Heterodox Academy Open Mind Conference

I just returned from the first Open Mind conference of Heterodox Academy, founded by Jonathan Haidt. I've been involved with the academic reform movement for more than 25 years, and this meeting was a watershed, not least because of the large audience of academics from all over the country who have taken an interest in campus speech issues and political correctness.

Haidt's strategic and organizational skills are impressive. The meeting integrated important mainstream and left-wing academics into some manner of organized expression of concern about an issue that heretofore conservatives have dominated. There have always been Democrats involved in leadership roles of the academic reform movement, such as Greg Lukianoff of FIRE (who has just coauthored a book with Haidt) and KC Johnson of Brooklyn College, but this meeting was different, for Heterodox is a mainstream academic and even left-organized group.

Among the speakers were President Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago; President Michael Roth of Wesleyan; and a former president of the University of California, Mark Yudof.

They also included Heather Heying, who had resigned from Evergreen State with her husband, Bret Weinstein, in a bizarre controversy. (Weinstein has received a $500,000 settlement from Evergreen.)  Alice Dreger, a professor who had resigned from Northwestern over a censorship issue, also spoke. Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Education, moderated one of the panels.

The meeting was held in an auditorium on the ground floor of the New York Times building. In other words, the New York Times has lent support to Heterodox Academy.

The speakers were mostly from elite institutions, with the exceptions of Angus Johnston,  a left-oriented scholar of protest movements, a public scholar, and an adjunct at CUNY’s Hostos Community College, and Heather Heying, with whom I had a conversation during the breakfast hour. There were several speakers associated with Yale, Haidt's alma mater, including Michael B Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and philosophy professor Jason Stanley.

Only a few of the speakers, like Robert George (founder of Princeton's James Madison program), were conservatives or libertarians. John McWhorter of Columbia (see his Atlantic article) made some comments that conservatives might like. ACTA's Michael B. Poliakoff also spoke.

There are strengths and weaknesses to organizing a higher ed protest movement from inside the higher ed Leviathan.  A strength is that the Republicans have dropped the ball on this issue, so reform from outside is unlikely in the short run.  A weakness is that this movement might forestall such reform. Moreover, many of the important failings of higher ed, such as the failure of higher ed institutions to do much in the way of real education, might get overlooked.

There may be a tendency to follow the mainstream Progressive patterns that led to political correctness in the first place. Insiders who oppose groupthink may offer Caspar Milquetoast prescriptions. It's not at all clear that moderate reform of some speech issues addresses what is required. 

Most of the speakers were on the obvious side of issues like opposition to shouting down campus speakers, but several said things like “free speech is just a justification for racism” and one or two defended shouting down.

I was skeptical of the degree to which President Zimmer painted Chicago as a center of academic freedom. I have no doubt that it’s better than most places, but I wonder what their D:R ratios look like, especially when you exit the economics department. (Illinois doesn’t provide voter registration information.) Also, although I had a pleasant conversation with Michael Roth before his talk,  I am skeptical that places like Wesleyan will become centers of free speech in the next 25 years.

That said, the brilliance of the movement that Jonathan Haidt and Heterodox Academy are creating is certain. Let's hope that great things will result.

Peter Wood's New Campus Anti-Americanism

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has a great piece in Minding the Campus on the decline and fall of higher education, which he attributes to the "new camps anti-Americanism." Wood notes that a Pew poll "showed 58 percent of Republicans saying that they now view American higher education as having negative effects on the country." (The other 42 percent are uninformed.) He adds, "Then a Gallup poll in August offered the even more troubling picture that 67 percent of Republicans and Republican “leaders” had only some or very little “confidence on colleges and universities.” The figure for 'all adults' regardless of political affiliation was 56 percent." Wood says that administrators have been complacent, and their anti-Americanism will result in further declining public support for higher education. Wood is optimistic that the public will insist on reform.

I'm not so sure. The Republicans need to wake up to the partisanship of elite academia. The left ideology prevalent on campus is a market signal, i.e., a selection device that provides a screen, for Democratic Party affiliation. I know that sounds strange, but which party funds universities? May we not expect the party that funds universities to expect the institutions that they fund to support them? Which party are leftists most likely to support?

This claim is supported by the following: There is a strong tendency for academics to be left wing in ideology, but there is an even stronger tendency for academics to be Democratic in party affiliation. In many elite colleges the proportion of Republicans is not significantly different from zero. In contrast, Pew finds that about 38% of the highly educated are now Republican--and that number is endogenous because it follows a generation of campus indoctrination of the highly educated.

Since the New Deal, the Democrats have relied on universities to propagandize on behalf of their programs. The Republicans have been slow to recognize that universities have been playing a partisan role, and if the faculty is predominantly left and entirely Democratic while elite young are turned into US-hating, Gramscian transgender activists, how nice for the Democratic Party.  The Democrats have funded the universities; the Democrats will benefit from a youth indoctrinated into left ideology at those universities.

The solution is ending government subsidization and cartelization of higher education.

That can be done by ending tax exemptions for the social sciences and humanities and using the tax revenues to provide tax credits to students who pursue STEM-related subjects either in universities or in proprietary colleges. As well, business and professional education should be treated as proprietary and put on an even playing field with proprietary training.

Academic Reform as Charade

The notion of reform assumes an institution that is worth saving. There is scant evidence that higher education is so, with the exceptions of technology, the sciences, and professions. While there is a long standing human capital argument that would favor higher education, there is no evidence that higher education optimally enhances necessary skills. There are no controlled or comparative studies of say business school graduation versus military service, or community college versus apprenticeship programs, not to mention creative alternatives that have been ignored because of the dominance of higher education systems. It is entirely possible that human capital can be more effectively enhanced through alternative institutions that have not received state support. The fact that universities depend on extraordinary degrees of government largesse and donations suggests that the economic returns due to the human capital that they produce do not justify the universities' extent. If this were not the case, state support and donations would be unnecessary, especially in today's liquid debt markets. Donations can infer not gratitude for economic returns, but the quest for social image and status, hence cannot be assumed to reflect repayment for economic benefits. If universities produced the value that they consume, students and firms would voluntarily pay to cover universities' costs to obtain the valuable knowledge that they produce.

The movement for academic reform takes as a starting point the view that intolerance of traditional approaches to education; the rejection of core curricula; and political correctness are impediments to the proper functioning of universities. Like any reform movement, it argues that improving the institution will be worthwhile because then it will perform more authentically, effectively and efficiently. In pursuing such ends, the reformers become part of the university system.

Phil Orenstein has been working on an article that argues that Nazism was a direct offshoot of the 19th century German university, and that Fichte and other German Idealists were the bedrock foundation on which not only Nazism, but also the modern university rests. In Phil's view, both the holocaust and the modern university are the heirs of the 19th century German university. Phil's idea is seminal because today's universities foster totalitarian ideologies and support intolerant extremism that, though cloaked in left wing garb, is little different from Nazism. Hence, the pattern of political correctness becomes not peripheral, or externally introduced by 1960s radicals, but rather fundamental to the culture and processes of universities themselves. Universities foster totalitarianism, and totalitarianism is inextricably linked to universities, not a peripheral malaise.

Academics who claim that they aim to reform their institutions from within thus have far-fetched, self-contradictory aims. Not only are universities culturally adverse to performing what the public expects (balanced education, for example) but their hiring and assessment policies are impossibly skewed toward favoring faculty who support totalitarian approaches and state-based solutions, and to suppression of any who disagree. The notion of reform in the real-world university context thus is a self-serving charade. Self-serving because the professor/reformer, whose conscience tells him that the institution is fraudulent or politically suppressive, can assauge his conscience while remaining secure in his knowledge that his activities will come to naught.

The spread of universities hearkens a deterioration of American democracy. This occurs in part through decades of advocacy of state-based solutions, Keyensian economics, Marxian sociology and similar university movements that advocate destructive social goals. It also occurs because of values that universities inculcate, such as identity politics, political correctness, uniformity of thinking and conformity to a professor's whims.

Society needs to begin to think of creative alternatives to universities that will sidestep the cracked views of a professoriate whose greatest contributions are left wing totalitarianism and the will to power.

Candace de Russy responds to this essay at:

http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTdkNzU5OWQ0MjAwYmIwNTE3MTJjN2I5ODQ4OGVmZTc=