In response to me, Devin Helton writes,
what these complaints ignore is that intellectual narrowness in academia has been a major problem for many decades. The devastating real world consequences have already happened.
His long post includes many citations, although he leaves out Allan Bloom, regarded by many as the ur-complainer on these matters. One of his links goes to a post put up almost exactly four years ago by Timothy Burke, a Swarthmore history professor, who wrote
the conversation about diversity usually boils down to fixed identarian formulas, to improving the percentage of recognized groups, not to diversifying the kinds of experience (and passions) that professionals can bring to intellectual work. I feel intuitively that the generation of faculty just ahead of me, people from their late 50s to 70s, are more diverse in this sense if not racially so. I know considerably more first-generation scholars whose passionate connection to intellectual work got them into academia in that generation than in any younger cohort.
That fits with my diagnosis. I think that as the pre-1960s-era professors (meaning professors who got their Ph.D’s before 1970) have aged out of academia, there has been an acceleration in the trend toward doctrinaire belief and away from rational thought.
The story as I am suggesting it is that starting around 1970, graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences started to filter out independent thinkers. By 1990, your chances of having a thesis adviser who was a Thinker rather than a Doctrinairian were somewhat low. They dwindled rapidly thereafter. So the cohort that is now entering into teaching positions is almost devoid of Thinkers, and they are replacing the few Thinkers from before 1970.
Of course, there remains the possibility that what has changed over the past 15-25 years is that I have become a right-wing nut job. Or that the biases in academia have remained approximately constant, and the increase has been in the amount of complaining and anecdote-recitation among conservatives and in conservative media.
Arnold,
You seem to consider MIT as a doctrinaire place, which exemplifies this trend. But I note that:
1) Daron Acemoglu is one of the least doctrinaire thinkers in economics by any measure
2) He is probably the most important researcher at MIT
3) He is also probably the most frequent thesis supervisor at MIT
So it seems to me that one of the top couple of PhD programmes in economics belies your claims.
You gotta be kidding. Acemoglu is a temple to Doctrinaire braindead thinking. He is the farthest thing form a Thinker.
this is demonstrably false. Acemoglu is attempting to reinvent macroeconomics entirely, by bringing in networks. Whether or not you agree with this, the complete departure from anything price theoretic is massively different from most of macro. Even if you dislike his work on institutions, it is obviously innovative. Plus the sheer breadth of his contributions is very, very far from dogmatic.
You should read more before talking about things like this.
I think that you are characterizing academia accurately to a first approximation but that there is a lot of variation. On the worse side of things, schools that emphasize teaching over research likely draw a more ideological crowd. On the flip side, what Angrist and Steffen-Pischke call the credibility revolution is taking hold in a lot of different places, for instance in my department, Columbia political science. Certainly as a whole we lean left, but our primary interest is improving estimation through research design, particularly field experiments.
Granted, little of this filters down to the undergraduate level. My prospective dissertation committee teaches few, if any, undergrad classes, and the adjunct faculty who teach the intro classes where we reach the most students are selected from a different pool. But we could solve that particular problem.
What schools emphasize teaching over research? Community colleges, maybe? Certainly no major institution.
At the risk of missing sarcasm -most of them. A single state may have one or two flagship research schools, followed by a half dozen or more regional comprehensive schools where teaching is more important than research. Then there are the public liberal arts schools -maybe one per state is too high, but not by much. Then, of course, the community and technical colleges below that. Private schools are the same, with more small teaching and liberal arts schools than big research schools.
On the OP, I think this is backwards. Conservative researchers will gravitate towards think tanks, because they’ll actually get a hearing there. Conservative teachers are more likely to appear in the regional comprehensives and the liberal arts schools, both because they can get a hearing there, either on tenure track or as an adjunct, and because of an ideological attachment to classical education forms. They’ll still be greatly underrepresented, but more prevalent than at the R1 schools.
I think the “is,research or teaching mphasized more” discussion is (like every discussion) highly simplified (perhaps rightfully so).
Teaching and research have much different standards. If we could give students as much market power as granting agencies and tenure committees then maybe the emphasis would balance out.
What exactly do you mean by “teaching is more important”? As in professors and instructors are evaluated on their teaching skills and retained accordingly? Professors and instructors are routinely put through workshops to improve their teaching skills? Professors and instructors have instructional designers on hand to assist them with curriculum design? I know this is often the case at vocational schools and maybe community colleges (which, yes, are a large part of the educational system), but this certainly doesn’t seem to be the case at large state schools, not to mention the elite private universities. I don’t know about state satellite campuses, though, but I would guess that their hiring practices also reflect the main campuses.
Yes. Exactly.
There is an entire world of higher education between R1 and Community/Technology schools where this is the case, and the professors also do research.
These aren’t satellite schools, they are usually a different system entirely. They might also be independent.
You identify them by the teaching load. Community colleges are 5/5 or even 6/6 loads. Flagship research schools are 3/3 or even 2/3. I’ve seen some research faculty carrying loads as low as 2/1. My institution is a 4/4. Half my job is teaching, only a quarter research.
You can also compare the ratio of graduate to undergraduate students (not a perfect number, some research schools also want to be premier teaching schools). More teaching oriented schools have more undergrads.
And there are schools starting to track professors. Georgia Regents University does this. They have research faculty who have low teaching loads and high research requirements, and they have teaching faculty with high teaching loads and low research requirements.
I’m in academia (grad student) but not in the liberal arts. I’m in physics. This discussion reminds me strongly of what we talk about often in my field: publish or perish.
I don’t think you can have a conversation about any academic in any field — and about whether they are Thinkers or “Doctrinairians” — without including a discussion of which type is favoured by the need to publish widely and constantly.
The professors that I know but dislike at my institution continue to succeed because they continue to publish widely, but what they publish just seems so banal that I wonder where the real physicists are anymore. The really interesting “old geezers” that I stumbled across as an undergrad, and whose papers suckered me into grad school, are rarely under the age of 60. A Thinker entering the professoriat now would never get tenure for three amazing papers versus the author of 30 iterations of the currently-popular mathematical navel-gazing. I suspect that this mirrors the experience of “right-wing nut job” grad students in the liberal arts. You can’t spend a lot of time “thinking” and being “out there” and get tenure, because you won’t be published enough.
Over two generations of PhDs (60s to now) that would seem to result in the homogeneous pap our universities have evolved into, no?
Formerly in France, the productivity of a farm and its steward could be evidenced by the size of its manure pile.
It was indicative of what it could grow, but only by being spread in the outlying fields.
I did not attend; nor did any of my offspring.
Why do we not read about the United States Military Academy and its success(es) in learning for objectives; as a relief comparison to other “institutions,” with their “administrations” and relative status objectives?
I did my graduate coursework in Asian literature in the late 70’s, and that timeline sounds about right to me. There were two advisors at my ivy league university in my field at that time, and the younger one taught a theory course among others, while the older one taught the works themselves. By the time I finished my dissertation under the latter, postmodernism theory and its execrable writing style was rife in the books and journals. Now it all seems to be about gender, class and race.
I presently work as a nursing assistant and as a gatherer of shopping carts. I find this work unpleasant, and I scored above-average at GRE, so I am considering entry into pro academia
I have few original ideas, but I think I can join the Klingon team and teach sound Klingon thought. Which field should I enter, so as to win important gains on behalf of the Klingon team, without preemptive filtration by PC teams?
I am not smart enough for Econ grad school, or math grad school. Gre 169 talk, 158 math. undergrad in romance tongues, performance poor, minor school
ya’ll r wise and smart and academically savvy
We still aren’t quite ready to go with the idea that it is racist to use nominal race identification as a proxy for other qualities.
I would look at a comparison of the fields with an eye on which fields are vulnerable to consolidation of thought behind some grand theory. Econ, psychology, (even) physics, and climate come to mind.
And does the grant system exacerbate this consolidation?
“The story as I am suggesting it is that starting around 1970, graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences started to filter out independent thinkers. By 1990, your chances of having a thesis adviser who was a Thinker rather than a Doctrinairian were somewhat low. They dwindled rapidly thereafter.”
That seems generally correct to me.
Two things to note though:
First:, the craziness of academia started long before 1970. Rothbard’s essay Power and the Intellectuals is required reading for anyone interested in this issue. The religious zealotry and statist impulses of the turn-of-the-century intellectuals is a terrible wonder to behold. Richard Ely, the founder of the American Economic Association, believed that the state was a divine instrument, and wanted to create a conscript industrial army to forge a better people. And actually it goes even further back — Harvard was founded as a Puritan seminary after all.
Another way of noting the craziness is to simply look at the buildings built in 1950 to 1960. The buildings are terrible, they are hideously ugly. This was a result of craziness taking over the academic architectural departments, and that craziness spreading into the profession.
So there was always a lot of crazy, but from 1850 to 1970, it does seem like there was genuine free thought, and ideas of all sorts were tolerated. Crazy ideas were promoted and popular in academia, but professors with more sane and accurate world-views were not filtered out.
Second: this debate is often framed as whether academia is doctrinaire versus free-thinking. Well, there is an infinite number of ways of being wrong. And academia’s job is to filter out wrongness and find truth. So academia cannot and should not be tolerant of any and all views. It is reasonable that a tenure committee would think, “Your views are so wrong that it is indicative that you cannot contribute to the work of progressing human knowledge.” The problem isn’t really that academia is doctrinaire. In some ways, there are many views professed now that could not be accepted in 1960. The problem is that the true views, the accurate world-view, is being filtered out. This was the case that I noted in my blog post about my college’s urban studies and sociology department. The problem wasn’t so much that they were doctrinaire, as that they were utterly wrong, obviously wrong. A lot of people like to fall back on “academia is too doctrinaire” argument because it is easier to get sympathy on all sides. Making this argument doesn’t require staking out an actual position on hot-button issues.
good point, Devin. academia seems like a free-for-all bounded within the counterculture.
there is a good blog post somewhere on internets about how new sociology and philosophy departments r formed under aliases like critical theory and comparative literature to accommodate disagreement, so that multiple, mutually supportive left orthodoxies can coexist despite irreconcilable views