Politics In Academia

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
21

Very interesting article – just one anecdote about one area, and not directly related, but still I think it’s illustrative:

http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire200411220823.asp

November 22, 2004, 8:23 a.m.
The Swelling Wave
A great wave of knowledge is soon to crash our shores.

An e-friend breezed by the other day ? a person, I mean, whom I had previously known only through his website and some e-mail exchanges on topics of common interest. He didn’t stay long. I was at home with my son. My wife and daughter were out (shopping, ballet practice). My son was in his room playing a computer game. The guest impressed Danny tremendously by greeting him with: “Word!” Then, leaving the boy to his game, we went downstairs and chatted over a drink. The guest showed me some interesting websites. My wife came home and was introduced. I took my guest out to dinner (or rather, he me ? he paid, I mean). We came home and chatted some more, looked at some more websites. The guest left. I sat thinking for a while ? thinking quite hard, as my thinking goes.

This guest was a young man, mid-20s I would guess, very energetic and fast-talking, very smart. He is a researcher at a famous university, in a field that is new: computational genomics. I’ll talk about that in a minute. I can’t give you his name, because he doesn’t want it given. He keeps his identity well hidden, in fact. Even his website offers no clues, though there are usually ways to find out the ownership of a website. He: “I can’t afford to be known. There are people out there trying to find out who I am ? people who mean me no good, people who could wreck my career. I’m not going to let that happen.”

Because I can’t give the guy’s name, I’ll refer to him by a word that I thought I had coined in an NRODT review last year, but which in fact had been used as a company name well before that: “datanaut.” (This person is not Charles Murray, who would be very flattered to be described as being in his mid-20s.)

“Datanaut” follows from my friend’s specialty, computational genomics. Genomics is the study of genomes, those tremendously long strings of quite simple chemicals (there are just four of these chemicals, known familiarly as A, G, C, and T) found in the nuclei of living cells, which encode the inherited physical properties of whatever organism ? a bacterium, a tree, a fish, a human being ? the cells belong to. We now know what the actual patterns of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts are in the genomes of several kinds of living things, including human beings. This, unfortunately, is like knowing the sequence of brush strokes in all the Chinese characters that make up the Analects of Confucius: not really very informative unless you know what the characters ? and their combinations and sequences ? actually mean.

The human genome has about three billion “base pairs” of these fundamental chemicals. (An example of a base pair would be GT. The G lives on one side of the “double helix” you have heard about, the T on the other, connected by one of the bonds that hold the helix together.) Even a humble bacterium has about four million or so base pairs. That is a lot of data. To get any sense out of it, in fact, you need to engage in a newish discipline called “data mining.” That is what my house guest, the datanaut, is involved in. He is a data miner, and the database he works with is the human genome.

Of course, it is slightly inaccurate to speak of “the” human genome. My genome is not identical to yours. If it were, we should be physically indistinguishable. The genome of human being A is slightly different from the genome of human being B. If A and B are siblings, chances are the differences are slight. If they are more distantly related, chances are the differences are larger, though not as large as if they were not related at all. Furthermore, if A and B both come from a population that has been breeding mostly among themselves for a few hundred years, while C comes from a different, remote population, it is very highly probable that you could discover this situation just by examining the three genomes. And now you know why the datanaut keeps his identity secret. He, or more precisely his website, has already been denounced as “bigoted” by one of those people who find their fulfillment in life by denouncing other people as “bigoted.”

The science here is deep, and not to be trifled with. The datanaut uses some heavy-duty math in his work: stochastic processes, Lie algebras, control matrices, ODEs and PDEs. That, at least, I could follow without effort; though it is impressive to hear such terms bandied about by a researcher whose line of inquiry belongs, insofar as it belongs to any traditional scientific category, to biology. (The old-fashioned sort of biology ? dissecting frogs, twiddling with microscopes ? was referred to by the datanaut as “benchtop” or “wet” biology. This was not said disparagingly; indeed, he spoke affectionately of his own benchtop work, and seemed proud of his practical skills in this area. Like the rest of us, though, he now spends most of his working day staring at a monitor.)

Where he lost me was with the genetics. Phenotypes and haplotypes, polymorphous and heterozygous, alleles and demes, founder effect and bottleneck, lysosomes and sphingolipids… I’m not a total idiot about this stuff. I try to keep up with science, and know the meaning of all those terms; but I know them as you know the vocabulary of a language in which you are far from fluent, because you only need to use it once in a long while. When I hear those terms in the flow of speech, I have to translate. I have to stop and think: “What does that mean? Oh, yes…,” by which time, of course, the speaker is four sentences ahead of me and I have lost the thread of his argument. If you are as incompetent in foreign languages as I am, you know the feeling.

I got the main drift, though. There is a huge swelling wave of knowledge building up ? knowledge about human variation, human inheritance, human nature. Things have gone much further than I realized. Genes controlling intelligence? “We’ve got a few nailed down, and more are showing up…”

I spent much of my working life wading through masses of data. I never did disciplined “data mining” of the kind my guest engages in, but I know how patterns and significance gradually emerge out of a vast mass of undifferentiated bits and bytes. That’s what is happening with genomics. It’s not just happening from this one end, either. As in physics, where the cosmologist who deals with clusters of galaxies and the shape of the universe needs to understand the subatomic physics of quarks and leptons, so here too the very large meets the very small. As my friend is toiling away with his nucleic acid molecules, at the other end of the scale population geneticists such as Luigi Cavalli-Sforza are mapping disease frequencies and patterns of inheritance across entire nations and continents. The work of each reinforces the other.

And all this work has to be done while keeping a sort of radio silence, because it is deeply unpopular. I know some of the scientists doing this work ? people like the datanaut. They are just like other scientists I have known, driven by a kind of hypertrophied curiosity, by an innocent urge to understand the inner secrets of the world. In other respects, they are just representative human beings, with the normal range of human weaknesses and failings. To the guardians of our public morality, though ? the media and political elites, the legal and humanities academics ? they are very devils, peering into what should be kept hidden, seeking out things better left alone, working to secret agendas, funded by groups of sinister anti-social plotters ? “bigots!”

And the paradox is, that so much good will come out of all this research ? is already coming out, in fact. As a result of work like the datanaut’s, lives are already being saved ? the lives, for example, of some of the tens of thousands of Americans who used to die each year because of adverse reactions to drugs. More marvels are just over the horizon. A couple might soon, for example, be able to pre-determine the attributes of their child before conception by picking the spermatozoon that is to initiate that conception. (Not all of a man’s spermatazoa carry the same genetic information ? if they did, my children would both be the same sex. To pick the best spermatozoon for the job, you would currently need to take several million of the little devils apart and scrutinize their cargo. However, non-destructive and highly efficient means of doing this are theoretically possible…)

“What about a cure for Alzheimer’s?” I ask my guest. My Dad died from Alzheimer’s, and it’s a thing I worry about. I had read that some genetic research was going on.

The datanaut shook his head. “Tricky. Dangerous. Alzheimer’s correlates with IQ, you see. Also has different incidence among different races…” He laughed. “Once researchers know that, they go find something else to work on. The state our science is in right now, there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit. No need to go committing professional suicide.”

So it goes. This wave of knowledge, this great wave, is building up in laboratories and research institutes all around the world. Sooner or later the wave will come roaring in to crash on our beach. When that happens, a lot of stuff will get swept away ? a lot of social dogma, a lot of wishful thinking, a lot of ignorant punditry and self-righteous posturing, and probably some law and tradition and religion and social cohesion as well. There is, however, no stopping the wave. Or rather, we might stop it here in the USA, but then it would just go crashing ashore somewhere else ? in China, or Japan, or India ? somewhere with a different set of attitudes, a quite different kind of wishful thinking.

Dragged forward by cold science, which doesn’t care what we think or wish for, we are headed into some interesting times.

22

Another interesting article – once again, not specifically on point, but illustrative of how one worldview can overtake a group – not all of academia in this case, but still illustrative, especially the stuff at the end:

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/254925p-218295c.html

Hate 101

Climate of hate rocks Columbia University

By DOUGLAS FEIDEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are “warmongers” and “Gestapo apparatchiks.”

The Jewish homeland is “nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States.”

It’s a capital of “thuggery” - a “ghastly state of racism and apartheid” - and it “must be dismantled.”

A voice from America’s crackpot fringe? Actually, Dabashi is a tenured professor and department chairman at Columbia University. And his views have resonated and been echoed in other areas of the university.

Columbia is at risk of becoming a poison Ivy, some critics claim, and tensions are high.

In classrooms, teach-ins, interviews and published works, dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.

In three weeks of interviews, numerous students told the Daily News they face harassment, threats and ridicule merely for defending the right of Israel to survive.

And the university itself is holding investigations into the alleged intimidation.

Dabashi has achieved academic stardom: professor of Iranian studies; chairman of the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department; past head of a panel that administers Columbia’s core curriculum.

The 53-year-old, Iranian-born scholar has said CNN should be held accountable for “war crimes” for one-sided coverage of Sept. 11, 2001. He doubts the existence of Al Qaeda and questions the role of Osama Bin Laden in the attacks.

Dabashi did not return calls.

In September in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, he wrote, “What they call Israel is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their soul.”

After the showing of a student-made documentary about faculty bias and bullying that targets Jewish students, six or seven swastikas were found carved in a Butler Library bathroom last month.

Then after a screening of the film, “Columbia Unbecoming,” produced by the David Project, a pro-Israel group in Boston, one student denounced another as a “Zionist fascist scum,” witnesses said.

On Oct. 27, Columbia announced it would probe alleged intimidation and improve procedures for students to file grievances.

“Is the climate hostile to free expression?” asked Alan Brinkley, the university provost. “I don’t believe it is, but we’re investigating to find out.”

But one student on College Walk described the campus as a “republic of fear.” Another branded the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department the “department of dishonesty.”

A third described how she was once “humiliated in front of an entire class.”

Deena Shanker, a Mideast and Asian studies major, remains an admirer of the department. But she says she will never forget the day she asked Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics, if Israel gives warnings before bombing certain buildings so residents could flee.

“Instead of answering my question, Massad exploded,” she said. “He told me if I was going to ‘deny the atrocities’ committed against the Palestinians, I could get out of his class.”

“Professorial power is being abused,” said Ariel Beery, a senior who is student president in the School of General Studies, but stresses he’s speaking only for himself.

“Students are being bullied because of their identities, ideologies, religions and national origins,” Beery said.

Added Noah Liben, another senior, “Debate is being stifled. Students are being silenced in their own classrooms.”

Said Brinkley: If a professor taught the “Earth was flat or there was no Holocaust,” Columbia might intervene in the classroom. “But we don’t tell faculty they can’t express strong, or even offensive opinions.”

Yet even some faculty members say they fear social ostracism and career consequences if they’re viewed as too pro-Israel, and that many have been cowed or shamed into silence.

One apparently unafraid is Dan Miron, a professor of Hebrew literature and holder of a prestigious endowed chair.

He said scores of Jewish students - about one a week - have trooped into his office to complain about bias in the classroom.

“Students tell me they’ve been browbeaten, humiliated and treated disrespectfully for daring to challenge the idea that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish nation,” he said.

“They say they’ve been told Israeli soldiers routinely rape Palestinian women and commit other atrocities, and that Zionism is racism and the root of all evil.”

One yardstick of the anti-Israel sentiment among professors, critics say, is the 106 faculty signatures on a petition last year that called for Columbia to sell its holdings in all firms that conduct business with Israel’s military.

Noting that the divestment campaign compared Israel to South Africa during the apartheid era, Columbia President Lee Bollinger termed it “grotesque and offensive.”

That didn’t stop 12 Mideast and Asian studies professors - almost half the department - and 21 anthropology teachers from signing on, a review of the petition shows.

To identify the Columbia faculty with the most strongly anti-Israel views, The News spoke to numerous teachers and students, including some who took their courses; reviewed interviews and published works, and examined Web sites that report their public speeches and statements, including the online archives of the Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper.

Their views could be dismissed as academic fodder if they weren’t so incendiary.

Columbia’s firebrands

In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are “warmongers” and “Gestapo apparatchiks.”

The Jewish homeland is “nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States.”

Nicholas De Genova, who teaches anthropology and Latino studies. The Chronicle of Higher Education calls him “the most hated professor in America.”

At an anti-war teach-in last year, he said he wished for a “million Mogadishus,” referring to the slaughter of U.S. troops in Somalia in 1993.

“U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy,” he added.

De Genova has also said, “The heritage of the victims of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. … Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust.”

De Genova didn’t return calls.

Bruce Robbins, a professor of English and comparative literature.

In a speech backing divestment, he said, “The Israeli government has no right to the sufferings of the Holocaust.”

Elaborating, Robbins told The News he believes Israel has a right to exist, but he thinks the country has “betrayed the memory of the Holocaust.”

Joseph Massad, who is a tenure-track professor of Arab politics. Students and faculty interviewed by The News consistently claimed that the Jordanian-born Palestinian is the most controversial, and vitriolic, professor on campus.

“How many Palestinians have you killed?” he allegedly asked one student, Tomy Schoenfeld, an Israeli military veteran, and then refused to answer his questions.

To Massad, CNN star Wolf Blitzer is “Ze’ev Blitzer,” which is the byline Blitzer used in the 1980s, when he wrote for Hebrew papers but hasn’t used since.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon can be likened to Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, he once declared.

“The Jews are not a nation,” he said in one speech. “The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist.”

Massad didn’t return several calls. On his Web site, he says he’s a victim of a “witch hunt” by “pro-Israel groups” and their “propaganda machine.”

George Saliba, a professor of Arabic and Islamic science. His classroom rants against the West are legendary, students have claimed.

One student says his “Islam & Western Science” class could be called “Why the West is Evil.” Another writes that his “Intro to Islamic Civilization” often serves as a forum to “rail against evil America.”

A recent graduate, Lindsay Shrier, said Saliba told her, “You have no claim to the land of Israel … no voice in this debate. You have green eyes, you’re not a true Semite. I have brown eyes, I’m a true Semite.”

Saliba did not return calls.

Rashid Khalidi, who is the Edward Said professor of Arab studies. He’s the academic heir to the late Said, a professor who famously threw a stone from Lebanon at an Israeli guard booth.

Columbia initially refused to say how the chair was funded. But The United Arab Emirates, which denies the Holocaust on state TV channels, is reported to have provided $200,000.

When Palestinians in a Ramallah police station lynched two Israeli reservists in 2000 - throwing one body out a window and proudly displaying bloodstained hands - the professor attacked the media, not the killers.

He complained about “inflammatory headlines” in a Chicago Sun-Times story and called the paper’s then-owner, Conrad Black, who also owned the Jerusalem Post, “the most extreme Zionist in public life.”

Reached at Columbia, Khalidi declined to comment on specifics.

“As somebody who has a body of work, written six books and won many awards, the only fair thing to do is look at the entire body of work, not take quotes out of context,” he said.

Lila Abu-Lughod, a professor of anthropology, romanticizes Birzeit University in the West Bank as a “liberal arts college dedicated to teaching and research in the same spirit as U.S. colleges.”

But it is well-established that Birzeit also is the campus where Hamas openly recruits suicide bombers, stone-throwers and gunmen.

As in her published works, Abu-Lughod gave a carefully nuanced response when reached Friday by The News:

“The CIA has historically recruited at Columbia, but that’s not the mission of Columbia. The mission of Birzeit is to educate students, and they’re working under very difficult circumstances to do that.”

Originally published on November 21, 2004

23

[quote]MSpencer wrote:
All I can say to you on your response to “bomb them” is this. One noteworthy Ullema (an Islamic theologin) said before the war in Iraq. “There was one Bin Laden before the war, their will be hundreds after” There is a reason a portion of the Muslim world hates us. Simple statements like “bomb them” only result in more of a mess, more hate on both sides, and more death. What do you think happens when a person has his house blown up and his loved ones killed? It takes a person who was a-political and makes them extremists over night. I know if another country came over here and blew up my house and killed someone I love, that i would seek revenge. I hope you would too as a man. Study International Relations and understand that there are always results. Cause and effect. Its simple political game theory. [/quote]

I was using the ‘bomb them’ quote to show that I am noy put into the neat little cubby-hole that the elitist studies want to place me.

Maybe I am more basic in my thought processes than the enlightened highly educated peoples around this country, but - I can remember a pile of 3000 innocent victims that were sent to their untimely deaths at the hands of a terrorist.

I can empathize with those who say violence begets violence, but sometimes you have to fight back, and being that we are the most powerful country in the world - we get to play a little rougher than the murderers who struck the U.S.

In the real world, I could care less about what an Ullema says - highly respected, or not. We should be engaged in this war to achieve victory, irrespective of how drastic the measures may seem to those we attack.

My rant isn’t against you - it’s against those who wear their education on their sleeve so as to remind everyone, themselves included, just how much ‘smarter’ they are than the rest of the population.

Sometimes the smart folks are wrong, too.

24

lmao, I guess we’d just better shut down all the universities now.

Look, if you are smart enough to get into a university, hopefully you are smart enough to figure out how to pass a course without believing everything you are told.

I guess it is just a matter of free speech you don’t like… ?

25

More directly on point, from John Fund at the Wall Street Journal:

High Bias
It’s time to bring some intellectual diversity to America’s colleges and universities.

Monday, November 22, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

Much of this election year was taken up by a debate over media bias, with charges and countercharges flying over how CBS, the New York Times, Fox News Channel and National Public Radio covered the campaign. Now a series of studies may shift the debate to another form of bias: the lack of intellectual diversity on university campuses, whose faculties are overwhelmingly liberal.

Some moderate voices are raising the alarm over the problem. A Nov. 9 staff-written editorial in the Columbia Spectator, the mainstream student newspaper at New York’s Columbia University, called for a greater range of views on campus. “In all other areas of campus life, students do not hesitate to call for diversity,” the editorial said in pointing out the complete absence of conservatives from history, philosophy and humanities departments. “It should be self-evident that a faculty that speaks with unanimity on some of the most divisive issues of the day is not fulfilling its duty. Students across the ideological spectrum must demand that Columbia address this need.”

The Spectator editorial comes at a time when several Jewish students are charging that they have been intimidated by anti-Israel professors. Several of the students told their stories in a new 25-minute film, “Columbia Unbecoming,” produced by the Boston-based David Project. Student Ariel Berry says that Prof. Joseph Massad told students that “the Palestinian is the new Jew, and the Jew is the new Nazi.” Columbia alumna Lindsay Shrier said Prof. George Saliba told her, “You have no claim to the land of Israel. You have no voice in this debate. You have green eyes. You’re not a Semite. I have brown eyes. I am a Semite.”

Such incidents have led both the New York Sun and Rep. Andrew Weiner, a Brooklyn Democrat, to call for dramatic reforms on Columbia’s campus. This month, Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president, asked the university’s provost to investigate the claims made in the film, partially backpedaling from a statement he had made in May supporting the findings of a university committee that found no evidence of “systematic bias” in Columbia classrooms.

Conservatives contend that assurances by liberals that the professional ethics of professors will keep them having their politics dominate the classroom and smothering alternative views just doesn’t pass muster. A forthcoming study by Stanley Rothman of Smith College looked at a random sample of more than 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183 institutions of higher learning. He found that across all faculty departments, including business and engineering, academics were over five times as likely to be liberals as conservatives.

Mr. Rothman used statistical analysis to determine what factors explained how academics ended up working at elite universities. Marital status, sexual orientation and race didn’t play a statistically significant role. Academic excellence, as measured by papers published and awards conferred, did. But the next best predictor was whether the professor was a liberal. To critics that argue his methodology is flawed, Mr. Rothman points out that he used the same research tools long used in courts by liberal faculty members to prove race and sex bias at universities. Liberals criticizing his methods may find themselves hoist by their own petard.

Furthermore, a new national study by Swedish sociologist Charlotta Stern and Santa Clara University economist Daniel Klein found that in a random national sample of 1,678 responses from university professors Democratic professors outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 in economics. 28 to 1 in sociology and 30 to 1 in anthropology. Their findings will be published in Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.

A separate study by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, run by conservative activist David Horowitz, looked at voter registration records of faculty members in six academic departments in 32 top schools. It found there were 10 Democrats for every Republican. Mr. Klein says a second study he co-authored looked at voter registration records for faculty at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. It found that among assistant and associate professors, there were 183 Democrats and only six Republicans. Since many of the Republicans were full professors close to retirement, Mr. Klein concluded that “in the coming decade the lopsidedness must become even more extreme. At Berkeley and Stanford, the Republican is an endangered species.”

Robert Brandon, a Duke University philosophy professor, is one liberal who has at least made an effort to explain why conservatives are seldom seen in academia. “We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican Party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia.”

But Mr. Klein says a better explanation of liberal dominance is the theory of “groupthink,” which holds that insular groups tend to adopt a set of uniform beliefs and then act to exclude anyone who doesn’t hold those views.

One way to combat groupthink would be if donors to universities and regents began pressuring faculties to adopt an Academic Bill of Rights that would forbid university faculties from hiring, firing, and granting or denying promotion or tenure on the basis of political beliefs. When Mr. Horowitz suggested the idea be adopted at Colorado’s public universities, he was accused of advocating “quotas” and “McCarthyism.” He calmly explained that his plan eschews quotas and only requires universities to judge professors on their merits, not ideology. After several legislative hearings, Colorado university officials voluntarily adopted a variation of his Academic Bill of Rights to ward off a more muscular one the Legislature was considering.

Colorado has also gone further and adopted a reform that could serve as a model for how to make higher education more accountable to students and the taxpayers which pay its bills. Starting next year, the state will start shifting its higher-ed dollars from direct payments to universities to vouchers that will go directly to students. The idea is hardly radical. It is taken from the GI Bill of Rights, which is widely credited with giving returning veterans a chance at college through a program that won universal acclaim.

Debating such reforms is perfectly legitimate given that about half of the budget of public university systems come from taxpayers. Private universities derive about 35% of their budgets from public money, largely research grants. In addition, much of the student loan and grant money used to pay college tuition flows from taxpayer sources.

Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University, argues that its time to scale back taxpayer subsidies to universities and move towards a voucher plan so that schools would have to compete for students as paying customers. That might also end the punishing double-digit tuition increases many schools have been imposing. Our colleges and universities would benefit not only from some intellectual diversity, but also some diversity and competition in how they pay their bills and how students and taxpayers hold them to account.

26

[quote]vroom wrote:
lmao, I guess we’d just better shut down all the universities now.

Look, if you are smart enough to get into a university, hopefully you are smart enough to figure out how to pass a course without believing everything you are told.

I guess it is just a matter of free speech you don’t like… ?[/quote]

No, though your straw-man is amusing for its absurdity, which was likely your point.

As for your free speech reference, to what are you referring? The examples I posted above were to illustrate the leftward tilt in the academy, and how group think can take over and lead to bias against other ideas.

27

I don’t think they showed group think, I think they show that one university has gone out and hired some folks radical viewpoints – perhaps so that they could reliably recreate the Arab viewpoint on Middle Eastern issues.

Who knows. I don’t think you have really shown much of anything at all yet, except some distrust of the educational system due to it’s pollution by liberal thinking people.

28

[quote]vroom wrote:
I don’t think they showed group think, I think they show that one university has gone out and hired some folks radical viewpoints – perhaps so that they could reliably recreate the Arab viewpoint on Middle Eastern issues.

Who knows. I don’t think you have really shown much of anything at all yet, except some distrust of the educational system due to it’s pollution by liberal thinking people.[/quote]

Fair enough – but the John Fund article above cites several different studies. Also, those quotes from Columbia are not out of line with the viewpoint of most Middle Eastern studies departments, at least from what I’ve read.

I think there’s enough evidence out there that there is a bias in the academy to be troubling – and I think that for anyone who thinks the universities should be bastions of free speech, debate and open research, and of true intellectual diversity, rather than simply having a bunch of people of different sexes and melanin concentrations, the idea that universities are dominated by any one viewpoint should be troubling.

29

[quote]vroom wrote:
I don’t think you have really shown much of anything at all yet, except some distrust of the educational system due to it’s pollution by liberal thinking people.[/quote]

I don’t think it is pollution. Pollution suggests that there is something there that shouldn’t be there (air pollution, water pollution). I think it would be more appropriate to call it a severe concentration.

There is nothing wrong with libs teaching. There is also nothing wrong with cons teaching. The problem arises when there is a severe concentration of one over the other - such as we have had for the last - geez, at least 20 years.

30

Boston,

I will agree that I would be troubled if I felt it were so. I think we are just hearing about cases where the statements made seem outrageous.

Denying or ignoring the viewpoing of the Arabic individuals with respect to the Middle East situation is just as silly as believing the US has never done anything deserving of criticism.

To have a balance, you need to get the extreme viewpoints expressed… which of course looks outlandish to most of us.

Sigh, this isn’t a US attack for you free thinking imbeciles out there, every country has done things deserving of criticism. Hate to be the first to break it to you.

31

If that’s the case, I don’t see why anyone should have a problem with something like was proposed above, provided, of course, there were safeguards installed to make certain it was not a quota program:

Excerpt from the John Fund article:

“One way to combat groupthink would be if donors to universities and regents began pressuring faculties to adopt an Academic Bill of Rights that would forbid university faculties from hiring, firing, and granting or denying promotion or tenure on the basis of political beliefs. When Mr. Horowitz suggested the idea be adopted at Colorado’s public universities, he was accused of advocating “quotas” and “McCarthyism.” He calmly explained that his plan eschews quotas and only requires universities to judge professors on their merits, not ideology. After several legislative hearings, Colorado university officials voluntarily adopted a variation of his Academic Bill of Rights to ward off a more muscular one the Legislature was considering.”

I think it is an especially good idea to counter what I perceive as group think among faculty hiring committees.

32

BB,

I wouldn’t argue with a merits based approach. However, that would protect the radical thinking that seemed to be at issue in one of the articles you posted.

The lack of use of “religion” as a hiring or firing criteria would cut both ways, because who best to understand the Arab viewpoint, for example, than someone who grew up as an Arabic person in the Middle East? We may hate their viewpoint… but we can’t fire them because they express it or their religion, which may almost be one and the same.

It isn’t religion per se but knowledge and expertise in the region based on first hand experience that would be a legitimate hiring criteria for the “other” side of this item in the curricula.

Of course, it would be asinine, but I wouldn’t put it past people to suggest that getting such expertise would represent a religious reason for hiring and thence those with that expertise should be excluded – after all, if the subject matter is based in religion, should it then not be taught be experts?

By all means, go for merits, as long as it isn’t used as a wedge to drive out diversity…

33

[quote]vroom wrote:
BB,

I wouldn’t argue with a merits based approach. However, that would protect the radical thinking that seemed to be at issue in one of the articles you posted.

The lack of use of “religion” as a hiring or firing criteria would cut both ways, because who best to understand the Arab viewpoint, for example, than someone who grew up as an Arabic person in the Middle East? We may hate their viewpoint… but we can’t fire them because they express it or their religion, which may almost be one and the same.

It isn’t religion per se but knowledge and expertise in the region based on first hand experience that would be a legitimate hiring criteria for the “other” side of this item in the curricula.

Of course, it would be asinine, but I wouldn’t put it past people to suggest that getting such expertise would represent a religious reason for hiring and thence those with that expertise should be excluded – after all, if the subject matter is based in religion, should it then not be taught be experts?

By all means, go for merits, as long as it isn’t used as a wedge to drive out diversity…[/quote]

vroom:

There are actually two issues. The first is the exclusion of conservative viewpoints.

The second is from the student perspective, and it involves professors abusing their authority to stifle student viewpoints.

Both are problematic, but the focus here is on the former.

I think the latter still needs to be solved, but it needs a totally different mechanism. Professors shouting down students, insulting students, kicking students out, etc., based on their viewpoints – or even their ethnicity nationality – is a problem more with individual professors that should be dealt with at an individual level.

THe professors should not be sanctioned, hired or fired based on their viewpoints – but at the same time, they should not be harassing the students. There is a standard of professionalism that must be upheld, and it doesn’t matter how emotional they get over their subject matter. If they aren’t capable of maintaining a calm, professional, educational demeanor, then they have no business being professors.

34

Boston,

Believe it or not, I would be against both the exclusion of conservative viewpoints and of course the abuse of authority by professors (of any stripe).

35

vroom:

I believe that you would. And that’s what the facts in the Columbia case seem to show. He’ll be entitled to a lot more process than would a student who was accused of saying similar things to another student - we’ll see how it turns out, but I suspect he will try to hide behind “academic freedom,” when what it seems he was doing was bullying his students.

36

George Will has some interesting thoughts on the studies mentioned above:

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/35147.htm

37

[quote]vroom wrote:
lmao, I guess we’d just better shut down all the universities now.

Look, if you are smart enough to get into a university, hopefully you are smart enough to figure out how to pass a course without believing everything you are told.

I guess it is just a matter of free speech you don’t like… ?[/quote]

I agree that you don’t have to believe every thing you are taught in class, but some things are just so insane that they can’t be born!
For instance (you knew I’d have an example, right?) several years ago I attended a community college in Spokane, Washington. The class was English 201 - advanced composition. The teacher for the class was a woman who was as wide as she was tall. I make no judgment on her obesity, but it has bearing on the story. One day we were discussing a Hemmingway short story ( I forget which as I dont’ really like his stories - just a personal taste) and the teacher began her critique with the statement (I’m paraphrasing), I think that what the author is saying is that men in our society are attracted to the supermodel type of woman because they are intimidated by a more voluptuous woman. And since all men are closeted homosexual pedophiles, they see the supermodel as being more like a boy than a real woman."
Eventhough this wasn’t a very funny joke - me being a polite young man at the time, I laughed. At which point all eyes turned towards me as if I had wetly and noisily crapped my pants right in class.
Though the instructor didn’t challenge me at that point, I received a 2.3 for the class.
So, no, I obviously didn’t believe anything that she was teaching, and I could have shut my mouth and allowed her to continue her dilusional “teaching” and gotten a better grade (in my English 101 class the previous quarter I received a 3.5) but there are just some things that have to challenged. Also, I was paying her to teach me to write more better-er not to tell me that because I am attracted to physically healthy women that I am some how a despicable sexual predator!

38

LOL! Good story, Geddy! I especially liked the part where you compared the laugh to noisily shitting yourself. I think that the class might have done you some good. Sucks about your grade, though. I’m sure you deserved better.

39

Good column by Jeff Jacoby – I especially like the stuff toward the bottom in which he expounds on the problems of a one-dimensional view:

A left-wing monopoly on campuses

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | December 2, 2004

THE LEFT-WING takeover of American universities is an old story. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with “God and Man at Yale,” which documented the socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the Ivy League institution he had just graduated from.

Today campus leftism is not merely prevalent. It is radical, aggressive, and deeply intolerant, as another newly minted graduate of another prominent university – Ben Shapiro of UCLA – shows in “Brainwashed,” a recent bestseller. “Under higher education’s facade of objectivity,” Shapiro writes, “lies a grave and overpowering bias” – a charge he backs up with example after freakish example of academics going to ideological extremes.

No surprise, then, that when researchers checked the voter registration of humanities and social science instructors at 19 universities, they discovered a whopping political imbalance. The results, published in The American Enterprise in 2002, made it clear that for all the talk of diversity in higher education, ideological diversity in the modern college faculty is mostly nonexistent.

So, for example, at Cornell, of the 172 faculty members whose party affiliation was recorded, 166 were liberal (Democrats or Greens) and six were conservative (Republicans or Libertarians). At Stanford the liberal-conservative ratio was 151-17. At San Diego State it was 80-11. At SUNY Binghamton, 35-1. At UCLA, 141-9. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, 116-5. Reflecting on these gross disparities, The American Enterprise’s editor, Karl Zinsmeister, remarked: “Today’s colleges and universities . . . do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America.”

At about the same time, a poll of Ivy League professors commissioned by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture found that more than 80 percent of those who voted in 2000 had cast their ballots for Democrat Al Gore while just 9 percent backed Republican George W. Bush. While 64 percent said they were “liberal” or “somewhat liberal,” only 6 percent described themselves as "somewhat conservative’ – and none at all as “conservative.”

And the evidence continues to mount.

The New York Times reports that a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics shows Democratic professors outnumbering Republicans by at least 7 to 1 in the humanities and social sciences. At Berkeley and Stanford, according to a separate study that included professors of engineering and the hard sciences, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is even more lopsided: 9 to 1.

Such one-party domination of any major institution is problematic in a nation where Republicans and Democrats can be found in roughly equal numbers. In academia it is scandalous. It strangles dissent, suppresses debate, and causes minorities to be discriminated against. It is certainly antithetical to good scholarship. “Any political position that dominates an institution without dissent,” writes Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory and director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts, “deteriorates into smugness, complacency, and blindness. … Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition.”

Worse yet, it leads faculty members to abuse their authority. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has just released the results of the first survey to measure student perceptions of faculty partisanship. The ACTA findings are striking. Of 658 students polled at the top 50 US colleges, 49 percent said professors “frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course,” 48 percent said some “presentations on political issues seem totally one-sided,” and 46 percent said that “professors use the classroom to present their personal political views.”

Academic freedom is not only meant to protect professors; it is also supposed to ensure students’ right to learn without being molested. When instructors use their classrooms to indoctrinate and propagandize, they cheat those students and betray the academic mission they are entrusted with. That should be intolerable to honest men and women of every stripe – liberals and conservatives alike.

“If this were a survey of students reporting widespread sexual harassment,” says ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, “there would be an uproar.” That is because universities take sexual harassment seriously. Intellectual harassment, on the other hand – like the one-party conformity it flows from – they ignore. Until that changes, the scandal of the campuses will only grow worse.

Jeff Jacoby’s e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

40

One more, from the Economist, which is weighing in from across the Pond – I wonder if British schools are more balanced? Does anyone have experience in both American and British universities?

America’s one-party state
Dec 2nd 2004
From The Economist print edition

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.