Stanley Fish Is Right on Academic Freedom

He wants to get political bias out of the classroom

Stanley Fish, author, university professor, "public intellectual," is a prodigious, original, unorthodox thinker. Even when one disagrees with him, his arguments are honorably and thoughtfully propounded as he unleashes his chicken upon your egg. In a July 23 New York Times Op-ed, Fish takes an intellectual straight razor to warring concepts of academic freedom. Springing from the case of Kevin Barrett, a 9-11 conspiracy theorist who lectures at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Fish labels argument over content, the ideas espoused, as the wrong battlefield of academic freedom.

"Both sides get it wrong," he writes. "The problem is that each assumes that academic freedom is about protecting the content of a professor's speech; one side thinks that no content should be ruled out in advance; while the other would draw the line at propositions (like the denial of the Holocaust or the flatness of the world) considered by almost everyone to be crazy or dangerous.

"But in fact, academic freedom has nothing to do with content....Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis.... "Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply...."

In other words, study and teach astrology if you will, "not to profess astrology and recommend it as the basis of decision-making...but to teach the history of its very long career." Study, learn, teach. Any subject, no matter how offbeat or mundane, is fair game for academic research, scholarly protocols, classroom introduction. No subject should be available for classroom "indoctrination." For that, there is the public square, no less available to academics (excepting Lawrence Summers, late of Harvard) than to the rest of us.

Fish's short brief should be influential. It won't be, because academia is thoroughly invested in content. Ward Churchill, the focus of the most prominent current battle (misconstrued as it is) over "academic freedom," was hired by the University of Colorado because he was provocative, not for his "scholarship." And he's the tip of the iceberg.

Just imagine, though, how refreshing it would be for graduates to actually emerge from universities with rigorous grounding in academic disciplines, thus capable of discerning facts, making rational, informed life judgments, even determining their own "partisan political ideals" without having been indoctrinated other than in the ability to think for themselves.

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Political diversity not welcome at universities

Imagine, if you can, that slightly more than half of the public voted Democratic in the last presidential election, yet some 80 percent of higher education's social scientists voted Republican. In that universe, you would expect the left to demand changes in university hiring practices so that academia would nurture greater diversity so as to better represent the American community. Then step back into the real world, where academia has become a solid bastion of the Left, as demonstrated by two articles in the latest issue of the scholarly journal Critical Review. One article presents a survey of academic social scientists that reports that 79.6 percent of 1,208 respondents said they voted mostly Democratic over the last 10 years, with 9.3percent voting Republican. Call that a near monopoly marketplace of ideas.

A second article studied the voter registration of California college professors and found that the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans (among professors located in voting registers) is 5 to 1. Let it be noted that the researchers made an effort to include schools reputed to be right-leaning. Some disciplines demonstrated more orthodoxy than others - with sociology departments showing a ratio of 44 Democrats to 1 Republican, but economics departments employing 2.8 Democrats for each member of the GOP.

Is it bias or self-selection? The two libertarian-leaning economics professors who conducted the California survey, San Jose State University's Christopher R. Cardiff and George Mason University's Daniel B. Klein, don't believe there is one quick, easy answer to that question, although they definitely see what Cardiff described as "subconscious bias."

"I think, partly, it is self-selection," said Klein over the phone Wednesday. He sees "something about intellectuals and hubris and conceit" in academia - with political scientists pumping themselves up as savvy saviors of a public sorely in need of their enlightened views. While liberal professors often think that they are open-minded, Klein believes that they also often think that "we're smarter" than those outside of academia, which gives them a right to "discriminate against people who get it wrong."

As a result, Klein asserts, an economics major might present a paper that argues that the New Deal deepened and prolonged the Great Depression, with supporting data, but "no matter how solid the research was, there's no way that would impress them." In their group-think, many social scientists marginalize heterodox thinkers.

Cardiff knows conservative professors "who are afraid to share their point of view," lest their colleagues turn on them. "You've got this situation where universities are professing to support intellectual freedom, academic freedom, when in reality there's a chilling effect on actual political discussion."

Many professors see their universe as expansive and novel. Yet, Cardiff noted, "If you're only getting one point of view, you're living in an echo chamber." The worst of it is, the most ideologically pure professors have so isolated themselves that, according to Cardiff, "a lot of these folks don't realize there are other opinions out there."

The Critical Review articles bared two disturbing trends: First, left-leaning academics are more orthodox than right-leaning academics. Klein, and Charlotta Stern of the Institute for Social Research in Stockholm, who conducted the social-scientist survey, polled academics about their views on where government intervention works best. They found "almost no diversity of opinion among the Democratic professors." Republicans - no surprise - demonstrated more ideological diversity. GOP scholars also are more likely to work outside the university - and that's no accident.

Second, as Klein succinctly put it, "It's going to become more lopsided in the future." Cardiff and Klein looked at the younger ranks in academia - tenure-track and associate profs - and found the ratio of Ds to Rs to be even greater.

So the future could see state universities morph into today's UC Berkeley, where Cardiff and Klein found 445 Dems to 45 Repubs. Group-think will further marginalize any free thinkers. If you think outside the box, you work outside the institution. That's where academia is heading.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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