Why should anyone be bothered with a fifteen-year-old analysis of an undistinguished right-wing hack’s ephemeral newspaper column?
Simple answer: virtually the same column, written by a different right-wing hack, showed up a few days ago in the Colorado Springs Gazette. The good professor Walter Williams, Olin (see below) Distinguished Professor of Economics and recipient of the 2017 Bradley (see below) Prize, has served the Koch Brothers-funded George Mason University since 1980, faithfully flogging the world view of his various corporate masters in his books and columns. His work, like most such thinly disguised propaganda, is indefensibly shoddy, proceeding from unstated and unsupported assumptions to huge leaps from one ill-defined stigma to another. I won’t bother to dissect this latest example. If you’re curious, you can find the column here.
Williams has been valuable to the Scaifes, Bradleys, and Kochs, et.al. not only as the author of books such as Liberty versus the Tyranny of Socialism, More Liberty Means Less Government and All It Takes Is Guts: A Minority View, but as a longtime syndicated columnist, in which capacity he explains “ideas…often unintelligible to the lay person and seemingly unrelated to real-world problems,” in the words of Koch Industries executive Richard Fink. (I’m not making that name up. Sometimes facts provide their own poetry.)
The One Percent, emboldened by the last forty years’ consolidation of its power and control, scarcely bothers to disguise its operations any more. Here is Mr. Fink’s description of how the “research” that fosters such columns as Williams’ comes about:
at the higher stages we have the investment in the intellectual raw materials, that is, the exploration and production of abstract concepts and theories. In the public policy arena, these still come primarily (though not exclusively) from the research done by scholars at our (italics mine) universities. At the higher stages in the Structure of Social Change model, ideas are often unintelligible to the layperson and seemingly unrelated to real-world problems. (This is why columnists such as Walter Williams have to misrepresent them to their readers, making it clear, for instance, that voting Democratic is right next door to committing treason.) To have consequences, ideas need to be transformed into a more practical or useable form.
In the middle stages, ideas are applied to a relevant context and molded into needed solutions for real-world problems. This is the work of the think tanks and policy institutions. Without these organizations, theory or abstract thought would have less value and less impact on our society.”
Value to whom? Mr. Fink doesn’t say. What sort of “impact”? Mr. Fink doesn’t say.
I present the following analysis, then, because it poses vital questions that should always precede acceptance of the purported findings of any “study,” “survey” or “research.” Especially if that research has been cherry-picked by a columnist or blogger.
Next Step in the Old Song and Dance (2005)
Like most people who’ve worked in the same field for thirty-five years, I’m always eager to hear criticism of my profession from people who’ve never spent a day working in it, such as columnist Mike Rosen. Higher education has a lot of critics these days, but you just can’t beat Mike for logical fallacies and distortion of evidence.
Within the first paragraph of a recent column, “Voters have the power to diversify CU faculty” [The Gazette, March 4, 2005], Rosen describes CU faculty as a “bureaucratic” “self-serving” “omniscient professoriat.” He’s just warming up. Pillorying the entire faculty of a large state university can hardly satisfy a broom so sweeping as Rosen’s. In the next paragraph he gets around to “higher education” as a whole, in which “some of the main problems these days” are “specifically, the tyranny of the tenured left and the paucity of conservative professors within liberal arts faculties.”
Now that’s sweeping. It covers 1.6 million professors and graduate assistants who teach nearly 16 million students. In 2001, 45% of those professors nationwide were tenured [US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2/27/04]. According to one of the studies of faculty political attitudes Rosen later quotes (Rothman, et. al.), 72% of the sample are “left/liberal.” That means that about 32% of those 1.6 million professors are exercising a “tyranny of the tenured left” over the other 68%, not to mention the 16 million students. A mighty determined lot they must be.
Of course, the denomination “left/liberal” raises a few questions. The other study Rosen refers to (Horowitz) categorizes any faculty member registered as a Democrat as “left/liberal.” That means, I suppose, that they’re in bed with such flaming radicals as Joseph Lieberman, Joseph Biden and Max Baucus.
The words “study,” “survey,” and “research” ought immediately to prompt two questions: Who paid for the “research”? What was its methodology?
Rosen and other journalistic experts on education currently make almost daily reference to two studies. The first to appear was “Political Bias in the Administrations and Faculties of 32 Elite Colleges and Universities,” a production of David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture. The second is “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty,” by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte.
Since 1989, Horowitz’s CSPC has received a total of $11,461,000 from the Scaife, Bradley and Olin Foundations. Lichter’s Center for Media and Public Affairs has received $2,177,000 from the same three foundations. Rothman’s Center for the Study of Political and Social Change has received $1,208,000 from the same three foundations [Media Transparency Grant Data Matrix. http: www.mediatransparency.org]. All three foundations exist primarily to fund right-wing think tanks, centers, academic chairs and campaigns. Lichter’s CMPA is associated with George Mason University, whose foundation since 1989 has received donations of $23,454,786, the lion’s share of that from the Bradley Foundation.
These foundations are not interested in producing research for the sake of finding truth. They are interested in funding “research” that will produce predictable outcomes that can be couched in sound bites that appear to “prove” the conclusions their funders have long before reached. The people who perform these “surveys” (except Nevitte, a Canadian with his own polling firm) have long histories of providing their funders with the kinds of “information” those funders expect, and of resolutely publicizing their “findings” while misrepresenting them. In short, the answers to the first question – who paid? – suggest that the methodologies and conclusions of both “studies” ought to be carefully examined.
Horowitz first “generated a list of 32 elite colleges and universities,” including “the entire Ivy League,” other northeastern colleges, and colleges and universities in California. Oddly, all these institutions are located in strongly Democratic states. Not so oddly, since Horowitz studied only voter registration, he found that the “overall ratio of Democrats to Republicans we were able to identify at the 32 schools was more than 10 to 1.”
In his Executive Summary – the part that’s meant to provide talking points to the print and radio pundits – Horowitz asserts that such a ratio “makes a prima facie case” that “there is a grossly unbalanced, politically shaped selection process in the hiring of college faculty.” But anyone who bothers to look at his actual figures discovers that while they show 40% of the studied faculty and administrators are registered Democrats, 55% are unaffiliated and 28% fall into the piquant category Horowitz calls “Too Many” – that is, those for whom he found “multiple results for the same name.” If this “study” shows anything, it shows a selection process that seems to favor the apolitical over members of either of the two major parties, a tyranny of the bland rather than a tyranny of the left.
In addition to assuming that all Republicans and Democrats hold “a predictable spectrum of assumptions, views and values,” Horowitz also limited the faculty studied to “tenured or tenure-track professors of Economics, English, History, Philosophy, Political Science and Sociology departments.” He asks us to believe that this limited number of a limited group of professors from a limited number of carefully selected institutions – 32 out of 4,074 degree-granting institutions in the US [nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/ d03/ch_3] “strongly suggest that the governance of American universities has fallen into the hands of a self-perpetuating political and cultural subset of the general population, which seems intent on perpetuating its control.” His figures indicate no such thing.
Rothman, Lichter and Nevitte’s study is based on a sample of American professors. The survey from which it is taken, apparently created by Nevitte, does not seem to be available for inspection, so its methodology remains unknown. The study’s authors have extracted from this survey 1643 faculty members, of whom 1183 responded to queries regarding their party affiliations and attitudes toward a number of the Right’s favorite wedge issues, such as abortion, homosexuality and environmental protection “despite higher prices, fewer jobs.” Only full-time professors were selected, and those only from “doctoral, comprehensive and liberal arts” institutions. As Horowitz did, Rothman, et.al. thereby eliminate all professors at institutions that enroll 39% of the entire student body in higher education. (Rothman blandly explains this by citing another study finding “that two-year colleges housed the fewest liberal faculty.” In other words, including such faculty would not have produced the desired result.)
In spite of these obvious attempts to skew the survey to show “that liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins” and “conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats,” Rothman, et.al. are forced to admit that “The results do not definitively prove that ideology accounts for differences in professional standing. It is entirely possible that other unmeasured factors may account for these variations.”
That both Horowitz and Rothman studies fail to show what they purport to show and were obviously designed to show is, of course, only important if you are looking for evidence regarding their subject. If you are instead looking for sound bites tricked out as “research-based,” Horowitz and Rothman are eager to provide them. Horowitz’s has already been quoted. Rothman places his sound bite conveniently in the Abstract: “This suggests that complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study.” Carefully distributed throughout the study are further quotable quotes, such as “political conservatives have become an endangered species in some departments” and “conservatives have a legitimate complaint.”
The Rothman study was released on March 29. The next day, writing in the Unification Church’s Washington Times, Joyce Howard Price quoted the study’s compiler Lichter: “This is the richest lure [sic] of information on faculty ideology in twenty years. And this is the first study that statistically proves bias [against conservatives] in the hiring and promotion of faculty members.” In one day, results that do not “definitively prove” have become results that “statistically prove.”
On the same day, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas summarized Rothman’s findings and quoted an AAUP director, Jonathan Knight: “Knight added that he is not aware of ‘any good evidence’ linking the personal views of professors to what they teach. He must be living in an ivory tower without Internet access,” Thomas continued, because “A quick Google search of ‘liberalism on college campuses’ brings a wealth of good evidence that what is being taught on many of them is anti-American, anti-religious, anti-Israel, pro-gay rights and abortion, often to the exclusion and ridicule of opposing views.” In short, the Rothman “research” that occasioned Thomas’s column does not provide any evidence that Democrats or liberals promote their views in their classrooms, or that they are favored in hiring or promotion, so Thomas must forget his original source to suggest that “a wealth of good evidence” exists elsewhere.
One doubloon from this wealth he names is www.campus-watch.org. This website is a project of the Middle-East Forum, an organization entirely concerned with promoting a “pro-Israel” stance and attacking any expressions critical of Israeli policy. 95% of its funding has been provided by the Bradley Foundation. Another is Thomas Reeves “of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute” [position not described], quoted by Thomas as alleging that “’conservatives are discriminated against routinely and deliberately in faculty hiring, making some highly qualified teachers virtually unemployable because of their political and social views.” Thomas provides no documentation for these claims. The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute has received 91% of its funding, to the tune of $6,685,000, from the Bradley Foundation.
Though Thomas doesn’t mention it, the greatest wealth of information a Google search would produce is to be found on the website of Students for Academic Freedom, a “student” group funded by Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture (and thus by Scaife, Olin and Bradley). This operation places ads in student newspapers nationwide soliciting student complaints about bias in the classroom. Its website provides a convenient “Academic Bias Complaint Form,” which suggests what students should be looking for, including “Required readings or texts covering only one side of issues,” “Introduced controversial material that has no relation to the subject,” “Mocked national political or religious figures,” and “Allowed students’ political or religious beliefs to influence grading.” These solicitations have produced quite a few pages of student complaints, and they make instructive reading.
An anonymous complaint of “Introduced Controversial Material” alleges: “This is in the school paper in a [sic] article about professors incorporating the election into the classroom. One was [sic – probably “way”] in which [professor’s name] says she plans on educating her English students is to view and discuss “Bowling for Columbine” by filmmaker Michael Moore. Currently, sh [sic ] sponsors the Amnesty International Club at [the college], and as a member of the Dallas Peace Center she frequently demonstrates for peace causes.” Those who recognize opposition to torture and support of peace as sure signs of a tyrannical leftist need hear no more.
Another complainant at Ohio State has far more specific complaints: “This complaint applies to the discriminating [sic ] nature of grading of [sic ] my English teacher. She knows I’m an advancer of conservative ideas b/c I where [sic ] a ‘W’ t-shirt to class on sometimes [sic]. Ever since the 1st day of class when I wore my ‘W’ shirt she has treated me cold [sic] and been discriminating [sic] in grading my essays. On the last one, I wrote about how family values in the books weve [sic] read aren’t good. I know the paper was pretty much great because I spell checked it and proofred [sic ] it twice. I got an [sic ] D- just because the professor hates families and thinks its [sic ] okay to be gay.” Certainly anyone who spell-checks and proofreds twice must deserve a high grade.
The web pages provide many more such complaints, none of them validated by any outside observer. Students who dislike, disagree with or are given low grades by professors are thus provided a national forum for their gripes. That these gripes may be perfectly sincere does not mean that they have any validity. Some are quite well written and do indeed describe actions or speech by professors that suggest possible bias, stupidity or downright lunacy. But the reader has no way to assess their accuracy. The site is rather like a national forum set up for employees to anonymously complain about their bosses. But doubtless they provide all or part of the “wealth of good evidence” Thomas has in mind.
This “wealth” of misrepresented research, unsubstantiated charges and meaningless anecdote is being used not only by newspaper pundits and television talking hairdos, but by David Horowitz as ammunition to persuade both state governments and the United States Congress to put into law his creation, the “Academic Bill of Rights” [ABOR]. This document is currently under consideration by at least eight state legislatures and by Congress.
The ABOR [http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org.abor.html] begins with a historical review of statements supporting “academic freedom” by the American Association of University Professors and the U.S. Supreme Court, followed by a definition of the term worth quoting in full: “Academic freedom consists in protecting the intellectual independence of professors, researchers and students in the pursuit of knowledge and the expression of ideas from interference by legislators or authorities within the institution itself. This means that no political, ideological or religious orthodoxy will be imposed on professors and researchers through the hiring or tenure or termination process, or through any other administrative means by the academic institution. Nor shall legislatures impose any such orthodoxy through their control of the university budget.” It’s hard to imagine any academic who would contest this definition. Unfortunately, the provisions of the proposed bill undermine or contradict this statement of principle.
Provision 1 states “All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise [so far, so good] and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives [my italics]. What the independent clause gives, the qualifying phrase takes away, injecting the faculty member’s “perspective” into the criteria for hiring, firing, promotion and tenure. As chair of a search committee for a faculty position, how am I to discover the applicants’ “perspectives” except by quizzing them all about their religious, political, and philosophical beliefs? And how is my committee to “foster a plurality” of “perspectives” without hiring or rejecting faculty based on those exact criteria?
Provision 3 states, “Students will be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.” Again, who would dispute this principle? But how, exactly, can the basis for grading a student paper be measured? It is notable that no mention is made here of the quality of the students’ expression of their “reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge.” A student such as the one from Ohio State quoted above would be empowered by this provision to protest a low grade – which may have been based on the evident want of literacy – to both administration and to the courts.
The most dangerous provisions are 4 and 5, both of which open the door to the imposition of “political, ideological and religious orthodoxy” by a variety of pressure groups and by legislatures “through their control of the university budget” that the ABOR’s preamble forbids. Proposition 4 reads, in part, “Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate.” Proposition 5 continues, “Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.”
Let us say that I am teaching a course in 20th Century American Literature, and let us say that the majority of my students have previously limited their reading of American Literature to the works of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Danielle Steele. (Such a condition is far from impossible.) If I do not include these authors in my reading list, have I failed to provide students with dissenting sources and viewpoints? Who is to say, after all, since human knowledge in the judgment of literary worth is uncertain and unsettled, that Sherwood Anderson is more worthy of study than Danielle Steele?
Or let us say that I am teaching a course on the Clinton “welfare reform,” and make passing reference to Jesus’ assertion,“Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” [Matthew 25:40]. Is his remark “relevant” to the discussion? Am I engaging in “religious indoctrination”?
Or let us say that I am teaching a course on Germany’s conduct of WWII, and include in my reading list the autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, in which he describes the process by which he “…personally arranged…the gassing of two million persons between…1941 and the end of 1943, during which time I was the Commandant of Auschwitz” [Hoess, Rudolf, Commandant of Auschwitz. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1960, 17]. Because human knowledge is “unsettled,” as it surely is, am I obliged to include in the same reading list a work by British “historian” David Irving, who has publicly and repeatedly argued that “No documents whatever show that a Holocaust had ever happened”? [http://www.powells.com/review/2005_03_04] Certainly Irving’s denial of the Holocaust is a “dissenting source and viewpoint.” And certainly I will eventually encounter a student who holds this viewpoint dear to heart, and will wish to sue me for neglecting it.
In sum, this proposed legislation would open the door to precisely the “interference by legislators or authorities within the institution itself” with hiring of faculty and curriculum that it claims to forbid. It is a Trojan horse, very cleverly designed by its author to disguise its purposes and inevitable effects.
Mike Rosen, far less cautious than Horowitz or Rothman, plainly states the goals of this campaign: “The sacred cow of tenure is under review, along with the limits of academic freedom and the shameful lack of ideological balance within college faculties….Academic freedom is not absolute….That means hiring conservative professors to balance the, now, left-lopsided scales….Here’s the perfect remedy. Convert CU into a bastion of conservative thought….” Cal Thomas is equally clear: “In matters of race and gender, colleges practice affirmative action….Why won’t they do the same for conservative professors and students…?” The process here is a familiar one. Major right wing foundations supply money to scholars who will perform “studies” that “prove” the existence of a “Left-Wing tyranny.” These “scientific studies” are then deployed by sympathetic publicists who selectively quote them and repeat their misrepresented “findings” in print and on the air until repetition establishes them in their readers’ and listeners’ minds as “fact.” Then the “facts” and “evidence” are used to intimidate academic institutions into diluting or suppressing expressions of “left wing” opinion on campus, and into hiring right wing faculty.
The process is familiar because it is identical to that employed in the campaign to convince Americans that a “liberal bias” controls “the media,” and to intimidate “the media” into abandoning all real questioning of the statements of those in political power and to fill their ranks with right wing ideologues. This campaign was largely funded by the same right wing foundations, carried out by the same “researchers,” and drilled into the public by the same publicists [http://media.eriposte.com/2-2.htm].
No one who has worked in higher education could deny that some faculty members express their particular ideologies in class. I have known some who did so. Their ideologies ranged from extreme left to extreme right. I have never known a student who has been either swayed or intimidated by such expressions, nor have I ever seen a case of punitive grading based on ideological grounds. I have never known of a faculty member either hired or dismissed on the basis of political or cultural ideology. Do such things happen? I think undoubtedly they do, since bias and injustice are endemic to human beings. The SAF student complaints illustrate not only the possible existence of such incidents, but the fact that they are scarcely limited to bias from the left.
“One time the professor answered my question about bias in the media in the US: ‘It is unlike the Arab World.’ Another time he was describing Chomsky as ‘insane’ and Edward Said as a rock thrower at Israelis because as he said ‘people there generally throw rocks.’ The class was in American politics and introducing remarks about Arabs because I am one of them is inappropriate,” writes one of the SAF’s anonymous complainants.
“When discussing the platforms of various candidates for the 2004 presidential election, my professor said that any candidate who took an anti-war position in their campaign was akin to a terrorist,” writes another anonymous student.
“Was repeatedly forced to repeat ‘Darwin is a loon’ on all assignments. Any arguments presenting evidence of evolution were denounced as ‘Satanism.’ We were also forced to watch videos of IDF forces butchering Palestinian kids while the teachers said that ‘judgment’ was being meted out. We were also told that we are not allowed to question the president and that God had appointed him to lead the Christian armies in smiting the Arabs so that we can steal all their oil. We were also told that global warming is fake, and when I presented evidence to the contrary, the teachers accused me of witchcraft,” reports a third.
Again, all three of these reports are anonymous and unsubstantiated. They do, though, suggest that attempts to ideologically indoctrinate students may come from the right as well as from the left.
Do they typify what goes on in American colleges and universities? My own experience is that they do not. I, and most of my colleagues, have been far too busy trying to help students understand what they read and learn to express their understanding coherently to have had time or inclination to indoctrinate them into our various views. And “various” is an accurate description, running the gamut of political and social opinions. No real evidence, other than the sort of silly, sloppily defined and frequently self-contradictory “research” of hired guns such as Horowitz, Rothman and Lichter and the unsubstantiated anecdotes of aggrieved students, exists to support the prevalent characterizations of higher education as a “tyranny of the tenured left.”
And of course that will not matter. “The tyranny of the tenured left” will be repeated by Sean Hannity and Mike Rosen and Rush Limbaugh and Cal Thomas and Thomas Sowell and Bill O’Reilly and the rest until, through mere repetition, it becomes an established “fact” in the minds of all those people who know nothing about higher education except that it drains their tax dollars. Legislators, state and national, will eagerly parrot the phrase as they seek to introduce legislation that will put them in control of both personnel decisions and curriculum, and give them further excuses to transfer tax dollars from education to the coffers of the wealthy who fund their campaigns.
And the actual ends of Scaife, Bradley and Olin will be accomplished. Dissent from academia, such as it faintly exists, will be stifled and the country may continue undisturbed in a lockstep march back to the way things were under the presidency of Karl Rove’s ideal chief executive, William McKinley [See James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush’s Brain, Hoboken, NJ: 2003].
