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The Smog of Academic Consensus
By Crispin Sartwell
May 29, 2008
That the University of Colorado is raising $9 million to endow a professorship of conservative studies is rather delicious in its ironies. It smacks of affirmative action and casts conservatism in the syntax of departments decried by conservatives for decades: women's studies, gay studies, African American studies, Chicano studies and so on.
Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems gratuitous. These other groups may be oppressed, but conservatives run whole wars, black site prisons, sprawling multinational corporations. In fact, if these other groups are oppressed, it's conservatives who are the oppressors, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense.
But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative (anarchism has its privileges), let me tell you why I think a "professor of conservative thought and policy" in Colorado, or anywhere else, is not such a bad idea. Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. At the University of Colorado, for instance, one professor found that, of 800 or so on the faculty, only 32 are registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or phys ed.
I teach political philosophy. And like most professors I know, I bend over backward to sympathetically teach texts I hate; I try to show my students why people have found Plato and Karl Marx -- both of whom I regard as totalitarians -- compelling. But when I get to the end of "The Communist Manifesto," I'm usually asking things like this: "Marx says that all means of communication should be centralized in the hands of the state. Anyone see any problems with that?"
I don't deceive myself into thinking that I teach these texts as well as, or in the same way as, a professor who found them plausible. And that's fine. What I'm trying to point out is that even as I try to be neutral (well, even if I did try to be neutral), my personal opinions affect every aspect of what I do, and I think that is generally true.
But it can be horrendously true in academia, where everything is affected by the real opinions of real professors, from the configuration of departments to the courses on offer to the texts taught. And because there's a consensus, there is precious little self-examination; a slant that we all share becomes invisible.
Academic consensus is a particularly irritating variety of groupthink. First of all, the fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a doctorate leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing -- that no one could disagree with, say, Obama-ism, without being an idiot. This attitude is continually expressed, for example, in attacks on presidents Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, not for their political positions but for their grades and IQs.
That the American professoriate is near-unanimous for Barack Obama is a problem on many levels, but certainly pedagogically. Ideological uniformity does a disservice to students and makes a mockery of the pious commitment of these professors simply to convey knowledge. Also, the claims of the professoriate to intellectual independence and academic freedom, supposedly nurtured by tenure, are thrown into question by the unanimity. Professors are as herd-like in their opinions as other groups that demographers like to identify -- "working-class white men," for example. Indeed, surely more so.
That's partly just a result of the charming human tendency to nod along with whomever is sitting next to you. But it's also the predictable result of the fact that a professor has been educated, often for a decade or more, by the very institutions that harbor this unanimity. Every new generation of professors has been steeped in an atmosphere in which the authorities all agree and in which they associate agreement with intelligence -- and with degrees, jobs, tenure and so on. If you've been taught that conservatives are evil idiots, then conservatism itself justifies a decision not to hire or tenure one. Every new leftist minted by graduate programs is an act of self-praise, a confirmation of the intelligence of the professors.
That this smog of consensus is incompatible with the supposedly high-minded educational mission of colleges and universities is obvious. Yet higher education is at least as dedicated to the reproduction of Obama-ism as it is to conveying information. But academics are massively self-deceived about this, which makes it all the more disgusting and effective.
So as my liberal old professor Richard Rorty said, referring to Allan Bloom, conservative Platonist: "Let a thousand Blooms flower." And if they take root in endowed chairs of conservative thought and policy, that's at least pretty funny.
Crispin Sartwell, author of "Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory," teaches philosophy at Dickinson College
Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems gratuitous. These other groups may be oppressed, but conservatives run whole wars, black site prisons, sprawling multinational corporations. In fact, if these other groups are oppressed, it's conservatives who are the oppressors, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense.
But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative (anarchism has its privileges), let me tell you why I think a "professor of conservative thought and policy" in Colorado, or anywhere else, is not such a bad idea. Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. At the University of Colorado, for instance, one professor found that, of 800 or so on the faculty, only 32 are registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or phys ed.
I teach political philosophy. And like most professors I know, I bend over backward to sympathetically teach texts I hate; I try to show my students why people have found Plato and Karl Marx -- both of whom I regard as totalitarians -- compelling. But when I get to the end of "The Communist Manifesto," I'm usually asking things like this: "Marx says that all means of communication should be centralized in the hands of the state. Anyone see any problems with that?"
I don't deceive myself into thinking that I teach these texts as well as, or in the same way as, a professor who found them plausible. And that's fine. What I'm trying to point out is that even as I try to be neutral (well, even if I did try to be neutral), my personal opinions affect every aspect of what I do, and I think that is generally true.
But it can be horrendously true in academia, where everything is affected by the real opinions of real professors, from the configuration of departments to the courses on offer to the texts taught. And because there's a consensus, there is precious little self-examination; a slant that we all share becomes invisible.
Academic consensus is a particularly irritating variety of groupthink. First of all, the fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a doctorate leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing -- that no one could disagree with, say, Obama-ism, without being an idiot. This attitude is continually expressed, for example, in attacks on presidents Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, not for their political positions but for their grades and IQs.
That the American professoriate is near-unanimous for Barack Obama is a problem on many levels, but certainly pedagogically. Ideological uniformity does a disservice to students and makes a mockery of the pious commitment of these professors simply to convey knowledge. Also, the claims of the professoriate to intellectual independence and academic freedom, supposedly nurtured by tenure, are thrown into question by the unanimity. Professors are as herd-like in their opinions as other groups that demographers like to identify -- "working-class white men," for example. Indeed, surely more so.
That's partly just a result of the charming human tendency to nod along with whomever is sitting next to you. But it's also the predictable result of the fact that a professor has been educated, often for a decade or more, by the very institutions that harbor this unanimity. Every new generation of professors has been steeped in an atmosphere in which the authorities all agree and in which they associate agreement with intelligence -- and with degrees, jobs, tenure and so on. If you've been taught that conservatives are evil idiots, then conservatism itself justifies a decision not to hire or tenure one. Every new leftist minted by graduate programs is an act of self-praise, a confirmation of the intelligence of the professors.
That this smog of consensus is incompatible with the supposedly high-minded educational mission of colleges and universities is obvious. Yet higher education is at least as dedicated to the reproduction of Obama-ism as it is to conveying information. But academics are massively self-deceived about this, which makes it all the more disgusting and effective.
So as my liberal old professor Richard Rorty said, referring to Allan Bloom, conservative Platonist: "Let a thousand Blooms flower." And if they take root in endowed chairs of conservative thought and policy, that's at least pretty funny.
Crispin Sartwell, author of "Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory," teaches philosophy at Dickinson College
From the Los Angeles Times
BLOWBACK
Why not a professor of disco studies?
Creating a chair of conservative studies makes a discipline out of a political fad.
By Robert Lee Hotchkiss Jr.June 13, 2008
Those who promote a chair of conservative studies, as Crispin Sartwell does in his Op-Ed article, "The smog of academic consensus,” seem to misunderstand both academia and the meaning of the term "conservative studies." They claim there is a problem with academia because most of the professors are liberal. They cite two proofs of this assertion: that the vast majority of professors vote for the Democratic Party and that some professors seem to let a kind of political groupthink guide their research and teaching.
Academia isn't known for its straightforward or desirable culture. My wife worked as an administrative assistant to a number of professors at a prominent religious university and saw such undignified behavior as a professor commanding his teaching assistant to spend all her time spying on his nemesis. When someone on a university campus says, "Let's throw a rally for gay illegal aliens," what they probably are thinking is, "I am going to grind peanuts (to which you are violently allergic) in the burritos and will have your parking space by Monday."
There are two reasons why liberalism -- as described above -- is directly expedient to a professor's career. First, universities in the United States depend on government funding at least in the form of Pell grants. Democrats tend to expand such programs, and so professors support Democrats.
Second, universities run on the publish-or-perish system. This leaves two basic career strategies for professors. The first is to make a discovery, such as "bees' wings are pieces of skin." The other is where groupthink comes in -- to say the exact same thing as someone else did about a slightly different situation, for example, "wasps' wings are made of skin."
The vast majority of academic writing falls into the second category and is often not worth the paper it is written on. But much of what falls in the first category -- the breakthrough research in social sciences, even in such disciplines as gender studies -- has been conservative.
Even the pretense of liberalism is swiftly being swept away by the increased desperation of tenure candidates for ever-shrinking spots and by the increasing amount of research that is paid for by corporations instead of the government.
So if the threat of liberal bias is overblown, Sartwell's proposed solution is positively batty. What exactly would a conservative chair teach? That is, what is conservatism? Ordinarily, it means highlighting the value of things as they are. But this is not what the proponents of a professorship of conservative studies have in mind. They are thinking of conservatism as the political and social movement that crystallized with Ronald Reagan's presidency -- that is, a particular collection of religious, social, political and economic views that is almost completely unique to the post-1980s United States and might end in the foreseeable future. While women, gays, immigrants and African Americans have played crucial roles in this country's history from the beginning and have been associated with various conflicting political moments, movement conservatism is a decidedly recent event. Even Barry Goldwater would have to be labeled proto-conservative. Where were the conservatives during the Revolution, the Civil War, the Whiskey Rebellion? And what side where they on? The conservative movement is certainly important and worthy of study within many disciplines. But given its short and geographically limited existence, giving it a professorship would be as absurd as giving a professorship to disco studies.
Academia isn't known for its straightforward or desirable culture. My wife worked as an administrative assistant to a number of professors at a prominent religious university and saw such undignified behavior as a professor commanding his teaching assistant to spend all her time spying on his nemesis. When someone on a university campus says, "Let's throw a rally for gay illegal aliens," what they probably are thinking is, "I am going to grind peanuts (to which you are violently allergic) in the burritos and will have your parking space by Monday."
There are two reasons why liberalism -- as described above -- is directly expedient to a professor's career. First, universities in the United States depend on government funding at least in the form of Pell grants. Democrats tend to expand such programs, and so professors support Democrats.
Second, universities run on the publish-or-perish system. This leaves two basic career strategies for professors. The first is to make a discovery, such as "bees' wings are pieces of skin." The other is where groupthink comes in -- to say the exact same thing as someone else did about a slightly different situation, for example, "wasps' wings are made of skin."
The vast majority of academic writing falls into the second category and is often not worth the paper it is written on. But much of what falls in the first category -- the breakthrough research in social sciences, even in such disciplines as gender studies -- has been conservative.
Even the pretense of liberalism is swiftly being swept away by the increased desperation of tenure candidates for ever-shrinking spots and by the increasing amount of research that is paid for by corporations instead of the government.
So if the threat of liberal bias is overblown, Sartwell's proposed solution is positively batty. What exactly would a conservative chair teach? That is, what is conservatism? Ordinarily, it means highlighting the value of things as they are. But this is not what the proponents of a professorship of conservative studies have in mind. They are thinking of conservatism as the political and social movement that crystallized with Ronald Reagan's presidency -- that is, a particular collection of religious, social, political and economic views that is almost completely unique to the post-1980s United States and might end in the foreseeable future. While women, gays, immigrants and African Americans have played crucial roles in this country's history from the beginning and have been associated with various conflicting political moments, movement conservatism is a decidedly recent event. Even Barry Goldwater would have to be labeled proto-conservative. Where were the conservatives during the Revolution, the Civil War, the Whiskey Rebellion? And what side where they on? The conservative movement is certainly important and worthy of study within many disciplines. But given its short and geographically limited existence, giving it a professorship would be as absurd as giving a professorship to disco studies.
Robert Lee Hotchkiss Jr. is a computer science major at San Diego City College.
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