The Cole Thesis
As this issue assumes an increasingly high profile, defenders of the status quo will have to move beyond what could be deemed the Brandon/McClamrock approach (named after Duke philosophy professor Robert Brandon, who maintained, “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire” and SUNY-Albany’s Ron McClamrock, who reasoned, “Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we're just f-ing smarter.") One such attempt comes from University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, who, as my colleague Ralph Luker noted, has issued a “spirited reply” to what he terms the “ridiculous and pernicious line” that major universities need greater intellectual diversity.
I agree with Cole on one major point: we need more data. And not just party registration of professors, but, far more important, descriptions of new lines over the last decade, and research interests of those faculty hired to fill these new lines.
Some of Cole’s arguments come across as red herrings. He chastises the currently existing studies for failing to include “Economics Departments, Business Schools, Medical Schools, Engineering schools.” As far as I know, the highest-profile studies (those at Duke and Stanford/Cal) did include economics departments. Meanwhile, the debate centers on the question of whether ideological bias in the hiring of faculty is affecting the quality and type of education that college students receive. Whether the nation’s business, medical, and engineering school faculties are 100% Republican, 100% Democrat, or 100% Green is irrelevant to that question.
Cole also challenges the idea that party affiliation predicts general ideological perspective, since, “What is a ‘liberal?’ If [Will] means they vote Democrat, then so did, until recently, Zell Miller.” I think we’ll all be waiting a very long time for Cole to identify the long list of Zell Miller Democrats on the faculty at the University of Michigan. And he dismisses the studies that have suggested ideological imbalance as coming from “the same people who assured us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was 2-5 years from having a nuclear bomb.” Hmmm.
Cole does, however, make two serious arguments—one cultural, one structural. On the cultural front, he notes, “I have been in a major history department for 20 years, and have served on innumerable search committees, in my own department and in other units on campus. I have never, ever, even once, heard any search committee member broach the political party affiliation of a candidate for a position.” I have no reason to disbelieve that statement. Although I’m sure there are a few other cases, I’m aware only of two recent instances (one at Smith, one at Brooklyn) in which candidates were asked about their political beliefs. (The responses of the two institutions then differed: at Smith, the president conceded that the comments violated the candidate’s academic freedom and ordered a re-evaluation of his tenure decision; at Brooklyn, the president used his Bylaws power to place the questioner on the department personnel committee, so she could ask future conservatives the same question.)
The fact that few candidates are asked about their political affiliations, however, is irrelevant to the basic issue. That college faculties are imbalanced between Democrats and Republicans is not a problem in and of itself. It is, rather, a symptom of the problem: the academy increasingly crafting new lines in such a way to skew ideologically, with a strong emphasis on positions that stress race, class, or gender.
Cole’s structural analysis therefore also comes up short. The search committee process, he contends, is inherently decentralized, and “there would be no way to stack this process politically.” But this simply isn’t the case, as Cole’s own department at Michigan demonstrates. As I’ve noted previously, this is a department that has crafted recent job descriptions in U.S. history to hire its 9th, 10th, and 11th specialists in race in America, even as it has hired no professors in U.S. diplomatic or military history, fields perceived (sometimes inaccurately) as more conservative. That job descriptions have been crafted to stress not a department’s curricular needs or intellectual balance but instead fields considered ideologically acceptable by the department’s majority means that the critical decisions have been made even before the search committee first sits.
Moreover, Cole’s own concession of the subjective nature of the search process, when combined with some of the rhetoric he employs in his article, suggests that this tried-and-true process isn’t up to the task of creating intellectually diverse environs. The search process, he notes, revolves around not political issues but answering such questions as,"Is this an interesting mind?""Is this person's methodology sound?""Has this person mastered the relevant literature (i.e. has read the other articles and books on the subject)?"
Everyone, however, determines what constitutes an “interesting mind” or “sound methodology” in different terms. In Cole’s case, his hypothesis as to why conservatives are under-represented in the academy hardly gives comfort that his is a mind who would find a conservative “interesting” or “sound.” If candidates are not queried about their political affiliation, and if the time-tested search committee processes produces the best candidate free from the application of ideological litmus tests, why, he asks, does the partisan imbalance cited in study after study exist? Greed by potential academic conservatives: “Someone who has academic skills but is a Republican would just have enormous opportunities and could easily become a multi-millionnaire. In contrast, academics on the Left would not be welcome in corporate boardrooms or at a think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, and wouldn't be comfortable in such a position.”
His evidence for this sweeping assertion? The career of William Bennett, who demonstrated how someone with a Ph.D. in political philosophy was confronted with lucrative opportunities in the provided sector—since he was “willing to oppose affirmative action and support increasing inequality of wealth and bash unions.” If you were politically conservative, would you think that Cole could give your application an impartial read? And in humanities and social science departments—in which evaluations of candidates are inherently subjective—where figures like Cole form the ideological majority, is it possible for someone with moderate or conservative beliefs to receive an unbiased hearing?
[Update, 11-30, 7.57pm: Adam Kotsko, who graciously deems me his"my twelfth favorite writer for Cliopatria," dismisses calls for greater intellectual diversity in the academy as irrelevant, on the grounds that diversity of race, sex, or ethnicity produces sufficient intellectual diversity."I'll admit," Kotsko notes,"that this is a completely political decision on my part and that the individual conservatives who are being discriminated against (and I'm sure this happens to at least some extent) are perhaps objectively better scholars than the leftists -- but please, tenured radical professors of literature, hold on." At least he gets credit for his candor.]