The Marketplace of Ideas (11 page)

Academics have been trained to believe that there must be a contradiction between being a scholar or an intellectual and being part of a system of socialization. They are conditioned to think that their workplace does not operate like a market, even as they compete with one another for status and advantage. Most of all, they are ambivalent about the status they have worked so hard to achieve. Interdisciplinary anxiety is a displaced anxiety about the position of privilege that academic professionalism confers on its initiates
and
about the peculiar position of social disempowerment created by the barrier between academic workers and the larger culture. It is an anxiety about the formalism and methodological fetishism of the disciplines
and
about the danger of sliding into an aimless subjectivism or eclecticism. It is an anxiety about the institutional co-optation of innovation
and
about institutional indifference or hostility to the new. Professors have become skeptical of the rhetoric of disinterestedness, but they are also contemptuous of claims of advocacy.
²⁸

Existentially (and here I am speaking very subjectively, but anxiety is subjective,
fear
is objective), I think that anxiety about interdisciplinarity is an expression of frustration. Academics of my generation grew up in a period—the sixties and seventies—when the world of art and ideas was undergoing changes that seemed to be coming from way outside the box of received ideas and methods. I think that many of us hoped to instantiate something like that ad hoc, performative mode of pedagogy and inquiry within the university, to strike out in new directions, to break down the walls a little. We believed that we could shake off the effects of our academic socialization, in part by theorizing about them. The theorizing was successful (I just rehearsed some of it here), but the shaking off did not happen quite as we had dreamed it might. Of course, professors in my generation are now relatively secure in our domains. But is it possible that we envy a little those contributors to the culture who have to do battle with the forces of the market and with heteronomy—with the reality checks of life outside the university? I think we might be. I think we want to contribute to the culture and the society that is being created and lived all around us, and we are a little sick of the institutional armature we once may have desired to secure us.

Mainly, we want to feel we are in a real fight, a fight not with each other and our schools, which is the fight that outsiders seem to be encouraging us to have, but with the forces that make and remake the world most human beings live in. We want to bring the dissonance and the struggles of competing interests, the risks of innovation and experimentation, into our box, and we are scandalized that the box refuses to accommodate them. It’s true that the box was designed with an entirely different intellectual game in mind. It was designed to protect professors and their valuable socializing function from the beasts of political and commercial interests. But those beasts are out there. They are what make the fight real. Maybe not all of the problem is with the box. “You tell me it’s the institution,” the song says. The institution is not inherently a friend to innovation and transgression and creativity. But it is not inherently an enemy, either. Interdisciplinarity is an administrative name for an anxiety and a hope that are personal.

1.

THE POLITICS
of professors has been an issue in higher education since the end of the nineteenth century. And why shouldn’t it be? Professors enjoy social authority, they virtually monopolize the business of knowledge production in many areas, and they have intimate and largely unsupervised access to developing minds. Their political views are important. At the same time, it is a custom in the modern university to segregate those views from the professional identities of professors—that is, to treat views extraneous to the subject matter of teaching and scholarship as somehow “out of bounds” to the evaluation of job performance. We don’t approve when the chemistry professor gives anti-war speeches (or pro-war speeches, for that matter) in chemistry class, and we may intervene, because we feel that the professor has impermissibly mixed her politics and her job. But we choose to not make it a problem when she gives such speeches out in the quad or on the street.

Professors have the protection of this firewall as part of a deal more or less tacitly worked out at the time of the establishment of the American Association of University Professors in 1915.
¹
The AAUP was founded to articulate and defend the principle of academic freedom in the wake of several notorious cases in which professors were fired for expressing political views that trustees or administrators considered obnoxious. The principle of academic freedom was designed to allow professors to pursue inquiry wherever it leads, without fear of damaging their careers if they reach results other people find offensive. It is, in effect, a pact with the rest of society: the results of academic inquiry will be worthwhile if professors are held immune from sanctions for the political implications of their work and for their personal political views. But another reason for the principle of academic freedom is that it helped to define academic inquiry as, by its nature, a value-neutral enterprise. Protecting professors’ political and religious views was a way underscoring their irrelevance to research and teaching. The modern university was about knowledge, not ideology. It was about facts, not values. It should have been obvious that patrolling this distinction was going to be a never-ending task.

It did not seem so at first, at least to John Dewey, the Columbia philosopher who (with Arthur Lovejoy) was the founder of the AAUP and who became its first president. When he took office, Dewey said that he imagined that within a few years, cases involving violations of professors’ academic freedom would be rare—a comment that gives an idea of the irenic nature of Dewey’s mind. Characteristically, he was too optimistic, and by the end of the year, he had to admit that he had been mistaken.
²
Professors’ politics are usually a low-level issue in higher education. They become a high-level, and sometimes inflammatory, issue during times of public anxiety: during turn-of-the-century debates over immigration, for example, or when the United States entered the First World War. The politics of professors was an issue during the McCarthy period in the early Cold War, and at the time of the protests against the war in Vietnam. They became an issue in the so-called culture wars in the late 1980s, and again after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Almost all professors subscribe to the principle of academic freedom under a fairly non-restrictive interpretation, and they are right to do so. Faculty members are by nature contentious and inefficient self-governors, but faculties must govern themselves. Simply as a practical matter, experience shows that you cannot dictate to tenured professors, or put their feet to the fire of public opinion, with much hope of success. Administrators come and go, but tenure is forever. But the importance of the principle goes beyond that. Academic freedom is not just a nice job perk. It is the philosophical key to the whole enterprise of higher education.
³
It informs more than the odd case of the professor who writes articles that can be read as promoting man-boy love or as condoning terrorism.
⁴
It includes practices and customs such as the inability of the football coach to influence the quarterback’s grade in math class. It gives academics a (circumscribed) zone of autonomy in which to work.

The claim by conservatives that the academy is under the control of a left-wing professoriate is an old one, and studies since the fifties have tended to confirm the general suspicion that professors, as a group, are more liberal than the general public. In 1952, for example, social science professors voted for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower in the presidential election by a margin of 58 percent to 30 percent, even though Eisenhower (who, when he ran for office, was the president of Columbia University) won the election by almost 11 percentage points.
⁵
Stevenson was not exactly Ho Chi Minh, though. He was, by the standards of only a decade later, quite conservative on issues like race relations and women’s rights. It was after the campus protests of the sixties—over free speech, civil rights, the draft, and the war in Vietnam—that the notion of the professoriate as a group of tenured radicals became dominant in the discourse of the culture wars.
⁶
That charge was revived after September 11 by critics outside the academy, such as David Horowitz (who was once an untenured radical himself, but by 2001 had become an activist against academic leftism),
⁷
and there have been a few surveys—from a social scientific point of view rather sketchy ones—done to support it.
⁸

In 2007, two sociologists working at Harvard and George Mason, Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, conducted a national survey of the political views of the professoriate that observed all the protocols of scientific research and that has a good claim to being an accurate statistical picture of the views of the 630,000 full-time professors, at every level of institution, from research universities to community colleges, in the United States at the time.
⁹
(Gross and Simmons did not include part-time faculty in their survey, although they note that about 47 percent of college instruction in the United States is done by part-timers. Assessing the views of part-time faculty presents methodological challenges, but of course those views are relevant to an understanding of politics in academic life.) The results of the survey are quite stunning.

2.

Gross and Simmons argue that the significant finding in their survey is that professors are not as radical as some critics have charged: 9.4 percent of American professors identify themselves as “extremely liberal” (only 3 percent of professors say they are Marxists) and 13.5 percent of faculty describe themselves as “liberal activists.” These self-reports are meaningful because professors demonstrate a much greater degree of ideological constraint in their views than most people do. That is, if professors say that they are liberals, their views on specific issues will be coherently and consistently liberal views.
¹⁰
In the general population, most people do not know what it means to identify themselves as liberals or conservatives. People will report themselves to be liberals in an opinion poll and then answer specific questions with views normally thought of as conservative. People also give inconsistent answers to the same questions over time. This is because most people are not ideologues—they don’t have coherent political belief systems—and their views on the issues do not hang together. Their reporting is not terribly accurate.
¹¹
But academics do tend to be ideologues, in this social science sense, so if less than 10 percent of them identify themselves as “extremely liberal,” that is a relatively reliable finding. If more than 90 percent of full-time faculty are not “extremely liberal,” then academia is not dominated by people with radical political views.

Gross and Simmons also found that, contrary to some assumptions, the more elite the institution, the less likely the professors there are to be left-wing. Professors at liberal arts colleges are much more to the left than professors at PhD-granting institutions. This is interesting, since the education and socialization of professors at liberal arts colleges and professors at research universities is usually identical: they are trained in the same graduate programs and are hired from the same pool. It suggests some institutional treatment effects in a realm where most of the results suggest selection effects (as we will discuss later). Gross and Simmons found that younger professors today tend to be more moderate in their political views than older professors, supporting the theory that the generation that entered the professoriate in the sixties was a spike on the chart ideologically. They also found, however, that younger professors are more liberal in their social views. But the most important finding of the survey, they say, is that a large plurality of professors holds a center-left politics. Most professors are not Ralph Naderites or socialists; they are mainstream liberal Democrats—at the time of the survey, John Kerry supporters.

What is striking about these results is not the finding that professors tend to be mainstream liberals. It is the finding that they are so
overwhelmingly
mainstream liberals. These are the data:

This means that 62.2 percent of the professoriate is some kind of liberal; only 19.7 percent is some kind of conservative. Collapsing this to a three-point scale—merging the slightly liberal and the slightly conservative with the middle-of-the-roads—we get: 44.1 percent of professors are liberal and 9.2 percent are conservative. By contrast, in the public opinion poll closest to the time of the survey, the American public as a whole reported itself to be 23.3 percent liberal and 31.9 percent conservative.
¹³

There are differences in the distribution of political views as one moves up and down the higher education hierarchy, but the distribution is surprisingly consistent across the liberal arts divisions. (Gross and Simmons did not include professors at professional schools in their study.)

Outside the liberal arts fields—in health, business, and computer science and engineering—liberals and conservatives are about equally distributed, with more professors identifying themselves as moderates than as either liberal or conservative. Overall, professors skew Democratic: 51 percent call themselves Democrats and 35.3 percent say they are independents, with most of these leaning Democratic. Only 13.7 percent of professors identify themselves as Republicans. In the public at large, in 2006, 34.3 percent of the population identified themselves as Democrats and 30.4 percent as Republicans.
¹⁴
In the 2004 presidential election, George Bush won 50.7 percent of the vote and John Kerry won 48.2 percent; 77.6 percent of professors voted for Kerry, 20.4 percent for Bush.

These statistics reflect the views of large samples of the professoriate—all natural scientists at every type of institution, for example. When you begin to crunch the data more finely, you find more extreme skewing: 51 percent of English professors are Democrats, for example, and 2 percent are Republicans. In history departments, 3.8 percent of professors are Republicans; 79.2 percent are Democrats. Only 5.5 percent of sociologists and 6.3 percent of political scientists are Republicans. At elite institutions, only 9.5 percent of professors in all fields are Republicans; over 60 percent are Democrats. The statistical breakdown of faculty voting patterns in the 2004 presidential election is fairly striking. At elite colleges and universities, 95 percent of social science professors voted for Kerry; the rest voted for third-party candidates. Zero percent (statistically) voted for Bush. More than 95 percent of humanities professors at elite institutions voted for Kerry, 0 percent for Bush.

There are a number of explanations for why academics are significantly more liberal than the rest of the population. There is a high correlation between education and liberal social and political views, for one thing. For another, professors are trained to question the status quo, so they are less likely to be conservative to the extent that conservatism means resistance to change. (Of course, for this explanation to be consistent, one would expect that in an environment in which liberalism
is
the status quo, many professors might choose not to identify themselves as liberals. This does not seem to be the case.) There may be fewer institutional havens for left-wing intellectuals than there are for right-wing intellectuals, so liberals tend to congregate in universities, conservatives elsewhere—in foundations or, during the years of the Bush administration, in Washington.