I agree with a lot of this, especially the part about George and West needing to confront the thorny specifics of those more extreme potential cases directly. That said, in practice it seems like there's a lot of middle ground where it's not nearly as blatant.
While I also agree that "viewpoint diversity" doesn't quite make sense for a lot of classes, I have seen plenty of attempts to force certain views and conclusions in many of those same kinds of courses. One might have a GIS course themed around "environmental racism" or an economics course required to discuss "systematic disparities between marginalized groups."
The "solutions" being imposed from above, especially the ham-fisted way the Indiana law is constructed that doubles-down on centralized censorship, aren't helping and are generally exacerbating the problems of politicization. But I don't think these concerns came out of nowhere and it would behoove academia to have a better response.
You raise the valid point that many courses have a normative judgment “baked in” to the content, that for the most part professors have felt free to not address. A course on Shakespeare’s comedies comes with the implicit judgment that they are worth studying, and Tolstoy’s rants against them can be ignored. A course in Cost-Benefit Analysis - indeed, an entire degree in Economics - comes with a baked in methodological individualism / utilitarianism that a Marxist, or a communitarian, or a Rawlsian, would have objections to, but in my experience these critiques do not play much of a role if any at all in the courses.
The examples you give illustrate what the Indiana legislature was concerned about: courses with a left-wing perspective at its heart (ie the Econ department is not what they worry about). These are a much smaller proportion of courses than they think (my son took courses in GIS, and they were non-political / technique-focused), but give the impression, that George and West also perpetuate, that it’s politics everywhere, and so everything warrants review. I just don’t think that’s right.
They should have provided specific examples of invidious accusations and process-is-punishment investigations. I certainly can. Look at what happened to Bret Weinstein at Evergreen, Carole Hooven at Harvard, or Alex Shieh at Brown, or just go down the list of cases at FIRE.
That said, one detail they did cite is the 3% of faculty holding conservative views, and you didn't address it. What is the Michael Rushton plan for reforming that fraction toward something resembling the American populace, which is larger by a factor of ten?
Two things. First, Michael Rushton does not think the percentage of faculty who tend to vote Republican, or who hold conservative political views (I’m guessing a higher number), or who hold conservative views regarding university curriculum (a much higher number, as attendance at any faculty meeting discussing curricular changes will confirm) is as important as some people seem to think it is. The vast majority of courses do not (and generally should not) come to involve the political preferences of faculty, and faculty should rightly be disciplined if they spend their time in a course on the nineteenth-century Russian novel constantly airing their latest grievances against current administration policy (this is not to say it would be wrong for a professor in a class, say, on International Trade to question the efficacy of the current administration’s policies). There are many pressing issues facing the academy - I do not put the distribution of political leanings near the top of that list.
But, for the sake of argument, suppose it really did matter. Well, given the slowness in changing the composition of faculty through hiring practices - that would take decades of retirements and new hires - the fastest way to make change would be to change the political preferences of at least some of the existing faculty. So, a proposal. Let’s take a leader in Republican circles - J.D. Vance might be someone appropriate for this. Let him embark on a series of campus visits, addressing faculty groups. He could begin:
“Yes, I know I have said in speeches that professors, i.e. you, are the enemy. Our government has, through cuts and freezing of funds to the NSF and NIH, caused tremendous disruption and uncertainty to your long term research projects. We have upended the system of student visas, in one case at least trying to prevent a university from enrolling any foreign graduate students at all. We appointed, with Republican-led Senate confirmation, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. But I’m going to ask you to look past these things, as I try to persuade you that, even if you have not previously voted for Republicans, now is the time. …”
The extreme marginalization of professors who say they hold conservative views - which is what West and George are talking about - may not matter to you. But they lead to Vance's statements and his administration's policies, which evidently bother you quite a lot. Perhaps you should consider the former further.
Vance, mind you, has a JD from Yale. He is not some anti-education ignoramus. He looked at what's going on and asked why American taxpayers should be underwriting, among other things, progressive antisemitism at Harvard. Professors would be in a very different position if, in response to Vance calling them the enemy, could point to the myriad examples of non-progressives thriving in academia and the robust intellectual exchanges between opposing political camps. On the contrary, decades of selection assured that nothing of the sort was taking place. Administrations have adopted policies that wide swaths of Americans find repellant...
...and signifcant numbers if not majorities of faculty have remade their fields according to values that, again, wide swaths of Americans find repellant.
If I understand you, your stance is that George and West are not describing a real problem, nor am I, nor is FIRE. Is the state of free speech and intellectual life just fine at the universities and they should be left alone to operate as they have been all these decades, right down to their business model? That strikes me as an untenable view as the Intafada globalizes from Columbia to UC Berkeley and public support for higher education continues to decay.
I agree with a lot of this, especially the part about George and West needing to confront the thorny specifics of those more extreme potential cases directly. That said, in practice it seems like there's a lot of middle ground where it's not nearly as blatant.
While I also agree that "viewpoint diversity" doesn't quite make sense for a lot of classes, I have seen plenty of attempts to force certain views and conclusions in many of those same kinds of courses. One might have a GIS course themed around "environmental racism" or an economics course required to discuss "systematic disparities between marginalized groups."
The "solutions" being imposed from above, especially the ham-fisted way the Indiana law is constructed that doubles-down on centralized censorship, aren't helping and are generally exacerbating the problems of politicization. But I don't think these concerns came out of nowhere and it would behoove academia to have a better response.
You raise the valid point that many courses have a normative judgment “baked in” to the content, that for the most part professors have felt free to not address. A course on Shakespeare’s comedies comes with the implicit judgment that they are worth studying, and Tolstoy’s rants against them can be ignored. A course in Cost-Benefit Analysis - indeed, an entire degree in Economics - comes with a baked in methodological individualism / utilitarianism that a Marxist, or a communitarian, or a Rawlsian, would have objections to, but in my experience these critiques do not play much of a role if any at all in the courses.
The examples you give illustrate what the Indiana legislature was concerned about: courses with a left-wing perspective at its heart (ie the Econ department is not what they worry about). These are a much smaller proportion of courses than they think (my son took courses in GIS, and they were non-political / technique-focused), but give the impression, that George and West also perpetuate, that it’s politics everywhere, and so everything warrants review. I just don’t think that’s right.
They should have provided specific examples of invidious accusations and process-is-punishment investigations. I certainly can. Look at what happened to Bret Weinstein at Evergreen, Carole Hooven at Harvard, or Alex Shieh at Brown, or just go down the list of cases at FIRE.
https://www.thefire.org/cases
That said, one detail they did cite is the 3% of faculty holding conservative views, and you didn't address it. What is the Michael Rushton plan for reforming that fraction toward something resembling the American populace, which is larger by a factor of ten?
Two things. First, Michael Rushton does not think the percentage of faculty who tend to vote Republican, or who hold conservative political views (I’m guessing a higher number), or who hold conservative views regarding university curriculum (a much higher number, as attendance at any faculty meeting discussing curricular changes will confirm) is as important as some people seem to think it is. The vast majority of courses do not (and generally should not) come to involve the political preferences of faculty, and faculty should rightly be disciplined if they spend their time in a course on the nineteenth-century Russian novel constantly airing their latest grievances against current administration policy (this is not to say it would be wrong for a professor in a class, say, on International Trade to question the efficacy of the current administration’s policies). There are many pressing issues facing the academy - I do not put the distribution of political leanings near the top of that list.
But, for the sake of argument, suppose it really did matter. Well, given the slowness in changing the composition of faculty through hiring practices - that would take decades of retirements and new hires - the fastest way to make change would be to change the political preferences of at least some of the existing faculty. So, a proposal. Let’s take a leader in Republican circles - J.D. Vance might be someone appropriate for this. Let him embark on a series of campus visits, addressing faculty groups. He could begin:
“Yes, I know I have said in speeches that professors, i.e. you, are the enemy. Our government has, through cuts and freezing of funds to the NSF and NIH, caused tremendous disruption and uncertainty to your long term research projects. We have upended the system of student visas, in one case at least trying to prevent a university from enrolling any foreign graduate students at all. We appointed, with Republican-led Senate confirmation, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. But I’m going to ask you to look past these things, as I try to persuade you that, even if you have not previously voted for Republicans, now is the time. …”
The extreme marginalization of professors who say they hold conservative views - which is what West and George are talking about - may not matter to you. But they lead to Vance's statements and his administration's policies, which evidently bother you quite a lot. Perhaps you should consider the former further.
Vance, mind you, has a JD from Yale. He is not some anti-education ignoramus. He looked at what's going on and asked why American taxpayers should be underwriting, among other things, progressive antisemitism at Harvard. Professors would be in a very different position if, in response to Vance calling them the enemy, could point to the myriad examples of non-progressives thriving in academia and the robust intellectual exchanges between opposing political camps. On the contrary, decades of selection assured that nothing of the sort was taking place. Administrations have adopted policies that wide swaths of Americans find repellant...
https://www.chronicle.com/article/higher-ed-brought-this-on-itself
...and signifcant numbers if not majorities of faculty have remade their fields according to values that, again, wide swaths of Americans find repellant.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/tenure-track-in-higher-ed-is-going-extinct/
I agree with you that the Indiana legislature does not have effective solutions to offer here. This fellow does, but you're not going to like it.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/trump-must-break-up-the-college-cartel/
If I understand you, your stance is that George and West are not describing a real problem, nor am I, nor is FIRE. Is the state of free speech and intellectual life just fine at the universities and they should be left alone to operate as they have been all these decades, right down to their business model? That strikes me as an untenable view as the Intafada globalizes from Columbia to UC Berkeley and public support for higher education continues to decay.