard anything from Empiricist on my site. Thanks.