Leftists in academia (or, why your professor hates America)

Let me begin this blog by talking about one particular manifestation of a much larger issue that I believe to be of crucial importance, one that I will be coming back to and approaching from different angles often. My own (admittedly dorky) label for this issue is "the problem with structural problems". I'll begin somewhere near and dear to my (dorky) heart: academia.

In his book "Thinking Points", George Lakoff points out (p.62) that "[i]n surveying conservative and progressive arguments, we have noticed another important regularity. Conservatives seem to argue on the basis of direct, individual causation, while progressives tend to argue on the basis of systemic, complex causation." This statement leads me to wonder about claims, made by Horowitz and other rightists of his ilk, that there is a leftist bias in academia. Because, in a sense, this fact seems to point a different explanation; namely, that a progressive stance is almost inherent in intellectual pursuits and that to be both a serious scholar and a dedicated rightist involves constant, unresolvable tension.

In studying history, politics, social sciences, or anything that probes the social in any way, one is struck with the massive complexity of the whole thing. Nothing is ever simple. To take a particularly obvious example, consider underdevelopment in sub-Saharan Africa. How did that happen? Why is it getting worse instead of better? To even begin to answer these questions at all, we would need to delve into the subjects of colonialism, neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, natural resource management, globalization, neo-liberal economics, and so much more. Zooming in on any particular theme or area or event, one is confronted with a massive number of contingencies, of individuals doing things at specific places and specific times. Nothing is ever the result of an individual rationally making a decision in a social/historical/political vacuum. All this means that taking an honest look involves confronting an almost overwhelming complexity.

More importantly, it involves grappling with what is called a structure or a system because, again, causation is rarely direct. I fill up my tank at the Shell station. This helps – just a tiny bit – make Shell a profitable business, ans thereby gives it a mandate to keep doing the work they're doing. Work that involves the economic and environmental destruction of such places as the Niger delta. But that's not me, I'm just going about my life, doing what I need to make it to work. This is indirect causation (and a relatively simple example at that). Indirect causation operates by reinforcing and perpetuating a structure through day-to-day acts that, taken individually, seem like nothing at all. This entails a whole host of problems for our way of thinking about morality, something I will be coming back to (again and again and again) in this blog. But back to academia.

With this in mind, we might begin to see why there's a leftist "bias" in the world of letters and minds. In those hallowed halls and ivory towers, people dedicate lives to studying such problems. Academics are, therefore, acutely aware of the complexity of the world, of the indirect causation that underlies most issues. With this awareness, conservative discourse stops making sense. Take the bootstraps principle, a conservative favorite (as described by Lakoff in "Thinking Points" p.61): "With enough self-discipline, everyone can pull himself or herself up by the bootstraps. The government has no responsibility to help people who have fallen behind, because it's their own fault, caused by lack of discipline and morality." This principle comes, of course, with a whole host of assumptions, all of which are problematic to the careful observer of society. It assumes the playing field is even, it assumes that there are no built-in, self-perpetuating obstacles to certain groups' achieving prosperity. How, I want to ask, could any honest intellectual accept these assumptions? This goes a long way to explaining the prevailing political leaning of academics. It's not a bias. Professors are hired because they are good scholars and teachers. This, I am suggesting, makes them extremely likely to have progressive sensibilities. But they're not hired because of their political beliefs. Those are simply a natural outcome of careful study. Accepting the assumptions of the bootstraps principle would make you a bad scholar with a myopic view of society. And who wants that in a professor?

Horowitz' Academic Bill of Rights says so itself: "All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs."