November 13, 2007
The academy as ruthless market process
A student at Columbia defends the character of American academia as the outcome of a ruthless market process in which excellence prevails (link via Economist’s View):
In reality, conservatives ought to appreciate academia, because it’s a vicious market system. Professors have absurdly specific training in tiny career fields. A guy who spends years writing a dissertation on the importance of beads to indigenous tribes in Brazil really wants the world’s other bead expert to fail. If he doesn’t get tenure, there’s a good chance he won’t find a decent job anywhere else ever. He doesn’t care whether bead-man number two is a Republican; he could be left of Castro and the first guy would still spend days writing scathing articles blasting his shoddy bead analysis.
Similarly, Columbia isn’t going to refuse to hire a conservative who has done prominent work, because rich people like prominence, and we at Columbia need rich people to send us their progeny. You could argue that conservative professors have a more difficult time becoming prominent, but if most professors are liberal, then a conservative doing convincing research or writing influential journal articles would probably just be more conspicuous. You might also argue that the liberal environment at Columbia makes conservatives less inclined to work here, but that just sounds like a way of saying that conservatives are pansies who can’t handle disagreement, which seems unfair to me.
A counter-reading from Stuart Taylor:
Perhaps I should confess my biases. I do dislike extremism of the Left and of the Right. But I have never been conservative enough to vote for a Republican presidential nominee. And the academics whose growing power and abuses of power concern me are far to the left of almost all congressional Democrats.
They are also ruthless in blocking appointment of professors whose views they don’t like; are eager to censor such views; and in many cases are determined to push their own political views on students, who have few reality checks in their course material and are often too innocent of the world to understand when they are being fed fatuous tripe.
Delaware students have been not only inculcated with the lunatic view that all white Americans are racists (and that "REVERSE RACISM" is a "term … created and used by white people to deny their white privilege") but also:
* Told to confess their "privilege" or lament their "oppression";
* Informed that "white culture is a melting pot of greed, guys, guns, and god";
* Required to "recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society" and "recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression" (whatever that means);
* Instructed to purge male residents’ "resistance to educational efforts" and "concepts of traditional male identity";
* Challenged to "change their daily habits and consumer mentality" for the sake of "sustainability";
* Pushed to display on their dorm doors politically approved decorations proclaiming support for (e.g.) "social equity" (whatever that means);
* Subjected to other "treatments" designed to alter their beliefs and behaviors and inculcate university-approved views on politics, sexuality, moral philosophy, and more;
* Ordered to attend residence-hall training sessions and submit to one-on-one sessions with RAs, who filed reports to their superiors about individual students’ "level of change or acceptance" of the thought-reform program.
One such report, for example, classified a young woman as one of the "worst" students in the residence life education program for saying that she was tired of having "diversity shoved down her throat" and responding "none of your damn business" when asked "when did you discover your sexual identity?"
I don’t know if that’s a market process, but it certainly sounds pretty ruthless.
The situation at Delaware sounds extreme and disturbing. The University did well to end such an illiberal program and it’s encouraging that they were forced to quickly do so when the details of such training materials were brought to public light.
Posted by: whichway | November 13th, 2007 at 12:08 pm | Report this commentBut I don’t quite understand how the second is a counter-argument or counter-reading’ to the first. Logically speaking, isn’t it the other way around? The Columbia student is deploying a standard Beckerian argument in pointing out that if academics really were organized enough to be “ruthless in blocking appointment of professors whose views they don’t like” then the institution to which they belong would soon enough find itself sliding to mediocrity and displaced another department that did not discriminate so openly and therefore was able to hire better talent.
Applied to the case of these ‘training/indoctrination’ programs the argument would be that students who in the US have many options of where to study would soon stop buying U of Delaware educations once it became evident that it came packaged with such ludicrous indoctrination. Fear of being punished like that in the marketplace is what disciplines University administrators to close down such programs, as this case very well demonstrates.
Maybe this is just my PC indoctrination speaking, but I have to stand up for tripe. Tripe is actually very good to eat - not especially tasty on its own I’ll admit, but it picks up flavor very well and provides a unique and interesting texture. I’d definitely recommend the tripe sandwich at Babbo, the various incarnations of tripe at dim sum, and menudo (the food not the boy-band - I’m not that indoctrinated).
Posted by: Homechef | November 13th, 2007 at 2:52 pm | Report this comment“Help help, I’ve been censored.”
But the ruthlessness of the market process is promptly abandoned with tenure. The issue is less who gets in but rather how to clear them out. The ‘conservative’ stance here is unclear if not a paradox.
BTW, its “Torture Champion Stuart Taylor”.
Posted by: rickhavoc | November 13th, 2007 at 6:19 pm | Report this commentHomechef: Too true. I was fed a lot of tripe as a youngster. Very tasty. It’s not something you see much of in DC. Supplies of the other kind go some way to restore the balance.
Posted by: Clive Crook | November 13th, 2007 at 6:29 pm | Report this comment“academia is a vicious market system”
When was the last time a university went bust because it had an inadequate product?
I can believe that the career of a physicist or molecular biologist depends on whether his theories are correct or not. I do not see why that has to be true of eg the Department of Womens Studies, or even English Literature.
Which suggests that departmental politics would tend to become more important…
Posted by: ad | November 13th, 2007 at 8:00 pm | Report this commentrickhavoc, ad: Tenure, and abuse of it, must be part of the problem. But of course there’s a good case for giving academics tenure. The thing that disturbs me more is that so many people prefer to be surrounded by intellectual clones of themselves. It’s much better to have colleagues (friendly ones, preferably) who disagree with you without questioning your good faith, and help you sharpen your opinions, than it is to live in an echo chamber. And you would expect, or hope, that scholars would feel that way more than the rest of us. This has not always been my experience. Speaking of good faith, rickhavoc, I urge you read Stuart Taylor in a receptive frame of mind. He and I did disagree on the torture debate, but I think he is an outstanding writer and thinker on legal and constitutional issues. He is the Martin Wolf of his realm. His book on the Duke lacrosse case is superb.
Posted by: Clive Crook | November 13th, 2007 at 11:24 pm | Report this commentThe academy is a ruthless *political* process, the precise opposite a market process. No one is voting on the relative desirability of tenure (or initial hire) candidates with their own dollars or euros. It’s all about currying favor with the court, now composed mostly of arrogant, condescending, demonizing lefties (the illiberal liberals). Candidates for academia who fail to worship the prevailing othodoxy, however nonsensical, of the self-appointed, self-righteous gatekeepers, do so at their peril.
Moreover, this condition is self-perpetuating, as these gatekeepers advocate that the intended ends (”progressive” leftist idelogy) justify any means necessary. What better way to propogate a flawed, totalitarian philosophy than to invade and dominate the educational system, which both “teaches” future generations and is one of the few major institutions in western democracies decidedly NOT subject to self-correcting market pressures? And most tuition payers (students and parents) have no way of easily discovering beforehand the indoctrination that precious young minds are to receive at good old U, often relying on hoary reputations, glib lifestyle-focused reviews, and glossy, nebulous brochures to differentiate among schools. Yes, a perfect cover (pun intended).
It seems the lefty that coined the original phrase is either transparently disingenuous, or entirely innocent of any actual insight into those cursed, evil “markets.” (Boo, hiss.) My guess, sadly, is the former.
Markets are, of course, imperfect, as are the human beings who create and participate in them. But political processes are far more imperfect, and far more susceptible to distortion and capture, and so inherently more dangerous as a social decision-making mechanisms. So it was in ancient times, in feudal times, in the socialist and communist era of the 20th century - and today.
Posted by: classiclib | November 16th, 2007 at 9:41 pm | Report this comment