The enemy of the productive class

From The Actual Politics of Professors by Neil Gross from a couple of years ago.

An interesting article that highlights the importance of definitions, the corrosiveness of advocacy and the paradox of academia. On the latter point, the paradox, as I see it, is that while most surveys show the bulk of the professoriate to lean left, whether by voter registration, self-identification, or dollar contributions to campaigns, and while most extreme policies seem to have their tap root in academia, on the other hand much of the most solid research seems to lean right in the sense of classical liberalism, liberty, freedom. The Niall Ferguson's, Angela Duckworth's, Thomas Sowell's of the world are all university professors. I don't know whether they identify with the right side of politics but they are certainly not of the left.

In the article Gross is clearly playing the advocacy role. He seems concerned that in a period of budget cuts, the reputation of the Academy as being left-leaning might have some undesirable repercussions and so he is clearly trying to downplay how left the Academy might be.

To answer this question, among others, I analyzed data from surveys and interviews with professors, including a nationally-representative survey of the American professoriate, conducted in 2006 with the sociologist Solon Simmons. My research shows that only about 9 percent of professors are political radicals on the far left, on the basis of their opinions about a wide range of social and political matters, and their self-descriptions (for example, whether they describe themselves as radicals). More common in the professoriate—a left-leaning occupation, to be sure—are progressives, who account for roughly a third of the faculty (and whose redistributionism is more limited in scope), and academics in the center left, who make up an additional 14 percent of professors.

From his research, we know that the majority (56%) are left of center. Gross does not provide the rest of the breakdown which is where the corruption of advocacy comes in. Omission of pivotal evidence is usually indicative that the omitted information does not support the hypothesis. Following Gross's taxonomy, I am guessing (because I have to owing to Gross's omission) that the unstated categories are: Center/Moderate, Center Right, Conservative, Radical Right. Assuming that there is no NA category, and based on other studies, I am guessing that the corresponding numbers that have been omitted are something like:

Center/Moderate - 30%
Center Right - 10%
Conservative - 5%
Radical Right - 0%

The skew becomes much clearer when you consider the omitted data. Radical Left:Radical Right - 9:0; Progressive:Conservative - 33:5; Center Left:Center Right - 14:10. That's the picture Gross is trying to obscure, hence the corruption of advocacy.

Playing the role of advocate doesn't mean that Gross is either wrong or uninformative, just that you have to be careful, you aren't dealing with an honest broker in pursuit of the truth. You are dealing with someone who is making a preferred point.

Gross offers this information, which I suspect is the source of the above mentioned paradox.

Radical academics, it turns out, are overrepresented not at elite research universities, like Harvard, but at small liberal-arts colleges. Most are concentrated in a handful of social sciences and humanities fields, like mine, sociology (in which radicals are nevertheless in the distinct minority), and in tiny interdisciplinary programs like women’s studies and African-American studies.

This rings true. A couple of months ago, there was the incident at UC Santa Barbra when Professor of feminist studies, Mireille Miller-Young was videotaped assaulting a 16 year old anti-abortion protestor and stealing her sign. Non-tier Tier 1 university/feminist studies. Then there was Laura Curry, adjunct professor of media studies and University of Buffalo, verbally assaulting protesters and creating a disturbance at an anti-abortion demonstration. Non-tier Tier 1 university/media studies.

I suspect that Gross is on to something. That radical professors in non-Tier 1 universities and in a very restricted set of fields, make a lot of news by the intensity of their anger and both help shape the impression of Academia as a hotbed of radicalism and lend the appearance that all the Academy might be overwhelmingly Hard Left.

The commenters on the article also have some interesting observations.

Thus, one reliable generalization that can be made about leftist academics is that they are the enemy of the productive class. A second would be that they will defend to the death the most privileged group, the tenured class. - Commenter mxb22

I suspect that mxb22 is on to something with his/her first observation. Professors with their tenure are much more able to focus narrowly and make the argument that for a particular issue, the best is more desirable than the good. "We can do better." To people living in the real world having to constantly make decisions with partial knowledge and make trade-offs between two (or more) nearly equally valued goals, they are always having to settle on the most optimal outcome among several competing goals and sacrifice the best outcome for any one of those goals. To denizens of the real world, the clerissy's pursuit of the very best outcome on a single goal does have the appearance of being the enemy of real world productivity.

The commenters call Gross out on not defining what he means by radical. Gross seems to accept that radical is something like a self-professed Marxist. In fact he makes it much worse by setting the bar ridiculously high by accepting the definition of a right wing politician.

In the course of seven years of research, I never encountered any radical professors who advocated “overthrowing the United States government.”

If that is your definition of radical, then clearly the Academy largely passes that bar. But that clearly is a fairly antiquated bar. Even accepting Marxism as the definition of a radical is not particularly enlightening. I doubt that Elizabeth Warren is or has ever identified as a Marxist but she is certainly a radical.

Even more importantly, and not much addressed in the article, how important are these pigeon holes? What makes someone conservative or progressive? What do we mean by that. A lot of libertarians are socially liberal and financially conservative; where does that fit. Many conservatives are exercised about inequality but ascribe its origins to different causes than might a progressive; where do they fit?

Finally, Gross does make a couple of points that I think are really quite important and which do not get enough attention.

Every system needs variance in it in order to evolve. Uniformity can only exist in a stable environment. If the context and environment change, then there has to be enough play in the system so that selective pressure can works its magic and evolve the system along with the context. Who wants to be the best flint knapper in a silicon chip context?

Gross, as an advocate, couches his point in terms of university funding.

Is it a problem for American higher education that 9 percent of faculty members are political radicals? The answer is that far-left academic radicalism is both a weakness and a strength. Were there no radical professors for conservatives to fulminate against—or had radical academics done more to keep their politics and their work separate—there might well be fewer political attacks on higher education today, and greater public support for colleges and universities. Radical professors in the post-1960s period overestimated how much tolerance there would be for them, and how far the idea of academic freedom could be stretched. Also, some academic radicals, privileging politics over scholarship, have waged unproductive battles against the scientific aspirations of their colleagues.

At the same time, academic radicals in the social sciences and humanities have given us novel and important ways of thinking about society and culture. They have alerted scholars and students to previously unrecognized dynamics of inequality around race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Forget the issue of funding. Is it important to have variance in the system? Absolutely. Is it worthwhile for their to be intelligent people pursuing dead-end speculations and fossilized ideologies. Sure, within the limits of available resources. That's how you evolve. Pursuing the obvious is only marginally rewarding. It is people on the frontier of the absurd and ridiculous who open up new vistas. Granted, only one in a hundred is likely to be a stout Cortez staring at the Pacific. The other ninety nine will be staring into a dark hole of meaninglessness and vociferously arguing for its relevance. Gross is right that "the social sciences and humanities have given us novel" ways of looking at society and culture. But for all the sturm and drang of the past three or four decades, it is not clear to me that these have indeed been materially important. Or at least not yet.

Yes, we need variance. Yes, much of that variance will be unproductive.

Gross approaches the real issue but then does not address it, mostly because of his advocacy around funding. It is not whether there should be radicals in the academic system pursuing non-productive or even destructive research and policy advocacy. The issue is how much and of what sort. Hard Right and Hard Left are equally noxious and potentially destructive. Gross tries to minimize that there are 9% Hard Left. He chooses to hide that there are (likely) 0% Hard Right. Shame on him for that omission. I think the real issue though is something more like, how many extremists do we want (0%, 9%, or other), does it make a difference whether they are Right or Left (i.e. logically wouldn't we want more balance?), is it important that they are isolated within certain departments?

I suspect we would be better off with slightly fewer radicals (say 5% rather than 9%). That we would be better off with a balance between the extremes (2.5% on the Hard Left and 2.5% on the Hard Right). Finally, I suspect that having all your radicals concentrated in victim studies departments is probably not healthy. In an environment of increased resource constraints, I suspect it is those departments that most likely are going to be on the chopping block (a la University of South Carolina). Diversity is important but needs to be balanced, dispersed and limited to a level which is affordable.