Republicans Need to Start Asking Questions about Higher Ed

Martin Knight of the RedState Blog proposes that Republican state legislators should probe the hiring practices, curriculum, faculty, and extra-curricular programs of colleges that receive public funds.  I agree. 

Knight is right that institutions of higher learning will frame an attempt to deflect this effort in the language of academic freedom.  However such institutions have not objected to and have enthusiastically supported Democratic Party attacks on academic freedom, especially associated with Title IX.  

Conservative monitoring of left wing subversion of universities has a long history.  Prior to the 1950s elected officials routinely intervened in the politically extremist, intolerant tendencies of higher education. McCarthyism went overboard, and the result was a subsequent reluctance by conservatives to question the ideology posing as research and the junk social science that has evolved in universities since the 1960s. The aim should not be the silencing of leftists but rather ensuring that their views do not dominate discourse. 

With the lifting of the right wing intolerance in the 1960s, equally or more intolerant left wing academics such as Herbert Marcuse began to advocate a McCarthyism of the left. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 offered a set of tools to left-wing extremists because, indeed, it prohibits certain, albeit limited, forms of speech. The task for the left was to expand the scope of the Civil Rights Act to incorporate any and all speech under the strictures of the Civil Rights Act.  The right should have been quick to draw the line on limitations on speech, research, and hiring. Instead, Republican officials dropped the ball, leaving the field to leftists. 

The result of conservative reluctance to manage badly run universities is documented in books like Lee Jussim et al.’s Politics of Social Psychology  and George Yancey’s Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education.    

As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt show in their recently published Coddling of the American Mind , excessive coddling of youngsters led to further attempts to prevent speech with which the left disagrees. 

The end result is a university that is more intolerant than was McCarthyism. As well, universities have discriminated against conservatives and harmed more conservative careers by an order of magnitude than McCarthyism harmed left-wing careers.   

The concept of academic freedom is ideologically rooted and is a left-wing pretense.  To most academics, McCarthyism is unfair because it silences leftists, but political correctness is fair because it silences libertarians and conservatives. 

Republican officials need to reconsider the place of the university in American life and the harm done by indoctrination in both K-12 and higher education.  I have in the past proposed rationalization of hiring practices using validation and orthodox human resource management methods, but the publications in the higher education field have refused to publish such ideas. 

When Colleges Say "Inclusive," What They Really Mean Is "No Conservatives"

The New York Post quotes my liberal arts study in an editorial today.  The editorial notes that speakers invited to campuses like SUNY Albany are overwhelmingly left wing.  At Indiana the rato is 30:9; at GWU the ratio is 9:2; at Alabama the ratio is 9:2, and at Vermont it is 44:2.  

This kind of phenomenon is consistent with the claims of Jonathan Haidt, the founder of Heterodox Academy and a brilliant psychological ethicist.  I am reading through Haidt's book Righteous Mind now, and his point is that moral reasoning is chiefly used to justify emotional moral reactions.  

Moral reasoning is not the way that we come to our chief political conclusions.  Rather, we tend to reason in a way that justifies conclusions at which we have arrived. We arrive at the conclusions in the first place through emotion; we then seek to confirm the emotional reaction by exposing ourselves to people and to reasoning that agrees with our feelings.  

As a result, social science is by nature susceptible to ideological bias as social scientists skew their findings, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in the direction that fits their preconceptions.  That occurs with respect to hiring as well as campus speaker invitations. 

Steven Volynets on Political Correctness

My former Brooklyn College student, Steve Volynets, wrote this email protesting the increasing political correctness in American culture.  He sent it to Prof. Jonathan Haidt, the founder of Heterodox Academy and an exceptional social psychologist and philosopher.  Steve recounts  9/11, when he was my student. On 9/11 I had breakfast with my former professor, Eric Flamholtz from the UCLA business school.  My later meeting in a diner with Steve and Endrhis, then my students, completed the cycle.

Dear Dr. Haidt,

I am writing to thank you for speaking out against the growing suppression of viewpoint diversity on college campuses and elsewhere in academic and intellectual discourse.

I am not a professor, or even a student. I am a fiction writer. Last year, I wrote an article for New York Observer in which I took issue with Roxane Gay’s review of Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, “Purity,” questioning the merit and wisdom of conflating the novelist with his fictive characters. My piece went viral and prompted what you have described as Twitter "flash mobs" against me, some initiated by other established authors and contributors to the New York Times (screenshots attached).

For reasons I cannot fathom, Jonathan Franzen has been described as a misogynist and personally made the target of attacks both on social and legacy media. No one can seem to provide an objective explanation as to the nature of or reason for these attacks, yet they persist. Since my Observer article appeared, I have seen others express similar disdain for Mr. Franzen. Last year, I learned that he and Jeff Bezos were scheduled to appear on Jeopardy from a Facebook post by a writer and creative writing professor, who referred to them both “the most insufferable guys.”

I was born in Soviet Ukraine and grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where, as kids, we used to describe to this manner of speaking as “talking shit.” Not a beacon of decorousness perhaps, my old neighborhood (at least not until the arrival of the Food Co-op), still I have been taught that making assumptions about people I have never met or gotten to know personally was wrong. So I decided to challenge this writing professor by simply asking her if she ever met Mr. Franzen, to which she responded by calling me a “Franzen apologist” and blocking me from her list of friends.

No one should have to apologize for writing a work of fiction, I thought, recalling the painful experience of Salman Rushdie as well as those of dissident authors from the Soviet Block. More than that, I imagined a creative writing student, one inspired by Jonathan Franzen’s novels, having to take this professor’s class. Could this student freely express her passion for Franzen’s prose, to quote it in her papers and in-class discussions, to ask questions about it and expect dignified answers, to engage with it critically without risking punitive grading or, worse yet, being dismissed as an apologist? That I do not know the answer to this question troubles me.       

I have always believed that when it comes to art, one cannot be disabused of one’s emotional or intellectual cathexis any more than one can be forced to fall in or out of love. To regard fictional characters, images and narratives as inherently doctrinal, or as reflections of an author’s personality, strikes me as absurd as conferring a moral judgment upon a movie actor based on a role she plays. Yet this, along with sharp stands against "cultural appropriation," is the guiding principle for writers and critics like Roxane Gay, who not only express this view in op-eds for the New York Times – which is perfectly acceptable and, indeed, should be encouraged – but also sit on editorial boards of literary journals, judge writing contests and fellowship application. Needless to say, I do not risk applying for those contests and fellowships after making my disagreements public (and as a working artist, I could use the support).

I was also heartened by your mention of Mitchell Langbert’s study during your presentation at Duke. It is fair to say that Professor Langbert is quite to the right of me politically. He is also one of the most important teachers I've ever had. So it was sickening to learn that he has been treated so dismissively and with such contempt by his own colleagues. It was in his class that I was introduced to a book that had transformed my understanding of urban life, Robert Caro’s ‘The Power Broker,’ a text that I return to again and again. Nor could I have written my J Journal story about Bernie Madoff, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, if not for Prof. Langbert, whose lectures on financial markets had fueled my leaps of fancy into Wall Street myths. Koch brothers or not, I don’t recall Prof. Langbert, a dedicated pedagogue and scholar, ever peddling cheap right-wing propaganda in his classrooms. But I do remember the afternoon of September 11, 2001, sitting at a table with him and my college buddy, Endrhis Santana, in a diner just outside the Brooklyn College campus. The air still smelled of smoke and we spoke freely (something one could do in those pre-social media days) of our shock and anger. After years of teaching, Prof. Langbert must have seen thousands of students just like us – immigrant kids with side jobs, trying to make it through a city school. After we were done, the hardline laissez-faire hawk that he is, Prof. Langbert paid for our food.

I never thought I'd see anything like this, not at CUNY– the mounting suppression of free speech and intellectual diversity on college campuses is a disgrace.  

I am not a professor. In fact, I never even finished graduate school, having dropped out of the MFA creative writing program for some of the aforementioned reasons. I cannot become a member of the Heterodox Academy. Still I join, if only in spirit, your worthwhile cause.

Sincerely,
Steven Volynets