Is There a "Liberal Professor" Problem?

Larry Summers thinks about it:

The Liberal (and Moderating) Professoriate: Summers said he identified strongly as a liberal and a Democrat, but that while in Washington he viewed himself as being on “the right half of the left,” in Cambridge, he landed “on the right half of the right.”... Summers said, he found “even less ideological diversity” than he thought he would, and that in the humanities and social sciences, Republicans are “the third group,” after Democrats and Nader and other left-wing third parties.

To date, Summers said, he has largely viewed the political imbalance as one of “able people making choices.” He said that if you are a smart individual, and you like the market, profits, and “striving for profits,” you have “a wide range of choices in life,” of which an academic career is but one. If you are a smart person who doesn’t like the world of markets and profits, “you have a much narrower range of choices,” he said, and academic careers may be quite desirable. In this way of thinking, he said, it’s not surprising to find more liberals than conservatives on college faculties.

At the same time, he added, the extent of the imbalance and some informal research he has conducted “give me pause”.... It’s not that there are no conservative professors, he said, but their share is so small as to raise questions that deserve more attention. Summers wondered if the situation isn’t like it was in the early days of baseball’s racial integration, when people trying to say equality had arrived could point to the relatively equal performance of black and white stars. “But it appeared that there were not any African-American 0.250 hitters,” Summers said. “The only [black] players who played were stars.”

Summers said it would be “extraordinarily unwise and dangerous” for government to try to force more balance in hiring. And he said it would be “a real horror” if, in the name of respecting all views, Harvard’s astronomy department hired an astrologer or the biology department hired a creationist. But while there is a “tension” in calling for more diversity of views, while excluding views such as those, he said it was worthy to seek more ideological diversity.

One reason... is to help liberalism. “As someone who is a strong Democrat and is a liberal, and does not think that we have won the argument with the country over the last 40 years, rather to the contrary, it makes me wonder whether if you do not engage in intense dialogue with those whom you disagree with in substantial number whether your own arguments will be sharpened and honed to maximum effect,” Summers said....

There is another argument for saying that more ideological balance in higher education shouldn’t be a goal, Summers said, and it is one that he understands, but questions. This perspective relates to conservative success in much of American society. “From the perspective of many, they’ve got the White House, the Supreme Court, the CEO’s of 85 percent of the Fortune 500. They’ve got Fox News. They’ve got an increasing share of the media, so is the right way to have diversity to change the one thing that’s progressive?” While Summers said that this attitude creates “a problematic role for universities to put themselves in,” he said that it explains the “extreme hostility” of some in academe to conservative ideas.

From where I sit, I don't think that either economics or political science has a conservative problem--meaning that I find myself slightly on the left as far as both disciplines are concerned. And I don't think any institution anywhere has a too-few-Republicans problem: universities don't need more believers in intelligent design or the appicability of the Laffer curve or the unitary executive or the genetic inferiority of Africans or more disbelievers in global warming. Do other disciplines have a too-few-conservatives problem? Perhaps, but I don't think it can be solved: I cannot think of a sociology department that would be improved by hiring Charles Murray or a philosophy department that would be improved by hiring William Kristol or a Middle Eastern studies department that would be improved by hiring Daniel Pipes. Perhaps there are history departments that would be improved by Ronald Radosh, perhaps not. But anti-meritocratic discrimination against thoughtful conservatives should create an opportunity and an obvious pool of potential high-quality conservative hires. I don't see such a pool anywhere.

Comments

[NeilS]

It is also true that most engineering departments tend conservative.

Should the next hire be a leftist?

Does it matter what the politics of the professors may or may not be? I have been in many classes (mostl science) and do not recall talk of politics.

[andres]

Brad: "From where I sit, I don't think that either economics or political science has a conservative problem--meaning that I find myself slightly on the left as far as both disciplines are concerned."

Oh, the perils of self-perspective. I, on the other hand, view Brad as an intelligent conservative who sits slightly on the right on most socioeconomic issues. What he doesn't seem to realize is that he is part of a profession whose initial training makes it inherently conservative.

(conservative not in the Republican sense of course. The Republican Party is in fact a _Medievalist_ party that wants to restore the Inquisition, the Divine Right of CEOs, and anti-Muslim crusades in the Middle East)

The economics profession that I know (with the exception of my own graduate school) takes the conclusions of Adam Smith as given starting points without actually making a serious examination of the assumptions needed to make Smithian policy prescriptions work. The mainstream economics profession therefore has a pre-built ideological bias towards laissez faire that makes it inherently conservative relative to the other social sciences and history. True conservatism may or may not be a bad outlook depending on the circumstances, but Brad owes it to himself to know where he stands in the wider perspective of things.

[andres]

Brad: "From where I sit, I don't think that either economics or political science has a conservative problem--meaning that I find myself slightly on the left as far as both disciplines are concerned."

Oh, the perils of self-perspective. I, on the other hand, view Brad as an intelligent conservative who sits slightly on the right on most socioeconomic issues. What he doesn't seem to realize is that he is part of a profession whose initial training makes it inherently conservative.

(conservative not in the Republican sense of course. The Republican Party is in fact a _Medievalist_ party that wants to restore the Inquisition, the Divine Right of CEOs, and anti-Muslim crusades in the Middle East)

The economics profession that I know (with the exception of my own graduate school) takes the conclusions of Adam Smith as given starting points without actually making a serious examination of the assumptions needed to make Smithian policy prescriptions work. The mainstream economics profession therefore has a pre-built ideological bias towards laissez faire that makes it inherently conservative relative to the other social sciences and history. True conservatism may or may not be a bad outlook depending on the circumstances, but Brad owes it to himself to know where he stands in the wider perspective of things.

[sd]

The problem with the liberal dominance in most humanities and social sciences fields is that:

A) It is overwhelming - almost absolute in many departments
B) Most tenured academics have literally never spent significant time outside the academy

Put the two together and you get a situation where many humanities and social sciences professors have never in their lives had to wrestle with challenges to their worldview. In a sphere where refining ideas about the nature of human beings and their civilization is the stock in trade, this simply cannot be good for the long term health of the enterprise.

Summers notes that “From the perspective of many, they’ve got the White House, the Supreme Court, the CEO’s of 85 percent of the Fortune 500..." But the difference is that almost every member of the executive branch and the supreme court and almost every high ranking corporate executive went to college. Which is to say that they were almost all exposed to challenges to their worldview from the left.

But someone who comes in to a liberal worldview at age 16, goes off to Yale or Amherst, then graduate school at Berkeley, then to a teaching job at Duke, has a good chance of never encountering any serious intellectual resistance. Never had to examine his assumptions.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Of course there is a problem, but having taught several thousand 20 year olds in days past, many if not most will avoid ideology, especially the shove-down-the-throat leftist kind.

Those who are hard core tended to get that at home (the kid who had two college professor parents seems to always be hard core to one side or the other, SDS or Young GOP).

The bothersome issue is that in many social science programs a conservative would never be allowed to get close to a doctorate, the leftish gatekeepers would drive them away. That is the real narrow mindedness.

[Colin Danby]

Summers is trying to collapse a multi-dimensional ideological space into one well-behaved dimension. In economics all it takes is one doubt over the neutrality of money to make you a dangerous radical.

No question we could do with a few more rigorous and well-educated Burkeans, Hayekians, and Oakeshottians around the place, if for no other reason than to persuade students that a thoughtful conservatism is possible. But "imbalance" is used in an awfully vague way in Summers' remarks, and he's clearly still smarting over getting his head handed to him for silly remarks on gender.

[wood turtle]

I took a lot of science classes in college and don't recall that there is any liberal/conservative bias in the sciences.

However, I do recall that people who took social science classes said that politics did creep into the curriculum, as in when a test question was graded to the particular view of the professor. But there probably isn't any way to get around that because that is what the professor sees as truth.

[Ottnott]

rustbelt wrote:
"The bothersome issue is that in many social science programs a conservative would never be allowed to get close to a doctorate, the leftish gatekeepers would drive them away. That is the real narrow mindedness"

Not true at any high-quality research-oriented school that I'm aware of.

As Brad noted, the pool of high-quality conservative candidates isn't out there. They are making other choices. Consider, for example, reactions to my wife's decision to pursue an academic career:

My libertarian, wealthy (financial services field) brother-in-law to my wife (poli sci professor at public research-oriented university): "Why would you want to study Africa? There's no money there."

My Republican, middle-class mother (married to a PhD) to my wife (while PhD was still a work in progress): "After that many years, you could be a real doctor."

Most of my wife's relatives (farm-country Republicans, some college, currently land wealthy subject to market forces): "Are you studying to be a politician?"

I'd say that, in the case of my wife and the many colleagues I've come to know, choosing the academic path has been a matter of pursuing a passion for knowledge. Getting the PhD and the professorial appointment was a labor of love. The only way political leanings may have played a role in her attraction to and success in the field, I believe, is that she would be slightly more likely to pursue that labor of love if she liked the people than she would if she did not.

There is plenty of intellectual debate in her field and her life, and what she and her colleagues value above all else is the ability to explain reality in a rigorous, scientific manner. "More liberal" is of no value, professionally, unless it comes attached to "better scholar".

Am I being naive about her field's ability to weigh scholarship in isolation from worldview? Perhaps, but I don't think the forces of bias are anywhere close to strong enough to explain the liberal/convservative makeup of her field. Consider a different version of the discussion here--how would a liberal fare in a very conservative world like financial services? Would those fields put a heavier weight on political outlook than on business success? No doubt there is a pro-conservative bias in that field, but I would still argue that the far stronger selective force is individuals weighing the personal attractiveness of the work and lifestyle presented by a career in financial services.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/opinion/08krugman.html

October 8, 2007

Same Old Party
By PAUL KRUGMAN

There have been a number of articles recently that portray President Bush as someone who strayed from the path of true conservatism. Republicans, these articles say, need to return to their roots.

Well, I don't know what true conservatism is, but while doing research for my forthcoming book I spent a lot of time studying the history of the American political movement that calls itself conservatism — and Mr. Bush hasn't strayed from the path at all. On the contrary, he's the very model of a modern movement conservative.

For example, people claim to be shocked that Mr. Bush cut taxes while waging an expensive war. But Ronald Reagan also cut taxes while embarking on a huge military buildup.

People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush's general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here's how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a "rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems" because "the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government."

People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.

But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that "under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors."

People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration's general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In "The Conscience of a Conservative," published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that "I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size."

People claim to be shocked that the Bush Justice Department, making a mockery of the Constitution, issued a secret opinion authorizing torture despite instructions by Congress and the courts that the practice should stop. But remember Iran-Contra? The Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, violating a legal embargo, and used the proceeds to support the Nicaraguan contras, defying an explicit Congressional ban on such support.

Oh, and if you think Iran-Contra was a rogue operation, rather than something done with the full knowledge and approval of people at the top — who were then protected by a careful cover-up, including convenient presidential pardons — I've got a letter from Niger you might want to buy.

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration's efforts to disenfranchise minority groups, under the pretense of combating voting fraud. But Reagan opposed the Voting Rights Act, and as late as 1980 he described it as "humiliating to the South."

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration's attempts — which, for a time, were all too successful — to intimidate the press. But this administration's media tactics, and to a large extent the people implementing those tactics, come straight out of the Nixon administration. Dick Cheney wanted to search Seymour Hersh's apartment, not last week, but in 1975. Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, was Nixon's media adviser.

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration's attempts to equate dissent with treason. But Goldwater — who, like Reagan, has been reinvented as an icon of conservative purity but was a much less attractive figure in real life — staunchly supported Joseph McCarthy, and was one of only 22 senators who voted against a motion censuring the demagogue.

Above all, people claim to be shocked by the Bush administration's authoritarianism, its disdain for the rule of law. But a full half-century has passed since The National Review proclaimed that "the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail," and dismissed as irrelevant objections that might be raised after "consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal" — presumably a reference to the document known as the Constitution of the United States....

[jp]

Selectively "liberal" Larry Summers tryed to shut down anti-Israel criticism at Harvard:

"Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent..."

NYT, September 21, 2002

In that respect he has more in common with Daniel Pipes than he might like to admit.

[anne]

"The bothersome issue is that in many social science programs a conservative would never be allowed to get close to a doctorate, the leftish gatekeepers would drive them away. That is the real narrow mindedness."

Rubbish, complete rubbish, but this is the rubbish conservatives have been peddling for decades. Simply for intimidation; like the liberal press, that is only liberal when trying to telling the truth.

[Bruce Wilder]

The too-few-conservatives in academia comes down to a problem with conservatism, not a problem with academia.

I think it was Mill, who observed that the conservative party will always tend to be the party of the stupid, but, in recent years, the Republican Party appears to have taken "stupid" as a mandate. Nevertheless, I fail to see the evidence that there is any shortage of conservatives at Harvard or other first tier Universities.

In economics, there might be a tendency for the habits of the discipline itself to favor conservatives of the Dr. Pangloss type -- I don't know -- and there is certainly a problem of corruption associated with the relative abundance of funding from right-wing foundations and individuals. I would not hold my breath waiting for Larry Summers to address himself to the corruption of the universities by corporate research funding and right-wing foundations.

[Kate G.]

Look, the funniest thing about Summers' argument is that he thinks that the "argument with the country" between "liberal" and "conservative" viewpoints is *won or lost* at the University level through some trickle down process that begins with disputing perspectives among faculty. He argues that we need more conservatives so that liberals can argue better *so that the country as a whole* will better understand liberal ideas/be more like Larry summers.

If that is how he thinks ideas are shaped in this country he's a fool. I thought so when I received the backwash of his ill informed opinions to the faculty just before he took up his ball and went home. But now its confirmed for me. Look, Larry, not only do conservative/greedy people have lots of options for making money while mere intellectuals do not but *all the money for political propaganda* is on the *money side* too. The Wall STreet Journal has more money and influence than the Nation. The AEI and every other think tank you can name including, at this point, brookings serves as a well paid pseudo academic sinecure for conservatives who want to get rich without having to teach for a living. They are paid to churn out conservative ideas and policy prescriptions and market them to policy makers and to the rubes. And conservatives and their economic backers *like it that way.* Its a damned inefficient means of inculcating conservative ideology to rely on poorly paid area specialists with a commitment to truth and reason. Far better to rely on an army of well paid hacks moving rapidly between the public sphere (as congressional aides, congressmen, or lobbyists) and well paid sinecures at conservative think tanks to create marketable ideas. And then to use well paid agents and advertisers to push those ideas through the media than to merely try to educate impressionable youth.

We don't need more conservatives in academia. We need fewer conservatives everywhere else.

But hey, check out Michael O'hanlon's new piece on health care. He's gone from being a paid international expert on nothing to being a paid international expert on health care and he's not employed at a university at all!

Kate G.

[Bloix]

But there is a real problem when students are educated in a certain intellectual tradition and when they go out to earn a living outside academia, as the vast majority of them do, finding that they are completely unable to communicate or persuade anyone about anything- not their employers, clients, or co-workers. What happens is they simply unlearn everything they studied for four years and adopt the prejudices and beliefs of their new surroundings - cynically, perhaps, but nonethless thoroughly. The problem of the absence of engagement between the universities and the public is a real one, and it can't be addressed by having professors say that they are pure and true while the society at large is corrupt.

[jerry]

Is there political correctness in Academia? Didn't we just go through the orthodox/heterodox discussion in economics a few months ago?

(Are physics departments now splitting up into the strings/no strings camps?? I don't know.)

Here's a group of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians that acknowledge and fight against campus political correctness all of the time. http://www.thefire.org If speech codes are present on campuses, why is it so hard to believe that departments aren't hiring based on "political" agreement of a candidate to a very narrow set of issues?

In 1997, at Haas, Professor Spiegel was telling us all with his famous "dollar auction" that there was no such thing as "flippers" in the market. There was no money to be made by speculation. 1997. His dollar auction was indeed famous, yet no other professor in the school thought it important or possible to refute him.

By 2002, IIRC, the Haas school was sending out fliers to its alums: hey! we've discovered that investors are not rational! They act on all sorts of other behavioral factors! Please come attend this lecture for only $3,000.

So yeah, schools are probably hiring based on agreement with a narrow set of beliefs.

It is probably human nature to do so, and so probably wrong to blame this on conservatives.

Modern Feminists acknowledge their puzzlement: EVERYONE they know in academia agrees with them, but in the rest of the world, young women are fleeing from the label of "feminist."

Economists have it much better. Their calls to destroy jobs have been met with lots of favor in Washington and Boardrooms, but the economists remain puzzled that everyone else in the community thinks they are a lot of generously tenured swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictators with delusions of godhood that have basically destroyed American life as it was once known.

So yeah, I don't think narrow hiring practices does the field of study, the department, or the students any good.

[Ari]

"And I don't think any institution anywhere has a too-few-Republicans problem: universities don't need more believers in intelligent design or the appicability of the Laffer curve or the unitary executive or the genetic inferiority of Africans or more disbelievers in global warming."

Or an anthropology professor like Nadia Abu El-Haj who believes that the whole Jewish historical connection with Israel is a complete myth fabricated by an imperialist, racist, Zionist state, or an "ethnic studies" professor like Ward Churchill who describes those who died on 9/11 as "technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire" and "little Eichmanns." These are two hardcore leftist nutcases, and infinitively more can be found.

But I suppose they don't fit the "crazy Republican" stereotype, even though, unlike the purveyors of the ideas you mention, they are well represented on American and European campuses, and we could certainly make do with less of them.

Obviously, left-wingers dominate the humanities departments of most universities, and not for conspiratorial reasons. I think that attempts to enforce idealogical equality would be absurd, but then again, wouldn't liberals love them? The rationale behind affirmative action is often predicated on the belief that a "diversity" of skin colors and races (they don't exist until the quota system comes into play) naturally engenders a diversity of outlook. If they really wanted a diversity of outlook, why not simply hire more conservatives?

[Paul J. Reber]

It's really tempting to simply say academia drifts left because we are reality-based and the facts have a well-known liberal bias.

In cognitive neuroscience (my field), I don't see a strong political contamination in established theory. Nature/nurture comes up but we debate the issues constantly. Good science is always aimed at uncovering truth, does this attract left-liberals?

I'd expect a domain like economics there would be a lot more political influence. Maybe I don't read broadly enough, but the limited right/liberatarian/conservative economics I've run into falls into 2 basic camps: intellectually bankrupt or not-really-disagreeing-with-the-center/left.

Academia itself may also attract left liberals, but not necessarily due to lack of options. I have the distinct impression that any of my really smart colleagues could earn a lot more working in business than academia. They (we) choose academia either because of a desire to do some small global good through research and teaching, or because of a decision to personally maximize quality of life by trading income for time/control/stability. I associate both of those impulses with left-learning attitudes.

In contrast, I had an experience with a politically very conservative student. To avoid conflict, I didn't discuss politics directly with him. However, I remember being surprised early in the Iraq war as he ran around citing "Italian Secret Service" memos he had found on the internet that proved Saddam Hussein had WMD. I marvelled at how much better he was at understanding scientific facts and evidence than real world facts and evidence (he was a smart guy). I also wondered at why a really smart guy who was not that altruistic would sacrifice so much earning power to stay in academia. He didn't, he quit to work in business.

It's also notable that the current political administration is more anti-intellectual and anti-science than any other I am aware of. That in itself should lead academics to be voting D over R in the last few elections at least.

[Kate G.]

Bloix's argument that liberally educated youth go out into the world and cynically betray the values they've been taught is a fantasy. For one thing, it confuses various forms of liberalism and various forms of conservativism. Politics in the US consists of a political system divided roughly center left/far right with the far right divided between social conservatives (the anti gays/pro gun/would be theocrats) and fiscal conservatives aligned with rape and pillage conservatives. Many a culturally liberal educated youth is a happy tool of the business interest by day, free thinker by night. Which is the "real" person? Which is the result of the educational system? Who can say? I sure can't tell.

But I can say this: The cultural conservatives have always been petrified of the pull of a culturally liberal,educated elite and they are right to be afraid of that. Culturally conservative children educated at culturally liberal schools very seldom fall back all the way to the know nothingness of their youth. That's why christian colleges are so popular *with christian parents.* Conservatives of other kinds aren't so worried about the influence of liberal professors because they know that political liberalism has nothing to do with effective teaching in history, economics, or any other soft or hard science.

I see no evidence that liberal students are having to turn their coats when they leave the liberal academy. Other things have as great or greater an affect on political identification if that is what we are talking about: age, sex, marital status, family i nfluence, etc...etc...etc....

But on the other hand as the country goes to the dogs economically trying to pay for Bush's war even the comfortable liberal children of the elite educated classes may decide they need more government intervention (oh liberal shibboleth!) and leave their econ 101 classes and demand socialistic universal health classes. And even the top buisnessmen nourished on randian principles may decide that it suits their new economic needs to push for universal health care because shoving social costs onto everyone is better for them than trying to continue pretending that sturdy individual worker capitalist drones really want to pay for their own health care entirely.

We may well see a serious re-alignment in this country but its not going to be because liberal professors learn to mix it up and persuade the masses by talking shop with their earnest conservative peers. And its not going to be because the academy is "liberal" and the real world is not so that dreamy, free thinking youth takes on the mantle of conservative buisnessmen like it does a serge suit. Its going to be because the interests of the population as a whole, both educated and uneducated, are or aren't being served by the current set of conservative leaders and policy makers and their disasterous political and economic policies. If conservative ideas and policies are so great--why is the country sinking under their execution? Is it Bush or is it conservativism? Krugman, today, argues that its just *business as usual.* I say its spinach and I say the hell with it.

Kate G.

[trotsky]

Times do change. I'm reading "American Prometheus," about Robert Oppenheimer. Last night I got to the part where the overwhelmingly conservative Berkeley faculty didn't want any more Jews on the physics faculty ("One" -- Opje -- "was enough."), where a teaching assistant was fired for speaking up for Communists' right to meet in a school building, etc.

[Emma Anne]

This kind of discussion always mystifies me. As an engineering major I neither knew nor cared what my professors thought about politics. And nor did the liberal arts professors discuss politics, with a few exceptions. In law school it made a little more difference - you kind of knew where the professors stood - but there were certainly plenty of students of all political stripes and they all got good grades when warranted and graduated in their turn.

[Barkley Rosser]

And why are we not worrying about the lack of liberals among the officer corps of the military or the private mercenaries in Iraq or evangelical Protestant ministers?

[Alexander Nekvasil]

The founding precept of conservatism is that some things (politically crucial things) must not be spoken of.

It's hard to see how this should grow into anything resembling (social, cultural) science (at the same time it's easy to see how it can grow into a war on science; as it has, from time to time).

[Robert Waldmann]

Indeed. Larry doesn't consider the possibility that people get ahead in [some fields] academics based on an ability to develop theories that fit the facts and to test them.

A willingness to face evidence excludes one from todays republican part . It makes it almost impossible to be considered a conservative. There are exceptions. One doesn't have to face facts to be a mathematician, one doesn't have to face recent facts to be a historian and one doesn't have to face an to win a Nobel prize in economics [as did someone who, according to ou, would not pass the Turing test].

[Thorstein Veblen]

Larry the-problem-with-Africa-is-its-vastly-under-polluted Summers may think of himself as a loyal, liberal Democrat, but I don't see why we should take his word for it. Everything I've ever heard him say or write, including this past article, suggests he belongs on the right. Does anyone have a link to an article or paper by Summers which expounds liberal thoughts?

[John Emerson]

"These are two hardcore leftist nutcases, and infinitively more can be found."

For some value of "infinitively", I guess.

I call Brad a conservative. He seems liberal in the US because "conservative" here means the 30% Bush-loyalist core of Armageddon Christians, racists, free-market ideologues, imperialists, and chauvinists. And these are mostly stupid, deluded, lazy, uneducable, emotionally unstable, or all of the above.

Smart conservatives are not well represented in universities because they can make more money elsewhere, and money is what conservatives are all about.

[Rob]

So Summers goes from meeting bankers in a southern city to meeting professors in a northern city and is shocked they have different views? They are more liberals in New York than in Charleston, SC obviously we must fix this problem!

[christofay]

Conservatives are seeking the Darwin Awards and not the Nobels. Academia is just too darn hard for conservative soft scientists so they invented new ivy covered halls-think tanks. Of course with their records referring to them as stupid tanks is more accurate.

[bakho]

Conservatism is about status quo and fossilization of knowledge and culture. Replace "liberal" with progressive and you get the definition of an institution of higher learning. The mission is "progress". Progress means change. Change means doing things differently from what they have been done in the past. So educational institutions are necessarily progressive.

Conservatism can also be a focused study of the majority POV. Liberalism is an exploration of alternative or minority views. In the world of ideas, there is only one "conservative canon". However there are multiple alternative (liberal) canons. In dividing the resources of a University to provide students with multiple POV, the conservative POV can be covered by a single academic. Each alternative POV requires its own academic. Thus, the conservatives are outnumbered by the "liberals", but the liberals are not monolithic or necessarily in agreement.

TV news is sometimes portrayed as "liberal" because the TV tries to cover multiple POV. Since there is only on POV that is "conservative", conservative is the status quo and news has a bias toward news, many conservatives see TV as being 'liberal". Of course, the "liberal" is not monolithic and not in agreement.

It comes down to "conservative" being a single POV and liberal encompassing multiple alternatives.

[bigTom]

There certainly is a perception problem. The isolated? horror stories perpetuate the perception, that in political fields students will encounter professors who only accept the party line. Hopefully the prevalence of these sorts of experiences is low. Nevertheless I know at least one smart but ultra-conservative person who doesn't want his kids to go to college because of the fear of ideological contaimination. If our society bifurcates into one group that is educated at traditional universities, and another group that goes to BobJones university propaganda factories clones we could be in for a rough time.

[jerry]

I am a proud progressive liberal, but I find a lot of the posts above "conservatism is about ... LOTS OF WANKING!" to be lots of wanking and about as insightful as visiting Hot Air and FrontPageMag to find out what liberals are about.

Brad, you may wish to read Daphne Patai's books to find out her experience with politically correct agendas in academia in women's studies. From there you can project to what it might be like in the other social sciences and humanities including economics.

I suspect that if the so called conservative doctors, engineers and physicists were to hear that they are not reality based, they would laugh and laugh and laugh at you as you sat yourself inside the aircraft they have constructed and worked inside their buildings and towers and allowed them to operate on your heart.

[William Bennett]

Martin Malia in his one, lovely book, "Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism" writes, "In the first place [Hegel] thought too much to be truly conservative. The best way to keep things as they are is not to think about them at all, but to accept them without reflecting, and this is what the real conservative always prefers to do. If, through some ill-fortune, the conservative is stirred to reflection by troublesome reformers, his favorite philosophy is an antirationalism which denies the possibility of understanding things and therefore of changing them." I find this observation persuasive and wonder whether it would help to explain the lack of "conservatives" in academia.

[Wagner]

The problem is not conservatives and liberals.

The problem is statists and cynical power players versus inviduals, humanists, and scholars.

The tyranny of the left is as bad as the tyranny of the right. The 20th century ought to have taught us that if nothing else.

Is the professor an ideologue or a scholar? A elitist or a humanist? That is what one needs to know, and the students tend to find that out, even if it is after their graduation.

[Bruce Bartlett]

I think Brad's comments about the unemployability of some prominent conservatives at any university are unfair. He is assuming that those people would have the same views they hold today even if they had careers as tenured professors. I seriously doubt it. Their careers would have developed in entirely different ways, they would have written on different subjects and in different ways, and they would have been constantly subjected to the moderating influence of their liberal colleagues. The people Brad mentions say and do the things they do today because that is what they are rewarded for doing. In other words, incentives matter.

[Marc]

The Republican party under Bush promotes sneering anti-intellectualism. This doesn't play well in the academy. There is a long history of (political) conservatives in science, for example. But to be a Bush Republican is to deny evolution and global climate change. You won't find these folks in the sciences, and it clearly isn't because politically conservative scientists are discriminated against. The GOP has chosen to be a know-nothing party...

[Kate G.]

bigtom's observation cracks me up. This country could be in a lot of trouble if conservatives decide to send their kids to bob jones university rather than to secular schools? Uh...where you been bigtom? They've been doing that--not, of course, conservative bankers, lawyers, doctors and scientists. They still send their kids to elite schools secure in the knowledge that elite schools turn out elite kids and that status counts in this wacky world. When George Bush et al needed to lawyer up they threw their "liberty law school" purity crew overboard and went with Harvard, Yale, Stanford at the white shoe firms. Guess prayer and being on the right side with G-d wasn't as good a bet as LSAT scores and law review rank.

But what's the cure for someone so frightened of modernity that he (smart guy) fears contamination of his seed if he sends them to the local state school or to an ivy? Should we offer him a special scholarship? Would mere filthy lucre be enough to get him to sacrifice his young on the altar of liberalism? Or should we just remove evolution and actual science (geology, plate techtonics, engineering and bridge building) as well as putting those pretty pink "life" stickers on the mouths of all the feminist professors who hurt daphne patai's feelings in the post after yours? And what on earth was daphne patai doing "dans cette galere?" anyway? What ever happened to voting with your feet and refusing to stay in a department that isn't congenial to you? Too free market for conservatives?

The very notion that conservatives in this country, where the term is generally proudly held primarily by free market free riders, should be paid or induced to violate their free market principles and do somethign they don't want to do (teach in universities/learn in universities) strikes me as the worst kind of affirmative action policy. And I've been paying attention! There's nothing that a true blue conservative hates more than affirmative action. Unless its accepting that the life of the mind is not all that remunerative.

Kate G.

[Jim von der Heydt]

TypePad ate my initial post, which invoked my op-ed in the Harvard Crimson the last week of Summers's presidency (search the archive for 'jeremiad').

Bottom line is that Summers should know that the political movement 'conservatism' he accidentally invokes when he refers to the coherent and sometimes principled set of ideas also called 'conservatism' would benefit from this set of comments. I find them politically irresponsible comments for him to make. He's commenting on societal deck chairs that we could rearrange after we miss an iceberg or two (instead of purposely hitting every iceberg we espy).

The real reason I'm posting now though is to say --

Kate G. is my new hero.

Jim von der Heydt

[david]

By "informal research", does Summers mean "hanging out with Steven Pinker?" Cause that would explain a lot.

[save_the_rustbelt]

This reminds me of a weakness of some of my very good leftist professors (one of my best professors was a Marine veteran of WWII and an avowed Communist, great teacher.)

They tended to say "stereotypes are intellectually lazy" and then they proceeded to stereotype everyone on the right.

So as long as there are humans in the classroom we will deal with this concern, real or not.

[Jim von der Heydt]

This is a high-quality thread.

But the main point is a very simple one. The kind of conservatism that thoughtful people like Summers see as unrepresented in academia is a completely different thing than the conservatism most people understand by that word in the US today.

One poster described his academic wife: "what she and her colleagues value above all else is the ability to explain reality in a rigorous, scientific manner. "More liberal" is of no value, professionally. " To which I say, Where have you been? To be rigorous and focused on reality IS to align yourself against political conservatism in the US since at least 1994.

As to whether other conservatisms, coherent and principled ones, are underrepresented in academia -- how about we wait until the massive constitutional crisis is over and address that question then? The deck chairs can be rearranged after we miss a couple icebergs.

Conservatism needs to define itself better if it wants to ask for special status in hiring decisions. At the moment, to me it means insane warmongering, anti-empiricism, and irresponsibility of all kinds. Period.

It's irresponsible of President Summers to think that he can talk this way about 'conservatism' and not toss red meat that moves the debate in general toward the morons who run the country right now and their out-of-control apologists. You can bet his comments will be a story and will be seized on by anti-intellectuals everywhere.

In Summers's last week in office I wrote an op-ed about the University's responsibility in a time of national crisis.
Here it is: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=513503

Jim von der Heydt

[sm]

It appalls me that seemingly intelligent people continue to think "left" and "right" are meaningful terms for discussing intellectual life.

[jerry]

Kate G.: lots of people, not just conservatives are reasonably upset with affirmative action. A large percentage of American Jews, if not the majority, outright oppose it. (The survey results I have seen suggests 46% approve of it to address racial discrimination, suggesting up to 54% oppose it.) Lots of people like to conflate opposition to affirmative action with being a conservative. Are you doing that too?

I believe, though I am not sure, that Daphne Patai did leave her department. Now, not being an academic myself, however, being a common laborer, I think leaving a job is a pretty big life choice. Are the jobs or departments equal in pay, career advancement? Is the devil I know better than then devil I don't? Do I like the community I live in?

I think it's very brave of you to tell Patai she should have just packed up and left.

I wonder what you think of tenure fights, like KC Johnson's?

I also wonder what you think of Patai's actual charges, once you get around your claims that she simply has hurt feelings because she found her department uncongenial to her. (Which I note is very close to a sexist attack on Patai herself.)

[Bloix]

There is no "liberal professor" problem. The problem is that there are many leftist professors whose point of view is antithetical to liberalism. The academic left - which is entirely divorced from political activity off-campus - has spent the last three decades furiously attacking and weakening liberalism on-campus.

These leftists have nothing in common with liberals. They do not believe that rational investigation will lead to truth. They do not believe in rationality or truth. They believe only in power. They are neoconservatives in the making.

Take that quintessential leftist, Stanley Fish, who now writes in the NY Times that liberalism is "a form of political organization that is militantly secular and incapable, by definition, of seeing the strong claim of religion – the claim to be in possession of a truth all should acknowledge – as anything but an expression of unreasonableness and irrationality."

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/

You see? It's the liberals who are implacably militant - not the deranged fundies, but the liberals.

There is no subject under the sun that will lead Stanley Fish to praise liberalism. No matter what the issue, he will accuse liberals of bad faith and intellectual incoherence.

The problem in the universities is first, that liberals have to spend their efforts battling the totalitarian left, and second, that students who are trained by totalitarian leftists graduate with no sympathy for or understanding of liberalism, and with a worldview that leaves them predisposed to become neoconservatives.

[Barry]

"Modern Feminists acknowledge their puzzlement: EVERYONE they know in academia agrees with them, but in the rest of the world, young women are fleeing from the label of "feminist."

Economists have it much better. Their calls to destroy jobs have been met with lots of favor in Washington and Boardrooms, but the economists remain puzzled that everyone else in the community thinks they are a lot of generously tenured swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictators with delusions of godhood that have basically destroyed American life as it was once known."

Posted by: jerry

Ya know, your description sounds suspiciously like a description of the power of money. We've seen many happy front-page stories on the death of feminism, despite what's happening. Simultaneously, we see an incredible bias towards the viewpoint of capital, when discussing anything remotely economic.

[hari]

Brad -

For one +70 and retired, this is an eye-opener Summers asserting for "more" academic conservatism!

I suppose you (also) more or less like Summers think-piece otherwise you won't have linked it. Or, am I wrong?

Some historical perspective:

If you so-called academics remember the cold war period under Soviet Politburo and its so-called "Nomenklature"?

If you can recall how we'd to dicipher their politburo decision-making process( between conservative and radical members!),
you'll find this BLOG revealing about what-in-hell-is going on with Acdemia in US?

Not long ago, I was shocked at a blog (you'd know!) in which libertarian economists were aligned against laissez-faire types! It went on, and on , and ....

My point is very simply, if knowledge is power, why the hell would you be afraid of ideas?

As undergraduates, in Bay Area, we're exposed to ALL schools of ideas during 1950s and 1960s. No one complaint if the professor was not liberal or too conservative. Our Professors told us, we made them great simply by the exchange of arguments and ideas!

Perhaps that was a era of the Sputnik or whatnot; I don't fear an argument which is based on suppositions that are not generally accepted as "truth" (notwitstanding the fact that "truth" is not an abstract phenomena: it's relative!).

Either the academia has been overly politicized in recent times, or there is a malise which is close to what Gibbons called: the fall and decline of an empire!

[Colin]

Fish is a leftist? Bloix, there are more than three ideological positions in the world. Most of your posting is indiscriminate stereotype.

And I have to laugh when Ward C, who made his name attacking the U.S. left in the name of Native American nationalism, is called leftist. The word is used by some folks to name anyone who pisses them off.

Jerry, Patai did not leave her job. She held, and holds to this day, a tenured professorship in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. You could have figured this out yourself pretty easily. Women's Studies typically works as an interdisciplinary program, which means that faculty across the university have the option to affiliate with it.

[jerry]

Colin, I got that from her bio at thefire. Her own website was down when I visited.

http://www.thefire.org/index.php/person/3445.html

thefire bio said, "including ten years spent in a Women’s Studies program" which I interpreted as being in the past tense so "I believe, though I am not sure, that Daphne Patai did leave her department."

I apologize that my standards for research for a blog comment are not up to your high standards.

As to the rest of what you actually feel towards Patai's arguments, no one knows!

[Paul J. Reber]

Prof Larry Summers is being a truly excellent provocateur on this topic. And I think it's better to see a professor stimulating this debate rather than the President of Harvard. Fewer worries about the amount of fuel being provided to the rabid right's complaints of liberal academia or worries about changes in hiring policy to provide affirmative action for "conservatives."

There's a hidden assumption in the concern Summers raises that hasn't been brought out here so far. The rabid right is frequently up in arms over the "totalitarian left" that seeks to censure, squash and marginalize dissenting viewpoints.

Now I suppose there is or was some sort of totalitarian left at some point, probably emerging out of Marxism in which a totalitarian state is supposed to be used to impose perfect equality. But seriously, are there any reasonable people left arguing this point any more? I certainly have never met one in all my liberal academic travels.

Outside of academia, I feel like I see a lot of evidence for the totalitarian right. I don't think facsism mixes with science well, though, so I don't think those people will seek academic jobs.

Academic debate is very often about competitive theory testing and evaluation. To the outside viewier, it might look like attempts to squash or marginalize -- when I think my theory is right, I try to make the case the other theory is wrong (and by inference should be marginalized). Done properly, there is never an attempt to actually censure, but I'm sure mistakes occur. But this is just science not politics. Our statistical models do best when evaluating the evidence for one theory versus another.

Now when science hits policy head on -- as in issues of gender/race bias -- it gets interestingly complicated. I have argued for caution here and some people seem to think I have argued for censorship. But what I am arguing is the danger of a "Type 1" error -- an inaccurate scientific claim usually due to experimental or interpretation error.

Here's a less politically loaded example I use in teaching Research Methods. In 1999, a group studying myopia in kids published a paper saying that having a nightlight in an infant's room caused greater levels of myopia (nearsightedness). This turned out to be a Type 1 error as they had not controlled for the fact that myopic parents are more likely to put nightlights in their kids' rooms. However, I knew parents at the time who took the nightlights out of their kids' rooms after the first report. I considered it with my own kids, but my kids cried at night without a little light. This is the problem of a Type 1 error -- you might inappropriately make babies cry.

Careful scientists need to be aware of the potential cost of a Type 1 error in their claims. Especially in areas where policy is likely to be influenced by their claims (e.g., gender/race bias issues).

[jerry]

Speaking of Type I and Type II errors, if you haven't come across it in his journeys, you question if it exists at all.

Perhaps you could question:
a) would you recognize it?
b) does you commit it without knowing it?
c) is its effects more pronounced in different departments
d) are you journeys representative of all departments at most universities, or are your journeys representative of your own interests and biases?

If you want to find some other discussion of closed minded/authoritarian behaviors in the university peruse Daphne Patai's books, visit thefire.org, google tenure fights, or even plate tectonics.

Orthodoxies in academia
http://toddshammer.wordpress.com/2007/06/08/orthodoxy-belief-cynicism-and-credulity/

orthodox and heterodox economics
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/06/

[c.l. ball]

We have very poor info. about the ideological views of professors. Some have tried to look up their party registrations, but the lack of centralized data makes this hard to do accurately (and what it tends to reveal is that Republicans are underrepresented relative to the general pop., Democrats are proportionately represented, and independents are over-represented). None of this data gives us firm views on ideology. Some mail and email surveys -- often lacking normal survey controls -- show self-identified liberals dominate, but this is a poor proxy for more serious analysis.

This data issues matters because we want to know whether conservatives fail to enter post-tertiary education or fail to get hired. The former would support the conservatives want more $ view; the latter would support the conservatives are excluded view.

[c.l. ball]

Data comes:

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/%7Engross/lounsbery_9-25.pdf

[andres]

mt: (1) there are many examples of intelligent conservatives; I believe Brad DeLong is one such. However, because of the advent of today's Republican Party, no intelligent conservative today self-identifies as such, much less as a non-disaffected Republican.

(2) you underestimate the breadth of the market in education. When students don't want to be subjected to courses in women's studies or leftist political economy, they enroll in colleges that have business schools. I would argue that avoiding the liberal arts in all its fragmented, identity-conscious political ugliness tends to drastically narrow their overall world outlook, and they are worse off for it just as much as liberal arts majors who never study business or economics.

When we come down to it, the real problem is _not_ the lack of intelligent conservatives in academia; I would argue that there are many such, Brad DeLong being a shining example even though he would deny it. The real problem is that the current set of policies and beliefs of today's Republican Party is neither intelligent nor conservative, and so it's not surprising that self-identified Republicans opt out of academia, and thus spare themselves the pain (and the moderating influence) of rejection.