FYI: "Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual"

FYI. Any responses? What effects can embedded assumptions or
worldviews of the teacher have upon students and their learning?
 
 
 The Chronicle of Higher
Education<http://chronicle.com/icons/2003/b/flag_468_review.gif> From
the issue dated November 12, 2004

Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual

By MARK BAUERLEIN

Conservatives on college campuses scored a tactical hit when the
American Enterprise Institute's magazine published a survey of voter
registration among humanities and social-science faculty members several
years ago. More than nine out of 10 professors belonged to the
Democratic or Green party, an imbalance that contradicted many liberal
academics' protestations that diversity and pluralism abound in higher
education. Further investigations by people like David Horowitz,
president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, coupled with
well-publicized cases of discrimination against conservative professors,
reinforced the findings and set "intellectual diversity" on the agenda
of state legislators and members of Congress.

The public has now picked up the message that "campuses are havens for
left-leaning activists," according to a Chronicle poll
<http://chronicle.com/stats/higheredpoll/2004/higheredpoll.htm> of
1,000 adult Americans this year. Half of those surveyed -- 68 percent
who call themselves "conservative" and even 30 percent who say they are
"liberal" -- agreed that colleges improperly introduce a liberal bias
into what they teach. The matter, however, is clearly not just one of
perception. Indeed, in another recent survey, this one conducted by the
Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California at
Los Angeles, faculty members themselves chose as their commitment "far
left" or "liberal" more than two and a half times as often as "far
right" or "conservative." As a Chronicle article
<http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i05/05a00801.htm> last month put it:
"On left-leaning campuses around the country, professors on the right
feel disenfranchised."

Yet while the lack of conservative minds on college campuses is
increasingly indisputable, the question remains: Why?

The obvious answer, at least in the humanities and social sciences, is
that academics shun conservative values and traditions, so their
curricula and hiring practices discourage non-leftists from pursuing
academic careers. What allows them to do that, while at the same time
they deny it, is that the bias takes a subtle form. Although I've met
several conservative intellectuals in the last year who would love an
academic post but have given up after years of trying, outright
blackballing is rare. The disparate outcome emerges through an indirect
filtering process that runs from graduate school to tenure and beyond.

Some fields' very constitutions rest on progressive politics and make it
clear from the start that conservative outlooks will not do. Schools of
education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as
definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle,
while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who
espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget
pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the
nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from
women's studies.

Other fields allow the possibility of studying conservative authors and
ideas, but narrow the avenues of advancement. Mentors are disinclined to
support your topic, conference announcements rarely appeal to your work,
and few job descriptions match your profile. A fledgling literary
scholar who studies anti-communist writing and concludes that its worth
surpasses that of counterculture discourse in terms of the cogency of
its ideas and morality of its implications won't go far in the
application process.

No active or noisy elimination need occur, and no explicit queries about
political orientation need be posed. Political orientation has been
embedded into the disciplines, and so what is indeed a political
judgment may be expressed in disciplinary terms. As an Americanist said
in a committee meeting that I attended, "We can't hire anyone who
doesn't do race," an assertion that had all the force of a scholastic
dictum. Stanley Fish, professor and dean emeritus of the College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago,
advises, "The question you should ask professors is whether your work
has influence or relevance" -- and while he raised it to argue that no
liberal conspiracy in higher education exists, the question is bound to
keep conservatives off the short list. For while studies of scholars
like Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri seem central in
the graduate seminar, studies of Friedrich A. von Hayek and Francis
Fukuyama, whose names rarely appear on cultural-studies syllabi despite
their influence on world affairs, seem irrelevant.

Academics may quibble over the hiring process, but voter registration
shows that liberal orthodoxy now has a professional import.
Conservatives and liberals square off in public, but on campuses,
conservative opinion doesn't qualify as respectable inquiry. You won't
often find vouchers discussed in education schools or patriotism argued
in American studies. Historically, the boundaries of scholarly fields
were created by the objects studied and by norms of research and peer
review. Today, a political variable has been added, whereby conservative
assumptions expel their holders from the academic market. A wall
insulates the academic left from ideas and writings on the right.

One can see that phenomenon in how insiders, reacting to Horowitz's
polls, displayed little evidence that they had ever read conservative
texts or met a conservative thinker. Weblogs had entries conjecturing
why conservatives avoid academe -- while never actually bothering to
find one and ask -- as if they were some exotic breed whose absence lay
rooted in an inscrutable mind-set. Professors offered caricatures of the
conservative intelligentsia, selecting Ann H. Coulter and Rush Limbaugh
as representatives, not von Hayek, Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, Thomas
Sowell, Robert Nozick, or Gertrude Himmelfarb. One of them wrote that
"conservatives of Horowitz's ilk want to unleash the most ignorant
forces of the right in hounding liberal academics to death."

Such parochialism and alarm are the outcome of a course of socialization
that aligns liberalism with disciplinary standards and collegial mores.
Liberal orthodoxy is not just a political outlook; it's a professional
one. Rarely is its content discussed. The ordinary evolution of opinion
-- expounding your beliefs in conversation, testing them in debate,
reading books that confirm or refute them -- is lacking, and what should
remain arguable settles into surety. With so many in harmony, and with
those who agree joined also in a guild membership, liberal beliefs
become academic manners. It's social life in a professional world, and
its patterns are worth describing.

The first protocol of academic society might be called the Common
Assumption. The assumption is that all the strangers in the room at
professional gatherings are liberals. Liberalism at humanities meetings
serves the same purpose that scientific method does at science
assemblies. It provides a base of accord. The Assumption proves correct
often enough for it to join other forms of trust that enable collegial
events. A fellowship is intimated, and members may speak their minds
without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions.

The Common Assumption usually pans out and passes unnoticed -- except
for those who don't share it, to whom it is an overt fact of
professional life. Yet usually even they remain quiet in the face of the
Common Assumption. There is no joy in breaking up fellow feeling, and
the awkward pause that accompanies the moment when someone comes out of
the conservative closet marks a quarantine that only the institutionally
secure are willing to endure.

Sometimes, however, the Assumption steps over the line into arrogance,
as when at a dinner a job candidate volunteered her description of a
certain "racist, sexist, and homophobic" organization, and I admitted
that I belonged to it. Or when two postdocs from Germany at a nearby
university stopped by my office to talk about American literature. As
they sat down and I commented on how quiet things were on the day before
Thanksgiving, one muttered, "Yes, we call it American Genocide Day."

Such episodes reveal the argumentative hazards of the Assumption. Apart
from the ill-mannered righteousness, academics with too much confidence
in their audience utter debatable propositions as received wisdom. An
assertion of the genocidal motives of early English settlers is put
forward not for discussion but for approval. If the audience shares the
belief, all is well and good. But a lone dissenter disrupts the process
and, merely by posing a question, can show just how cheap such a pat
consensus actually is.

After Nixon crushed McGovern in the 1972 election, the film critic
Pauline Kael made a remark that has become a touchstone among
conservatives. "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won," she
marveled. "I don't know anybody who voted for him." While the second
sentence indicates the sheltered habitat of the Manhattan intellectual,
the first signifies what social scientists call the False Consensus
Effect. That effect occurs when people think that the collective opinion
of their own group matches that of the larger population. If the members
of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it,
they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way.

The tendency applies to professors, especially in humanities
departments, but with a twist. Although a liberal consensus reigns
within, academics have an acute sense of how much their views clash with
the majority of Americans. Some take pride in a posture of dissent and
find noble precursors in civil rights, Students for a Democratic
Society, and other such movements. But dissent from the mainstream has
limited charms, especially after 24 years of center-right rule in
Washington. Liberal professors want to be adversarial, but are tired of
seclusion. Thus, many academics find a solution in a limited version of
the False Consensus that says liberal belief reigns among intellectuals
everywhere.

Such a consensus applies only to the thinking classes, union supporters,
minority-group activists, and environmentalists against corporate
powers. Professors cannot conceive that any person trained in critical
thinking could listen to George W. Bush speak and still vote Republican.
They do acknowledge one setting in which right-wing intellectual work
happensnamely, the think tanksbut add that the labor there is patently
corrupt. The Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the
Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution all have corporate
sponsors, they note, and fellows in residence do their bidding. Hence,
references to "right-wing think tanks" are always accompanied by the
qualifier "well-funded."

The dangers of aligning liberalism with higher thought are obvious. When
a Duke University philosophy professor implied last February that
conservatives tend toward stupidity, he confirmed the public opinion of
academics as a self-regarding elite -- regardless of whether or not he
was joking, as he later said that he was. When laymen scan course
syllabi or search the shelves of college bookstores and find only a few
volumes of traditionalist argument amid the thickets of leftist
critique, they wonder whether students ever enjoy a fruitful encounter
with conservative thought. When a conference panel is convened or a
collection is published on a controversial subject, and all the
participants and contributors stand on one side of the issue, the
tendentiousness is striking to everyone except those involved. The False
Consensus does its work, but has an opposite effect. Instead of uniting
academics with a broader public, it isolates them as a ritualized club.

The final social pattern is the Law of Group Polarization. That lawas
Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of political science and of jurisprudence
at the University of Chicago, has describedpredicts that when
like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion
shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs. In a
product-liability trial, for example, if nine jurors believe the
manufacturer is somewhat guilty and three believe it is entirely guilty,
the latter will draw the former toward a larger award than the nine
would allow on their own. If people who object in varying degrees to the
war in Iraq convene to debate methods of protest, all will emerge from
the discussion more resolved against the war.

Group Polarization happens so smoothly on campuses that those involved
lose all sense of the range of legitimate opinion. A librarian at Ohio
State University who announces, "White Americans pay too little
attention to the benefits their skin color gives them, and opening their
eyes to their privileged status is a valid part of a college education"
(The Chronicle, <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i48/48b00501.htm>
August 6) seems to have no idea how extreme his vision sounds to many
ears. Deliberations among groups are just as prone to tone deafness. The
annual resolutions of the Modern Language Association's Delegate
Assembly, for example, ring with indignation over practices that enjoy
popular acceptance. Last year, charging that in wartime, governments use
language to "misrepresent policies" and "stigmatize dissent," one
resolution urged faculty members to conduct "critical analysis of war
talk ... as appropriate, in classrooms." However high-minded the
delegates felt as they tallied the vote, which passed 122 to 8 without
discussion, to outsiders the resolution seemed merely a license for more
proselytizing.

The problem is that the simple trappings of deliberation make academics
think that they've reached an opinion through reasoned debate -- instead
of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on
the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of
principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a
larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants left the
enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to
the beliefs of others. But with the conferences, quarterlies, and
committee meetings suffused with extreme positions, they're stuck with
abiding by the convictions of their most passionate brethren.

As things stand, such behaviors shift in a left direction, but they
could just as well move right if conservatives had the extent of control
that liberals do now. The phenomenon that I have described is not so
much a political matter as a social dynamic; any political position that
dominates an institution without dissent deterioriates into smugness,
complacency, and blindness. The solution is an intellectual climate in
which the worst tendencies of group psychology are neutralized.

That doesn't mean establishing affirmative action for conservative
scholars or encouraging greater market forces in education -- which
violate conservative values as much as they do liberal values. Rather,
it calls for academics to recognize that a one-party campus is bad for
the intellectual health of everyone. Groupthink is an anti-intellectual
condition, ironically seductive in that the more one feels at ease with
compatriots, the more one's mind narrows. The great liberal John Stuart
Mill identified its insulating effect as a failure of imagination: "They
have never thrown themselves into the mental condition of those who
think differently from them." With adversaries so few and opposing ideas
so disposable, a reverse advantage sets in. The majority expands its
power throughout the institution, but its thinking grows routine and
parochial. The minority is excluded, but its thinking is tested and
toughened. Being the lone dissenter in a colloquy, one learns to acquire
sure facts, crisp arguments, and a thick skin.

But we can't open the university to conservative ideas and persons by
outside command. That would poison the atmosphere and jeopardize the
ideals of free inquiry. Leftist bias evolved within the protocols of
academic practice (though not without intimidation), and conservative
challenges should evolve in the same way. There are no administrative or
professional reasons to bring conservatism into academe, to be sure, but
there are good intellectual and social reasons for doing so.

Those reasons are, in brief: One, a wider spectrum of opinion accords
with the claims of diversity. Two, facing real antagonists strengthens
one's own position. Three, to earn a public role in American society,
professors must engage the full range of public opinion.

Finally, to create a livelier climate on the campus, professors must end
the routine setups that pass for dialogue. Panels on issues like Iraq,
racism, imperialism, and terrorism that stack the dais provide lots of
passion, but little excitement. Syllabi that include the same roster of
voices make learning ever more desultory. Add a few rightists, and the
debate picks up. Perhaps that is the most persuasive internal case for
infusing conservatism into academic discourse and activities. Without
genuine dissent in the classroom and the committee room, academic life
is simply boring.

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and
director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts.
 
 
 
Alan Altany, Professor & Director
Coulter Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning
Western Carolina University
Cullowhee, NC 28723 (U.S.)
Email: altany@email.wcu.edu <mailto:altany@email.wcu.edu>
Fax: 828.227.7340
CFC Web Site: http://facctr.wcu.edu <http://facctr.wcu.edu/>
SoTL at Western: http://www.wcu.edu/sotl/ <http://www.wcu.edu/sotl/>
MountainRise, SoTL eJournal: http://mountainrise.wcu.edu
<http://mountainrise.wcu.edu/>
 
 

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Received on Mon Nov 15 11:40:06 2004