Robert Campbell's post raises all kinds of good questions for discussion. Being somewhat sympathetic to the argument Gus DiZerega made in the comments, I'd like to add a thought or two.
My sympathy for Gus's argument is really about how I see myself: I've always thought of myself as "on the left" but believing that economic freedom was a better means to many of the left's ends than was interventionism or socialism. Perhaps this is the result of being in academia and finding that I'd largely rather hang out with my leftist colleagues than free-market conservatives of the policy world sort. I find too many conservatives less tolerant of difference than I might like them to be; too quick to demonize the left in the very same ways they object to being demonized by the left; and generally too dismissive of the world of academia, both as it is currently structured and inhabited, and as a vocation/avocation. Hayek's classic essay "Why I'm Not a Conservative" captures a few more of my complaints.
In the way that leftists describe libertarians as "conservatives without the sex and drugs hangups," I'd prefer to describe myself as a "leftist without the capitalism hang ups."
Of course none of this, I think, changes the substance of my libertarianism. Robert is quite right in describing the substantive issues, and I do agree that there are things equal to or greater than defeating George W. Bush on the libertarian priority list. (Although I will note that if I was coerced to vote and had to vote for one of the two major parties, as of right now I'd vote for Kerry. Bush is the worst of both worlds - fiscal profligacy and bad on civil liberties/rights, not to mention that whole war thing.) Still, I bristle every time someone calls me a "right-winger" or says that libertarianism is "on the right." Yes, it tries to explode the simple binary opposition of left-right (one of the few binary oppositions that sophisticated French-influenced leftist cultural theorists are not passionate about deconstructing), but if I have to choose, I'm on the left.
A few weeks ago I said that the Democratic presidential candidates would be forced to do some fancy dancing with respect to the same-sex marriage issue so as to navigate between the more radical wing of the party and its appeal to moderates. They have to support gay rights but not gay marriage, however one does that. One reading of Bush's proposed constitutional amendment is that it was a brilliant political tactic to squeeze the Democrats into a corner. If one assumes the amendment allows for state-by-state civil unions (and it's not clear it does), then those who say they oppose gay marriage but favor civil unions, and who also voted against the Defense of Marriage Act because they believed it was unconstitutional now have to explain why they oppose the FMA as a way to fix the constitution such that one state can't "impose" same-sex marriage on the rest. The Bushies are just smart enough to have thought this through. And if you want to see the results, and a very fancy dance indeed, here's John Kerry on the hotseat during the most recent presidential debate thanks to Ron Brownstein of the LA Times:
BROWNSTEIN: Let me ask you, Senator. I want to sort of burrow in a little bit and understand your views of exactly what the role of Washington is, Senator Kerry.
You say you oppose gay marriage. You also oppose the constitutional amendment to ban -- federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Do you think Georgia and Ohio, or any other state, should have to recognize a gay marriage performed in California or Massachusetts? And if not, why did you vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, designed to prevent that, in 1996?
KERRY: I said very clearly -- I could not have been more clear on the floor of the United States Senate. My speech starts out expressing my personal opinion, that I do not believe -- you know, I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.
But notwithstanding that belief, there was no issue in front of the country when that was put before the United States Senate.
And I went to the floor of the Senate and said -- even though I was up for reelection, "I will not take part in gay bashing on the floor of the United States Senate. I will not allow the Senate to be used...
(APPLAUSE)
... for that kind of rhetoric."
BROWNSTEIN: But you also said in that statement...
KERRY: But let me just finish.
BROWNSTEIN: You also said in that statement that you believe the Defense of Marriage Act was fundamentally unconstitutional. And if the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, isn't President Bush right, that the only way to guarantee that no state has to recognize a gay marriage performed in any other state is a federal constitutional amendment?
KERRY: In fact, I think the interpretation -- I think, under the full faith and credit laws, that I was incorrect in that statement. I think, in fact, that no state has to recognize something that is against their public policy.
And for 200 years, we have left marriage up to the states. There is no showing whatsoever today that any state in the country, including my own -- which is now dealing with its own constitutional amendment -- is incapable of dealing with what they would like to do.
And I believe George Bush is doing this -- he's even reversed his own position. He's reversed Dick Cheney's position. He is doing this because he's in trouble. He's trying to reach out to his base. He's playing politics with the Constitution of the United States.
(APPLAUSE)
BROWNSTEIN: But let me just nail down one thing very quickly.
So are you saying that, now that gay marriage is on the table in a place like California or Massachusetts, that you would support the Defense of Marriage Act?
KERRY: No, because...
BROWNSTEIN: That it's not...
KERRY: ... the Defense of Marriage Act is the law of the land today.
KING: And you would support it today?
BROWNSTEIN: And you would leave it...
KERRY: ... no votes to take it back. And I think it's more important right now to pass the employment nondiscrimination act, hate crimes legislation, and begin to move us forward so we have on the books those laws that will allow us to protect people in this country.
(APPLAUSE)
If he loses the presidency, he can give dancing lessons.
And let it not be said I don't give props where props are due. Shortly afterward, here's Al Sharpton on the same issue:
KING: Al?
SHARPTON: I think is not an issue any more of just marriage. This is an issue of human rights. And I think it is dangerous to give states the right to deal with human rights questions.
SHARPTON: That's how we ended up with slavery and segregation going forward a long time.
(APPLAUSE)
I, under no circumstances, believe we ought to give states rights to gay and lesbians' human rights. Whatever my personal feelings may be about gay and lesbian marriages, unless you are prepared to say gays and lesbians are not human beings, they should have the same constitutional right of any other human being. And I think that that should be...
(APPLAUSE)
BROWNSTEIN: How would you effectuate that? How would you do that?SHARPTON: I would say that they have the constitutional right to do whatever any...
(CROSSTALK)
KING: So you would have another amendment?
(CROSSTALK)
BROWNSTEIN: You would have a constitutional amendment?
SHARPTON: No, I wouldn't -- first of all, I think we've got to deal with a lot of constitutional amendments. If Bush wants to deal with it, let's get to ERA. Let's deal with a lot.
Of course he manages to avoid giving a concrete answer that demonstrated some knowledge of how Washington works (anyone see his answer to the question about the Fed a few debates ago?). Still, he's right on target with this one from my view.
More dancing to come, that's for sure.
Just a quick thought to add to William's post about senatorial stock portfolios: Yes, some of that might be explained by senators trading on superior information, but consider a different argument. It could also be that if Senator X buys a particular stock, and if her purchase of said stock becomes known, investors assume that the industry in question, if not the particular firm, might be the benefit of favorable legislation, thus leading to a speculative politically-based run up. So what we see is not superior information causing a run-up in price, but senatorial purchases being signals about the possibility of legislatively-generated profits.
I think both explanations are in play, and that neither one is very comforting. The United States: Crony capitalism here, and abroad.
Just to follow up on Chris's spot-on observations, I find it amusing that conservatives, who are supposedly the defenders of a constitutional republic, now are the biggest supporters of direct democracy. Here they are complaining that the Constitution puts limits on what "the people" can do at the ballot box. Voters decide that marriage means a man and a woman. Suppose the Supreme Court says otherwise, implying that there are some rights that the ballot box can't override. What's the problem? Isn't this the whole point of having a constitution, so that legislatures do not have total power? And let us examine the shoe on the other foot: where's the applause when "the people" decide that the right to bear arms should not be rammed down people's throats by activist judges, or that Fifth Amendment protections for property rights shouldn't be forced on people by the courts? I hardly think conservatives would rejoice in hearing "the people's voice" the next time the democratic process produces laws at odds with those constitutional rights.
Yes, one can have a legitimate debate over whether the Constitution's equal protection and due process clauses make the case for same-sex marriage (I think they do), but to cheer on legislative attempts to define fundamental rights seems a tad at odds with conservatives' self-professed love of a constitutional republic.
I'm going to break my own promise about the left-bias issue and make one more observation (and it's better than those creepy economists Radley linked to... {shiver}). I suggested that I would engage in a more detailed response to Ed Feser's two-part series on the subject at Tech Central Station. Well part two is out, and I'm going to pass. Ed, who I've met and respect as a Hayek scholar, but with whom I've tangled over cultural issues on the Hayek list, has descended into traditionalist madness in this second part. His argument is that "Leftism" has become a "counter-church" responsible for the supposed cultural decay of western society. He goes so far as to argue that Leftism amounts to little more than intellectual rationalizations for the welfare state and pornography:
That is why Leftism has gotten, with the passing decades, ever closer to sheer lunacy; and also why, as such lunacy has permeated ever more deeply into modern Western society, the ideas of conservative thinkers have come to seem to the common man increasingly romantic, unrealistic, and unattainable. If the typical contemporary Westerner does not quite resonate to the ravings of Marxists and postmodernists, neither is he much drawn to the doctrines of Thomists, Burkeans, or Hayekians. He is too far gone for that. He wants his conservatism heavily watered down, at least enough to leave room for a Federal prescription drug benefit and easy access to pornography, should the mood for it strike him. If this makes for inconsistency… well, he's happy to let the professors worry about such things.
And if what they tell him is that he ought to discard the conservatism altogether and opt instead for a worldview specifically designed to justify the benefits and the porn, he is, with the passing years, ever increasingly ready to listen.
If this is what it's come to, I'm out of sympathy for conservative critics of academia. Granted, Ed's view is an extreme one, but it serves to confirm the worst nightmares of the Left (that the critics are trying to resurrect, no pun intended, St. Thomas Aquinas himself) and in so doing, it tars the more reasonable criticisms of bias. Thanks but no thanks Ed.
Here's another unhelpful piece on why academia leans left. If I were a left-leaning academic, I would find this one rather insulting myself. Maybe it's just me, but suggesting that academics live in a world of "freedom without responsibility" and that the one responsibility we have, teaching, is one we are constantly trying to reduce at all costs, is both insulting and wrong. Once again, people are generalizing about "academic life" from a picture that holds true, at best, at Research I schools, when the vast majority of academics, including those who lean left, work in very different institutions. In those institutions there are people actually committed to teaching and serving the institution, and producing scholarship too, who also are to the left politically. Not to mention those of us who have carved out academic careers as libertarians or conservatives who have somehow risen above the fray and overcome the structural incentives of "freedom without responsibility." How can Kling explain the lean to the left of faculty at primarily teaching institutions, where said faculty often are more than willing to take on responsibility for the institution? What explains all the left-leaning deans all over the place if all people want to do is explore their pet French post-structuralist du jour? Explanations of this phenomenon are going to have to do better than this.
Anyone who wants to write about this issue should at least have spent some serious time among the natives, and should do so in a variety of their differing communities. And they probably ought to start with something a little more subtle than his two-part political quiz.
One good point: the small picture of Hayek with the "oy vey" look on his face with Hitler, Lenin, and Marx in the background is now my new wallpaper.
This whole issue of classroom bias is one that I think about a lot. Having survived The University of Michigan as an "out" libertarian, and then doing graduate work at George Mason, I've both been the outsider and the insider politically. And now being at a small liberal arts college whose faculty is probably near the mean in terms of their "leftiness", I get to see these issues from both sides: leftist colleagues and conservative/libertarian students who complain to me.
Let me start by saying that I have no doubt that there are faculty whose goal in the classroom is to get students to think like they do on a political level. I also have no doubt that there are faculty who evaluate their students work based on the same criterion. However, I do think that such faculty are not as common as the conservative press, and blogosphere, often makes it seem. Moreover, I don't think that all the complaints that conservative students have about liberal bias in faculty are always legitimate. We've recently had a re-formation of our College Republicans group on campus, and it has drawn several dozen students to meetings. For us, that's an unbelievable level of political participation for ANY cause! And the one issue that's drawing them is "classroom bias." I have a theory about why this has become such an issue recently, but I'll save that for another post (it's not that original anyway).
But when I talk to these students, what they say is that they feel "silenced" in the classroom. (You can see that they in fact HAVE learned from their professors about the power of the rhetoric of being silenced; after all, certain groups on the Left can be very loud about how they've been silenced.) When I prod them as to what this means, they say "I don't feel like I can say what I think." Okay, why not? "Well when I do, I get attacked." Now what exactly constitutes an "attack?" Are they being called names and being told they're stupid? They say no. What they report is that some students will challenge them and faculty will respond to them with more questions and requests for evidence.
Often, what it sounds like to me, is that the conservative students are being forced to articulate and defend their views in ways they haven't had to in the past. I think this is especially true with respect to war-related issues. They hear a prof, or another student, argue against the war, or argue that US policy bears some real blame for 9/11, and they feel like the US is being attacked. They love America and they try to respond. The prof, or the students, push back, suggesting some evidence to the contrary and asking for the same from them. But perhaps they can't provide it. They know what they believe, and they know it's not what the prof believes, but they struggle to articulate it. (I should add that I think this is the broader problem with the conservative students on my campus - they are notoriously non- or anti-intellectual. I cannot think of more than 2 or 3 conservative students who I would call intellectual in any real sense of the term. All the student-driven intellectual energy on campus - and it's not a lot - comes from the Left.) In their inability to articulate their views and provide evidence, they feel silenced and attacked.
The first speaker that the CRs brought to campus was this guy Dan Flynn to speak on his book Why the Left Hates America. The guy was embarrassingly awful. Just terrible. The campus lefty students showed up en masse and were polite to a fault. They asked him great questions and more or less showed him to be the uninformed anti-intellectual that he is. (Some lefty students also defaced several of the CR's posters, which led me to think we'd have a nastier situation during the talk, but they behaved themselves.) He was so bad that the CRs privately apologized to some of their friends on the left for bringing him. The question for me is why they didn't think to bring a serious conservative or libertarian intellectual. Dinesh D'Souza spoke on campus a couple of years ago and was treated very respectfully by students and colleagues. The answer, I fear, is that most conservative students (at least here) are just not intellectually engaged in the ways my colleagues and I would like them to be. That's the real problem.
As I said, I have no doubt that there is classroom bias that is real, but I also believe that conservative students too often adopt the very victim mentality that they complain about in other venues. If the CRs came to me for advice, I'd tell them to forget about bringing guest speakers and to spend their time in some reading groups that can help them learn what they need to know to at least try to level the intellectual playing field with leftist students and faculty. I know I'd much rather teach a room full of smart, well-read lefty students than one full of anti-intellectual country club conservatives. And, if my colleagues are to be believed, they'd rather have a room full of smart, well-read conservatives, than one full of apparently leftist students who are just parroting what they heard from other faculty.
More to follow....
I've been thinking about the issue Radley raises about the same-sex marriages in San Francisco as well. And I think he's put his finger (or Insta's I guess) on the puzzle for me too: is it a legitimate form of civil disobedience for an agent of the state to violate a law he or she has sworn to uphold when he or she believes that law to be immoral? My own view is that the constitutional principle at stake trumps the importance of the "rule of law" in such cases. If the Mayor of SF genuinely believes that the current law that prohibts same-sex marriages is unconstitutional, then I see nothing wrong with him attempting to violate that law, peacefully, to make a point. Radley's race analogy is very telling.
But here's another fly in the ointment: As Rod Dreher points out in The Corner, what precisely is the difference between this situation and Judge Moore's refusal to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom? Surely Judge Moore perceived himself in exactly the same situation as the mayor: caught between obeying the law as written or obeying a more abstract moral/constitutional principle. My own view of the constitution leads me to believe that the mayor is right and Moore is wrong, but that judgment rests on my reading of equal protection and separation of church and state. In some objective sense, I'm not sure there is a difference between the two cases.
On the subject of intellectual diversity on college campuses, I call your attention to this lengthy piece by Ed Feser at Tech Central Station. I don't have the time to tackle Ed's various arguments about why academia leans to the left, and I should wait until Part II comes out before I respond anyway. For now, I'll just say that I think he raises some interesting arguments, only a few of which ring true for me. The one that rings most true is this one:
Here we have in effect the ideal of the "philosopher king" and with it another possible explanation of why intellectuals tend toward the Left, viz. the prospect that increased government power might give them an opportunity to implement their ideas. As F.A. Hayek suggests in his essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism," for the average intellectual, it just stands to reason that the most intelligent people ought to be the ones running things. Of course, this assumes they are in general capable of running things better than others are, an assumption many of these purportedly always-questioning minds seem surprisingly unwilling to question. Yet there are very good reasons for questioning it, some of which are related to the failure of socialism discussed above.
As Hayek himself has famously argued, large-scale social institutions are simply too complex for any human mind, however intelligent, to grasp in the amount of detail necessary to create them from scratch or redesign them from top to bottom in the manner of the socialist economic planner or political or cultural revolutionary. The collapse of the French Revolution into bloody chaos, its immediate Napoleonic sequel, the long decay and sudden collapse of the Soviet empire, and the institutionalized lunacy that was communism in general are only the most vivid and undeniable confirmations of this basic insight.
Still, the intellectual is forever a sucker for the idea that things would be much better if only everyone would just go along with the vision of the world he and his colleagues have hashed out over coffee in the faculty lounge and in the pages of the academic journals. As Hayek put it in The Fatal Conceit, "intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence," and they will even find it scandalous to suggest that intelligence is the sort of thing that can be overvalued. But of course it can be, as long as it has limits, which even the most brilliant human being's intelligence does. To see this requires nothing more, though also nothing less, than simple humility -- something intellectuals tend to have in short supply, especially if their intellectual accomplishments are great.
I do think that many intellectuals overvalue book-smarts. This is an attitude I do see in many of my colleagues, and one of the beautiful things about Hayek's vision of the catallaxy is that it is "fueled by" the bits and pieces of often inarticulate knowledge possessed by anyone and everyone. The engine of economic growth, and the spontaneous ordering processes of society more broadly, is knowledge, but not intelligence. In an academic world where knowledge is valued if it is rational, "scientific," articulated, and defended with explicit arguments, it's easy to understand why intellectuals might distrust the spontaneous ordering processes of the market and culture that are based on knowledge that is frequently tacit and "unscientific," and believe that they can construct institutions that would improve upon their admitted imperfections. And, as Feser points out elsewhere in his essay, such intellectuals are apt to be contemptuous of the claim that traditions and institutions can embody important social knowledge that we will lose if we attempt to ignore or reconstruct them. To me, this is the supreme irony of the post-modern Left: if they really believed what they say about the "subjectivity" of knowledge and the limits to rationalism and scientism, they ought to be reading Hayek and recognizing the market as the embodiment of how knowledge is really discovered and communicated. But for some reason, they aren't.
One way this overvaluing of intelligence plays out is in the critique of Bush based on his grades at Yale. Without defending his policies, it is certainly plausible that the president is not particularly book-smart (compared to Gore and maybe Kerry), but nonetheless has the kind of knowledge that leadership requires. Certainly that description would apply to many CEOs and many shop-floor folks as well. Again, not saying this is true of Bush, but lord knows I'd prefer a politician full of common sense knowledge and trust in the same knowledge of the citizenry than one who has lots of book-learnin' but not much horse sense.
In my prior post, I promised some unoriginal theorizing about the heightened interest in the classroom bias issue. As the example I used there suggests, I think much of it is related to 9/11. What 9/11 did was to blow the lid off of the politics of many faculty, and make those politics clear to the broader public. Those of us in academia have always known what many/most faculty thought about the US and its foreign policies, but I doubt that Joe and Jane Sixpack did. The events of 9/11 changed all of that. The combination of a perceived "blame American first" on the part of faculty with an "America, love it or leave it" instinct on the part of students, made for a dangerous brew. The result is that many conservative students all of a sudden felt the perceived classroom bias more palpably and, more important, they found support for their reaction in the media, both print and electronic. The bias was in their face, and their perception of it found sympathetic ears elsewhere.
Now feeling empowered that their perception of bias is right, conservative students have gone on the offensive. I don't think this is a bad thing, in and of itself. Of course, it's even a really good thing when it translates into more than just whining and complaining and maybe even leads to real intellectual and political activity. I'm willing to predict that this issue will not go away. I think we're entering an era of a widening gulf between the mean political position of college students and that of their faculty. This gulf might have been wide 30 years ago, but with students on the left and faculty on the right! Now, the positions are reversed and I'd argue the gulf is even wider.
I think another factor in the rise of the classroom bias issue is the Internet, and the blogosphere particularly. Students can more quickly identify support for their perceptions of bias, and the outrageous examples can more easily get press coverage. Groups like FIRE are doing great work in shedding light on real problems. In addition, students who wish to take advantage of it can easily and quickly find arguments and evidence that contradict what they are hearing in class. This enables them to label things as "bias" much more frequently than has been the case in years past. Thinking back to my days at Michigan, if I wanted to prove some faculty member wrong, it would have required some serious research at the library. Today, a student can just Google up a bunch of material in 30 seconds. Part of me would like to think that left-leaning faculty are more frequently being challenged in substantive ways by well-informed conservative students. I'm not sure though. If not, there's no excuse for conservative students not trying. The information is out there for the taking.
If I had the time and energy, I'd set up a web site that served as an information clearing house for students (of any political persuasion) who wanted a perspective on an issue that differed from what they'd heard in class. The kid who wants a history of the Middle East that doesn't turn the Israelis into Nazis and the Palestinians into innocent victims could go to the site and get an info sheet and/or links to other well-respected scholars and writers. Same for the kid who wants to defend same-sex marriage at a religiously-oriented school.
One last thought: it's easier to use the classroom for "indoctrination" when your institution doesn't put much weight on teaching, and especially when it doesn't talk about teaching very much. If nothing else, a politically correct classroom is really bad pedagogy. If, and it's an if, we really do care about student learning, then staying away from the forms of bias that are the subject of so much discussion today is a very good idea. Students learn best when the classroom atmosphere is both open and full of intellectual challenges, from faculty and from peers. Another prediction (who says Austrian economists can't predict?): if American higher education paid more attention to the quality of undergraduate instruction, concerns about political correctness and classroom bias would begin to fade away fairly quickly.
Just a very loud "second" to Rod's last post about libertarians and environmentalists. Economy and ecology share more than some alphabet letters, and Rod has it just right. Many years ago, as part of a team-taught course, I had to read Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, a classic in ecology. There are a number of passages where if you substituted "market" for "ecosystem," you'd have sentences that could have been right out of Hayek. Or me, for that matter!
And a second "second" to Rod's call for more conversation and listening between libertarians and the Left.
I also wanted to add a few comments about the KC Johnson post that Dave noted earlier.
I was at this year's AAC&U meetings and saw Stanley Fish's talk. It was about as entertaining a piece of rhetoric as I've ever heard at a professional conference. I was there with a group of 5 other St. Lawrence folks, including my dean and president, and all agreed that it was a brilliant talk. Of course, as one colleague put it, "he's totally wrong of course, but it was a brilliant talk." The context was AAC&U's push for bringing "civic engagement" into liberal education. The idea being that the work that's done in the classroom has to be connected to "real world" concerns about democracy, participation, etc.. Fish eloquently argued that all we should be concerned with is truth, qua academics, and nothing else. (Disclaimer: my campus has had several AAC&U grants and has been a participant in many of their events. I'm on the organizing committee for an upcoming one this fall.)
I'm sympathetic, of course, to Fish's position, especially when a concern with "civic engagement" becomes using the classroom for political advocacy (a trend that has become very explicit pedagogy among a few colleagues here). There is a line, I think, between trying to get students to understand that classroom knowledge should matter for making the world a better place and making advocating a particular vision of what constitutes that "better place" part of one's pedagogy or part of what it means to succeed in the course in question. I don't object to the claim that the classroom is, in the broadest sense, a political place and that none of us can be truly unbiased as teachers. What I do object to is when this point becomes a rationalization for claiming a monopoly on the moral high ground (my own definition of "political correctness"), or for evaluating students based on their conclusions not their arguments.
One can have a strong point of view in the classroom but not engage in advocacy and not grade students based on their politics. If one views "civic engagement" as being about helping students to connect their learning to developing a concern about the broader world and the potential role they might have in improving it (whether through politics, education, or even business), then I'm all for it. Of course, my reading of "civic engagement" is not the same as many of those involved in the AAC&U project, hence the link to the issues of intellectual diversity and advocacy pedagogies.
For me, the issue of campus intellectual diversity isn't to be addressed by hiring more non-Leftists. As Duke political scientist Michael Munger put it:
"The solution is not to have 15 Republicans and 15 Democrats in one department. If everybody forced students to write papers based on a faculty member's particular perspective, that's still not diversity," he said. Rather, he said, the classroom, not the department, must be depoliticized.
That last sentence is the key: those of us who resist Leftist orthodoxy must continually ask our colleagues to check their premises and continually challenge their claims to a monopoly on the moral high ground. We have to turn our differences into debates over the means and not the ends. We need to find our shared values and then engage over the best ways to achieve them. No one, I think, likes poverty. We'd all like to reduce/eliminate it. How we do so, however, is another story. And to the extent we can never let our Leftist colleagues forget that we care too, perhaps we can make some headway toward diversifying colleges classroom by classroom, rather than by changing hiring practices in ways that threaten both academic freedom and our sense of justice.
It's difficult for me to make too compelling a case that libertarians are victims of political correctness on college campuses when I've not only never had a problem on my campus with such things, but I've been continually rewarded for my work both in the classroom and in my discipline. To throw out a somewhat more provocative claim: campus conservatives and libertarians are not always very good at being good colleagues and, as Rod suggested earlier, they aren't often good at actually conversing and listening to their Leftist colleagues. This doesn't mean you have to kiss up to them, but it does mean you have to know something about their interests and conversations and be willing to be a part of them. And, at places like mine, being a good teacher helps a lot!
Well, Robert has raised a number of good questions in the post below about academia. I want to focus on his ending questions:
Perhaps a Tier II liberal arts college is less likely to hire (or retain) deans with monstrous egos than a middle-level state university with top 20 ambitions. Perhaps, too, such a college is more likely to involve faculty in evaluating deans, and less likely to deep-six faculty complaints about their performance. But have the liberal arts colleges avoided adding administration over the past couple of generations? Or has administration at least grown more slowly at such institutions than it did at bigger universities?
I can say a few things about my place relevant to this question. If we're talking about administrators only within the Academic Affairs division, in the 15 years I've been here, we've actually cut one associate dean's position and not created any others. All of those positions qualify as administrators by Robert's definition: 50% or more of their time spent managing people. What we have added is a slew of "director" level positions, just below associate dean. These are faculty who have course reductions of one sort or another to run various programs (our University Writing Program, Academic Advising, etc.). We do have more of these than we used to, but they vary in just how much course release they get. Some may be just at 50%, others spend less than half their time "managing." None are full time. My own view of my campus is that one of our biggest problems is that we have too many majors/minors/programs. We're headed toward a world where every faculty member has his or her own very narrow major! We simply cannot keep up with these from an administrative point of view, and some of them serve so few students as to be just silly (which of course suggests their real purpose - serving faculty desires). Of course, these new majors/minor vary greatly in their, from my perspective, academic weightiness.
However... there is no doubt that the overall presence of administrators on campus is much greater than in the past, when one includes the Student Life division, as well as Finance and Development. We've hired tons of new people in our "University Advancement" office in the last few years. One might argue these are "revenue-producing" expenditures, as private schools like mine depend greatly on alumni and external grant support. On the Student Life side, we have a much bigger (and more professional) staff than we used to. Are they all necessary? Good question. Students want more services (Counseling, Health Center, Career Services, Student Activities, etc), and co-curricular education is the buzzword these days. Competitive pressures are tough to resist. In my associate dean's job, I work a great deal with these folks and they are, for the most part, sincere and professional, and really want to see themselves as educators. Do they bring in benefits in excess of their costs? Hard for me to answer when we just opened a $15 million new student center last month.
So if we're talking about academic administrators, I think we've grown a bit since I've been here, although not a lot and most of it is being driven by curricular initiatives. If we're talking about non-academic administrators, we've grown a ton. Is that bad? Not so clear. I can say this about my place: we are financially better off and have notably better students and faculty than we did when I arrived in 1989. We are on the cutting edge with several pedagogical and curricular innovations (including, he said modestly, the First-Year Program that I administer), and I think we take pretty good students and do very good things with them. We could do more, if we could only get more of them focused on the classroom and not alcohol. Hope that's helpful Robert.
