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Volume CXXXIII, Number 12 |
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Not necessarily a problem
SCOTT MACEACHERN
FACULTY CONTRIBUTOR
Not enough Republicans on the faculty at Bowdoin? "Quelle horreur!" But what should we do to remedy this situation? Ask job candidates whether they're Democrats or Republicans? Well, no, we can't, won't, and shouldn't do that and, besides, the problem is not actually that there aren't enough Republican faculty on campus. Well, I'm a Canadian and vote for neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. But, the problem is that there are not enough conservative faculty on campus. Or is it?
The report by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (not the Center for Popular Culture) didn't actually survey the whole professoriate on campuses. Rather, it looked at a limited number of departments in the social sciences and humanities. There are a number of studies of political attitudes among university and college faculty, and these tend to indicate that faculty in the social sciences and humanities are politically more liberal than those in the natural sciences and engineering. Perhaps there are proportionately more Republican faculty members in those latter departments at Bowdoin. Careful choice of departments surveyed thus allows the CSPC to increase the shock-and-horror quotient of its survey results.
On to the Center for the Study of Popular Culture itself. The CSPC is run by David Horowitz, a well-known conservative commentator who back in the 1960s was a student organizer for the Students for a Democratic Society and who then was busily attacking universities and colleges for being too conservative.
The mission remains the same; only the politics change. CSPC is only part of Horowitz's empire; he is best-known for running FrontPage Magazine.com, which is an online source of conservative commentary. The flavor of FrontPage can be taken from an article in today's (December 5) version, where patriotic Americans are advised to avoid the movie The Last Samurai, because the Tom Cruise character is too reminiscent of John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban." The movie is apparently "...a Hollywood sermon on the evils of bourgeois liberalism."
The faculty survey doesn't seem to be run by the CSPC itself, but rather by Students for Academic Freedom, which bills itself as "a clearing-house and communications center for a national coalition of student organizations whose goal is to end the political abuse of the university..." with 105 university and college chapters across the country. But the SFAF Web page belongs to Horowitz's organisation, and donations go to the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
Tracing the links between these organization-and they'll eventually lead you to Richard Scaife, Lynne Cheney, and back to our own Bowdoin Patriot,-among other directions-is an amusing and harmless way to spend a Friday afternoon. There is a larger question at stake here, though: what role should ideology play in the hiring of professors at Bowdoin?
The straightforward, and best, answer to this is: none. As Dean McEwen says, we don't ask job candidates about their political affiliations or views, nor should we. Even David Horowitz appears to agree: the "Academic Bill of Rights" quoted in the Orient article says that "No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs."
But this "Academic Bill of Rights" is actually a fairly equivocal document, because it also calls for "...a plurality of methodologies and perspectives..." in the arts, social sciences and humanities. The only way to square these two objectives would be if colleges and universities were to accept the goal of "intellectual diversity" and start a program of hiring conservatives for new academic positions, through choice or through fiat. In fact, there have been a number of recent (Republican) political initiatives, in state legislatures and in Washington, that are meant to hurry that process along.
Careful readers will have noted that the natural sciences, engineering and related disciplines are exempted from the requirements of Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights," and this is I think an important point. They are exempted, apparently, because such disciplines deal in "facts," and Horowitz doesn't want his credibility damaged by anti-evolutionists and flat-earthers clamouring for a place in the academy. Of course, the corollary is that in the social and humanities, we don't deal with facts, but simply opinions (and indoctrination, of course). And one opinion is just as good as another, isn't it?
Well, no. As an example, take a claim made by Horowitz in another context, in this case a debate on reparations for slavery in the U.S. The claim that he made was that Africans were as responsible for the origins of the African slave trade as were Europeans and Americans. This is, by the way a popular claim among American conservatives more generally. It's a claim about facts, and it can be tested through examination of the historical, anthropological and archaeological data on the African slave trade. These are all data from the social sciences and humanities; they are not just opinions. Taken together, they show that Horowitz's claim is factually incorrect. Should we, then, allow someone who believes this to claim a faculty position simply because it's a conservative belief? If not, in what cases should people be admitted to the Bowdoin faculty because of "intellectual diversity," and not because they do good, original, interesting academic work?
The possibility that there might be a factual basis to faculty viewpoints in the social sciences and humanities doesn't occur to David Horowitz, nor to most of the other commentators calling for "intellectual diversity" in the academy. Very few of these people are academics. Horowitz, for example, doesn't keep the Center for the Study of Popular Culture open by doing rigorous research, or by submitting his papers to peer review: he keeps it open by pleasing a select set of conservative sponsors. He has no real sense of how academic investigation works, and his picture of the academy is a straw man, convenient only for demolition.
Daniel Schuberth thinks that at Bowdoin "...the ideological makeup of the faculty must resemble the ideological makeup of the student body." That's not the case. Faculty members have to be open to and encouraging of debate in class, and outside our disciplines our opinions are worth as much (or as little) as the study and thought that lay behind them. Within our disciplines, however, we do have something particular to say, and faculty in anthropology or history are no more bound to accept incorrect information or erroneous inferences than are our colleagues in physics or chemistry. If that leads to differences in ideology between faculty and students, so be it.
For information on sending a letter to the editor, please click here.
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