Volume CXXXIII, Number 12 January 30, 2004

The non-issue of political diversity on college campuses
HENRY LAURENCE
FACULTY CONTRIBUTOR

The debate about the "imbalance" between Democrat and Republican professors on campus is as irrelevant to Bowdoin's educational mission as insisting that the faculty be evenly divided between Red Sox and Yankees fans.

Political opinions, like judgements about music, food, or sports teams, have no intrinsic bearing on teaching ability. A good professor should be able to discuss all the controversies within her field, and be receptive to the different viewpoints of her students, regardless of what views she holds personally. A professor who is unable to do so is simply a bad teacher. In fact, at a good liberal arts college what separates good teachers from bad is precisely the ability to convey the richest possible array of ideas to their students. True "intellectual diversity" is made possible only by open and inquiring minds: it cannot be mandated by balancing closed-minded professors from either side of the political aisle.

Unless-and this is the vital point -unless you believe that political opinions are so all-consuming, so fervent, so theological in nature that they render open-minded teaching impossible. To me, the most depressing aspect of this debate is that it rests entirely on the assumption that professors cannot or will not speak to issues beyond what they personally believe: that a conservative is incapable of presenting liberal ideas, and that a liberal is incapable of analyzing conservative arguments. That so many people appear to share this assumption is a depressing commentary on the ideological divisions within this country, although perhaps not a surprising finding at a time when political disagreement is more likely to be dismissed as anti-American treachery then engaged intellectually. But does anyone really believe it?

Do you seriously think that a Red Sox fan would be unable-not just unwilling, but unable-to comment on Yankee Derek Jeter's hitting ability? Do you really believe that the ONLY thing a Red Sox fan could possibly tell you is "Jeter Sucks!"

If so, then perhaps you also believe that someone who voted for George W. Bush is incapable of airing an argument about gun control. Such a belief is, I submit, absurd. Yet that's the level of inanity required in order to get bent out of shape about this so-called "problem."

If you truly believed that it is educationally vital that the personal opinions of your professors be an accurate reflection of the personal beliefs of the population at large, then you could save someone about 40 thousand bucks a year by getting your education from opinion polls. At the very least, you should be demanding that the music department offered more classes on Britney Spears and fewer on Beethoven, that we replaced Shakespearean Tragedy with Joe Millionaire 101, and that we dropped the Classics department entirely. After all, what matters is that we simply mirror what "most Americans" think, right?

As a side note, it's funny how the same Republicans who make loud elitist arguments about what they deem the erosion of "traditional excellence" in the curriculum at the expense of popular, "trendy" new subjects suddenly become raging populists on this issue. But such inconsistency reflects the cynical and politically-inspired nature of the debate. The outrage seems to emanate exclusively from conservatives who are palpably enraged by the fact that a body of people who are more intelligent, better informed and better trained to analyze complex political, economic and moral issues than the average American are also (and perhaps not uncoincidentally) much more likely to be liberal than the average American.

In short, criticism of the preponderance of Democrats among Bowdoin's faculty is based on an assumption is intellectually bankrupt, professionally insulting and, fortunately, wildly inaccurate. Most of us are here to teach you how to think. We are not here to teach you what to think. I could be wrong, but I have yet to see a single piece of hard evidence that Bowdoin's educational excellence is suffering as a result of the political affiliations of the faculty. Until anyone comes up with any such evidence, I propose that we treat this subject as the anti-intellectual non-issue that it is.

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