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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
If you don't believe American campuses are dominated by the left, try finding a registered Republican teaching in the social sciences.
Jun 20, 2002 | In the fall of 2001, I spoke at a large public university in the eastern United States, which will remain nameless to protect the innocent. It was one of more than 30 colleges I had visited during the school year and, as usual, my invitation had come from a small group of campus conservatives who also put together a small dinner for me at a local restaurant.
Among those invited to the dinner was a silver-haired history professor, who served as the faculty sponsor of the club inviting me. This man represented a dying breed of faculty conservatives who had become tenured in an era when hiring committees were not yet applying a litmus test to exclude those whose political views were not suitably left. The transformation that followed was succinctly described by the distinguished intellectual historian John P. Diggins at an annual meeting of the American Studies Association in Costa Mesa, Calif., a decade ago. Diggins told the assembled academics: "When my generation of liberals was in control of university faculties in the '60s, we opened the doors to the hiring of radicals in the name of diversity. We thought you would do the same. But you didn't. You closed the doors behind you."
Diggins' observation provides the template for what has happened to American universities in the last 30 years. The liberal academy of the 1950s and 1960s, whose ideals were shaped by Charles Eliot and Matthew Arnold and whose mission was "the disinterested pursuit of knowledge," is no more. Leftists tenured after the 1960s first transformed these institutions into political battlegrounds and then redefined them as "agencies of social change." In the process, they first defeated and then excluded peers whom they perceived as obstacles to their politicized academic agendas.
Some years ago a distinguished member of this radical generation, Richard Rorty, summarized its achievement in the following words: "The power base of the left in America is now in the universities, since the trade unions have largely been killed off. The universities have done a lot of good work by setting up, for example, African-American studies programs, women's studies programs, gay and lesbian studies programs. They have created power bases for these movements." Rorty is a professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia and one of the nation's most honored intellectual figures. He is also an editor of the democratic socialist magazine Dissent and a moderate in the ranks of the left. That such an intellectual should celebrate the conversion of academic institutions into political "power bases" speaks volumes about the tragedy that has befallen the university.
On the occasions of my campus visits, I am always curious to discover the local circumstances that conspire to create a situation so otherwise inexplicable in an open society. How, in particular, does an institution that publicly promotes itself as "liberal" and "inclusive," as dedicated to "diversity" and the "free exchange of ideas," devolve into such a dim political monolith? The conservative history professor who had come to dinner was obviously a senior member of his academic department. Of course, he could not have been a junior member, since the hiring doors had been closed nearly a quarter of a century earlier. So I asked how conservatives were treated by faculty colleagues.
"Well, they haven't allowed me to sit on a search committee since 1985," he replied. He was referring to the committees that interview prospective candidates to fill faculty openings. "In 1985," he continued, "I was the chair of the search committee and of course we hired a Marxist." He said "of course," because for conservatives, diversity of viewpoints makes perfect sense.
The professor went on: "This year we had an opening for a scholar of Asian history. We had several candidates but obviously the most qualified one was from Stanford. Yet he didn't get the job. So I went to the chair of the search committee and asked him what had happened. 'Oh,' he said, 'you're absolutely right. He was far and away the most qualified candidate and we had a terrific interview. But then we went to lunch, and he let out that he was for school vouchers.'"
In other words, if one has a politically incorrect view on K-12 school vouchers, one must be politically incorrect on the Ming dynasty too. This is almost a dictionary description of the totalitarian mentality. But there is more than dogmatism at work in the calculation. The attitude also reflects the priorities of an entrenched oligarchy, which fears to include those it cannot count on to maintain its control.
