MEGAN MCARDLE: The Real Victims Of Political Bias On Campus:
Every time I write about bias against conservatives in academia, I can count on a few professors writing me to politely suggest that I have no idea what I’m talking about. Sometimes they aren’t so polite, either. How would I know what goes on in their hiring meetings, their faculty gatherings, their tenure reviews? They’re right there, and they can attest firsthand that there ain’t no bias, no sir!
But none of them can explain why, if that bias doesn’t exist, so many of their conservative and libertarian colleagues feel compelled to hide in the closet. Deep in the closet, behind that plastic zip bag of old winter coats in mothballs, and sealed, with many layers of packing tape, in a box marked “Betamax Tapes: Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon 1981-1987.”
“The modern academy pays lip service to diversity,” notes my colleague Virginia Postrel in a column about “Passing on the Right,” a new book about the conservatives in academia. “Yet as a ‘stigmatized minority,’ the authors note, right-of-center professors feel pressure to hide their identities, in many cases consciously emulating gays in similarly hostile environments.” If conservatives aren’t being discriminated against, then why are so many of them, sitting in those same meetings and tenure reviews, afraid to show their ideological colors? . . .
As it happens, I think there are some justice problems with discriminating against people for their political beliefs, particularly in places that are nominally dedicated to free inquiry. But let’s leave aside those questions, and think about what the politicization of the academy does to the quality of its work.
Consider, for example, a study showing that conservative and libertarian law professors tend to publish more and be cited more than their liberal counterparts. This suggests that schools are effectively engaging in a sort of affirmative action for liberal professors, lowering the intellectual firepower of the teaching staff as a whole. Or consider the way bias can affect the methods researchers use and the questions they ask, potentially leading to invalid results.
But perhaps even more disturbing is the way that this bias alters, and narrows, what gets studied. “Conservatives can safely study ancient history but not modern American history, economics but not sociology,” writes my colleague. “Literature, largely a politics-free zone until the 1980s, has become hostile territory.” This resonates with me, and not just for ideological reasons.
The politicization of the humanities was well under way when I was an English major in the early 1990s, and my education suffered as a result. This wasn’t because I was so oppressed as a conservative, but because in roughly half my classes, there was no easier route to an A than to argue that some long-dead author was a sexist pig, racist cretin or homophobic jerk. Being, like so many college students, not overfond of unnecessary labor, I’m afraid I all too frequently slithered along the easy path to the 4.0.
And students who do this get shortchanged, but their tuition check still clear, so the academy doesn’t particularly care.