Russell Jacoby’s Admission
In the course of a windy attack on advocates of greater intellectual diversity within the university, UCLA history professor Russell Jacoby, writing in the April issue of the Nation, makes what strikes me as a significant admission. More on this in just a bit. First, though, a quick précis of the piece. Jacoby’s intention, in standard leftwing fashion, is to cast the efforts of groups like Students for Academic Freedom as “un-American” “witch hunts” aimed at creating “thought police” on campuses by targeting leftist professors despite the presumed “fact” that “nothing has shown that higher education discriminates against conservatives.” To this end, the professor tilts his lance against the ostensibly biased “researchers":
Nonleftist voices are ‘muffled and fearful,’ the researchers say. They do not, however, present a scintilla of information to confirm this.
The temptation is to dismiss the professor’s assertion as unwittingly risible at best and intentionally dishonest at worst. In the interest of good faith, however, let us allow for the possibility that the professor is merely ignorant of the reality of ideological groupthink at our nation’s universities. If so, he may consider looking here.
But a comment interred deep in the professor’s philippic suggests that while he may plead ignorance, Jacoby well knows the stakes in the fight for greater ideological diversity. With palpable anxiety, he frets that the efforts to promote a greater multiplicity of political viewpoints may have grave consequences:
Professors would become more claustrophobic and cautious. They would offer fewer “controversial” ideas. Assignments would become blander.
Translation: Greater intellectual diversity would sound the death knell for the radicalism that for so long has thrived in the classroom. In lieu of expounding on their latest theory about the entrenched evils of American society, foreign policy, etc., professors would actually have to concentrate on such unfashionable duties as, well, teaching. If this is “blandness,” we surely need more of it.
4 Comments:
The "radicalism" of the professorate is the only thing that keeps higher education from becoming nothing but a series of trade schools and job training institutes. Professorial Leftists are the only ones keeping alive the tradition of inquiry and scholarship.
Finely a leftist speaks the truth!
Laeth MacLaurie said...
"The "radicalism" of the professorate is the only thing that keeps higher education from becoming nothing but a series of trade schools and job training institutes."
radical n : the political orientation of those who favor revolutionary change in government and society
It's a failure of imagination to conflate radicalism with inquiry and scholarship. It is an insult to those who were squeezed out by the orthodoxy, to the work they pursued at think tanks and elsewhere, and to the work scholars would have pursued without the corrosion of critical theory and its ilk.
If you have an open mind to experience scholarship without radicalism, The New Criterion is a great example.
There are, I'm sure, any number of professors who harangue their students with leftist ideology. The question I have, though, and the one that Frontpage and DTN don't seem to have answered, is how many? What percentage of humanities professors are engaging in debate-stifling pedagogy?
I spent 4 years at Yale and 2 at Columbia, and in all that time I never once felt that a professor was indoctrinating me. Most of my profs, I suspect, were liberals, but so what? I also had David Gelernter, part-time conservative pundit; Louis Dupre, a brilliant Belgian who tried to persuade a lecture hall full of godless, hedonistic college students to contemplate the mystery of God; and Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn's biographer.
Sure, there's some annoying political correctness on campus, and there are some obnoxious ideologues in the marginal departments and programs, but I find it impossible to believe that it's an issue for most college students (truth be told, going to class isn't an issue for most college students). I don't have a problem with thoughtful criticism of the Academy, but this picture that's being painted, of campuses run amok with leftist propaganda, is just nuts - really big nuts, like macadamias.
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