Caplan is writing about a marginally dated study from 2006 conducted by Neil Grossman which appears to have been scrubbed from the internet. The interpretation of the results is contingent on the definitions and I cannot access those. The critical table is this one.
Caplan focuses on somewhat different issues than do I. I do want to know how Gross distinguished a Radical from an Activist from a Marxist. It is noticeable that only 3% of professors identify themselves as Marxists. I am guessing that is a fairly stable number over the years. When I was at Georgetown in the late seventies/early eighties, we had a small handful of faculty who were willing, indeed, proud to identify themselves as Marxists. Very few and nice and open. I never intuited any particular proselytization. Indeed, one of those teachers, don't remember his name, don't even remember the class, was instrumental in delivering a critical lesson. We had been assigned to critique an essay that was making some argument around a domestic or international social issue. All of it is lost in the mists if time. What I do remember is the next step. It was a large class with maybe forty or fifty members. We all troop in and hand in our papers critiquing the essay, attacking its arguments. The grad student who was teaching that day then approached the critique in an entirely different fashion than had occurred to any of us.
We had all tackled the logic and quality of the evidence of the argument made in the essay, taking it all at face value. What the grad student did was to force us to look deeper and work harder. He walked us through the heavily footnoted article. Every sentence or two was footnoted. He would stop, read the footnote citation and then would bring out the original source document to which the footnote referred. He only had to do this a half dozen times or so for the pattern to become clear to us.
We had taken the author at face value and assumed that all his assertions were accurate and fair statements of fact. What we learned by checking the footnotes was that there were multiple instances where the author had misunderstood the original data or had misinterpreted it. Sometimes the citation went to a source that had nothing to do with the claim in the article. Sometimes there was quote truncation. For example, the author might have made the claim in the body of the article (made up example) that even Ronald Reagan admired the Soviet Economy by attributing the following quote to him "The Soviet economy is a magnificent thing." But when you went to the original speech, the full quote was "The Soviet economy is a magnificent thing unless you look at wealth, income, growth, consumer choice, consumption and innovation."
Marxist the professor might have been or not, but that lesson of doggedly researching claims was an immensely valuable one.
So 3% Marxists? What's there to worry about?
I would argue that the issue and the concern is in the aggregate of Radical, Activist, and Marxist. 3% is not of particular concern, but what about 28% (the aggregate). The number of people in the general population who might self-identify as Marxist, Activist or Radical is markedly low, generally less than 5% depending on the survey. Absent major advocacy campaigns, the issues of interest to MARs, such as income inequality, racism, global warming, microaggressions, discrimination against LGBT, etc. tend to garner less than 5% focus among the general public as important issues. That 28% number could be concerning.
But what is of real concern, I suspect, and the source of so much negative branding for universities, is the concentration of such radicalism. 62% in the Social Sciences and 50% in the Humanities. Yikes. Not too unexpected. That is consistent with the distributions at Duke during the Lacrosse Team Rape Hoax and the noxious Gang of 88 (88 professors condemning the accused students without waiting for due process or even evidence, condemning them simply because they were white and male). All the other fields, physical and biological sciences, computer sciences and engineering, business, health sciences - all under 10% for professors who self-identify as Marxist, Radical, or Activist.
Where do all our journalists come from? Social Sciences and Humanities. Where do all our school teachers comes from? Social Sciences and Humanities.
And that is the link to the second article, Freshman Reading Choices 2015: Welcome to Groupthink U. by Harry Painter.
If one is looking for clues regarding what universities think a college education should be about, one obvious place to look is their freshman summer reading programs. These programs are often the first interactions students have with their new school and their first actual assignments.Again, I take away something additional from what Painter is focused on. What caught my attention was that 26 out of 52 universities/colleges in North Carolina did not have a summer reading program (or did not respond). I think these programs are fairly meaningless and do not achieve much or anything. Or at least that has been my experience. Still, I would have assumed everyone had such a program.
The 2013-14 edition of the National Association of Scholars “Beach Books” report finds that the programs are becoming more popular. The report says that colleges claim to assign summer reading to build community, begin conversations, encourage critical thinking, and inspire social activism.
Such programs could have great value. It is good that colleges are encouraging students to read, an activity that fewer students are engaged in than they used to be. A 2014 Common Sense Media study found that the number of 17-year-olds who “never” or “hardly ever” read for pleasure had tripled since 1984—to 27 percent from 9 percent.
Unfortunately, colleges often use their summer reading programs not to help students make the leap to the higher standard of scholarship that should be demanded of them at the collegiate level, but to expose them to books that may influence them to adopt the political agenda of the left.
At least, that’s what a look at the summer reading selections in one state, North Carolina, reveals. Last year, I highlighted the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s choice of The Round House, a novel featuring racial and sexual themes—trendy topics in college today. Those themes continue this year. Recently, national media drew attention to Duke University’s 2015 summer reading choice: incoming freshmen are reading and discussing Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a book depicting graphic episodes of lesbian sex. UNC-Chapel Hill’s assigned reading is Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, about racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
Especially popular this year are books centered on victimhood or identity struggles of various kinds. There may be good cause to learn about those topics, but when they become the dominant trend for summer reading programs over multiple years, one starts to wonder what really is the intent of these programs. Such consistent pounding away at similar themes, given the entire vast array of books from which to choose, suggests the programs are meant to introduce students to a certain worldview, and the reading program is just the convenient and seemingly scholarly way to do so.
But Painter's broader point is well taken. There is not a lot of "diversity" in the list, virtually everything is by or about African-Americans, Hispanic or LGBT issues and there is hardly any real diversity. If the goal is to get people to think critically, think independently or to become engaged with reading as a critical skill and asset, then I think most of these universities have missed the mark. If the goal is to foster victimhood and cultural self-loathing, then perhaps they have advanced their agenda. But I doubt it. Most students I know, when confronted with such heavy handed idiocy, roll their eyes and skip the reading altogether, counting on their cultivated ability to regurgitate the desired answers and observations, or when compelled to, look up an online summary so they can fake it with more detail.
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