WindsOfChange.net
Title
Winds of Change.NET
Description
I recently read an essay about academic freedom, by Michael Berube on Le Blog. I'd like to address some of what I think are flaws in his argument, but I appreciate the fact that he has gone to the trouble of expressing his thesis in a form that's accessible to the blogosphere. The first issue I'd like to raise is that I think he understates the problem of bias in the academy:
I'll make the obvious argument first. Academic freedom is under attack for pretty much the same reasons that liberalism itself is under attack. American universities tend to be somewhat left of center of the American mainstream, particularly with regard to cultural issues that have to do with gender roles and sexuality: the combination of a largely liberal, secular professoriate and a generally under-25 student body tends to give you a campus population that, by and large, does not see gay marriage as a serious threat to the Republic. And after 9/11 again, for obvious reasons many forms of mainstream liberalism have been denounced as anti-American. There is, as you know, a cottage industry of popular right-wing books in which liberalism is equated with treason (that would be Ann Coulter), with mental disorders (Michael Savage), and with fascism (Jonah Goldberg). Coulters book [sic] also mounts a vigorous defense of Joe McCarthy, and Michelle Malkin has written a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. In that kind of climate, it should come as no surprise that we would be seeing attacks on one of the few remaining institutions in American life that is often though not completely dominated by liberals.
Simply put, be begins by understating the bias and misrepresenting the opposition as a bunch of right-wing kooks. No doubt there's a little hyperbole in the submissions of the three critics he mentions (though at this point he omits more credible critiques, such as Alan Kors' The Shadow University), but sometimes a little hyperbolics are necessary to get the boulder rolling. Recent polls indicate that left self-identification in the humanities within American universities varies from a high of 88% (English) to a low of 77% (Sociology and History), while less than 10% identify with the right in those disciplines. More to the point, there are no longer any reliably conservative disciplines anywhere in academia. Even campus departments traditionally viewed as conservative tend to be more "liberal" than the general population, including business and engineering. According to Stan Rothman's recent testimony to the "Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on American Faculty Ideology", 49% of business and 51% of engineering faculty self-identify as "on the left or liberal" while a minority of 39% in both disciplines self-identify as "on the right or conservative". Moreover, the major shift leftward has been relatively recent. In 1969 the Carnegie Commission found that 45% of faculty identified as left/liberal and 28% as right/conservative. Over the next two decades the situation didn't change much, but then by 1999 72% identified as on the left with only 15% on the right. What changed?
Languages
English
Additional Information
Related Domains
External Links
- Alexa: WindsOfChange.net
