Stanley Fish on education, law and society.
In the opening sentence of a key chapter in his new book on the academy, “No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom,” Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors and a self-identified leftist, makes an important, and conciliatory, point: “Although few students or faculty on American campuses who are on either the right or the left …are inclined to acknowledge each other’s perspective, members of both groups feel beleaguered, isolated, outcast and underrepresented in their higher education environments.” Later in the chapter Nelson allows that while political correctness is not the “all defining campus cultural force the right makes it out to be, it does operate, in some contexts absurdly.” His own example of absurdity (it occurred in his home department) is a faculty appointment that was derailed when it was discovered that the candidate, then teaching in New Zealand, had written a letter to a newspaper criticizing the practice of going barefoot in public places on the grounds that it promoted the spread of disease. A department member decided that the letter “was an attack on the Maori people and thus racist,” and even when it was determined that it is not the Maori, but “white hippies, who go barefoot in New Zealand, the majority voted against pursuing the candidate in order, says Nelson, to prove “themselves to colleagues of color.”
“We can do better,” Nelson admonishes, and a bit of evidence that we may in fact be doing better is provided by the appearance of another new book coming from the opposite political direction, “ The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope, and Reforms,” a compilation of essays edited by Robert Maranto, Richard E. Redding and Frederick M. Hess for the press of the American Enterprise Institute. What makes this volume different from its predecessors in the “you-won’t-believe-what-liberals-have-done-to-our universities” series is the absence of hysteria and the presence of moderation. In a brilliant feat of organization, the editors begin with contributions that are soberly statistical and give substance and considerable nuance to what has too often been a polemic supported largely by incendiary anecdotes (of the kind provided by Nelson.) Rather than simply observing that the vast majority of academics in the humanities and social sciences self-identify as left-of-center (as they surely do) and then proceeding without any intervening steps to the conclusion that the imbalance must be redressed immediately lest chaos come again, the authors of these essays stop to interrogate this undoubted fact with a view to determining how it came to be, what it means, and what, if anything, can or should be done about it.
Their first conclusion is that the predominance of liberals in the academy is not “the result of intentional discrimination.” No one, that is, designed it. Their second conclusion is that it may be self-correcting in time as an older generation of 1960s radicals is replaced by a more pragmatic cadre of scholars for whom the ‘60s are a piece of history. (That is what some on the left fear.) Their third conclusion is that a few “fervent idealists” get “disproportionate attention” while the majority of teachers, even those with liberal political views, tend to be moderate. Their fourth conclusion is that personality traits which antedate the experience of college and graduate school lead to a sorting out that may be regrettable, but is benign: “Personal preferences in combination seem to have a greater impact on conservatives’ educational aspirations than any other factors.” In other words, conservatives are not being kept out of the academy by a liberal power structure, but are making choices dictated by the fact that they are “more family oriented, more focused on financial success, less interested in making a theoretical contribution to science.” (Remember, this is a conclusion reached by researchers on the conservative side of the aisle.) Their final conclusion is that because so many factors not under conscious control contribute to the “ideological imbalance that permeates academia,” that imbalance may be “intractable,” that is, not capable of being altered by some program of social engineering.
Of course one might disagree with these conclusions and question the methods that generate them, but it would be hard to deny that they are offered with the appropriate reservations and in a spirit that eschews polemics. In some of the essays that follow, polemics of the kind we remember from the ‘90s occasionally reappear, especially when the topic is “intellectual diversity”: the idea (championed by David Horowitz) that if diversity is the watchword of liberal academics, why do they not move to remedy the lack of diversity in the ideological makeup of the faculty and in the texts they assign?“ The reasoning is that “just as minority students may feel alienated in educational environments lacking minority professors or culturally sensitive course content, conservative students may feel alienated when few (often none) of their professors share or respect their views and when conservative perspectives are excluded from pedagogy.”
This is an identity politics argument — pedagogical choices should track ideological and tribal affiliations — which, as many have pointed out, is a program of affirmative action for conservatives. I would object to it, as I have in the past, by observing that intellectual diversity is a political, not an educational, measure, but Professor James Caesar, writing in the same volume, does it for me when he declares that “Universities are not, or at any rate should not be, representative institutions that are asked to meet the criterion of what political theorist Hanna Pitkin once called ‘descriptive representation’, or a mirroring of the society at large.” That is to say, neither the faculty nor the works they teach should be required to “look like America”; rather the criteria for selection should be strictly academic both when faculty are being hired or promoted and when syllabi are being constructed.
The call for intellectual diversity is, as the volume’s authors acknowledge, less philosophical than strategic; it is designed to embarrass liberal academics who are dedicated to what Peter Wood calls the “diversity regime” in academia. Liberals, says Wood, “cannot repudiate the value of intellectual diversity without kicking the traces out from under their own doctrine” in which race, class, and gender become proxies “for intellectual differences.” Wood frankly embraces the “appropriation” by his side of a term that he says (correctly) is already “an aggressive ideology that stigmatizes and attempts to drive out anyone who does not … support it.” Why not turn it to our advantage, he implies, and hoist them on their own petard? The answer is that it would be better if all sides acknowledged that “diversity” is a word that has lost whatever usefulness it may have had and has become an umbrella rationale for importing political criteria into the process of academic decision-making. We should be done with it.
Cary Nelson would seem to agree, at least when the story of the unsuccessful applicant from New Zealand prompts him to conclude that identity politics thinking leads faculty “to mistreat one another and to politicize their own decision making.” He counsels that we should “stop seeking to be agents of the victims of the first rank,” for “the price we pay otherwise is that identity politics and its effects rule our professional decisions.” Witness, for example (it is his example), the fact that “the only socially and politically acceptable stance for some people in academia is that Israel has no right to exist, has no moral or political legitimacy, and must be dissolved into a larger regional nation-state.” The tendency to tie “program planning, hiring, and tenure decisions” to one’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will, Nelson warns, make those matters “impossible to negotiate.” (Already happening.) We must recognize, he concludes, “that the dangers to critical thinking on campus come not just from the organized right outside the university, but also from internal intolerance and self-delusion.”
Wise words (which mirror the concession made by the A.E.I. authors), but Nelson does not see their relevance to his insistence that it is entirely appropriate for professors to voice their personal and political views in the classroom: “A complete prohibition on political speech not relevant to the subject would disable American pedagogy” by preventing instructors from reacting to great events. “Some of us believe national tragedies can trump the syllabus for a day, whether for an open discussion or an impassioned lecture.” But why stop at national tragedies? Why not extend the latitude to political tragedies, that is, to the election of a president who is, in an instructor’s view, on the wrong side of every issue? And why not extend the latitude further to include personal tragedies, to the mistreatment you think you have suffered at the hands of a corrupt university administration? Once the syllabus can be “trumped” by something, the way is open to its being trumped by anything.
To his credit, Nelson expresses uneasiness at his part in creating an academic word where “’the professional is the political.’ ” If he now believes, as he says, that we should “set aside our political differences in tenure decisions,” he should also believe that we should leave our political differences and commitments outside the classroom door. The reason he gives for declining to do so is that a classroom free of political passion would be overly reasonable and contribute to the acceptance of the status quo: “The relentlessly reasonable classroom may reinforce confidence in the reasonableness of the nation state in which it resides.” Get it? If you confine yourself to the subject and preside over reasoned discussions of the assigned materials, you will be turning your students into toadies for the neoliberal state. I guess you would also be courting that danger if you arrived at class on time, and devised objective tests and assigned grades accordingly. In the face of an argument like this one, there is literally nothing to say.
Still, the passages I have cited in the previous paragraphs constitute only a small portion of Nelson’s book. In many of its other pages he offers informed and acute analyses of our present situation and its discontents, and this is especially true of his chapters on unionization, tenure, and the emergence in recent decades of a “contingent” faculty, untenured, underpaid, undervalued, overburdened, and vulnerable to every form of pressure one can imagine. (There is also a chapter arguing that academic freedom requires the institutionalization of “shared governance,” a position with which I strongly disagree: academic freedom and forms of governance are independent variables.) Nelson recalls (accurately) that when he and I discussed the role of politics in the classroom at a public forum and he reported proudly on his practice of inserting the names Bush and Cheney into a poem about a past military disaster, I declared that “If I were Cary’s dean, I would fire him immediately.” But upon reflection, and after having read this impassioned and worthwhile book, I am moved to reconsider.
Indeed I would welcome not only Nelson but all the contributors to “The Politically Correct University” as faculty members in my college, if I still presided over one. On the evidence of what they have written, they are capable of tempering (without abandoning) their partisan commitments in an effort to look closely and clearly at the state of higher education and propose solutions to the problems acknowledged by all parties. No one (as I have demonstrated in this column) will agree with everything these two books say, but reading them together, and in counterpoint, is a genuinely educational experience. Rather than merely cheering for your side and booing at the other, you actually learn something.