Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Paul Krugman and the left-wing academy
Krugman addresses the absence of Republicans in the faculties of elite universities. Remarkably, he concedes the factual point:
It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that?
More reliably, he does not believe that this is "evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion." While he agrees that some of the reason is "self-selection" (we'll get back to that), Krugman thinks that the main reason is that the Republican party does not believe in scholarship.
But there's also, crucially, a values issue. In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the "party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the "party of theocracy."
Krugman goes on to cite conservative battles over the teaching of evolution and environmental science as evidence of the anti-intellectualism of the Republican Party:
Scientific American may think that evolution is supported by mountains of evidence, but President Bush declares that "the jury is still out." Senator James Inhofe dismisses the vast body of research supporting the scientific consensus on climate change as a "gigantic hoax." And conservative pundits like George Will write approvingly about Michael Crichton's anti-environmentalist fantasies.
Think of the message this sends: today's Republican Party - increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research - doesn't respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn't be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.
Krugman, like most people who run in circles, does not see that he is running in a circle. If there is little diversity of political opinion in academia (as Krugman concedes), then there is by definition going to be a consensus among professors about subjects that are highly politicized. Opposition to the consensus proves nothing about the opponent other than that he or she is not a professor. Republicans are therefore not ipso facto anti-intellectual because they oppose a consensus forged without taking the scholarship of Republicans into account. If you define anti-intellectualism to be that which differs from academic consensus (as Krugman has done) and if you admit that the academic consensus only takes into account the scholarship of Democrats and other leftists, then you cannot prove that Republicans are excluded because of their politics or (as Krugman proposes) because of their "theological" opposition to scholarship.
In addition, Krugman's argument that the lack of diversity in faculties is a recent phenomenon owing to the rightward drift of the Republican Party does not hold water. Today's leading professors were entering graduate school in the 1970s, when there were very few fundamentalist Republicans and (according to Krugman) the GOP was the "party of ideas." Why are these older professors also almost uniformly left-wing?
The truth is, this is not a new problem. Major research universities were overwhelmingly liberal thirty years ago. My father was the only "openly" Republican professor in the University of Iowa's history department. The difference -- and this is the only difference -- is that thirty years ago the Republicans were flat on their back politically. Republicans were so unthreatening to the established order that conservative professors such as my father were thought of as quaint, rather than as demon spawn to be exorcized (or merely excised).
Finally, liberals who blame the outsiders (I'm avoiding the word "victim" advisedly) -- as Krugman has done -- for the ideological conformity in the universities are disingenuously ignoring their traditional arguments in support of the regulation of hiring practices in the private sector. Liberals have long argued -- correctly, I might add -- that affirmative action was necessary even in the absence of current discrimination because minorities are often "chilled" from even applying for jobs at companies without minority employees. If a company is known to have very few black employees it will find that it has very few black applicants, no matter how pure its heart. Why? Because the absence of blacks at the very least means that entering black employees will believe that they will have fewer opportunities to participate in the informal social networks that sustain a career over the long haul. More often, black applicants see the absence of other black employees as evidence of a deeper problem.
That Krugman does not even countenance the possibility that prospective conservative scholars may be foregoing an academic career because they will be lonely or because they see what happens to the careers of conservative professors reveals more about Krugman's willful myopia than about today's Republicans.
4 Comments:
By 
Sluggo, at
Tue Apr 05, 01:28:00 PM:
Krugman is troublin for many reasons. He is either a committed ideologue, like Anthony Lewis, who permits himself to bend the truth when he needs to wrap it around a point he wants to make, or he believes the stuff he prints. In that case there is truth to the notion that some things are so dumb only an intellectual will belive them
By slickdpdx, at
Tue Apr 05, 03:59:00 PM:
Isnt that why the military isn't wanted on these campuses? Its not eliminating what they disagree with, its just self-selection.
Anyone who has attended an institution of higher learning in the last twenty years or so knows the truth, as Krugman must too. Was Krugman never at a faculty meeting?
Ask most any law school professor who has tried to start or runs a prosecution clinic and you'll find out. Ask the faculty at a law school that doesn't have such a clinic if its been proposed and what happened.
By Dan tdaxp, at
Tue Apr 05, 09:26:00 PM:
Krugman's comments on the Republican Party's transformation are also startling. Most pundits of the left and the right agree that the Republican party is more original and more innovative than the Democrats. (This does not mean better or worse.) Attempts to build Democrat "think tanks" and Sharpton's cry that "The Democratic Party is the Conservative Party" are part of this.
Paul's just being dishonest.
-Dan tdaxp
By Charlottesvillain, at
Wed Apr 06, 01:32:00 PM:
There's an excellent Goldberg file on this topic, significant in that it adds the term "scrotal-tightening horror" to our lexicon.
