Commentary on the Republican Debate from JPod (Keyes is "a deeply unpleasant buffoon" heh), Drezner, and the super-fun Transcript Analyzer at the Times.
Where’s the oil? Cool map from Sullivan.
How to Write an Editorial about Higher Education. Advice from d at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Blog gossip. Ezra Klein has his own digs at the American Prospect. Garance Franke-Ruta heads over to the Washington Post and coins a new term, "the mainstream blogosphere".
Geeky Mom gives the spouse’s perspective on the tenure debate, which has been a hot topic in the academic blogosphere. Lots of links there.
The stupidity of eco-fashion.
Oh, I know they’re full of big phonies, but I used to love going to art openings. Apres children, I’m stuck at home watching the Ghost Whisperer. Sigh. I go hot and cold on Lucien Freud.
Apt. 11d 
No matter how stale the material is, conservatives do have a very good case that the deck is stacked against them in higher education, and intellectual life suffers from the fact that large areas of intellectual inquiry have been roped off and declared off-limits. (Megan McArdle had an excellent comment thread on the under-representation of conservatives in universities a while back.) D snarks about the overuse of the Larry Summers case, but there is an excellent reason for mentioning it. If the president of Harvard isn’t safe, who is? There’s also the related story of the reception of the Bell Curve, which was not so much argued against or refuted, but anathematized. The problem I have was not the disagreement with Summers and Murray, but the totally inappropriate and un-academic way that the campaign against both was conducted, and the chilling effect that this sort of campaign of annihilation has to have on more junior faculty.
There were some very good points brought up in Megan McArdle’s thread on this, but I think there’s at least one factor that got missed. Namely, that social and religious conservatives might be disproportionately marrying and having kids younger, having more kids, and preferring to have a mother at home. This removes a lot of bright conservative women from the field (although fortunately a lot of them blog!), and also handicaps a spouse who is trying to get a degree, get a job, and get tenure.
LikeLike
My being a liberal atheist progressive Democrat doesn’t mean the conservative POV and/or so-called “conservative” areas of inquiry are missing from my classroom or my research.
This is the whole problem with the critiques of academics’ political stances.
LikeLike
By the way, the Summers case is alarming to me in some ways, but not because it was simply an attack on him for being “un-PC.” Rather, it seems to me that the faculty were very upset with him, and this incident became a rallying point and reaction to it was more severe than it otherwise would have been. It became the way the faculty got rid of him, not the reason. I can’t really speak to whether or not he deserved to be fired for his leadership at Harvard, but it’s a way more complex story than simply a case of “he said an unPC thing, so they dumped him.”
And it proves why tenure is needed. A tenured faculty member would have been protected and not fired for saying what he said.
Hey Laura, you mentioned Ghost Whisperer. Do you watch Moonlight (which follows it)?
LikeLike
“My being a liberal atheist progressive Democrat doesn’t mean the conservative POV and/or so-called “conservative” areas of inquiry are missing from my classroom or my research.”
To begin with, there is no “the conservative POV.” Conservatism is a big ideological zoo and there’s no way that you (no matter how sympathetic) or even a single conservative voice could really do it justice. Your desire to be equal time is very admirable. However, self-deception springs eternal. Of course we think we’re being fair. But are we? There was a very interesting exchange in last week’s Dear Prudence at slate.com. A professor wrote in complaining about a student. Here it is:
Dear Prudence,
I’m a youngish professor dealing with a bad apple in an otherwise great class. I’m pretty good at handling difficult personalities, but this student (male, older) was extremely rude to me in several e-mails and voice messages over an issue early in the term. I elected not to engage him or reply to his inappropriate correspondence, and he either got the message or didn’t get the fight he was hoping for, and things settled down (save for a nasty note on a quiz about the same issue). He added my e-mail to a list he distributes, which means I get some benign stuff about local veteran’s events, as well as some pretty awful anti-Islamic stuff. Again, I chose to ignore it, rather than get into a political debate with a student who wants to spar with a “liberal professor.” Today, he asked where he could buy my book and whether I would inscribe it to him. Signing the book would make him go away, but I hate the thought of giving him anything that’s personal or indicates that I like him. Is there any way I can appropriately get out of his request without telling him directly what I think of him?
—I’d Rather Sign a Monkey’s Behind
Here are my thoughts:
1. Older students can seem like know-it-alls and can monopolize class discussion. I’ve certainly seen that. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Note that the alleged misbehavior was confined to e-mails and a note on a quiz. I read this to my husband, and he thought that the fault was with the professor. He said that while conventional-aged students are often overawed by professors, an older student is more likely to have more background knowledge and to stand up for themselves. Not being able to deal with a confident, assertive student is a big black mark against a teacher.
2. Notice that the student was definitely over whatever disagreement they had had earlier in the term, was trying to patch things up, was engaging the professor, and actually got his book, and wanted it signed. Meanwhile, the professor was still mad about their earlier disagreement and didn’t want to move on. I bet he thought he was giving conservative ideas enough attention, too. I don’t even like to think what grade he gave the student.
LikeLike
Amy, the professor said the student was rude and inappropriate, and you’re automatically assuming that s/he’s overreacting and that the student was just “confident” and assertive? I think you’re making a huge assumption.
That student may or may not be a figment of that professor’s imagination, but I can tell you… *I* have had that student.
LikeLike
Amy P always gives me a good sense of what talking-points memes that require high levels of confirmation bias are successfully reproducing themselves out there.
—-
It took reading that summary at JPod to make me even aware that Alan Keyes is involved in this campaign–and yet, I must have actually seen him at some point on a stage in this political cycle.
LikeLike
What large areas of intellectual inquiry have been declared off limits and are not being studied?
LikeLike
Wendy,
I’m dubious about the “rude” and “inappropriate” remarks because of the way that the professor was holding a grudge and disregarding the student’s attempts to patch things up and engage with the professor intellectually by getting his/her book. Note once again that the professor said nothing about the student monopolizing discussion or disrupting class. That’s how a real “bad apple” would act. Writing a few brusque e-mails does not qualify, in my opinion.
LikeLike
Timothy Burke,
Glad to be of service. Of course, I bet you’ve never been a conservative graduate student. By the way, do you notice that the level of hostility you are displaying suggests that that “talking-points meme” (that conservatives have a hard time in the universities) might not be so far from the truth?
Lisa SG,
The example that springs to mind is sex and ethnic differences. There are a lot of areas where you could get into hot water, as did Murray and Summers. I know a researcher who discovered that people of different ethnicities react entirely differently to the same injury. In some cultures, you just get up and work, and you live a normal life. In others, the same injury turns into a lifelong incapacitating disability, and your relatives wait on you hand and foot. I don’t think that researcher is going to write up those findings anytime soon.
As there is more progress in genetics we are going to be confronting lots of uncomfortable, un-PC facts, particularly with regard to human intelligence.
LikeLike
First of all, Sommers was not studying these matters. It was not even his field. He was instead leading an institution, and when you lead an institution you have to do so in a diplomatic manner that does not offend the people working for you. That is hardly unique to universities. But his scientific speech was not in the least repressed–since he is not a scientist. And the scientists who are studying these sorts of matters seem to be doing fine. Try searching it in google scholar.
Secondly, I believe that Murray did not work for a university either when he wrote The Bell Curve, so I fail to see how his speech was in the least repressed by a university. It seems to me that it helped his career, rather than harmed it, to write such a polarizing book.
As for the injury recovery issue, I just did a google scholar search and came up with hits on studies related to the topic. Indeed, I remember hearing about a study like that relatively recently.
I believe that conservatives may be unhappy being the minority in (some of)university culture. But that is not the same thing as being repressed in their speech, or being unable to study topics that they are interested in.
LikeLike
Megan McArdle’s post “Is academia serious about diversity?” and the very interesting comment thread is at
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/10/is_academia_serious_about_dive.php
I went to graduate school in Russian after a hitch with the Peace Corps. I spent 2.5 years there and got an MA rather than continuing for a PHD. The work was really hard, as it is for everybody. Looking back, I think I suffered a lot from not having a faculty mentor that I could look up to and try to be like when I grew up. On the one hand, there were the professors who did rather plodding, uninspiring work. On the other hand, within the department there were the cultural studies professors and the women’s studies professor. They were fantastic teachers, much admired by the graduate students, and did very sexy, interesting work. Unfortunately the second group was not a good fit for me ideologically. Not sharing their political orientation, the papers that I wrote for them were a sort of auto-ventriloquism, and of course they weren’t any good.
Why did I quit? Lots of reasons–lack of a mentor and a clear vision of what it would mean to be a scholar, while being true to myself, not seeing any of the very smart, very hard working older graduate students get a job who had been there nearly a decade, losing my passion for Russian literature, being happily married and knowing that we would probably have a large family, etc.
I’ve occasionally had regrets, and I sometimes wish I’d gone on, perhaps in some other academic area. However, I was fairly young at the time, and I don’t think that the me of the late 90s could have pulled it off. The me of today might do better in a doctoral program, but she’s got two kids and will probably have more and doesn’t have the time, energy, or inclination. (I have thought about eventually going back to school and qualifying as a high school history teacher.)
Here endeth the talking points meme.
LikeLike
I might add that every semester I teach a different ethical issue that is very polarizing in my critical thinking classes. We read essays on both sides of the issue, and the students must paraphrase and evaluate the arguments in those essays and then make their own arguments. I push as hard as I can against both sides of the issue and I also consider as sympathetically the arguments on each side of the issue. The students usually cannot even tell what my point of view on the issue is. I have covered just war theory v, pacificism, abortion, euthanasia, drug legalization, gay marriage, and more over the past five years or so. While some academics may have a problem being fair in the classroom, I think that they are in the minority. Professors generally want students to be able to consider different points of view fairly and with care, not repeat back to them what the professor believes. And we are mainly concerned with getting the students to write and reason well (and believe me, as someone not working at an elite institution, that is difficult enough), not agree with us on the issues. I take great pleasure in a well-written and reasoned student paper that disagrees with me, and I am saddened to see poorly written and reasoned essays that agree with me.
LikeLike
A study on cultural impacts on recovery from injury could never be published??
Saltapidas H, Ponsford J. (2007) The influence of cultural background on motivation for and participation in rehabilitation and outcome following traumatic brain injury.J Head Trauma Rehabil. 2007
Hart et al (2005) Community outcomes following traumatic brain injury: impact of race and preinjury status.1: J Head Trauma Rehabil. 2005 Mar-Apr;20(2):158-72.
bj
Yup, Timothy — I too recognize the little summary we get from Amy of the talking points. But, I don’t know what those blogs are. Can someone list them? that is, where does Amy get this information she passes on to us? Is there some rousing discussion out there of how we don’t study some topic enough? one that would convince me on its usefulness and relevance?
LikeLike
Lisa SG,
That’s interesting. It’s possible that public political discourse is more repressive than discourse within particular academic disciplines. Note for example Saletan’s recent semi-retraction of his very interesting piece for Slate “Liberal Creationism.”
I’d argue that it’s a perversion of academic life to insist that a college president be merely a smiling, glad-handing, fundraising nonentity. It would have been nice if Summers had been able to recreate the role of college president as public intellectual, as I believe was true in the past.
LikeLike
Lisa SG,
What you do in your class sounds very good. What I’m wary of is anyone who says both: 1) I am scrupulously fair in my classes and 2) Conservatives are too stupid or greedy to be academics.
bj,
“Yup, Timothy — I too recognize the little summary we get from Amy of the talking points. But, I don’t know what those blogs are. Can someone list them? that is, where does Amy get this information she passes on to us? Is there some rousing discussion out there of how we don’t study some topic enough?”
See the first paragraph of my 5:09 comment. I am perfectly willing to be corrected where I am factually wrong.
However, I’d like to point out that it is quite dehumanizing to view political adversaries on-line as simply a collection of “memes,” rather than a real human being with experiences different than your own.
LikeLike
“What large areas of intellectual inquiry have been declared off limits and are not being studied?”
Well, in African American literature classes, you can’t study white people, you know.
I did grad work at what I call “Ground Zero in the Culture Wars” back when the Culture Wars began. I know aaaaallllll about “theory” people and Marxists and post-structuralists. I was probably one of the most conservative intellectually in the department, and to this day, the only “theory” terms I throw around with any confidence are “the other” and “hegemony.” I love “hegemony.”
And just … no. It’s just not that simple. There are so many forces at work in academia. And there are so many lies being told by those who have an interest in discrediting academia and preying on the emotions of those who have been excluded somehow.
LikeLike
How are you on homo-bonding, essentialism, specularization, and the Marlboro man? (I had to page through through my heavily annotated copy of Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics before I turned up specularization.)
LikeLike
Back in the day, my fellow graduate students used to come up with elaborate and very dirty yo mama jokes based on French literary theory. Those were the days.
Ooo, how about Orientalism?
LikeLike
Here’s an imaginary dialogue between A (a conservative former grad student) and B (a liberal academic) that I feel sums up a lot of the discussion I’ve seen on this subject. (Matt Groenig is quite free to steal it for Life in Hell–but I bet he’s already used it.)
A: I feel marginalized and excluded.
B: No, you don’t.
(Apologies for thread hogging.)
LikeLike
Wendy, I recommend the blog that KC Johnson did on the railroad job attempted by Nifong on the Duke students: http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/ and in particular the Group of 88 academics who could not let go their notion of vile white men versus virtuous suffering black woman. In addition, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education http://www.thefire.org/?PHPSESSID=. Now, I went to Berkeley in the 70s to early 80s, and to Harvard 81-4, and didn’t run into too much trouble personally. I was in science and public policy, not in the humanities, which I think was part of why I was spared. I also think Gramsci’s Long March through the Institutions has gone further in the intervening time. As near as I can tell, the speech codes are dreadful, coercive, and make it nearly impossible to have a real discussion of real issues.
You are right that people outside of the academy see the spectacular flameouts – Ward Churchill and Wahneema Lubiano. But it certainly looks like intellectual thuggery from the left, and I am very concerned to try to send my kids to college in a situation where they can develop their own views in a not-so-coercive atmosphere.
In many ways I think you are right that the satraps of Harvard’s departments were anxious to depose Summers and seized on this pretext. It’s also true that his responsibilities as President are a little different from what a professor can hope for – and Steven Pinker has been able to survive quite nicely saying, basically, ‘Summers was right’ in plain view of all the folks who knocked him off.
The incident at UC, where Davis professors mobilized to embarrass the Regents to keep them from listening to Summers in a meeting, was a real example of coercive left group think, and a disappointment to me as a UC graduate.
LikeLike
Here’s an anecdote from the early 90s at the University of Southern California that I went to as an undergraduate. There was a big public panel on the currently fashionable subject of “the canon.” Every single panelist (probably four people) identified themselves as liberal or left of center. That was definitely a topic where a conservative would have come in handy, but somehow the organizers either didn’t think to find one, or couldn’t get one.
LikeLike
Dave, if you’re using the term “Group of 88” at all, you’ve just ruled out the hope of any discussion with me on the topic of Duke. And linking Ward Churchill to Wahneema Lubiano is beyond offensive.
Amy, nope, none of those, either. I’m a disappointment, I know!
LikeLike
I have to say that I haven’t heard of any widespread persecution of conservative students in the classroom. Most, if not all, political scientist professors that I worked with really try to put on the white coats in the classroom. They honestly try to put aside their own politics and foster good debate. That’s how we’re trained. It’s part of our definition of professionalism. An extremely well known leftie activist in my graduate department mentored a student who was a pro-life activist and later entered the seminary. The persecuted conservative student story just flies in the face of all of my experiences.
How about the conservative faculty members in the larger academic community? I do know some conservative faculty. They do exist. I think that the libertarian-type conservatives have no problems. Even if they are isolated in a political science department, they can find plenty of friends in the business schools. Social conservatives might find more obstacles, but mostly in the form of a jeer at the office parties and not in terms of being denied tenure.
Academics are conservative, not in terms of politics, but in terms of behavior. They aren’t activists. They do their little studies. They teach their classes. They go home and play video games. They aren’t forming lynching parties for the nasty Bush lovers.
LikeLike
Laura,
I’m talking primarily about the graduate experience, which can be quite different from the undergraduate experience, even at the same institutions. I don’t know if your department has a graduate program, but if it does, how many conservative graduate students are there, and how do they seem to be getting on? Or, if your department doesn’t have a graduate department, how many conservative graduate students were there in your PhD program, and how well did they do? Did they have a faculty member (or members) that they clustered around? It’s not like there aren’t a lot of conservatives, and it’s not like they aren’t interested in politics. Likewise on the social conservative side–there’s no shortage of pointy-headed Catholic intellectuals in the US, and they tend to be pretty good at making angels dance on pins.
A super smart Catholic conservative friend got into one of the major Ivy law schools a couple years back, and she found it a really jarring experience. She said she was always being singled out in class and asked for “the” conservative position, and asked to defend all sorts of views which she didn’t actually hold, but which her interlocutor assumed she did. I know law school is supposed to be a crucible, but it didn’t sound like her classmates were being singled out in the same way.
LikeLike
It wouldn’t hurt, Amy, to start by reading the link provided which you neatly bypassed. What frustrates me about this entire topic is that I come at it with considerable sympathy for the argument that there needs to be more intellectual diversity in many disciplines, including conservative opinion. Moreover, I would agree that conservative thinkers (students and faculty) do sometimes come up against snide remarks, shunning, etc. There are many moments where interesting, important or wholly legitimate discussions don’t happen when they should or could happen.
But trying to get to a reasonable place on this issue has proven an impossible task. By reasonable, I mean: 1) where we don’t conflate having liberal faculty roll their eyes at someone with ‘discrimination’, and set some kind of test for what would actually represent actionable kinds of discrimination. You know, as conservatives often insist we should do when we’re talking about race, gender, or class discrimination in political and civic institutions. That 2) we don’t confuse anecdotes for systematic claims. 3) That even when we’re talking anecdotes that we not stupidly take every single one as a valid story even on its own terms. Look at the LGM thread: the editorial it references is by a conservative academic who complains of feeling slighted after he blurted out his political affiliations and opinions during an on-campus job talk/interview. As I and many others pointed out, I don’t care what your political views are, if you take time during the delicate, complicated business of meeting with potential colleagues to announce your party registration, your future voting plans, and list off your major political convictions, you’re probably a bombastic crank. You at the least have dubious professional judgement. Whether you’re conservative, liberal, radical, what have you. I’d think twice about hiring someone who exhibited that behavior, and that’s got nothing to do with that person’s specific politics.
Look, when I drop into a conversation to make a point, I’ve usually tried to follow *conversations* on that topic elsewhere, to get a sense of the contours of opinion, before taking a stance. Not gone looking for the two or three things which completely echo my prior point of view. The conversation about “bias in academia” is a long-running one that I and many other bloggers across a range of views have had a long-running discussion about. So I’m pretty well weary of turning the corner and coming across another person who has read one thing by David Horowitz or who gets all their information straight from Phi Beta Cons or one thread from Megan and then just obediently repeats that information as gospel. But ok: blog comments are not dissertations. The least one might do is actually read the link provided by the host of a blog, however. And that link to LGM in this case ought to at least create a moment of reflection, a pause for complexity, an awareness of the limited value of anecdote.
Particularly when it comes to asserting what I or anyone else have or have not experienced. In many respects, within my own disciplinary speciality, I think there are those who view me as rightward of the orthodoxy for various reasons. So maybe I know more about the eye-rolling that one can receive for some opinions or arguments than Amy thinks. Maybe that’s also why I think that some of this is much ado about nothing, because all it takes is a smidgen of courage about one’s convictions and a strong commitment to professionalism, collegiality and friendly engagement with other scholars to go ahead and have whatever opinions you please. (Well, tenure doesn’t hurt.) At least some of the academics who develop a stronger feeling of persecution for their views are mistaking the reaction you get when you’re an unpleasant, indiscriminately hostile, unprofessional crank who thinks all work but your own is intellectually worthless and the reaction you get when you’re a conservative.
LikeLike
Wendy,
How about the male gaze, the lesbian continuum, lacunae, and ostranenie (defamiliarization)?
LikeLike
TB,
Yes, I did read the LGM post, or at least gave it a heavy skimming. Also, I read every blessed comment in that long comment thread at Megan McArdle’s back in October–there were some very insightful comments. Plus, if you look at my comments in this thread, I added an additional possible reason for social conservative underrepresentation (early marriage, earlier childbearing, more kids, more SAHMs). And for the record, I don’t read Phi Beta Cons and I haven’t read Horowitz regularly in years. I read a lot of other things and spent the last four years living with my family on campus in a dorm in DC. I’m a grad school washout, but my husband has two PhDs, and both his parents have a PhD and we live in a faculty neighborhood here in Texas. I’m not a member of the peasant mob with pitchforks charging the castle–I live in the castle, so to speak.
I continue to wonder why you single me out with such hostility.
LikeLike
Tim is just frustrated, because this conversation comes round and round in the blogosphere. The academic bloggers spend a lot of time thoughtfully rejecting the notion of conservative lynch mobs and adding some subtlety to the argument. They feel like they’ve made some good points. And then the same conversation comes up again one month later with the same exact wording. Rock. Hill.
Wrote about my frustration with the blogosphere here.
I honestly haven’t seen conservatives shut out of the classroom or denied tenure track positions because of their political beliefs. There’s been some eye rolling and smirks, but nothing else. This comes not only from my experience, but from conversations with my formerly liberal and now conservative academic daddy.
LikeLike
Check out the discussion here.
LikeLike
Going back to that post on your frustrations with blogging, Laura, I agree that the synchronous character of blogs is part of the issue. But part of the issue is also that we could have the best bibliography in the world, or a well-maintained kind of Wikipedia-format index of the state of long-running conversations, and that’s not going to do anything to help if people won’t consult or read it.
Hence, Amy, my “singling you out”. It’s one thing to enter a conversation innocent of what has come before. We all do that and should do that regularly. It’s another thing to enter it with magisterial pronouncements derived from a combination of personal experience and consulting a single confirmation-bias source that more or less treat any contradictory information as a speed bump on their way to schoolmarming the hell out of any conceivable opposing position. Is this just about you? No, by no means, but it seems to me that Laura sets a thoughtful table here, so perhaps it grates me more than if I go off to a blog that already functions like an echo chamber.
LikeLike
Laura,
But somehow the number of registered Republicans at universities has been dropping over the years, and registered Republican faculty are now outnumbered by a huge factor. Something has been happening. Unfortunately, as the number of conservative faculty has dropped, it becomes less possible to find a mentor or a model for ones future career. Much as I liked the professor who said that all differences in strength between men and women are socially constructed and anyone who said different was an essentialist, or the professor who brought in a guest speaker to talk about Mumia, those two people weren’t accessible to me as models. They did very original work and were phenomenal teachers, but I didn’t see the world through their eyes, and I couldn’t follow them without betraying myself. I came to graduate school wanting to talk about the Grand Inquisitor section of “The Brothers Karamazov” and such things, and it was a sad discovery to find that that wasn’t what upper level Russian literature study was about. (I was pretty young when doing my application, I did it from overseas, and this was all when the internet was in its infancy. I didn’t know zip–I just knew I wanted to keep studying Russian, and graduate school was the place to do it.) There was very heavy attrition amoung the junior graduate students during my stay, but looking back, the attrition was particularly heavy among women and the two conservative graduate students, despite the fact that among the incoming students, there were rather more women.
I thought it was very bad of TB to criticize me for not reading the LGM post when I respond to D by name in the very first comment in this thread. D may have a point about socially inept conservative professors feeling shunned (although being shunned can make you cranky). On the other hand, it’s not true that sensitive issues won’t come up except if you’re totally inept and blurt something out. When my husband interviewed for the first tenure track job he got, he got asked a stick of dynamite type culture wars question, but he survived it and got the job. It helped that it was a major Catholic university and that the department was philosophically very diverse and had a live and let live culture. Plus, he had a large publication and internet track record, so the department knew exactly what kind of critter he was before inviting him for an interview. Of course, the flip side of this (and I bet this isn’t a talking points meme) is that when interviewing at smaller Christian colleges (places like Calvin, Wheaton, etc.), job candidates occasionally blow the interview by mentioning that they are living with a girlfriend.
LikeLike
I have very little sympathy for concerns about being persecuted in academia for being conservative because my experiences have been the opposite. I have a lot of, shall we say, issues with my graduate experience, which I often refer to as “the therapy years.” It’s one reason why I will continue to refer to my grad program by pseudonym (GZitCW). You can accuse the people who ran the program of being racist, sexist, Marxist, post-structuralist, self-centered, or just plain CRAZY, but there is one thing you can never accuse that place of:
being intellectually stagnant. My gd, the place was NOT intellectually stifling.
Above, Amy, you said you practiced a kind of autoventriloquism when you were in grad school. Well, that’s your fault. As Tim said, all it takes is a little strength of character, and not to be back-patting, one of the things I think I can be proud of in my grad school career (it sure wasn’t my grades or publications 😉 was that I stayed true to my passion, which was for African American literature. During my graduate coursework, we had NO courses in African American lit. NONE. But I made every course *be* about African American lit for me. Taking a modernism course? I wrote about the Harlem Renaissance. Taking a theory course? I wrote about the Gates-Joyce-Baker imbroglio. I never took a Shakespeare course, but you can bet I would have written about Othello or The Tempest!
What I was doing was, I think, the essence of a grad school education: I was meeting these people who had these newfangled ideas and I was engaging these ideas. It was often discouraging, sometimes humiliating, but it was also exhiliarating at times.
What I did in grad school in many ways has no bearing on what I do now. I have a passion for teaching writing skills to non-English majors. I satisfy my passion for African American literature by teaching it whenever I can in the gen ed curriculum. I knock ’em dead with my analysis of “Sweat”! 🙂
But it does help me now because I always remember what it was like to face new ideas and how difficult it can be when you feel like everyone else is getting it and you’re not. I have a lot of students who look at me with that look while I’m teaching, and I think my awareness of it makes me a better teacher.
Oh and “How about the male gaze, the lesbian continuum, lacunae, and ostranenie (defamiliarization)?”
No^4. But I did read an article about a Supernatural fanvid and the female gaze. Think it was in New Yorker. 😉
LikeLike
Based on Laura’s link above, it looks like the disparity between conservatives and liberals in higher education is pretty hotly contested. I remember seeing a breakdown for Georgetown University, showing campaign contributions to Democrats being about seven or eight times larger than those to Republicans. Unfortunately, I’ve had an awful time turning up that chart. I did find the following:
http://www.campaignmoney.com/professor.asp?pg=66
I don’t know how reputable they are, but they show college professors giving at least eight times as much to Democratic as to Republican campaigns from 1999 to the present. That might be off, but the number is basically what I would expect.
LikeLike
Academics have biases, but I think that the liberal/conservative thing is less serious than other biases.
Academics have biases about where your publications come from. Presented with a liberal candidate who blogs and favors specialty journals and a conservative candidate who does regression analysis and publishes in APSR, they will choose the conservative candidate every time.
I think that academic search committees discriminate against pregnant women or women with children. The entire graduate school experience works against most women and family oriented men. The system has problems.
However, d at LGM makes excellent points about the guy who wrote the editorial in the WaPo.(I let this argument go beyond the particular issue at hand. My bad.)
It is somewhat distressing that the argument about outright discrimination against conservatives still floats around. I’ve got to read Berube’s book, so I can whip out some handy statistics every time I come across this discussion.
LikeLike
Wendy,
You’re right, I suppose, but I was 22 years old, and going in I really had no grasp of the difference between undergraduate and graduate work. Years later, I finally realized that the sort of literary work that I would have been interested in gets done in philosophy departments. But, as I said, I’ve since lost my taste for fiction.
LikeLike
Amy: I singled you out for repeating “memes” because you were repeating anecdote without critically examining it yourself. I wouldn’t try to make a strong point about whether this is more frequent among “conservatives” or “liberals.”
But, it is the very antithesis of what academics is supposed to be about. We are supposed to force ourselves, continually, to critically examine evidence and reconsider the data on which our views are based. a
Where the conversation here got meme-like to me is when you repeated an anecdote about the potential of publishing a particular piece of work without checking (it’s easy to check -google scholar, pubmed will get you there) whether your assumption could be falsified in some way. (i.e data on culture and injury couldn’t be published.). That’s what an academic( Lisa SG & I were (probably almost simultaneously) does.
I am very much a liberal, but what we’re defending here is a modus operandi of critical thinking. That’s what academia is supposed to be about. Do we fail? Yes, of course. We’re human. But we aim for that goal. In the context of that aim, any well-argued well-thought idea is possible to discuss. I do feel that conservatives are free to join the community of critical thinkers. And, as Tim says, most of us would welcome a critical thinker, whatever their political ilk. I’ve often found it frustrating that conservatives I meet refuse to participate in critical discussion.
Your own description of your graduate school experience illustrates a common problem that students face — a misunderstanding about what the research v teaching focus of a field is. In its most extreme, one gets physics students who really enjoyed learning about classical mechanics, only to realize that the study of physics is about complex math or really liked examining the behavior of songbirds only to realize that the study of songbirds is about the molecular biology of estrogen’s impact of song production.
LikeLike
bj,
My relative hesitated to publish the material. That’s not to say that someone else wouldn’t do it.
LikeLike
You may have mentioned D, Amy, but you showed no signs of actually grasping what was said in that thread.
The experiences and issues you describe are broadly distributed in academia. Restricting them to an axis of political convictions or party registration is simply factually incorrect. As Laura says, academics are tempermentally if not politically conservative, and their institutional practices allow them all sorts of means for subtly squashing dissent, maintaining knowledge monopolies, and enforcing orthodoxy. This can be an issue given that it is at tension with a mission to think freely, explore intellectual boundaries, and produce new knowledge and new interpretations. It’s worth talking about how to rethink what we do to open up some closed spaces.
But making these issues into a matter of liberals v. conservatives is another kind of narrowness, a form of self-absorption at best and a malicious partisanship at worst. Your husband’s experiences are, I suspect, broadly shared, Amy. But not simply by “conservatives”. I had one job interview where a very militant Afrocentrist subjected me to a witheringly partisan interrogation. One of the most senior figures in my field of specialization took time out to drop an acidic footnote about the topic of my dissertation in his memoir. I’ve had people roll their eyes because they didn’t like my methodology or my manner or my subject matter. It’s part of a lot of people’s graduate and junior-faculty experience.
Once you recognize that this is a shared experience, the notion that this constitutes some specific bias against conservatives goes away. It also, of course, makes the question of how to effect change to academic culture all the more difficult, which might be another reason that self-declared conservatives avoid that broader context. It’s so much easier to play the martyr and construct a culture of permanent complaint.
LikeLike