In an October 11th opinion piece in The New York Times, John Tierney (subscription required) jumps from the claim (made by David Horowitz) that Democrats outnumber Republicans on law- and journalism-school faculties to the assertion that this is somehow deliberate:

To some extent, this is a problem of self-selection. Journalism attracts people who want to right wrongs, and the generation that's been running journalism schools and media businesses came of age when government, especially the federal government, was seen as the solution to most wrongs. These executives, like the tenured radicals in law schools and the rest of academia, hired ideological cronies and shaped their institutions to reflect their views.

Of course, that’s an oversimplification. Educators and journalists no more look for ideological “purity” when hiring than do the generally conservative business executives. That’s not why there are more liberals in academia than in the general population. What happens to cause that is a great deal more complex.

And, in terms of renovating academia, the political makeup of the faculty is completely beside the point. Though Fox News may connect them, “balanced” and “fair” are completely different concepts. Academia doesn’t need to be politically balanced in order to be fair or to present all legitimate sides of an issue. The problem is that academia does have unfair aspects; because these are not being addressed internally, outsiders are using them as the basis for a much broader attack — one that has political, not educational, ends.

The Horowitz study that Tierney points to as the basis of his claim uses the methodology of an earlier study by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte, and published in The Forum. Both studies look at university faculties and determine liberal and conservative through political-party affiliation. This is a highly dubious methodology, for it assumes that all members of a party share an ideology. Both studies are based on the idea that all Democrats think alike and that all Republicans do, too. Zell Miller thinks the same as Ted Kennedy? Newt Gingrich and Michael Bloomberg walk in tandem? That’s the assumption.

Unfortunately, the weakness of the studies aside, Tierney and Horowitz and the others who carp about “liberal” academia do have a point. Academia doesn’t reflect the overall culture politically any more than the business community does (and large parts of both, by the way, feed at the public trough, and so could be made responsive to public pressure). They are right: The diversity that our universities have promoted rarely extends very far in terms of diversity of thought (though this should not be confused with a diversity of political opinions — the mistake both Tierney and Horowitz make). The extent of diversity in academia, according to Tierney, can be expressed as a question: “As long as the professors look different, why worry if they think the same?”

To bolster his claim that conservatives are deliberately kept out of academia, Tierney makes this comparison:

At think tanks and other research institutions outside academia, there's a much higher percentage of Republicans than there is on university faculties. Apparently, despite their greed and other failings, many conservatives do want to become scholars, but they can't find work on campus.

Tierney seems to forget that one can get a job at a think tank without the same sorts of degrees and publications that academic jobs require and that many who aim for jobs in think tanks see them as steps to political or governmental positions, something with no academic parallel. They aren’t there to become scholars, so the analogy falls apart.

Yet there are elements of truth in what Tierney writes. He claims:

“One reason [for the liberal bias in academia] is the structure of academia, where decisions about hiring and publishing papers are made by small independent groups of scholars. They're subject to the law of group polarization, derived from studies of juries and other groups.”

In an article (subscription required) in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual,” Mark Bauerlein asserts pretty much the same thing: “[A]cademics shun conservative values and traditions, so their curricula and hiring practices discourage non-leftists from pursuing academic careers.” It’s not in the hiring, however, that this pressure exists. Having been through that process more than once, I know that no questions are asked that pertain to political leanings — not, at least, in any self-respecting hiring process. It’s afterward, in retention and promotion, when the pressure comes to bear, and it is there that academia needs to examine itself. It’s there that orthodoxy exposes itself. It’s there that diversity begins to disappear.

Three basic factors go into job retention and promotion in academia: scholarly activity, peer evaluation and student evaluation. Of these, student evaluation is generally perceived as the least important — and most questionable. Scholarly activity is usually measured through conference presentations and publication in a narrow range of “academic” journals and presses (one can actually lose status by publishing in the “wrong” places). The pressures to conform are strong, for the review processes are inherently risk-averse, keeping accepted works within “appropriate” bounds and discouraging extreme experimentation. It is in peer evaluation, however, that the greatest force for conformity appears.

Outside of education departments, few university professors have any training at all in teaching pedagogy. As a result they rely on perceived wisdom about teaching, much of which does have a political aspect and all of which has remained pretty much unexamined for decades. Lecturing, for example, is assumed to be a bad thing, an attitude resulting from an unthinking assumption that all lecturing is merely an example of what Paolo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, calls “the banking concept of education,” where students passively accept information and then pay it back on examination. Yet lecturing has proven that it can be much more than that; many of the most influential and inspiring teachers of the past were lecturers.

The fact remains, though: Lecturing is an inherently conservative educational methodology. It is hierarchical and not at all student-centered, at least in the short run (though the argument could be made that its purpose is to inspire student work, not to give students knowledge per se; rather than “giving” knowledge, it is a means of encouraging students to strike out on their own). The activities now asked of teachers, sometimes even codified through evaluation checklists, are much less authoritarian; discussion, group activity, individual student projects, clear delineation of goals, etc., all have an egalitarian aura much more comfortable to someone with a liberal bias.

Unfortunately, a system of peer evaluation that emphasizes these activities eventually becomes restrictive itself, limiting diversity by trying to force all teachers into one mold. Those teachers who are more effective as lecturers should be encouraged to lecture well rather than to add to their classrooms other processes that they may not be able to execute as effectively. The same goes for those teachers who work best by assigning tasks to small groups of students. When the rubric for peer evaluation demands a greater diversity of “acceptable” activity, such individuality is impossible.

Not all courses work well with the (supposedly) varied panoply generally used for evaluation anyway. My own teaching career (I teach English at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania) is split between literature and composition. When I teach literature, I generally lecture. Over the years, I have developed skill as a reader of poetry and as something of an actor in front of a class. As my students, for the most part, bring little enthusiasm for the subject to their literature classes, small groups and individual tasks — and even class discussions — work poorly. My job, as I see it, is to interest them in literature, to get them reading and then writing about it with passion. I can do that best by inspiring them through lectures. Yes, I do use other tools in the classroom, but the lecture is my primary one — when I teach literature.

When I teach writing, on the other hand, I do not lecture at all. The focus there needs to be on the students, on development of their abilities to gather ideas and information and to express them well on paper. The classroom focus needs to be on the individual student, not on the instructor. Yet once when I was evaluated for a writing class at another school, I was taken to task for not using the blackboard enough (one of the standard things an evaluator now looks for).

Most teachers know their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as what works best for a particular course. Yet each semester, they have to change their pattern for a day for a peer evaluation. This demeans them in the eyes of the students, who recognize the changes and the reasons for them, but also see the change as pandering to the powers that be. I refuse to do this, so — though my evaluations are quite good — I generally receive a criticism or two based on my not having done all the things, like that use of the blackboard, that the rubric requires.

Another aspect of peer evaluation with an inherently liberal bias resides in syllabi. In literature, for example, the pressure to expand the field to include writers who have been ignored is extremely powerful. Someone whose interests and knowledge are more traditional can feel uncomfortable in such an environment. Those (like me) who have chosen to study less traditional aspects of literature are not generally bothered by such demands, but even we are pressured to ensure that our syllabi contain a good percentage of nontraditional (nonwhite-male) texts. It doesn’t work the other way, however: Someone who concentrates just on the works of a particular minority or other group in a survey course (as long as it isn’t dead white males) rarely faces criticism. Bauerlein claims that such attitudes go far beyond literature:

Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies.

I don’t think the situation is quite as extreme as Bauerlein claims, but the pressure to conform is quite real.

One of the worst consequences of this situation, in both scholarship and teaching, is the hindering of academic and pedagogic explorations. Bauerlein even goes so far as to claim that, “The ordinary evolution of opinion — expounding your beliefs in conversation, testing them in debate, reading books that confirm or refute them — is lacking, and what should remain arguable settles into surety.” Few who have experienced life as an academic would agree with such an assertion, but there certainly is an underlying fear of stepping too far outside of “acceptable” bounds — and discussions are necessarily tempered as a result.

The critics of academia, the ones complaining about the predominance of liberals there, are conflating two different concerns. And that is the heart of my problem with what they are saying and the basis of my fear that what they really have is a hidden agenda, one of wresting control away from the teachers and placing it in the hands of the politicians. One of these concerns is the orthodoxy I’ve been describing, one that limits diversity instead of promoting it. That’s bad, no matter whose orthodoxy it is, from right or left, north or south. And that is a concern academia needs to address.

The other concern is the very real liberal political tendency of the majority of academics. On its own, this should be no cause of anxiety (any more than it is a problem that most people in business are conservatives). We are not going to provide a “better” education by mandating that people with a diversity of political views be hired to teach in our universities. The reasons that academics tend to be liberal, just like the reasons that businesspeople tend to be conservative, are cultural and not specific to academia. To change that aspect of academia, in other words, requires a changing of the culture as a whole, not simply a changing of university procedures and mindsets. And neither our academic institutions nor our business ones is the appropriate place to start, if that is one’s goal.

Hiring for faculty, then, should be on merit alone. And, once hired, academics should not feel pressure to conform to any academic orthodoxy. A diversity of teaching styles and of research foci benefits our students and our scholarship. Pressure to conform, on the other hand, leads to a deterioration of our institutions and, as we have seen, leaves them vulnerable to attack by those who see this as a lever for prying open education so that it can be restructured in a fashion suitable to the attackers. This is where a “real” tenure system (rather than the diminishing one in place in most schools now) could be of great value, providing a measure of protection for all academics — even from each other.

Yes, performance needs to be evaluated, but evaluation has devolved into a formula, an orthodoxy, that doesn’t serve the universities well, either internally or in terms of public perceptions of the institutions. But, as far as I know, no one is willing to address the issue of the value of our evaluations as they are now instituted.

If our universities are to be protected from the onslaughts of the likes of Tierney and Horowitz, they need to reform themselves constantly, challenging themselves, never accepting “received” wisdom. Unfortunately, contemporary academics have a tendency to circle the wagons when any attack comes, rather than following the intellectually adventurous option of trying to find a way to use even the attacks to extricate themselves and find a peaceful, passable road.

Improve ourselves we must — or someone will “do” it for us (or to us). Just as they have done with No Child Left Behind — a law created with very little help from educators  — the politicians will be able to force their way into our classrooms and set academic agendas for us. Our own orthodoxies within the universities are our enemies, as much as those who use them as a means to attack us, and we should worry about them before we respond to any outside attack.

Contributors to this article: Beverly in NH, JeninRI, Standingup and Sue in KY

Discuss this article...

return to introduction