The Marketplace of Ideas (12 page)

It also may be the case that people with conservative views generally find work in the for-profit sector more congenial than people with liberal views do. A recent survey done by two political scientists suggests that young people with conservative views are more likely to seek careers outside academia because they value making money and/or having a family more highly than liberal young people do.
¹⁵
And there are possible demographic explanations: as Gross and Simmons point out, younger cohorts in the professoriate are significantly more moderate politically than the baby boom cohort. So the left-wing skewing may continue to moderate as baby boomers move out of the system. What this means, though, is that the professoriate will become even
less
ideologically diverse than it is today, since there will be shrinkage on the far left of the political spectrum. The radicals will die or retire and opinion will regress toward the mean—which is to say, the ideology of the center-liberal Democrat.

Possibly more pressing is the question whether holding liberal views has become a tacit requirement for entry and promotion in the academic profession. This issue has a number of aspects. One has to do with the way in which class cuts across the distribution of political and social views among the professoriate. Gross and Simmons note that “preliminary regression analysis suggests that it is the lower average levels of educational attainment and lower social class origins of conservative and Republican academics that may do the most to account for their underrepresentation in elite research institutions.” In other words, a conservative who goes into academic life is likely to start lower down in the educational hierarchy than a liberal, and may therefore have a harder time reaching elite ranks. (One might wonder whether this factor, starting at a lower level of socioeconomic status, operates similarly for white and non-white academics, though.)

Another possible aspect of the issue has to do with the decline in adherence to the standard of scientific neutrality, or disinterestedness, in the American higher education system—the very standard that once made it possible to argue that a professor’s political views were irrelevant to his or her research. Of the respondents in Gross and Simmons’s survey, 70.9 percent said that it was all right for a professor’s research to be guided by his or her political or religious beliefs; only 5.1 percent of liberal professors described themselves as “ardent advocates of neutrality.” These data might be useful to anyone claiming that colleges and universities discriminate against people with conservative views. The data certainly don’t
prove
discrimination, but they suggest the emergence of an ethos in which there is less aversion to weighing political views in evaluating merit than might have been the case thirty or forty years ago. If so, this would affect the career of someone whose views were outside the mainstream of the profession.

Still, the important lesson of the survey is not that the politics of the professoriate is liberal. The important lesson is that the politics of the professoriate is homogenous. Is this because of treatment effects? Are professors trained in a way that converts them to liberal opinions? Or is it a question of selection? Do people become professors because they are already liberal when they enter into their training? More significantly, is there a code, which would include opinions on political and social matters but would also include views on matters of intellectual, pedagogical, and collegial decorum, that entrants are required to demonstrate for admission to the profession? Does the profession select for attitudes about how the academic system works, about standards for performance, even about personal manner and appearance? The higher the barriers to entry in an occupation, the more likely there are to be implicit codes that need to be mastered in addition to the explicit entrance requirements. And the profession of college professor has a pretty high threshold. In fact, the height of the threshold may explain a lot of what we see in these studies of professors’ politics.

3.

A national conversation about the condition and future of the PhD has been going on for about ten years. The conversation has been greatly helped by two major studies: “Re-envisioning the PhD,” which was conducted by researchers at the University of Washington, and “PhDs—Ten Years Later,” which was carried out at Berkeley.
¹⁶
Both studies identified roughly the same areas where the investigators thought that reform is desirable in doctoral education. These are: interdisciplinarity, practical training, and time to degree.

The studies were necessary in part because data on graduate education are notoriously difficult to come by. Until very recently, departments tended not to track their graduate students very assiduously. Departments knew how many students they admitted, and they knew how many they graduated; but they did not have a handle on what happened in between—that is, on where students were in their progress through the program. This was partly because of the pattern of benign neglect that is historically an aspect of the culture of graduate education in the United States, and it was partly because when some students finish in four years and other students in the same program finish in twelve years, there is really no meaningful way to quantify what is going on. “Are you still here?” is a thought that often pops into a professor’s head when she sees a vaguely familiar face in the hall. “Yes, I am still here,” is the usual answer, “and I’m working on that Incomplete for you.” There was also, traditionally, very little hard information about where students went after they graduated. Graduate programs today are increasingly asked to provide reports on job placement—although, for understandable reasons, these reports tend to emit an unnatural glow. An employed graduate, wherever he or she happens to be working, is ipso facto a successfully placed graduate, and, at that moment, departmental attention relaxes. What happens to people after their initial placement is largely a matter of rumor and self-report.
¹⁷

English was one of the fields surveyed in the two studies of the PhD. It is useful to look at, in part because it is a large field where employment practices have a significance that goes beyond courses for English majors. What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about thirty years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since. Things went south very quickly, not gradually, and then they stabilized. Statistically, the state of the discipline has been fairly steady for about twenty-five years, and the result of this is a kind of normalization of what in any other context would seem to be a plainly inefficient and intolerable process. The profession has just gotten used to a serious imbalance between supply and demand.

Up to half of all doctoral students in English drop out before getting their degrees (something that appears to be the case in doctoral education generally), and only about half of the rest end up with the jobs they entered graduate school to get—that is, tenured professorships.
¹⁸
Over the three decades since the branch was grabbed, a kind of protective shell has grown up around this process, a culture of “realism,” in which exogenous constraints are internalized, and the very conditions that make doctoral education problematic are turned into elements of that education. Students are told from the very start, almost from the minute they apply to graduate school, that they are effectively entering a lottery. This has to have an effect on professional self-conception.

The hinge whereby things swung into their present alignment, the ledge of the cliff, is located somewhere around 1970. That is when a shift in the nature of the PhD occurred. The shift was the consequence of a bad synchronicity, one of those historical pincer effects where one trend intersects with its opposite, when an upward curve meets a downward curve. One arm of the pincer has to do with the increased professionalization of academic work, the conversion of the professoriate into a group of people who were more likely to identify with their disciplines than with their campuses. This had two, contradictory effects on the PhD: it raised and lowered the value of the degree at the same time. The value was raised because when institutions began prizing research above teaching and service, the dissertation changed from a kind of final term paper into the first draft of a scholarly monograph. The dissertation became more difficult to write because more hung on its success, and the increased pressure to produce an ultimately publishable work increased, in turn, the time to achieving a degree. That was a change from the faculty point of view. It enhanced the selectivity of the profession.

The change from the institutional point of view, though, had the opposite effect. In order to raise the prominence of research in their institutional profile, schools began adding doctoral programs. Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent.
¹⁹
On the one hand, a doctorate was harder to get; on the other, it became less valuable because the market began to be flooded with PhDs.

This fact registered after 1970, when the rapid expansion of American higher education abruptly slowed to a crawl, depositing on generational shores a huge tenured faculty and too many doctoral programs churning out PhDs. The year 1970 is also the point from which we can trace the decline in the proportion of students majoring in liberal arts fields, and, within that decline, a proportionally larger decline in undergraduates majoring in the humanities. In 1970–71, English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor’s degrees; that represented 7.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, including those awarded in non-liberal arts fields, such as business.
²⁰
The only liberal arts category that awarded more degrees than English was history and social science, a category that combines several disciplines. Thirty years later, in 2000–01, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in all fields was 50 percent higher than in 1970–71, but the number of degrees in English was down both in absolute numbers—from 64,342 to 51,419—and as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, from 7.6 percent to around 4 percent.

Fewer students major in English. This means that the demand for English literature specialists has declined. Even if a department requires, say, a course in eighteenth-century literature of its majors, the fact that there are fewer majors means that there is less demand for eighteenth-century specialists. But although the average number of credit hours devoted to courses in English literature has gone down over the last twenty years, the number one subject, measured by the credit hours that students devote to it, has remained the same. That subject is English composition. Who teaches that? Not, mainly, English PhDs. Mainly, ABDs—graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations. There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs.

The same trend can be observed in most of the liberal arts fields. In 1971, 24,801 students received bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics, about 3 percent of all bachelor’s degrees. In 2001, there were 11,171 undergraduate degrees in those fields, less than 1 percent of the total number.
²¹
Again, it is not that students do not take math; it is that fewer students need specialized courses in mathematics, which are the courses that graduate students are trained to teach. There was a similar fall-off in bachelor’s degrees awarded in the social sciences and history. There was upward movement in only two major liberal arts areas: psychology and the life sciences. American higher education has been expanding, but the liberal arts part of the system has been shrinking.

The Berkeley study, “PhDs—Ten Years Later,” was based on lengthy questionnaires sent to just under 6,000 people, in six fields, who received PhDs between 1982 and 1985. One of those fields was English. People who received their PhDs in English between 1982 and 1985 had a median time to degree of ten years. A third of them took more than eleven years to finish, and the median age at the time of completion was thirty-five. By 1995, 53 percent of those with PhDs that had been awarded from ten to fifteen years earlier had tenure; another 5 percent were in tenure-track positions. This means that about two fifths of English PhDs were effectively out of the profession as it is usually understood. (Some of these people were non-tenure-track faculty, and some were educational administrators. Most of the rest worked in what is called BGN—business, government, and NGOs.) Of those who had tenure, less than a fifth had positions in the kind of research universities in which they had been trained—that is, about 5 percent of all English PhDs. PhDs who began in a tenure-track position took an average of 6.1 years to get tenure. PhDs who began in non-tenure track positions but who eventually received tenure, which about half did, took an average of 8.1 years to get tenure.

The placement rate for PhDs has fluctuated. Between 1989 and 1996, the number of starting positions advertised in history dropped 11 percent; in art and art history, 26 percent; in foreign languages, 35 percent; and in political science, 37 percent. Yet every year during that period, universities gave out more PhDs than they had the year before.
²²
It was plain that the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life. That meant if not quite a lost generation of scholars, a lost cohort. This was a period that coincided with attacks on the university for “political correctness,” and it is not a coincidence that many of the most prominent critics of academia were themselves graduate school dropouts: Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, Richard Bernstein, David Lehman.
²³
Apart from their specific criticisms and their politics, they articulated a widespread mood of disenchantment with the university as a congenial place to work.