This blog continues my discussion of bureaucracy in the politicized academy.

It turns out I'm not the only person to blog on Rick Perlstein's account of the annual meeting of The Historical Society. David Horowitz has written a blistering critique of Perlstein's piece, scathingly noting Perlstein's failure to mention that The Historical Society was founded by marginalized academics who had been effectively forced out of major historical organizations, and taking the liberal Perlstein to task for drawing thereby a distorted picture of the conference: only by omitting the facts surrounding THS's origins could Perlstein represent the conference-goers as bound by an obsolete belief that the culture wars were still happening, Horowitz argues, and only then could Perlstein seriously contemplate depicting them as naively unaware of the precise nature of their frustrations with academe. I mention Horowitz's piece because it dovetails with my own sense that it does not make sense to separate the anti-bureaucratic feel of the THS conference from the political marginalization of THS itself. My guess is that the desire to escape bureaucracy that manifested itself at THS's meeting was very much an expression of frustration with the campus left's enormous administrative machinery.

It's not hard to connect the dots here. The yearning for community that Perlstein witnessed at THS was the yearning of marginal academics for a place where they could gather and exchange ideas in a climate of tolerance and respect. The anti-bureaucratic dimension of that yearning--a dimension Perlstein perceptively identified--was in turn closely tied to the intellectual and political isolation and even ostracism that many of THS's members know well. In the wake of the won culture wars, left-wing academe has been busily building a huge ideologically-oriented bureaucratic infrastructure: on top of the already impacted bureaucracy of the billion-dollar university has been laid the additional administrative weight of politicized policy, procedure, projects, and programs.

Probably the best place to begin an analysis of the campus left's administrative coup would be to note how much new bureaucratic bloat is created by politically correct boondoggles. Diversity is fast becoming a huge industry: multicultural coordinators, programmers, and consultants are in high demand on campuses, where the expensive and intricate sensitivity machinery forms a significant chunk of middle academic management. Campuses have become crowded with things like residential programming, divisions of student life, offices of multicultural affairs, women's centers, area studies departments and programs, diversity task forces, and so on. Together they do the arduous, time-consuming work of "celebrating diversity"--they handle minority recruitment and retention, they conduct sensitivity training and run endless programs to raise our various awarenesses, they schedule separate orientations and graduations for minority students, they ensure that the residence halls are zones of sensitivity and inclusiveness, and so on. You can get an idea of the political temperament of these entities by looking at the degrees of the people who run them: there are many people with the evil Ed.D. degrees; plenty, too, with degrees in English, women's studies, and other "soft" fields that have ceded their educational missions to agenda-driving. Academic administration is a favorite landing strip for former humanities majors and even unattached humanities Ph.D.'s; women's studies majors, for example, frequently get recycled into low-level administrative jobs in the feminist establishment--as an Independent Women's Forum article points out, that's about all their degrees are good for.

The making of career bureaucrats is a signal aim of the politicized postmodern academy, which has a seemingly endless array of grants and ideologically-oriented programs to administer. As David Horowitz has shown, the initiatives of the campus left have been almost single-handedly funded by the Ford Foundation, which has, over the years, turned liberal philanthropy into a multi-billion dollar tax dodge. Ford gives over $900,000,000 in left-leaning grants annually; as Horowitz shows, the common liberal assumption that the right has all the money, and the frequent charge that conservative scholarship has been "paid for" by well-heeled conservative foundations, is a patent falsehood. As Horowitz explains, "the biggest and most prestigious foundations, bearing the most venerable names of the captains of American capitalism -- Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie and Pew ’Äì are all biased to the left, as are many newer but also well-endowed institutions like the MacArthur, Markle and Schumann Foundations. MacArthur alone is three times the size of all 'big three' conservative foundations--Olin, Bradley and Scaife--combined."

Much of this liberal foundation money goes to fund campus projects and programs; for decades, the campus left has been happily picking the pockets of the great nineteenth-century robber barons. The left is paid well to do the work that best suits their global mission. In 2001, for example, the Ford Foundation gave $50,000,000 to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The largest gift Ford has ever made, and the largest KSG has ever received, the money will go toward expanding KSG's decidedly left-wing educational reach, training future policy-makers around the globe in the arts of central planning and big government. Horowitz, who keeps track of such things, has noted that KSG is overwhelmingly liberal in its orientation: "The Kennedy School of Government," he wrote in 2000, "is arguably the most prestigious and important reservoir of intellectual talent and policy advice available to the political establishment. Cabinet officials are regularly drawn from its ranks. Yet of its 150-plus faculty members only 5 are identifiable Republicans, a ratio that is as extraordinary, given the spectrum of political opinion in the nation at large, as it is common in the university system."

But the Ford Foundation is not alone; there are many organizations eager to sink money into left-wing campus projects and programs, the U.S. government not least among them. Jessica Gavora has shown how Title IX--which forbids gender discrimination in all federally funded educational institutions--has become the agent of reverse discrimination: Title IX has been used for decades to attack men's athletics; Gavora argues persuasively that it is fast becoming the basis for imposing gender quotas on every branch of American education. Likewise, Stanley Kurtz and Martin Kramer have shown how Title VI--which grants federal funding to academic "area studies" programs--has been used by left-wing academics to further a distinctly anti-American agenda.

In effect, foundation grants and federal dollars are paying for massive social engineering on American campuses. They finance the institutionalization of left-wing bias, turning politically correct agendas into the basis for academic policies, programs, hiring, firing, recruitment, and curricular reform. Wendy McElroy reported on a disturbing new instance of this just this week: At the University of Maryland, a pilot program called RISE (Research Internships in Science and Engineering) has been established for the express purpose of helping women enter these historically male-dominated fields. McElroy notes that under Title IX, UM cannot discriminate on the basis of sex. She also notes that this is exactly what UM is using nearly a million dollars of government money to do: RISE internships are reserved for women; the National Science Foundation is paying for RISE with $899,814 of your tax dollars. Worse: RISE is billed as a "demonstration program"; the aim is to establish programs like it at universities across the country.

Nearly a million dollars thus backs the logical fallacy that the lack of equal numbers of men and women in the hard sciences means lack of equal opportunity for women; i.e., that institutionalized discrimination effectively bars women from participation in the scientific and engineering professions. The hypothesis that not as many women as men want to be engineers and physicists is dismissed as an impossibility--if equal numbers of women aren't drawn to these fields, the argument goes, it is because women are socialized not to engage in masculine intellectual pursuits from day one of life. Likewise, the suggestion that women as a group may not be as talented at abstract reasoning and problem-solving as men are is dismissed as the false consciousness of the misogynist. Within the logic that funds RISE, there is no room for the possibility that there may be subtle differences in intelligence between the sexes, and that these differences make men more likely than women to excel in the hard sciences.

When it comes to education, there is plenty of money out there for people who want to try to make dubious ideological propositions come true. RISE is born of the belief that equality between the sexes is not achieved by ensuring equal opportunity for women and men, but by engineering equal results. The radical feminist agenda behind RISE is parity, which must be achieved even if it is at the cost of quality, even if it involves pushing women into fields they might not otherwise choose and then refusing to select out those who can't do the work. Moreover, because it is founded on the premise that discrimination keeps women out of the sciences, RISE is also a program that cannot fail (or, to be more exact, can never be held responsible for failing). If RISE does not substantially increase the numbers of women in science, that won't be the fault of RISE. It will be the fault of sexism, the perniciousness of which will have been shown to be even more dire than we had thought. This will in turn become a rationale for even more funding. If nearly $900,000 isn't enough to combat discrimination against women in the sciences, then the government and good-hearted foundations will just have to cough up even more in the future.

As these examples show, campus social engineering is a huge, hugely lucrative bureaucracy. It's also a distinct culture, one that produces and sustains a distinctly collectivist, distressingly irresponsible mindset in the name of social responsibility. More on this soon.