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Quote for the day
From Robert Weissberg:
As the academy grows more stridently left wing, conservatives respond with calls for ideological affirmative action — for schools to hire more right-thinking faculty so students encounter intellectual diversity. This is a seductively alluring scheme, and thanks to wealthy donors, it is proliferating.
It is an ill-advised and ultimately anti-intellectual strategy, even in the unlikely event that it succeeds. The academy can not be, nor should it be, an intellectual version of Noah’s Ark. Sadly, this conservative version of “inclusion” mimics the Left’s subordination of truth to ideology.
The quest should be about insisting that whatever professors teach, content should be truthful, whether this truth is liberal, conservative, reactionary, or Marxist, whether the subject in English or sociology. After all, who wants conservative falsehoods to “balance” radical dishonesty? It is fantasy to insist that if students learn at 9 a.m. that 2+2=3 and at 11 a.m., 2+2=5, they will eat lunch knowing that 2+2=4.
The hunt to hire truth-seekers changes everything. Out with the ideological litmus tests; in with character and temperament. If a Marxist job candidate argues that Africa is poor owing to colonial exploitation, the sharp rejoinder should be, “Can you prove this?” Ditto for the conservative job seeker who insists that only capitalist free markets can solve Africa’s poverty.
Admittedly, abandoning ideological labels complicates life, and may even discourage donors from funding pet projects, but this is what the life of the mind is about.
All true. Also true: it’s quite common to dismiss those who criticize academia’s evident ideological homoegeneity as people who are problematically arguing for affirmative action for conservatives–when they are doing nothing of the kind. It’s happened to me quite a bit, for example. But there is a middle ground that’s ethical all the way around–one that requires people on both ends of the political spectrum to lay off the cheap political point-scoring and to focus on making sure that practice measures up to principle.
Yes, of course people should “lay off the cheap political point-scoring,” and of course we should be alert to “character and temperament” when hiring. But things are a little more complex than Weissberg lets on, as when he writes this:
“If a Marxist job candidate argues that Africa is poor owing to colonial exploitation, the sharp rejoinder should be, ‘Can you prove this?’ Ditto for the conservative job seeker who insists that only capitalist free markets can solve Africa’s poverty.”
Most likely, both the Marxist and the conservative can “prove this.” Actually, it would be better to say they can come up not with proof but with a fair and well-supported argument–which of course will only be persuasive to someone who buys the fundamental premises of Marxist or conservative thought. If one doesn’t buy into those premises, that’s OK, too–the purpose is not so much to persuade the student; it’s to help the student understand what different kinds of arguments look like.
Weissberg’s “2+2=3 and 2+2=5″ is good as far as it goes, which is not very far. If we want a mathematics analogy, I prefer something like this:
Intellectual diversity consists of students learning at 9 a.m. that in Euclidean geometry, on a flat surface, the three angles of a triangle always add up to exactly 180 degrees, and at 11 a.m. learning that in non-Euclidean geometry, on the surface of a sphere, the three angles of a triangle always add up to more than 180 degrees.
FWIW, this issue has just about zero to do with whether profs are disproportionately “liberal” in the pop-political sense. As for the “conservative affirmative action” idea, I don’t see any problem at all with hiring faculty on the basis of intellectual diversity. We just have to remember that “intellectual diversity” doesn’t map very neatly onto “political diversity.” We need to be careful not to think that hiring both “liberals” and “conservatives,” as those terms are used in popular political discourse, is the same as hiring for intellectual diversity.
Intellectual diversity in, for example, an English department means having feminists and postcolonialists and New Critics and New Historicists and Arnoldian liberal humanists and so on. The critical approaches that are considered “conservative” within the discipline might well be taught by profs who are “liberal” in the popular political sense–but so what? In an English department, intellectual diversity also applies to matters of canon and syllabus. A good faculty should have people teaching DWEMs as well as feminist science fiction. But again, the folks teaching DWEMs are not particularly likely to be Republicans.
Also FWIW: I don’t think it’s true that academia is “grow[ing] more stridently left wing.” I think that’s a sort of optical illusion, and that in absolute terms the professoriate as a whole has been creeping toward the center, while the nation as a whole has moved toward the right.
[...] of the day at Critical Mass: From Robert Weissberg: As the academy grows more stridently left wing, conservatives respond with [...]