Marshall Feldman offers a detailed rebuttal of the right-wing caricature of academia as hotbeds of leftist radicalism.
This caricature was never really true, and Marshall offers interesting anecdotal evidence against it. And in the last 20 years or so, the corporatization and neoliberalization project have gained tremendous momentum which makes suggestion of radicalism in academia seem somewhat ridiculous. What is, however, true is that US universities do nurture a certain kind of moderate liberalism, and even tolerate - upto a point - certain types of radicalism. There is lots of evidence for this. See e.g.: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/liberal-bias-or-neoliberal-bias-neil-grosss-why-are-professors-liberal-and-why-do-conservatives-care There is an interesting theory for why it makes structural sense for academics to be slightly liberal: to keep capitalism dynamic. Capitalists want workers to be dynamic, creative and critical, but not too critical that they may start questioning and challenging the power structure itself. In other words, for universities to optimally serve capitalist society, they have to maintain a delicate balancing act. I find this theory superficially appealing. I'd love to hear comments. Here's a good statement of this theory: http://www.aaup.org/article/small-fish-big-pond -----------------------------------snip Indeed, a slightly liberal university offers compelling advantages to business, so long as it is firmly contained within a larger conservative milieu. And a slightly liberal university system in a largely conservative political-economic and cultural milieu is exactly what the United States has. I underscore “slightly.” One of the more striking aspects of Gross’s book is just how low the “liberal” bar is set. Gross lumps together “radicals, progressives, and center-lefters” as the “left-liberal flank” of US universities and concludes that 54 percent of the professoriate belongs there. Of this group, less than 10 percent are self-identified “radicals,” clustered almost entirely in a few humanities and social science fields. A somewhat larger contingent, 14 percent of the “left-liberal flank,” are described by Gross as “center-left,” a group that includes those who typically vote Democratic but may oppose abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration, or affirmative action and favor the death penalty. A “liberal” tent this large suggests that party affiliation, essential to Gross’s data analysis, is a rather weak indicator of “politics” in a country that has only two parties, practically speaking. My conclusions are thus quite different from Gross’s. The question of professorial politics cannot be separated from the larger political ecology of the United States and how a liberal university can be made congruent with the interests of corporate elites even when the content of the challenges posed by individual professors is incongruent. Neither functionalism nor conspiracy theory are required to explain how dissidence might be *hegemonized *by dominant culture, as Frank and others have shown. Hegemonization also explains why the economic challenges to the university have, in general, been so much more successful than the overtly political ones: the elite hegemonic imperative is to limit the liberal university, not to destroy it. For this reason—and certainly this won’t come as news to most readers— our politics cannot remain within the university only, where it is effectively contained. On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Marshall Feldman <[email protected]> wrote: > What gets me about the myth is the complete disregard for the 800-pound > gorillas in the room. > > - How many universities have business schools but not even a single > course in running non-profits or workers' cooperatives, let alone how to do > good (centralized or decentralized) economic planning? > - How many have departments of government or "political science," with > a sanguine view of the state, but no courses, let alone departments of > anarchism, self-management, or syndicalism. > - How many universities are beholding to corporate interests for 50% > or more of their physical plant, as even a casual noting of the names of > university buildings readily attests. > - How many are more concerned about their multi-million dollar sports > business than academics? > - How many "land grant" colleges today ignore the enabling > legislation's intent that they provide a liberal education to working-class > students, with "liberal education" understood as education suitable for > free persons, and instead focus on what's "practical and applied" and leads > to jobs in the corporate economy, justifying this orientation by the > Morrill Act's requirement that participating states offer instruction in > "agriculture and mechanic arts," when Morrill himself said this was > included just as a way "to tempt" students to attend college at a time when > less than 1% of the population went to college and not a single profession > required a college degree? > - How many academic departments are under pressure to justify their > existence by increasing enrollment and therefore self-police by keeping > academic standards modest but students' perceptions of > employment-relatedness high? > > The deeply corporate nature of U.S. "higher education" is also more > subtle. When I was an undergrad at Cornell, I took a required course called > "Advanced Engineering Economic Analysis," which covered things like > deciding on projects based on internal rates of return, etc. We read > articles on capital theory by Modigliani and others without even a whiff of > the Cambridge Capital controversies, which turned much of what we learned > into nonsense. I had to learn this subject matter on my own several years > later. When I told the professor teaching the course that I was thinking of > studying urban planning in graduate school and would therefore like to > write my term paper about applications of the subject matter in the public > sector, he told me he knew nothing about how this ostensibly neutral > subject matter could be applied in the public sector. Instead, he suggested > I consult with a certain professor in Civil Engineering, who gave me a > reading list of about 40-50 books, by Galbraith and others. Reading all of > them would have been the equivalent of taking 2-3 courses to fill the > deficiencies in my corporate-oriented education, and even then would not > have covered Marx, Keynes, or any of the major critiques of and > alternatives to neoclassical economics. > > Some years later, while a PhD student in UCLA's urban planning program, I > received a fellowship to spend several months in Chile attending a seminar > on inequality systems (it was spring of 1973). Emmanuel's "Unequal > Exchange" was one of the required texts, and I remember how I found its > approach so completely alien to the social science I had been studying and > therefore more difficult to grasp. At the time, my department at UCLA > bragged about its ranking as the #1 planning department in urban and > regional economic development, yet what it taught was strictly & solely > neoclassical. Since the department had a strong emphasis on the LDC's, it > was more than odd that what it taught was nothing like what many > universities in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere taught about the > subject. (To its credit, the faculty of the department was open to change > when a number of students returning from overseas study, as well as > esteemed guest speakers from outside the U.S., gave critiques of what the > department was teaching.) > > It is interesting to note that even in the late 1960's & early 1970s, > Cornell had a reputation for being left-leaning (having graduates like > Peter Yarrow & Richard Farina will do that), as did the department at UCLA. > Yet this visible leftish tinge was just a patina over a deeper, almost > subconscious, right-leaning corporatism. > > And haven't there been several studies of economics departments and their > ideological biases? I seem to recall one that asked economics faculty > members to rank economic journals, with the result that even completely > fictitious titles, like "Journal of Mathematical Economics," got higher > rankings than actually existing ones with leftish names, e.g. RRPE? > >
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
