February 9, 2005

Reporting today in the conservative New York Sun, Josh Gerstein claims that in an e-mail conversation I "dismissed the notion that leftists control academia." My actual responses to his smart questions, e-mailed yesterday and reprinted here, were not the least bit dismissive. When questioned about "liberal orthodoxy" (not " leftist control") on US campuses, I point to evidence for both liberal and conservative presence in diverse schools throughout the country. I conclude that it is hard to generalize about the relative influence of either faction, and that neither label adequately captures the reality of academic life. - GL

JG: The language of the proposed bill of rights seems, to many people, rather unobjectionable on its face. Indeed, some aspects of the bill track very closely with AAUP's own policy statements on academic freedom. Are you disturbed by the language, by the proponents or by a perception about how it will be enforced?

GL: In the abstract, it is true that there's nothing objectionable about many of the ideas put forward in this proposed legislation, which runs to more than a thousand words. Indeed, it would be easy enough to add two or three thousand more words that everybody could agree on. For instance one could add that "teachers should not hit or kick their students." Like most of what's in the proposed bill, this extra legislation would add little to existing safeguards, aside from the insinuation that these safeguards are not in place. By falsely implying that American colleges and universities do not have the students' best interests at heart, any such insinuations damage the image of these institutions.

There are also plenty of things in the bill that are objectionable on principle, as I have explained at length in my debates with David Horowitz. These include the infantalization of students, the specter of epistemological and moral relativism, the increased politicization of intellectual pursuits, and the replacement of a model of mutual understanding with one of incommensurable differences.

JG: Do you agree with the proponents of the legislation that many campuses operate under a liberal orthodoxy and that instructors or students who challenge tenets of that orthodoxy are sometimes subject to discrimination in hiring or grading?

GL: If a place is truly liberal, then there's no orthodoxy, because true liberals are by definition broad-minded and unprejudiced. As believers in individual autonomy, liberals are anti-authoritarian, anti-orthodox and open to change. Indeed, one could say that they need things to change in the direction of anti-authoritarianism and anti-orthodoxy. This kind of progressive thinking is certainly widespread among college professors, but I would be hesitant to call this attitude an orthodoxy. At worst, one could accuse the liberal professorate of being prejudiced against orthodoxy.

Nor is liberalism universally prevalent. Places like Oberlin, Vassar, Wesleyan and Berkeley certainly seem very progressive, whereas Texas A&M, Brigham Young, Bob Jones, Wheaton College and the U.S. Naval Academy seem largely conservative. When I was at graduate school at Harvard, the Fine Arts Department was liberal, in the sense that it was open to a wide range of ideas. There I felt free to combine tradition-bound practices of connoisseurship with the trendiest post-structuralist theory. And yet for five years my landlord in Cambridge, Charles Fried, was a Harvard professor who had served as Reagan's solicitor general, and who filed an amicus brief supporting the Florida state legislature's decision not to recount the votes in the 2000 election. So I experienced a wide political spectrum, and it would be hard to say whether the Harvard liberals or conservatives wielded more real power.

At Stanford, where my office is literally in the shadow of the Hoover Tower, David Horowitz imagines that one in thirty professors are 'leftists,' but I don't see that as a useful description of what we're doing. Horowitz has repeatedly called me a leftist -- a term he sees as synonymous with liberalism. To his credit, he has also called me a reactionary. There are certainly conservative aspects to my job, which involves convincing students of the genius of a bunch of Dead White European Male artists and architects. But on the whole such labels are only of very limited use in describing what I do. Unlike David Horowitz, who by his own admission switched from hard leftism to hard conservatism, serious intellectuals tend to defy easy categorization.

JG: If you think it is a problem, is there some better way to address it than this type of bill of rights/legislation?

GL: While I don't feel that there is "a problem" with political bias in the academy, I know from personal experience that professors are fallible. This is why universities have extensive professional guidelines and grievance procedures. One of the reasons I joined the AAUP is because it represents the industry standard of academic professionalism. For a while, David Horowitz acknowledged this authority by claiming that his Academic Bill of Rights is in line with AAUP precepts. He has distanced himself since coming under fire from AAUP over some of the fuzzier and scarier aspects of his bill. The AAUP website provides detailed guidelines on such issues as faculty governance and academic freedom. The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, revised in 1970, is an important foundation stone, but the policy is also developing with the times, as witnessed by last year's statement on Controversy in the Classroom. The task of defending academic freedom is never-ending.

JG: All universities have some kind of grievance scheme to deal with issues of race/sex/gender/sexual orientation discrimination/harassment in the classroom. These also impinge to a degree on academic freedom. Is the proposed legislation on intellectual diversity more objectionable or dangerous in your mind? Or would you object across the board to all such enforcement schemes?

GL: It is crucial for universities to have grievance procedures for all forms of discrimination, including discrimination on political grounds. Since any discrimination charge is a very serious one, it should always be treated with the utmost caution and gravity on all sides. A grading dispute ultimately needs to be worked out between the complainant and the accused, with each party taking responsibility for his or her own actions. Sometimes this gets escalated to the next level -- i.e. a review by the instructor's peers -- in order to ensure that the grading decision was made according to the appropriate academic standards. These standards concern the integrity of scholarly practices of argumentation, citation and so on. They are not about adherence to some ill-defined notion of intellectual or ideological diversity, much less to the grandiose and questionable idea that all truth is unsettled.

Related Link: The Larkin-Horowitz Exchange