Dictator Professors

I have spent some time scanning the conservative blogs, and the bulk of what they pay attention to is foreign policy. I'm almost tempted to offer them a swap: you have your foreign policy, but give liberals control over domestic policy. It might almost be worth it.

Apparently there is only one domestic policy issue the wingers care anything about: the liberal university. They are harping on Howie Kurtz's discussion of a study on the liberality of most professors. David Horowitz is pushing a "student's bill of rights", which is making some progress in Florida. The bill would allow students to sue professors who are not "respecting their beliefs."

Yeah, I can hear it now: "Give me an A or I'm suing you!" "In my religion two plus two equals five!" Talk about your silly ideas.

The right wing is really barking (and I mean barking) up the wrong tree here. They have identified the fact that most college professors are liberals, and leapt to the conclusion that there must be discrimination against conservatives. They also assume that professors both try to convert their students and are able to do so.

Where do I start? First, I really doubt if professors care much about persuading their students to their political way of thinking. We're too busy trying to get them to read the book and show up to class to digress away from our subjects onto politics. If we are teaching politics, we spend all of our time on process, not substance. Second, teachers have a hard time convincing their classes of even self-evident material (like facts), so I really doubt their capacity to effectively propagandize their students. Honestly people, the academy has been left-wing for generations, and I don't see any fewer conservatives out there in the electorate! College graduates are in fact the most Republican constituency. So get off it!

So at worst we are dealing with a situation without real social consequences. This still leaves the possibility that conservatives are discriminated against in hiring and promotions, which would affect people looking for jobs in the university. If it were true. Which it isn't.

The first problem with the Horowitz argument is that he ignores the supply problem: the sorts of people who want to spend their lives teaching others are not the sorts of people who tend to be conservative. It would be like saying that liberals are being discriminated against in the corporate world because 99% of business executives are Republicans. Certain fields just attract certain sorts of people.

A second problem is in regards to hiring and promotions. Your ability to get a job in academia is dependent on two things: your ability to teach and your ability to publish. That's it. Now publishing has simply nothing to do with political credentials. They don't ask you what party you voted for when you're writing an article on number theory or the Battle of Shiloh. And if students really felt to aggrieved at authoritarian teachers, then the teaching evalutions would be bad and the professor might not get tenure (depending on the kind of school we are talking about). In this situation, professors actually have to curry favor with students.

All of this is besides the point, of course. Demolishing the premisses of the right wing critique of academia, as fun as it is, ignores the fundamental mistakes that Horowitz and his band of loonies are really making. On the one hand the right is fundamentally misunderstanding the role of the academy and university of education. On the other hand, they are just avoiding the real problem, which is the intellectual worth of conservatism itself.

The sad fact of it is, students don't know anything. The only "beliefs" they ever present are usually just parroted back from somewhere else. Professors are trying to give them the evidence and analytical tools to make up their own minds, to come up with informed beliefs rather than simply prejudices. So if we aren't allowed to challenge their opinions, then you have effectively abolished the academy. The whole point of the university is to make people uncomfortable with their too-casually held beliefs.

Which gets to the real problem that conservatives have with the Academy. The right thinks that because their kind has so scarce a presence in the halls of the educated, it must mean that the Academy is an institutionally biased group keeping out smart, hard-working, conservative academics. What they cannot accept, and what is in fact going on, is that modern conservatism is not an intellectually respectable position. You can't publish an article (or even get a PhD) if you are prone to sloppy reasoning, weak arguments, or misrepresenting facts. The contemporary right is just a ridiculous combination of ideas without logical support or consistency. So no person who has to learn how to think is going to subscribe to it.

All the training that graduate students go through teaches them how to collect evidence and weigh it in an even-handed fashion, to avoid dogmas, and to stick to logic and cool reason. What conservatives can't face is the reality that no person who undergoes that kind of rigor is going to end up a conservative, because today's conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. Sorry, but there it is.

People who support conservatism are just asserting their "beliefs" rather than employing rational arguments. If that sounds kind of postmodern to you, you're right.

(By the way, I've always hated postmodernism, so the fact that it has migrated from the left to the right just makes my life easier.)

What is really frightening to the right is that if students are really educated, if they learn how to grasp facts and use them in a sound way, they will realize all of this. Which means that, at its core, today's right has to be hostile to education. Which if you look at what the christian right is up to in the K-12 system and Horowitz wants for the colleges, is precisely what you see. Once again, the right is after the death of reason. They don't dare let today's youth become truly educated, because then they would be "corrupted" into growing brains and rejecting conservatism.

So am I saying that the problem conservatism has in academia is that it is just stupid? Well....yes. Sorry.