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February 14, 2004
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More on Duke
Duke philosophy professor Robert Brandon has responded to those who criticized him for his glib invocation of J.S. Mill's comment about stupid people being conservative. It's still self-discrediting, especially the part about how, if conservatives want to see more conservative academics, they should study hard, get Ph.D.'s, and get jobs as professors (that's not just insulting to the people whose politics weed them out of academic careers in or before grad school, but,in its failure to acknowledge that there are no academic jobs, not even for those who toe the ideological line, it's also insulting to all aspiring and contingent academics). Read it anyway, and don't miss the comments, which include this gem from an English major named Courtney:
Professor Brandon,
I think you may have missed one explanation for the very real left-liberal dominance of academia -- avoidance by moderates and conservatives looking for a career. As a moderate Republican studying English in a large university, I find myself hiding my political preferences after coming up against intolerance within the department. Many professors, not realizing a Republican voter was in the classroom, have made comments that did not invite debate and left me feeling like a pariah. All in all, I've decided never to go into academia since I don't plan to suffer this environment for the rest of my career. I would have to hide my beliefs or become the odd man out. I'd rather find a job where politics REALLY don't matter. Academia, despite your protestations, is an ideal workplace for left-liberals, and uncomfortable for moderates and conservatives.
Right there, in that little note, lies the truth disingenuous rationalizations such as Brandon's deny. Love of learning, a scholarly impulse, a desire to teach--none of these things is inherently liberal. But when a systematic, unacknowledged contempt for conservative, or even moderate, views filters through enough courses, and when those courses cluster in distinct disciplines, you do have a situation in which some students receive a very loud message that they are not welcome in those disciplines, and that the price of participating in them, even at the undergraduate level, is thus going to be unreasonably high. So they take themselves elsewhere, and leave behind them only those whose beliefs fit nicely into the biases of the field. And so the field perpetuates itself as a bastion of left-leaning folk where the scholarship that gets done and the ideas that get debated always presume a certain set of shared beliefs. And so it starts to look like liberals just naturally are more scholarly and more inquisitive and more invested in the selfless work of educating others than conservatives, who in turn get cast as greedy dullards out to make a buck and protect their own interests. At least it looks that way to those who are benefitting from a system that favors them and excludes those they don't like.
It's astonishing to me that this simple and obvious phenomenon--one my partner in academic cant-spotting, Maurice Black, and I have been endlessly remarking for years--is not being acknowledged and addressed on campuses across the country. Behind all the rhetoric about nurturing student minds and exposing them to new vistas and encouraging intellectual exploration lies an institutional arrogance that places its own comfort high above the wellbeing of students. In Brandon's comments, we can see how personal smugness trumps both reason and humane concern even in the moment of trying to seem to be both reasonable and humane.
Worth reading: John Rosenberg's analysis of Brandon's response (included as an update to this post). Michael Friedman has some comments, too.
