Author:
Publication: The Economist
Date: December 2, 2004
URL: http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3446265
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.
