by Penny, Laura
The university is one of the places where we see the love-hate relationship with knowledge very clearly. Whenever a post-secondary education story gets posted on the Globe and Mail or New York Times website, for example, trolls swarm the board, fulminating about cutting off their public funding. They rejoice at the thought of murdering every seemingly impractical discipline, hanging the last art history prof with the guts of the last philosopher, the better to serve science, engineering, and business, the only fields of inquiry that justify their existence with tangible benefits.
Or cranks get in a huff because fags, feminists, and radical minorities have seized control of the ivory tower. The other really loud complaint about universities is a political one. They, like the bathroom in that kitschy anti-commie poster, are breeding Bolsheviks, as the majority of professors in the humanities and sciences skew liberal-to-lefty.
Conservative columnist Barbara Kay, writing for Canada’s National Post, went so far as to suggest that left-wing bias at universities was the most serious problem affecting the nation. Here’s a smidge of her screed, which is typical of the genre: “From their ivory towers our leftist ecclesiastics rigorously monitor the four credos from which no dissent is permitted: relativism (each to his own ‘truth’ except the truth of relativism, which is absolute), feminism, postcolonialism and multiculturalism (cultures trump civilization).”11
You can find far less grammatical variations on these themes all over the Web. This is another of those get-you-coming-and-going-arguments, like the anti-nerd allegations listed in the first chapter. Do we believe in no truth, or are we radical activists for the other isms that we propagate as truths? Are we po-mo nihilists or politically correct true believers? Anti-Christs or new priests? And isn’t civilization made up of, um, cultures?
To be fair, there are some leftist dogmatics in academe, surely as there are Tories on Bay Street or Republican millionaires in Texas. But if you think that this hardcore minority of tenured radicals are turnin’ anyone not already that way inclined, you are paranoid. Boring doctrinaire leftists are lunch for Kay and her ilk. They goad a very special minority to become hot-headed doctrinaire rightists. And those students keep doughty right-wing columnists permanently supplied with column fodder, with tattletales and fresh outrages: My prof said Stephen Harper was awfully chubby for a robot. Can we fire/sue/stone him?
I may have lefty sympathies, but the last thing I want to see in a student paper is what I think. I make that very clear in every class I teach. I’m there to provide information and assistance, and it’s their job to think, to come up with their own ideas and back them up with evidence or research. I don’t grade them on what they think but how well they think and express it. And that’s how most of my colleagues roll too.
It is awfully disingenuous for righty dogmatists to claim they are flying the flags for truth, objectivity, and science when they are incensed about other values such as God, family, patriotism, and capitalism. The constant righty slurs against relativism are lazy and sloppy, displaying an ignorance of the very tradition they pretend to defend. Relativism is not some sulphurous vapour from the seditious 1960s; it’s been there all along. Classical thought is not some marble temple of absolutes. It includes sophists and the original cynics and skeptics. Michel de Montaigne, the Renaissance thinker whom many nerds call the inventor of the personal essay, was hardly some po-mo nihilist. His essay “On the Cannibals” is a classic example of a relativist argument: the people of the New World may have some barbaric habits, but they have the decency to eat dead men instead of torturing living ones in the name of decency and religion like hypocritical Europeans. Conservatives’ kvetching about relativism is another expression of their desire for authority, their nostalgic longing for the absolute wisdom of Big Dad.
I’m sympathetic to pleas to keep the university open and genuinely liberal in the old John Stuart Mill sense. I just don’t think that’s what most of these prof-bashing types are asking for. Rather, they want some kind of conservative staffing parity, one that would make the university subject to the same shift – down and to the right – that we’ve seen in public discourse and political life. Such complaints ignore the fact that faculties such as business and economics swing the other way politically. Then there are all those fundie schools, like Liberty University and Bob Jones, where you can skip all the secular hedonism and stick to the English that was good enough for Jesus.
The right presumes that scores of conservative nerds are getting blacklisted from academia by the commissars of correctness. But analysts have argued that the liberal majority in the arts and sciences is the result of a self-selecting process driven by the personal values that influence political ideologies. A paper by the husband-and-wife – and Republican-and-Democratic – team Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner looked at the different factors that influence students in favour of grad school and academia, including liberal bias. They argue that self-identified conservatives are more interested in having families and making money, whereas self-identified liberals and lefties value creativity, flexibility, and doing meaningful work more than money or babies.12
Consequently, conservative students tend to cluster in the professional faculties, which are more likely to result in money and babies sooner rather than later. Lefty libs do enjoy a slight edge in the professorial schmoozing sweepstakes, but the differences between lefties and cons are statistically insignificant when it comes to grades and professorial support. Further more, both ideological camps clean the clocks of self-described moderates, who do worst of all. This research was presented at the very conservative American Enterprise Institute, in conjunction with a conference called “Reforming the Politically Correct University.” The Drs. Woessner do argue that keeping the classroom apolitical, or balanced, might help incubate more conservative grad students, but they also advocate liberal policy initiatives to close the con gap: better pay and more family-friendly workloads.
The most high-profile figure in the anti-lefty-prof campaign is David Horowitz, who has cranked out countless op eds and a couple of books about the scourge, inventorying the U.S.’s most scurrilous socialists and tenured radicals. The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America is precisely that, a shit list of the leftiest lefties in all of academe, an omnium-gatherum of the most egregiously anti-American honky-haters, Palestinian-huggers, eco-feminists, and unabashed Marxists.
A former lefty radical himself, Horowitz is very adept at using progressive language to serve his retrograde cause, couching his campaign in terms of intellectual diversity and plurality. This means that he and his fellow-travellers in the right-wing media and think tanks, the very people who bitched longest and loudest about quotas and affirmative action, are now demanding quotas for conservatives. The people who shat a brick about campus language codes and anti-discrimination policies are now trying to craft them. It’s a political twist analogous to the Creation Museum’s use of Enlightenment trappings to advance anti-Enlightenment beliefs.
What is the logical extension of calls for political parity on all academic issues? Business profs forced to assign socialist critiques of the system as a counterpoint to their steady diet of “yay for capital”? Medicine profs giving equal time to crystal healing and homeopathy? And why stop there with the sensitivity to delicate student sensibilities? Should my English syllabus ditch the divine Emily Dickinson and replace her with the latest chick lit out of respect for the differently literate or the poetically challenged?
Of course not. This isn’t about learned judgments but ideological ones. Some groups have even gone so far as to declare that they will be monitoring and recording professors, searching for more scary, traitorous quotes. In 2008 the conservatives at the National Association of Scholars announced they were starting something called the Argus Project. Just like that Greek mythology guy all covered in jeepers peepers, so too shall conservative scholars have eyes on campus as volunteers scrutinize the nation’s colleges to see if anyone conducts
“politicized teaching, requires ideological adherence, or sustains slights to conservative students.”13
Any reasonable person will recoil at the sight of phrases such as “requires ideological adherence,” and no responsible prof, regardless of his or her ideological stripe, would request such a thing. Required factual adherence is quite another matter, though, and that’s where this issue gets quite swampy, when groups such as creationists also cry academic freedom in defence of their nonsense.
The word that really slays me, though, is slights. It’s pretty paternalistic and patronizing to assume that a thinking adult, or at least somebody who has expressed an interest in becoming one by signing up for higher ed, cannot hear opposing or critical views without getting the vapours or feeling brainwashed. This charge also assumes that students are too dumb to recognize ideological bias, even though they fairly marinate in it while watching TV or surfing the Web.
Once we get the professors on a short leash, do we monitor student-on-student slights too, like when Chomsky Junior gets into a nasty dust-up with Mr. College Conservative in their political philosophy seminar? You can’t have the totally neutral or balanced college that right-wing rhetoric romanticizes unless the students come to college ideologically pristine, untouched by their parents’ steady diet of Fox News or BBC World, or their peers’ interest in kicking Iraqi ass or saving Darfur.
I’ve spent time on both sides of the campus divide that professional alarmists like Horowitz keep conjuring, which is why I find so many of the right wing’s claims wildly exaggerated and pointlessly polarizing, statements that exist for the express purpose of enriching the speaker by inflaming everyone else. I have walked among the bow-tied and the Birkenstocked, the monarchists and the Marxists. I’ve studied and taught the Great Dead White Men they recommend and the po-mo studies they revile as sophistry in the service of sedition and sodomy. Not once did anyone shave my head and shame me like a Vichy traitor for serving both sides of the culture wars.
There aren’t many Horowitzian anti-extremist extremists. Much of this “grassroots movement” for students’ rights is Astroturf, artificially kept alive on Fox News and talk radio, louder than it is large. These groups’ websites hardly teem with popular outrage. No Indoctrination.org has collected a measly 178 complaints in the past seven years. Students for Academic Freedom, Horowitz’s super-fun student fan club, no longer has a forum to report ideological abuses. Last time I saw it, there were around four hundred complaints, some of which were obvious goofs, such as people saying that their economics prof was indoctrinating them with capitalism. Then there were some malcontent loons claiming, “they woodnt let’s me into aPHD,” whose issues are more personal than political.
Students love bitching about their profs on the Web. Rate My Professors has amassed millions of gripes from the disgruntled students of many lands. In the summer of 2009, the site celebrated cracking the ten-million-reviews mark. Many universities and student unions have launched their own professor-review websites and guides. There we see students complaining about things that bother them more than any sort of perceived bias or attempted brainwashing. They savage hard markers, heavy foreign accents, favouritism, and bad dressers, dissing the grouchy and the incoherent and the dull and the unfair and the not hot.
Arguing that ideological bias is the most serious problem afflicting our universities perpetuates two ideas that hurt our capacity to consider ideas: namely, that every truth depends on your political persuasion and that there are only two sides to every argument. The fancy technical term for this is bi-univocal, and the best example of it is the news. Show the protestors and the anti-protestors, a head that says yea and another that says nay. Teach evolution and creationism! Equal time for all, regardless of evidence, relevance, or import – which are antiquated and elitist notions, or crafty cover for activist agendas.
Horowitz buries the lead and misses a real problem in his rush to assemble his festive bonfire of straw men. In a footnote in The Professors, he talks about how he never heard this kind of political indoctrination when he was a student at Columbia College in the 1950s. He writes, “There was a reluctance to look at events more recent than twenty-five years in the past because of the dangers of ‘present-mindedness’ and the fear that events so fresh could not be examined with ‘scholarly disinterest.’ “14
Times have changed. We prefer fresh ideas and new breakthroughs. Twenty-five-year-old ideas happened before many of our students were born. They will probably be uninterested, not disinterested in the scholarly way that Horowitz intends. The university’s current “student-centredness” combined with inadequate student preparation in the K–12 system has condemned us to the present, so we are often stuck in a cul-de-sac of current events. This means a lot of talk about pop culture and contemporary issues, even when a prof is trying to teach an old text. And it isn’t just the kids who are stuck in their own cultural moment. The disciplines are suffering from the same presentism too. In a 2008 editorial called “Gone and Being Forgotten,” UCLA professor Russell Jacoby wonders where all the old thinkers have gone. People aren’t reading Hegel in poli-sci or Freud in psych; instead, they’re reading the latest theories and research.15 These fields are behaving as though they’ve been promoted to the hard sciences – yet another sign of our tendency to treat technical reason as the only worthwhile form of thought.
Here’s a gem from the Spellings Report that exhibits the same relentless presentism: “We recommend that America’s colleges and universities embrace a culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement.”16 This is the misshapen issue of Stalinist crop projections mating with management-speak. Are philosophy, history, and literature fields in which one witnesses “continuous innovation and quality improvement”? Not really. Scientistic – not scientific – notions of constant improvement and innovation are utterly at odds with any thoughtful study of our past. Given that the university is one of a handful of institutions that maintains a connection to the past, it is all the more distressing to see this presentism and scientism at work in academia.
The liberal arts are not just old; they are also accused of being weird, and deliberately so. Humanities professors are routinely derided as professional obscurantists and obfuscators, traffickers in snooty jargon. To cite just one example, when revered French thinker Jacques Derrida died in 2004, the supposedly liberal and brainy New York Times ran a dismissive obituary of the “abstruse” thinker that incited the ire of professional nerds all over the world. Derrida’s obituary was merely the latest in a long line of anti-theory screeds. In short, the message is “This shit is hard on purpose and it makes no sense!” Deconstruct the Western tradition and the Gray Lady spits on your grave. Deconstruct the global economy and she reports your latest multi-million-dollar bonus.
I concede that there exists some dreadful, deliberately prolix academic writing. That’s inevitable under publish-or-perish rules in a weak job market. But the subtext here is blatantly anti-intellectual. It says that philosophy and literature profs are only faking it, putting on airs, when they produce work that is difficult or complex. Literary and philosophical thinking dare not outpace common sense or popular taste.
Conversely, the sciences, because they are a form of technical reason, have the right to be as complicated as they wanna be. Nobody ever blusters about the physics department, castigating the way their needlessly elaborate equations spurn the understanding of the common man. Nobody demands transparency from the chemistry department because their complex formulas might grow up to be pills or pantyhose or explosives, y’know, like, things people can use. When it comes to, like, words, and the, like, meaning of stuff, everybody’s got a write 2 they’re opinion and no body’s better then any buddy. Who teh heLL R u 2 tEll me what 2 reed or how 2 spel?
The activities at the very heart of the university – reading and writing – get demoted to gen ed requirements or electives that round out “real” subjects like business and hotel management. Students approach the
m with all the vim and vigour that the descriptors general and mandatory usually elicit. That single required English course or philosophy elective that Useful Studies majors are frogmarched through then gives them the right to dismiss such disciplines as fluff, to wave away thousands of years of human endeavour as nothing other than preparation for a career in front of a deep-fat fryer, har-dee-har-har.
We treat university education as another consumer good, a product, not a process. University rankings such as the ones generated by U.S. News and World Report, or the Canadian version in Maclean’s magazine, always sell really well. People love a list. But the rankings also show us the conflicting missions of the university. They imply that a college education, like any other consumer good, is easy to review and rank. But when universities question them for this very reason, academia gets thwacked with the public-service, taxpayer-accountability stick. Post-secondary education is stranded in a weird limbo somewhere between being a public service and a big-ticket purchase.
Some liberal arts colleges, such as St. John’s and Reed, have long refused to participate in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, arguing that they encourage educational homogeneity, stat gaming, and status seeking. In 2006, eleven Canadian university presidents announced that their institutions would not participate in the Maclean’s survey, citing concerns about the way the magazine weighted and packaged the data they submitted. Lest you surmise that this was merely sour grapes from the losers, the letter’s signatories included top-ranking schools such as the University of Toronto. Their actions emboldened another fifteen schools to drop out.
Undaunted, Maclean’s has continued to put together its guide using publicly available data. Its editorial about the boycott began, “Nobody likes being graded, particularly those used to giving tests, not sitting them,”17 spinning the universities’ arguments against their methods as a refusal to submit to scrutiny. It sounds good, but the people used to giving tests and grades had to take a shitload of tests and get a gazillion grades themselves before they got to grade or test anyone else. Most of us remember how it feels. (Some of us even like it. Sick, I know.)