I think this is all a misunderstanding by conservatives of the role of higher education. Colleges worthy of the name aren’t in the business of spoon-feeding knowledge to their students; they’re in the business of teaching students the tools of inquiry - how to ask good questions, how to use known tools of analysis to answer those questions, and how to develop your own tools to do so.
If professors are teaching students how to find out the truth for themselves, to the extent that it can be known, and how to defend honestly and rigorously those positions they develop as a result, it hardly matters if they are liberal or conservative.
But I completely understand why many American conservatives have this misunderstanding. They come from a milieu where there are right ideas and wrong ideas, not good ideas and bad ideas. After all the decades of bashing “political correctness,” they have developed their own: a world where creation myths of a favored religion should be given equal scientific standing with a detailed theory of origins backed by piles of evidence; a world where their government’s response to inconvenient facts is to decide to no longer publish them; a world where our party is currently against filibusters and for up-and-down votes on judicial nominees, so our party has always been against filibusters and for up-and-down votes on judicial nominees.
If one lives in such a world, then truth is to be provided to the next generation, and that is surely the role of college professors. But like I said, that’s a complete misunderstanding of what college is all about.
Perhaps if private sector employees were paid less and professors were paid more this might occur. Until then, I suppose the true state of scholarship and literature will be dominated by those willing to make the sacrifices necessary to learn and teach it.
Sorry, but speaking as a teacher, relying on the “noble underpaid teacher” meme won’t go far with me.
Tenured college professors tend to make decent money; and getting to tenure often does require “fitting in” with a school’s existing socio-political ethos … I refer you to post #6.
I never said anything about a noble, underpaid teacher. Your argument is also very weak, despite your profession.
Tenured college professors make an adequate amount of money. However, the decision-making process at the core of the issue is not how much tenured profs make but about whether people attempt to pursue academic careers at all based on their expectations about their futures.
Suppose a 22 year old student is making the decision whether or not to go to grad school in the humanities. He knows he needs about 6 years of education, during which in my city he will live on about $20k per year. $20k in NYC barely pays my cable bill. He also knows that fewer than half of PhD grads in his field get tenure-track jobs within five years that pay about $40k per year. At 28 years of age, his expected income will be $20k p/a. He will have no substantial savings, almost certainly no equity, and a degree that entitles him to do little else but compete for a handful of positions in his field.
So what is the probability that even with a tenure-track position that he will actually get tenure? Less than 25%. In NYC, a tenure-track prof is paid on average about $90k p/a. He thinks that when he is 35-40 years old, after having published several times and run his heart out in the academic hamster wheel, he has maybe only a 25% chance of getting tenure. Expected value of his income at 40 years old? $22.5k.
The issue is not how much tenure track professors make. It is what drives people to become academics. The incredibly low expected value of their incomes drives away intelligent, talented people who value money, be it purely for greed, for financial security, whatever the reason. They simply aren’t willing to make the kind of sacrifice necessary to pursue an academic career. It should come as no surprise that grad student ranks are filling out with “Trustafarians” and people of independent wealth who do not have to make these calculations.
Would it surprise you that valuing money highly may just correlate with right wing political beliefs?
I think that there is some merit in that; I also think pinning it all one one variable would be a gross oversimplification, and not enough to explain the 10-1 type of disparities we see in the humanities.
Ok, I agree with that, too. There are definitely other forces at play. I do believe that there are strong selection effects that influence who is willing to make the tradeoff between money and academic success.
I also think that in order to be successful as an academic, there is a certain amount of crap you have to swallow, be it the scholarly flavor of the month or the prevailing political ideology in your department. While this is not a good thing, it is not really any different than what you have to swallow to be a success in a Fortune 500 company. The content certainly is, but the substance probably isn’t. I do not see anyone advocating political affirmative action for corporate executives.
The issue is not pity for all the poor unemployed conservative academics; they (we) knew what they were getting into.
The issues are that:
Education suffers if students only see subjects approached from one philosophical approach.
Taxpayers pay for state schools, and as such they have some right to expect that the instiutions they support should be as non-partisan as practicable.
This is fine if you’re OK with the idea that some kind of cohesive, monolithic Left is bent on enforcing a single curriculum. Righties tend to think that’s the case, and I’m hugely distrustful of that tendency–I think it’s done out of political convenience.
Reality is, however, that getting academics to agree on anything is like herding cats. I think you’d agree that achieving tenure is hugely, hugely competitive, and the successful ones are those who not only know their subject but can speak their own voice, often and eloquently. I’d go so far as to say professors seem to enjoy disagreeing with each other; getting an entire department of professors to agree on ‘one philosophical approach’ would be a ludicrous exercise. I only ascended as far as a bachelor’s degree at a large state school, but even I knew of feuds between professors so bitter that they wouldn’t speak to each other for years even though their offices were next to each other.
RTFirefly has it right: The good colleges aren’t there to teach a student what to think, they’re there to teach him (or more commonly, her) how to think.
I’d go further than that last paragraph, however. This movement of Horowitz’s isn’t a misunderstanding of the role of higher education. I don’t think this is anything less than an attempt at political intimidation by a conservative movement that seeks to shout down its opponents. Sorry if I sound alarmist, but I don’t trust these people. They begin with a basic bullshit premise, that all ideas are equally worthy of praise and do not deserve to be examined and refined or discarded; it’s never occurred to them that that is, in fact, the central mission of a university.
No. Not even remotely close to reality. Being a bold traiblazer may be possible AFTER you’ve gotten tenure and have some publications. But you progress through grad school and get a job and get published by belonging to an identifiable school of thought and showing due respect to the authorities. Inertia is a very powerful force in most disciplines. Most true innovators – people with genuinely novel approaches to a discipline – are not tenured professors.
Not one approach per se; but certain constellations of thought, yes.
To draw on my own experience in Literature: all the dominant schools of interpretation have one of two basic ideas. Either studying the way works of literature are the products of broad sociohistorical forces (Marxism, Feminism, Postcolonial, etc.) or else focusing on the unreliability of language and the way readers can choose to interpret texts (Deconstruction, Reader-Response, etc) with little regard to the author’s intentions.
If your approach is more traditional – say a humanistic belief that language is reliable and that literature is worth reading because of its power to inspire and enlighten – you are a dinosaur, not to be taken seriously. I don’t think its bizarre to think that Shakespeare et al. are worth reading because they represent the highest and best of humanity; or at the very least to say that they are essential parts of Western Civilization, a flawed thing which is nonetheless worth preserving and advancing. But you might as well break wind as make that case to a roomful of English profs.
A conservative is far, far more likely to hold to the latter views, and thus far, far less likely to be teaching at a university.
Since I happen to be up late working on something regarding our state appropriations committee, I can’t let this go without insisting on a caveat.
Taxpayers only PARTIALLY support state schools. Their slice of the pie is declining. Yes, they still may have a right to expect certain things, but don’t anyone make the mistake of thinking those public dollars form the majority of a state college’s support.
I do not want to take this discussion too off track, but these ideas are definitely worth mulling over. I was also a literature student, though in a discipline less permeated by post-structuralism at my university. I was also a philologist by training and inclination. I do not believe that any subfield in literature has been defecated on more this century than philology. So believe me, I hear you.
However…
The modern or structuralist approach has been largely discredited in many disciplines. It is worth analyzing in a literary historical context, but teaching the Grand Western Narrative is like teaching Ptolemaic astronomy or Intelligent Design. They are ideas that have merit when studied in their appropriate contexts but are no longer helpful pedagogically. They were not discredited because they were conservative, but because they are bad. The fact that they still exist and that some people still cling to them does not entitle them to be taught in schools.
This does not mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. I was also a historian, and lamented the disappearance of military, diplomatic, and political history. I attribute this more to academic fashion than to political ideology. When we all get bored of intellectual and cultural history, we will go back to political and military. I believe this is already beginning to happen: I wrote a little monograph in 1999 on sources for a medieval battle that was perfectly accepted within my department. I discovered during my research that it was a thriving subfield, and even big names were making contributions. My own advisor was an up-and-coming scholar of medieval legal documents.
We may be talking past each other here; I’d call attention to the “while flawed” in my last post, and I should have said Shakespeare was “among the highest and best.” Obviously the days of seeing all history through blue eyes are past, and deservedly so. I think we are in agreement there.
But I note your choice of the word “bad.” It is the right word, because we are making a moral judgement based on certain value systems or philosophical worldviews. In my case, religious humanism.
Such is the inherent nature of the humanities; or at least the humanities as they have historically been understood. But nowadays nobody wants to do humanities, they want to do social science or archaeology or anthropology – often without any of the rigor of those disciplines. IMO, it’s going to be the death of the humanities as such.
I think we are talking past each other, and that we do not substantially disagree.
I do not use “bad” here in any normative sense whatsoever. I am not so far gone that I believe that by taking a “religious humanist” position that I would intrinsically marginalize other groups, viewpoints, etc. I simply think that it is an outdated story and that it is high time for better interpretations, categories, and analysis. It is a “bad” idea not because it is evil but because it will continue to lead us down unhelpful paths.
This is a very interesting point. I drifted from history and literature to quantitative political science and economics. None of the fluffy stuff, all rational choice. Curiously enough, after getting my MA in rigorous social science, I am biding my time to go back into the humanities. I found that everything interesting to me about human behavior falls between the gaps of quantifiable measurement.
I said it was a dumb premise, shrewdly applied, not that conservatives are dumb.
That’s true, and that isn’t what I was referring to. I was simply pointing out the “Monolithic Left” bogeyman that anti-academic conservatives trot out every time this debate comes up.