Student Free Speech
A more complicated application of the question of students' right to academic freedom, however, comes from this week's Chronicle, which profiles the case of Oneida Meranto, a professor of Latin American politics at Denver's Metropolitan State College. Despite the college's rejection of student protests of anti-conservative bias in her classes (protests that, contrary to most such complaints, seem to have been taken seriously by the campus administration), Meranto, who calls herself a"liberal" but concedes her politics are"very raw," has received death threats and hateful e-mails. In some ways, this seems like a case of students complaining because the professor's remarks didn't reinforce their own ideological agenda.
Yet, as has occurred in virtually every such instance since the issue of students' academic freedom has emerged as a major one in the last couple of years, defenders of the status quo undermine their own case. Meranto herself dismissed the students' complaints as part of a broader pattern of whites"trying their darndest to demonstrate that they too are victims in a society where they dominate." (She includes white women who claim sexual harassment in this group as well.) The students, she reasoned, demanded"the right to be free of professors like me that force them to think, who demand that they be respectful to women, minorities and gays," all"because some students, faculty, and administrators want the right to stay ignorant." More generally, Meranto claims that whites"have failed to prove to us that they don't have racist, sexist tendencies that just might be part of the very essence of their white skin. They have failed to prove to us that they too have not benefited from affirmative action legislation. They have failed to demonstrate to us that the reason for their poor grades is the flood of nonwhite professors. They have failed to take responsibility for their actions in this country where being white has its privilege." I can see how some students might be taken aback by such views.
Meranto's defenders offer similarly wild views. Univ. of Texas law professor Brian Leiter (whose website celebrates his position as"the youngest chairholder in the history of the law school at Texas") describes the Meranto affair as part of a crusade against universities, which"remain one of the few elite institutions in American society not taken over by the forces of reaction." He dismisses the recent figures of ideological imbalance among the nation's faculty as natural, speculating that"the ratio of Democratic voters to Republican voters in the academy has increased over time because the Republican party has gone increasingly bonkers, such that educated and informed people by and large can't stomach it any more." Leiter, speaking on behalf of"the reality-based community," notes that"not all ideologies have merit. That there are relatively few Republicans in the universities may simply be co-extensional with the fact that there are relatively few educated people who believe that Iraq attacked the World Trade Center." But, he hastens to add, he has never displayed any ideological bias in determining which candidates he has supported for full-time positions at Texas or his previous institution, USD. How reassuring.
SUNY-Albany philosophy professor Ron McClamrock likewise asserts,"I've been around a lot of academic hiring, and I have never once seen hiring done based on the politics of the applicants." So why do left-wing professors outnumber conservatives in the academy?"We outnumber them because academic institutions select for smart people who think their views through; and if you're smart, open-minded, and look into it carefully, you're just more likely to end up with views in the left half of contemporary America. Which is just to say: Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we're just f-ing smarter." I'm not sure that I would consider such a remark an example of being"smart" or"open-minded," but perhaps that's because I'm insufficiently leftist.
Maybe Leiter, McClamrock, and Meranto do not, when interviewing job candidates, imitate the behavior of my Brooklyn colleague, whose website affirms her belief in combining her own scholarship with activism for"assorted radical causes," but who thought nothing of directly asking an applicant who had written for a conservative, Christian webzine about whether his kind of political beliefs belonged in the classroom. But, of course, directness isn't necessary if conservatives are just stupid: since the task of a job search is to find a smart candidate, conservatives can be dismissed out of hand. I suspect that senior white male professors in the early 1960s, when challenged about the small numbers of leftists, women, or blacks in their departments, might have employed arguments rather similar to McClamrock's.
[Update, 7.03pm: Prof. Leiter has just contacted me to claim that I"misrepresented, via selective quotation and [my] own interspersed comments," what he"said about the proportion of Democrats and Republicans in the academy." He states that his post argued"that to show that bias is the explanation for the disproportion you would have to rule out other explanations, including (1) the extremism of the Republican Party which alienates many libertarian and conservative scholars, (2)self-selection, and (3) the merits. Since in many fields, including philosophy, the politics of candidates are invisible, yet the proportions are the same, that would tend to suggest that bias is not the most likely explanation." I disagree, on both points: as I've commented frequently at Cliopatria, decriptions of lines in all social sciences and humanities departments can easily be manipulated to screen out ideologically undesirable candidates. As to the claim of misrepresentation, you be the judge.]