More on Intellectual Diversity
“Lexington,” writing in The Economist, argues that the recent studies suggest that “academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of 'diversity officers'." Yet,"when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it,” producing a situation that “is profoundly unhealthy per se,” since “university faculties suffer from the same political problems as the ‘small republics’ described in Federalist 10: a motivated majority within the faculty finds it easy to monopolise decision-making and squeeze out minorities.”
Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globeadds that “today campus leftism is not merely prevalent. It is radical, aggressive, and deeply intolerant,” leading “faculty members to abuse their authority.” Jacoby cites a just-released study from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which polled 658 students at the top 50 US colleges. Of the respondents, 49 percent said professors"frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course," 48 percent said some"presentations on political issues seem totally one-sided," and 46 percent said that"professors use the classroom to present their personal political views."
Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, meanwhile, dismisses calls for intellectual diversity by pointing to the fact that “among full professors, 87 percent are white and 77 percent are male.” Interesting that Goodman neglects to mention that the comparable figures among recently hired professors range anywhere (depending on the survey) from 40 to 51 percent female, with racial diversity also increasing; the nature of the tenure system means that a good portion of the nation’s full professors were hired in the late 1960s or 1970s, before current gender and arcial diversity hiring programs were put in place. Beyond this point, she offers up her share of bizarre observations, saying that the intellectual diversity position reminds her of “the arguments in favor of teaching creationism in the name of open-mindedness” and wondering if advocates of intellectual diversity are not also “suggesting that ExxonMobil would profit from a gallon of ideological pluralism.”
My Cliopatria colleague, Tim Burke, offers a far more reasoned critique of the intellectual diversity concept. I basically agree with Tim’s point that “the critique of groupthink in academia has already gone badly astray when it begins by counting up voter registrations and assuming that this is both evidence and cause of the problem.” If the figures were 70-30 either way, these figures would be meaningless. The extreme recent examples (the Klein study of 96% of recent Cal and Stanford hires who are Democrats, the Duke History Department with 100% registered Democrats) suggest only that a problem might exist, and nothing more than that. It is distressing, however, that many administrators have simply dismissed such overwhelmingly one-sided figures without even considering the possibility that they might suggest broader difficulties.
In an important way, moreover, I fear that the stress on party registration understates the crisis. As I tried to argue when I testified on this issue before the Senate Education Committee, in the academy terms like “conservative” or “Right” have very different meanings than in the political world. In many History departments, a professor who rejects the supremacy of the race/class/gender trinity would be labeled a “conservative”; ditto for a political scientist who urged his or her department to stress political development rather than Marxist theories and identity politics. Yet among political commentators, many who are liberal Democrats and nearly all who are considered a moderate Democrat would take the “conservative” position on these pedagogical questions.
Second, Tim quite correctly points out that the weakest part of my arguments for intellectual diversity comes in my suggested reforms, which would (at best) only partially resolve the problem (and do not, as my colleague Jonathan Dresner points out, touch on the situation in smaller departments, where hiring generalists has to assume priority). Beyond the suggestion of ensuring that requests for new lines reflect curricular needs rather than “groupthink” and counting on the inherent power of publicity to shame practitioners of “groupthink,” there is a way of addressing this problem within the system, focused on the activities of administrators and Trustees, people who might, if they take their responsibilities seriously, provide some outside pressure on the academic “small republics.” For example, departments with good records of practicing intellectual diversity can be rewarded with new lines, with reduced teaching loads for their faculties and increased funds for their teaching needs. These are potentially powerful tools of influence: Brooklyn has a 4-3 teaching load and limited resources for departmental teaching tools, and I know that some of my Cliopatria collegeaues and undoubtedly many of our readers teach at even more financially strapped colleges.
In an extreme form in my tenure case, I learned firsthand of the ability of these forces from outside the faculty but still within the college/university structure to affect the “small republic” mentality—for good and ill. When three CUNY Trustees spoke out quickly in support of my tenure, it provided instant credibility to my challenge. And when the college’s provost, Roberta (“teaching is a political act”) Matthews, contended that shifting personnel evaluation away from teaching and scholarship and toward collegiality was a critical step for achieving faculty gender diversity (since collegiality “is especially attractive to women”), she provided an intellectual rationale for those faculty intent on using my case to practice “groupthink.”
Third, I’m not sure about Tim’s argument that interdisciplinarity represents one way to solve the problem of intellectual diversity in the academy. There certainly are examples where this approach has worked—such as, in my own area, schools of public affairs like Harvard’s Kennedy School or Texas’ LBJ School. But a look through the curricula of colleges that have completely embraced an interdisciplinary approach, such as Evergreen or Cal. St.-Monterey Bay, gives me great pause. Whatever these schools are attempting to accomplish, it is not providing students with anything resembling a liberal arts education. At the very least, disciplinary boundaries provide some sort of objective criteria to which critics can appeal: I fear that faculty intent on “groupthink” would be more likely to organize interdisciplinary colleges around the Monterey Bay model than the Kennedy School model.