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The Opium of the Professors--The second of a two-part series on universities and the Left.

Posted by SJackson
On 02/16/2004 9:34:57 AM EST with 10 comments

TCS ^ | 02/16/2004 | EDWARD FESER
It is said of Woodrow Wilson that when asked what the purpose of a liberal education is, he replied "To make a person as unlike his father as possible." He was, at the time, merely the president of Princeton University, and had not yet become schoolmarm-in-chief of the United States or waged the war that ended all wars and made the world safe for democracy. But as with his better-known schemes of social uplift and gauzy internationalism, so too with his philosophy of education, Wilson was the very model of the progressive academic. Whatever bland official statement of purpose might...

Edward Feser: Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?

Posted by Tolik
On 02/13/2004 8:10:51 AM EST with 57 comments

Tech Central Station ^ | 02/13/2004 | Edward Feser
The hegemony of the Left over the universities is so overwhelming that not even Leftists deny it. Whether the institution is public or private, a community college or an Ivy League campus, you can with absolute confidence predict that the curriculum will be suffused with themes such as: capitalism is inherently unjust, dehumanizing, and impoverishing; socialism, whatever its practical failures, is motivated by the highest ideals and that its luminaries -- especially Marx -- have much to teach us; globalization hurts the poor of the Third World; natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and that human industrial...

First two articles were discussed here:

To take the latter first: Professor Brian Leiter, who fancies himself an arbiter of all things academically respectable, disagrees with my assertion that conservatives are treated with condescension and hostility in the modern university. His way of proving me wrong is to call me "embittered" and a "crackpot," a "lunatic" whose "ranting" and "paranoid" "lies" are not only "embarrassing," but raise "a serious psychological question" about my mental stability. Then, calling in the heavy intellectual artillery, he links approvingly to another blog which characterizes my article as "bullshit" and "total crap," and me personally as "nuts," a "Neanderthal," "stupid," "dim-witted," "a twit," "a moron," a product of "the breeding ground of chaos and hate in this country [which] lies nested in the pathological conservativism of murderous anti-abortionist goons, right-wing militias, and wanna-be theocrats," and -- the coup de grace -- "Ann Coulter's long lost fraternal twin." At this point Professor Leiter and his fellow bloggers apparently exhausted the thesaurus.

Apparently, they missed the section on "dramatic irony" in graduat school.

Great article!

One thing the author barley touches on is that the "left leaning" professors generally exists in areas that have little or no bearing on the real world. Ask the average English or Humanities professor what they would do if they were not able to teach, and you will more than likely get a blank stare. This is not to say that English and Philosophy are not important and worthy areas of study, just that one need to realize that the professors in those fields have as much contact with life outside academic circles as I have with Tibetan monks. I know they exist, but probably couldn't relate to them in any meaningful way.

This is not true in area like engineering or business. In my college years, the engineering side of the school was populated mainly by professors who viewed teaching as a way to semi retire. They had made their mark in the industrial world, and now wanted to live a bit more quiet of a life and pass on some of their experiences. For the most part, the professors were conservative, realist, and down to earth. This isn't to say there wasn't a few odd individuals, but not one of my engineering professors tried to express any political leanings.

Feser's response is a little over the top. It looks like the sort of thing he should have let sit for a few days, then asked himself whether he needed to dignify some critics with a response, and whether he couldn't condense his remarks.

This caught my eye in the first article:

In short, they dream of him returning from school an educated gentleman, whose piety and patriotism have been enhanced by an exposure to learning and high culture. Yet what remains after four years at the contemporary university, after the professors have had a chance to mold him according to their own vision of New Progressive Man? A dope-smoking, Che-Guevara-T-shirt-wearing foul-mouthed serial fornicator, whose conception of the higher moral life comprises recycling and voting a straight Green Party ticket, and whose idea of "spirituality" is hanging out with other New Age flakes at a Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. He has been taught nothing about his religion except that it is a repressive sham, nothing about sexual morality except that there isn't any, nothing about his country and its history except that it is "racist," "sexist," "homophobic," and insensitive to people in wheelchairs, and would be much better if only if it was more like the country his parents had crawled under barbed wire to escape from.

My first response was that it's pretty nasty. The second was that there was some truth in it. My third response is that undergrads and recent grads are bound to be silly and sophomoric -- whatever ideas they adopt. Young people are bound to go through a lot of follies, whatever they are exposed to in college. Many don't go through the "dope-smoking, Che-Guevara-T-shirt-wearing foul-mouthed serial fornicator" phase. Others survive it and come out the other side.

There's no doubt that some professors live in ways Feser abhors and promote immorality, but whether students pick up bad habits from what they hear in class is another matter. More likely, both students and faculty are influenced by a consumer culture that promotes the vices Feser condemns.

And are parents really so naive today? There are colleges that claim to promote traditional values and culture, but parents, like students and faculty, usually choose other options. Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe more should be known about traditional education, but I don't think parents are as naive about what colleges teach and how students live as Feser claims.

The identification, though, of immorality with voting for the Green Party or "caring" about people in wheelchairs is a cheap shot, on par with those who'd argue that voting Republican is equivalent to killing whales, drilling for oil in Yellowstone, or starving children. It relies on taking as a single inseparable bundle things that don't always go together. The notion that Feser's child might turn out well-behaved, courteous, and responsible, yet vote in ways he doesn't approve of, or ill-behaved, loutish and irresponsible, yet accept his own political opinions, doesn't seem to occur to him.

In other words, Feser's attack reflects a scattershot, us against them point of view that doesn't grant that one's political opponents, however mistaken or misguided they are, may have legitimate reasons for supporting the causes that they do. So when Feser uses dismissive cliches like that, how can he complain when he hears other cliches and insults thrown back at him?

A lot of political commentary today is simply feeding the beast of factional animosities. The assumption seems to be that battle ranks are drawn between two camps that are hostile all up and down the line. In fact, things aren't so polarized.

A lot of people accept some views that Feser would regard as left and others that he would regard as right. He's certainly on target in seeing the universities as tilted heavily to the left, but he ignores the wider context of public debate that's more evenly balanced on the whole.

So yes, most professors are on the left, especially in the humanities and social sciences. And yes, a lot of young people do move left in college, and many do act irresponsibly and immorally. Many would do so even without college. It's natural for the young to be rebellious. But as time goes by most people end up on the center or the right.

I don't minimize the grounds for concern: the ideologies that dominate the universities usually make an impact on the politics and culture of subsequent decades. But it's hard to prevent young people from being foolish and trying out ideas that strike them as new and daring. Not questioning, examining and criticizing those follies, fads and fashions would be a mistake, but so would lumping them all together and attacking or suppressing them as a package.