Posted on 08/27/2003 9:04:11 PM PDT by MikalM
What do colleges really mean by diversity? As the brochures suggest, they generally mean external characteristics: skin color and ethnic background that supposedly make you different, in very important, if ambiguous ways, from your classmates. If you're black, for example, you're assumed to be somehow crucially different from your white roommate--even if you both graduated from Edina High School.
This isn't real diversity, and many students sense it--especially people who've traveled to places that have truly different cultures: India, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, or even France. In America there's really one overarching culture in which all citizens participate, though the experience of various demographic groups may differ in relatively minor ways. Today, however, for complex reasons, colleges magnify these small differences into cultural gulfs that are thought important enough to feature on the covers of recruiting brochures.
But there is one kind of diversity that is actually central to both a liberal education and a flourishing free society. That's intellectual diversity: the diversity of ideas, of philosophical perspectives, of ways of looking at and understanding the world. Unfortunately, the last place to look for this kind of diversity is at American colleges and universities. Today, you can generally find a wider spectrum of opinion in any bowling alley or fast-food restaurant than in the faculty lounges of a typical American university.
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Why Are Professors Liberal?
All of this raises an obvious question: why are so many college professors on the left/liberal side of the political spectrum? Some observers claim that professors tend to be liberal because they're smarter and better educated than other people--which proves, they say, that the liberal position is correct.
Is this right? Not at all. In my view, there are two fundamental reasons for the ideological imbalance that pervades most American campuses.
First, political conservatives often face many obstacles if they seek to become a professor in a discipline like history, English, or sociology. Conservatives may find it tough to get accepted into a doctoral program, especially at a prestigious institution. Once accepted, they may struggle to find a thesis adviser. (I have a friend who attended graduate school in history at a large public university, and had to hide his political leanings for years in order to make it through the program.)
When conservatives finally get their degree, they may have trouble landing a job. Moreover, they may find it difficult to get tenure, and next to impossible to win a position of real influence--for example, to get appointed to their department's hiring committee.
Many conservatives, of course, don't even think about going into college teaching because they have no desire to live and work in an unwelcoming social environment. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I worked as an administrator in the 1980s, I was surrounded by faculty who frequently made loud, mocking comments about Ronald Reagan. A faculty member who didn't share their views simply couldn't be part of the club.
Clearly, centrists and conservatives are not likely to feel at home on many college campuses. But there's another, more profound reason that few conservatives join college faculties: the matter of mindset.
The Liberal Mindset
Intellectuals, especially in the humanities and social sciences, tend to be drawn to a particular vision of how the world works. This vision is common to many members of the so-called knowledge class--a group that includes academics, journalists, psychologists, non-profit staff people, mainline church pastors, social workers, and members of what are loosely termed the helping professions.
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[Thomas] Sowell identifies two primary visions, which he calls the constrained and the unconstrained vision. The constrained vision correlates roughly with political conservatism, and the unconstrained with political liberalism.
What distinguishes these two visions? Generally speaking, the constrained vision--political conservatism--holds that human beings are fundamentally flawed. Though human beings have many potential good qualities, they also have a permanent tendency toward selfishness and violence. This means that crime, war, and social dysfunction will always be with us.
People who hold the constrained vision believe that human beings can improve society, for example, by structuring institutions that create incentives for constructive behavior, like a democratic government with checks and balances or a free market system. But such people are convinced that we will never be able to completely solve social problems like crime and war. Because of inherent human limitations, even our most effective social policies will always involve trade-offs, and never solutions.
The unconstrained vision--political liberalism--starts from a very different view of human nature. It sees human beings as malleable and perfectible, that is, continually improvable. The unconstrained vision holds that, with proper guidance and education, people can be brought to do the right things for the right reasons.
The unconstrained vision holds that social problems are primarily due--not to human limitations like selfishness--but to unjust or imperfectly designed social institutions. Two hundred years ago, the philosopher Rousseau summed up the unconstrained view in this way: "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains." The unconstrained vision maintains that if we have good intentions and sufficient commitment, we can--over time--actually solve social problems like poverty or war.
The constrained and unconstrained visions differ in another important way. The constrained vision sees the world as very complex, and views individual human beings--no matter how smart--as having limited intellectual capacities. As a result of these limitations, even if a plan for social reform seems brilliant in the abstract, it may not succeed in the real world. (The real world is always more complex than human beings can grasp.) In fact, such a reform plan might produce unintended consequences, which could actually make the problem in question worse.
The unconstrained vision takes a very different view of human beings' intellectual abilities, and their related ability to engineer change. It holds that smart people have the capacity to bring about the social changes they desire, if only they embrace the proper goals and have the proper motivation and commitment.
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People who hold the constrained and unconstrained visions are generally guided by different criteria in formulating public policy. Liberals tend to see the intentions of policy-makers as decisive--what's crucial is caring, compassion, and commitment to institutional change. Conservatives, on the other hand, see real world consequences as decisive.
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Now, in trying to understand the ideological imbalance on college campuses, it's important to recognize that for at least the last fifty years, intellectuals have been drawn in large numbers to the unconstrained vision. Why is this?
For one thing, intellectuals are idea people. They tend to like theories, that is, abstract explanations of complex social phenomena. In addition, they tend to value a certain kind of knowledge--articulated rationality--which is at the center of the unconstrained vision, with its ambitious designs for social reform.
Ordinary people--the sort of people who run small businesses or work for fire departments--tend to give equal or greater value to a different sort of knowledge. It's often called common sense. Common sense is knowledge that comes from experience and tradition. It is transmitted socially in largely unarticulated forms, and embodied in behavior, sentiments, and habits that have developed over generations.
The famous conservative William Buckley once captured the difference between the two forms of knowledge--articulated knowledge and common sense--when he said he'd rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty.
The Adversary Culture
Today, many intellectuals are drawn--not only to the unconstrained vision--but to a related phenomenon: the adversary culture that grew up in the 1960s. The adversary culture is a subculture made up of people who tend to feel alienated or estranged from mainstream American society. As a result, they are hypercritical of it, and constantly find fault with it. You know the sort of people I mean: if you say one good thing about this country, they inevitably start in about slavery or World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps.
Why are so many intellectuals attracted to the adversary culture? In my view, there are three fundamental reasons. First, individuals who hold the unconstrained worldview are likely to have extremely high expectations of people and society. In other words, they're likely to have utopian tendencies. When their society and fellow citizens fall short of these expectations, they're likely to be disappointed, and to become fuller and fuller of righteous indignation.
But there's another reason intellectuals are attracted to the adversary culture, and it has to do with power. Let's say you're a very smart sociology or political science professor. You have studied for years, you know all the theories, and you think you know what's wrong with society and how to achieve the reforms that would make things more truly just and equal. But do you get to fix things? No. Who does? Whom do the people give power to? George W. Bush! A guy (you suspect) who probably hasn't read a book in years. A guy whose vocabulary is probably half the size of yours, a guy who says "nucular." Or worse yet, Ronald Reagan gets to be president. He's a Hollywood actor, and you have a Ph.D. from Princeton!
And who else does America reward with money and power? Business people! The kind of people who make Cheerios or run Victoria's Secret stores. Here's my point: many intellectuals believe that this society does not properly value or reward them, and as a result, they often harbor resentment toward the system.
There's a final reason that intellectuals tend to be drawn to the adversary culture. For many intellectuals today, the adversary culture has actually become a kind of secular religion. Think about it. Over the past century, institutional religion has declined markedly as a force in American life, especially among intellectuals. This has left a giant hole.
The fact is, most people need what religion provides--among other things, a sense of meaning, purpose, and direction in life. For some intellectuals, the adversary culture has come to fill this hole. It offers a sense of meaning, and a purpose--social justice--to which one can dedicate one's life. Like a religion, it also sets out a model of virtue: the "caring," compassion, and commitment that lie at the center of the unconstrained vision. The adversary culture offers something in short supply in our atomized world: a sense of belonging, of participation in a cohesive community. It provides a ready-made community of political activism, a fellowship, and a rationale for collective action.
Have you ever participated in a protest march? If you have, you know this sense of belonging, the visceral feeling of connectedness, of passion in a common cause. It can be very seductive.
Here's another important point. The adversary culture gives people all these quasi-religious rewards without requiring them to sacrifice anything. It allows them to feel righteous simply by wearing a black armband, or shouting slogans with the crowd ("No blood for oil!") or sitting on the cafeteria stairs with signs demanding peace. When you do these things, you show the people on the sidelines how much you care (demonstrating, of course, that you're "better" than they are). It's all so easy. You don't have to do the hard, self-sacrificial things that traditional religion requires, like dying to self, keeping your promises, and striving for humility.
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Radical feminism offers women a fellowship of the anointed. It's called the "sisterhood." This form of feminism also has a devil: the patriarchy. Feminist writers like Susan Faludi, author of the best-selling Backlash, write of the patriarchy in satanic terms. (Faludi portrays the patriarchy as "whispering" in women's ears, and "cajoling" them into acting against their own interests.) Radical feminism also has its heretics: women like me. A number of years ago, feminist professors at a University of Minnesota women's studies conference told me that I was an agent of the patriarchy and a victim of false consciousness. I could never teach in their program, they said, because I wasn't a real woman.
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When you understand the adversary culture as a secular religion, you grasp something else as well. That's the source of the intolerance that grips many campuses today: the intolerance called political correctness. The adversary culture, with its unconstrained worldview, holds that people who disagree with it are not just wrong-headed. They are, in a sense, bad people, because they do not have the right intentions. Do you oppose the left's anti-poverty program? Then you don't care about the poor or social justice, or you're greedy. Are you in favor of the war in Iraq? Then you only care about oil, or dominating the world as an American imperialist. On many campuses, this intolerance for divergent (that is, heretical) views is a principal reason that diversity stops at the classroom door.
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Today’s Students More Conservative Than Their Professors
I want to close with a couple of quotes from a recent New York Times article. The headline reads "With Current War, Professors Protest, As Students Debate." The article is about how much more liberal today's professors are than the bulk of their students.
The article reports on a protest at Amherst College, where--shortly before the Iraq war began-- forty professors paraded into the dining hall waving antiwar signs. Many students were vocally annoyed. Some accused the professors of behaving inappropriately, of "not knowing their place." One student put it this way, "It seems the professors are more vehement than the students. There comes a point when you wonder are you fostering a discussion or are you promoting an opinion you want students to embrace or even parrot?"
According to the article, many professors were dismayed by the students' failure to follow their lead. "There's a second when I hear them," says one prof, "and my heart just falls." And here's Martha Saxton, an Amherst professor of women's studies: "We used to like to offend people. We loved being bad, in the sense that we were making a statement. Why is there no joy now?"
Why does diversity stop at the classroom door? If you want a two-word answer, it's "my generation." And I'm afraid that true diversity may not return to college classrooms until my generation fades away.
Ms. Kersten, who serves as American Experiment's distinguished senior fellow for cultural studies, holds a law degree from the University of Minnesota, an M.B.A. from Yale, and a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame--from which she recently received the Family Life Exemplar Award for 2003. She and her husband, Mark Johnson, a lawyer, have four children; the oldest, Will, is a sophomore at St. Olaf.
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Bingo!
"It was all so much simpler when everyone was on acid, man, you know?" she added.
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