Posted on 12/08/2004 12:27:38 AM PST by katman
If you loathe political debate, join the faculty of an American university
TOM WOLFE'S new novel about a young student, “I am Charlotte Simmons”, is a depressing read for any parent. Four years at an Ivy League university costs as much as a house in parts of the heartland—about $120,000 for tuition alone. But what do you get for your money? A ticket to “Animal House”.
In Mr Wolfe's fictional university the pleasures of the body take absolute precedence over the life of the mind. Students “hook up” (ie, sleep around) with indiscriminate zeal. Brainless jocks rule the roost, while impoverished nerds are reduced to ghost-writing their essays for them. The university administration is utterly indifferent to anything except the dogmas of political correctness (men and women are forced to share the same bathrooms in the name of gender equality). The Bacchanalia takes place to the soundtrack of hate-fuelled gangsta rap.
Mr Wolfe clearly exaggerates for effect (that's kinda, like, what satirists do, as one of his students might have explained). But on one subject he is guilty of understatement: diversity. He fires off a few predictable arrows at “diversoids”—students who are chosen on the basis of their race or gender. But he fails to expose the full absurdity of the diversity industry.
Academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of “diversity officers”. Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it.
Evidence of the atypical uniformity of American universities grows by the week. The Centre for Responsive Politics notes that this year two universities—the University of California and Harvard—occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et al. Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as to George Bush. Meanwhile, a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics by Daniel Klein, of Santa Clara University, shows that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. And things are likely to get less balanced, because younger professors are more liberal. For instance, at Berkeley and Stanford, where Democrats overall outnumber Republicans by a mere nine to one, the ratio rises above 30 to one among assistant and associate professors.
“So what”, you might say, particularly if you happen to be an American liberal academic. Yet the current situation makes a mockery of the very legal opinion that underpins the diversity fad. In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell argued that diversity is vital to a university's educational mission, to promote the atmosphere of “speculation, experiment and creation” that is essential to their identities. The more diverse the body, the more robust the exchange of ideas. Why apply that argument so rigorously to, say, sexual orientation, where you have campus groups that proudly call themselves GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning), but ignore it when it comes to political beliefs?
This is profoundly unhealthy per se. Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies”. Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities' ability to influence the wider intellectual culture. In John Kennedy's day, there were so many profs in Washington that it was said the waters of the Charles flowed into the Potomac. These days, academia is marginalised in the capital—unless, of course, you count all the Straussian conservative intellectuals in think-tanks who left academia because they thought it was rigged against them.
Bias in universities is hard to correct because it is usually not overt: it has to do with prejudice about which topics are worth studying and what values are worth holding. Stephen Balch, the president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, argues that university faculties suffer from the same political problems as the “small republics” described in Federalist 10: a motivated majority within the faculty finds it easy to monopolise decision-making and squeeze out minorities.
Ivy-clad propaganda
The question is what to do about it. The most radical solution comes from David Horowitz, a conservative provocateur: force universities to endorse an Academic Bill of Rights, guaranteeing conservatives a fairer deal. Bills modelled on this idea are working their way through Republican state legislatures, most notably Colorado's. But even some conservatives are nervous about politicians interfering in self-governing institutions.
Mr Balch prefers an appropriately Madisonian solution to his Madisonian problem: a voluntary system of checks and balances to preserve the influence of minorities and promote intellectual competition. This might include a system of proportional voting that would give dissenters on a faculty more power, or the establishment of special programmes to promote views that are under-represented by the faculties.
The likelihood of much changing in universities in the near future is slim. The Republican business elite doesn't give a fig about silly academic fads in the humanities so long as American universities remain on the cutting edge of science and technology. As for the university establishment, leftists are hardly likely to relinquish their grip on one of the few bits of America where they remain in the ascendant. And that is a tragedy not just for America's universities but also for liberal thought.
I've seen a number of reviews of "Charlotte Simmons." I have just started reading it myself but the impression I get is that the novel focuses on the Jock/Fratboy subculture and their camp followers and hangers on to the exclusion of everybody else.
My oldest son (21) has had trouble adapting to "traditional" education, (which I see as a sign of good social adjustment and mental health).
Since he still has a thirst for knowledge, we have come up with a list of 100 (and growing) books that I am buying for him one at a time, as he finishes them. This will become his personal library, and I believe will afford him a quality education at a cost between $3-5,000, plus our discussion time.
The initial response has been excellent, and the level of father/son interaction is edifying for both of us.
Just a thought for those of you looking for an alternative to the mind-numbing and bankrupting university experience.
By the way I was watching CSPAN's Booknotes interview with Tom Wolfe. An American Original to say the least. Perhaps I should get it on tape. Everything he had to say was priceless, especially his reminisciences on his works (I'm definitely going to have to get that one where he pokes fun at modern art) and his advice on writing. I like it where he says that any budding young writer should have one good book in themselves about their own life experiences but from there on one has to stop navel-gazing, get out into the real world and research and learn and experience it.
Since he still has a thirst for knowledge, we have come up with a list of 100 (and growing) books that I am buying for him one at a time, as he finishes them. This will become his personal library, and I believe will afford him a quality education at a cost between $3-5,000, plus our discussion time.
Young master Ben Shapiro (Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth) in light of his own recent experiences in the UCLA system basically says that on today's PCU campus you have to teach yourself, challenge your lefty professors and read on your own, cultivating an independent mindset.
My point exactly. So why pay them $20-40,000 per year for the priviledge of doing it on their campus?
My point exactly. So why pay them $20-40,000 per year for the priviledge of doing it on their campus?
So you can get that nice, fancy piece of parchment suitable-for-framing that opens the doors of Careersville.
I have one of those - from a VERY expensive school.
I take a good hard look at it every night, just before I go to tend bar at the casino! (Best job I ever had!)
I'm very happy for you. One slight problem, however...
[New Yorker cartoon]
Fifty-something couple partying in their living-room; mother says to their visiting adult children...
"We're celebrating paying off our student loans."
Fortunately, I had GI Bill, three part-time jobs and a loan that only took four years to pay off. (But that was thirty years ago!)
Send me a copy of your list please!
bump
If you like Tom Wolfe, you might also get ahold of his slim volume, From Bauhaus to Our House, about the dreadful scourge of concrete-box "modern" (actually, early 20th century) architecture.
Best deal: have the kids start taking high school classes for college credit as soon as they can (usually their junior year.) Get them enrolled for community college classes over the summer. They can basically have their freshman year of college out of the way by the time they are graduated from high school. Then let them do another year at the community college, finish their sophomore year there, and transfer to the four year college to complete their BA or BS.
They're out a year sooner, so they can start working sooner. If they get scholarship money for the community college (not difficult to do) and go to a four-year college in town & continue to live at home, they can graduate virtually debt-free - *and* they've avoided the brothel-atmosphere dorms as well.
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