This week's Chronicle of Higher Education contained
an attack on the Students for Academic Freedom movement (full disclosure:
Brooklyn College has an SAF chapter, of which I'm a strong supporter) that I
had to read twice. Initially, I thought the piece was either (a) a parody of
how an out-of-touch 1960s radical might write; or (b) an article authored by
David Horowitz under a pen name to present a laughably weak argument. But the
author, Donald Lazere, is, in fact, a retired professor (he's author of a book
called American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives), and the
organization that he represents, Teachers for a Democratic Culture, does, in
fact, exist -- committed, according to its website, to "preserving education
as a force for social change and a site for cultural pluralism."
Lazere
describes Students for Academic Freedom as at the vanguard of a "conservative
assault" that "once again sabotages the very academic values that
conservatives claim to champion." Indeed, he detects in the SAF a "cynical
intent to unleash the most ignorant forces of the right in hounding liberal
academics to death."
That many humanities and social science
departments exhibit a one-sided bias, Lazere suggests, is either (a)
irrelevant; (b) not really true; (c) true, but necessary; or (d) a
misperception on the part of intellectually vacuous students.
Lazere
spends a good deal of time complaining about the effects of corporate culture
and commercialism: "As Thoreau said in 'Life Without Principle,'" he notes,
"There is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay,
to life itself, than this incessant business." Beyond the effects of corporate
culture, "Intercollegiate sports and fraternity-sorority life, which serve as
training grounds for chamber-of-commerce boosterism, are more central to
college life for many students than courses in the humanities, whatever their
professors' politics might be." Apparently, then, we shouldn't worry about
ideological bias among the professoriate, because it doesn't really
matter.
Or, perhaps, it would matter -- if this bias actually existed.
Lazere charges that those who contend that a one-sided bias exists among the
professoriate focus on "elite liberal-arts colleges and some urban public
universities, where liberal influences are strongest." Some surveys (such as
the one showing that
Duke's History
Department includes 32 Democrats and 0 Republicans) are
focused on top-rank universities, but I'm not aware of polls that suggest that
the ideological breakdown at non-elite schools differs in any noticeable
degree. Indeed, as I discovered in my own
tenure fight at
Brooklyn College, non-elite schools open up the possibility of coalitions
between non-ideological advocates of the "culture of mediocrity" -- the sort
of figures who could never get a job at elite institutions -- and the hard
left. Such alliances can give the hard left influence disproportionate to its
numbers.
Or, perhaps, the bias does exist -- but, argues Lazere, it is
a necessary counter to what he terms "the branches of universities devoted to
serving corporations, the lucrative professions, and the military," which
"indoctrinate students in pro-management, anti-labor, anti-government (but
pro-military) ideology." Such fields include "business and the equally
business-friendly studies in engineering, computer science, agriculture,
industrial technology, medicine, advertising, public relations." The "very
justification" for general education requirements in the humanities and social
sciences, Lazere reasons, "is to provide liberal viewpoints that students are
unlikely to get in courses for their majors." This is a breathtaking claim.
Apparently it's okay, in Lazere's vision of the academy, for the vast majority
of students who do not major in disciplines devoted "to serving corporations,
the lucrative professions, and the military" to receive wholly one-sided
"liberal" instruction.
Then, however, comes Lazere's major claim: that,
in the end, students who complain about classroom bias are, to put it bluntly,
dumb. "Perhaps," he notes, "the major source of cognitive dissonance is not
liberal ideas versus conservative ones but complex ideas versus simplistic
ones." For most students, Lazere contends, "their conservatism is in direct
proportion to their self-admitted, near-total ignorance of politics, history,
geography, economics, and academic modes of reasoning." Once they have been
"educated," no doubt, they will abandon their conservative beliefs and embrace
the need for revolution.
This contempt for the academic abilities of
the students that they teach is common among critics of the academic freedom
movement. It appears consistently, for example, in the publications of the
most powerful organization devoted to curricular indoctrination, the
Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Lazere concludes his
essay with the tale of a student named Richard, for whom Rush Limbaugh served
as the sole source for the history of the American Revolution. When Lazere
asked the student to consider other interpretations, Richard responded that
"his last English professor taught that there is no objective truth and that
texts have whatever meaning readers want to find in them. So he's entitled to
believe Rush and his parents if he wants, and I'm not entitled to force any
contrary evidence on him."
Essays like this one provide some of the
most powerful commentary on why groups like Students for Academic Freedom are
needed -- and why they should keep up the good work.
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