I've posted before about conservative claims of persecution by the allegedly leftist academic establishment. Most of these are avbanced by a handful of well-funded right-wing outfits seeking out and disseminating reports of individual incidents of such persecution. The champion in this field is David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine, which recently carried this report, written (allegedly, see below) by a Kuwaiti student, Ahmad Al-Qloushi, charging his professor with an egregious instance of enforcing political bias, culminating in being told "you need regular psychotherapy" for writing a paper with which the professor disagreed.
The only problem is that the few pieces of verifiable information in the article turn out to be highly dubious. For starters, he writes: "Most of all we remember our one-week-old baby cousin who died while the Iraqi invaders were stealing incubators from hospitals to sell them for profit." This isn't true, because the incubator story is a fraud. Later on, he claims that, in his high school in Kuwait, "Many of my teachers were Palestinian; they hated America, they hated my worldview, and they did their best to brainwash me." As a comment on the article's discussion page points out, this is also extremely unlikely, as most Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait after the first Gulf War. So already his credibility is in serious doubt.
Moving on, Al-Qloushi's story centers around the final exam for an introductory class in American politics and government:
A week before thanksgiving Professor Woolcock assigned us a take home final exam. The final exam consisted solely of one required essay: "Dye and Zeigler contend that the Constitution of the United States was not 'ordained and established' by 'the people' as we have so often been led to believe. They contend instead that it was written by a small educated and wealthy elite in America who were representative of powerful economic and political interests. Analyze the US constitution (original document), and show how its formulation excluded the majority of the people living in America at that time, and how it was dominated by America's elite interest." ...I disagreed completely with Dye and Zeigler’s thesis. I wrote an essay defending America’s Founding Fathers and upholding the US constitution as a pioneering document, which has contributed to extraordinary freedoms in America and other corners of the world - including my corner, the Middle East.
Here's where it really gets interesting, as Al-Qloushi has helpfully provided us with a link to the paper in question. Oddly enough, the paper precedes the essay question with the numeral three, suggesting that the topic was one of at least three options for the final paper, which Al-Qloushi specifically chose to write
But more importantly, and for lack of a better word, his paper is shit. It is riddled with grammatical errors and makes no scholarly references whatsoever (unless you include two unsourced quotations, made without comment or explanation, from Thomas Jefferson and George W. Bush). The content is entirely polemical ("If [the Constitution] was so negative how did the Soviet Union collapse in the Cold War?") and analyzes neither the authors cited in the question nor the text of the Constitution itself.
The story gets even fishier given this press release, put out by the College Republicans chapter, of which Al-Qloushi is the president (a fact it negelects to mention, although the later FrontPage article does). The release was issued a day after the incident in question, and leads with an argument for Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights," which the American Association of Univeristy Professors has labeled an "infringe[ment] on academic freedom".
Horowitz has a history of deliberately provoking campus political controversies with outrageous behavior, notably through an incident involving newspaper ads attacking reparations for slavery a few years ago. It seems quite likely that this whole affair was premeditated, designed to provoke the professor into rejecting the paper and turning Al-Qloushi into a cause celebre for the right-wing media and an argument for the "Academic Bill of Rights".
Premeditated or not, it worked. The story has been picked up by the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, the UC Davis student newspaper, and dozens of right-wing blogs. At least one intelligent progressive blogger has pointed to it, apparently accepting the story at face value. (The San Jose Mercury News, to its credit, expressed skepticism about the story's veracity.)
This is the power of the right-wing spin machine: to take a dubious, and likely bogus, account of an isolated incident, turn it into an argument for a deceptive public policy measure, and immediately reach thousands of readers.
Following up on my earlier post point to Juan Cole's comments on conservatives in academia, I've just stumbled upon recent blogging along similar lines from Paul Waldman and Peter Levine, commenting on Jonathan Chait and Timothy Burke, respectively. Good stuff, and it's about time we started returning fire. My favorite graf comes from Chait:
A few weeks ago, a pair of studies found that Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among professors at leading universities. Conservatives gleefully seized upon this to once again flagellate academia for its liberal bias.
Am I the only person who fails to understand why conservatives see this finding as vindication? After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?
Anyone who's been anywhere near a college campus lately has heard the incessant whining that political conservatives are a savagely oppressed minority (thank you David Horowitz). It's been a pet peeve of mine since day one at school, so it is with great glee that I now read Juan Cole laying the smack down:
There are about 1.1 million post-secondary teachers in the United States. A lot of the ones in the Red States are conservatives, and a lot of the ones in the engineering schools everywhere are. So it simply is not true that "universities" are bastions of the political left. Moreover, there are almost no leftists in any major economics department in the United States, in contrast to Europe. ...I have been in a major history department for 20 years, and have served on innumerable search committees, in my own department and in other units on campus. I have never, ever, even once, heard any search committee member broach the political party affiliation of a candidate for a position, and there has never been any way to even know such a thing from the materials submitted. ...
The most logical explanation for any political bias in some parts of the professoriate in my view is that the sort of persons with the skills to be in a major academic liberal arts department could also be successful in business, lobbying, law, advertising and other well-paying professions. And it is the corporate world and its lobbying appendages that have the marked bias, to the Right. Someone who has academic skills but is a Republican would just have enormous opportunities and could easily become a multi-millionnaire. In contrast, academics on the Left would not be welcome in corporate boardrooms or at a think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, and wouldn't be comfortable in such a position. (All think tanks hire explicitly by ideology, and 17 of the 19 most influential ones in Washington are deliberately staffed by conservatives ...)
Check out the whole thing for a laundry list of effective arguments to use the next time you hear this canard.
So I spent a lot of time complaining with some friends about hipsters yesterday. (Specifically Prescott ones, for those of you at Hampshire.) To my amazement, there is an entire blog, very cleverly written, catering to this tendency. Also, this is very funny.
This is a cultural trend which should be encouraged, lest the entire college-educated youth population of this country be reduced to snorting cocaine, buying trucker hats at thrift stores, and developing an "ironic" appreciation of network television. God help us.
P.S. I just remembered The Onion once ran a hysterically funny piece entitled something like "Family Unsure What to Do With Dead Hipster's Possessions," but it doesn't appear to be online any longer. Very sad.
I just noticed this thought-provoking article from last week's New York Times magazine:
... the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more -- it might require us to give up our money. ...This, if you're on the right, is the gratifying thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem. And it is also a rich people's solution. For as long as we're committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don't have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately diverse, we don't have to worry that most people can't go to them, while others get to do so because they've had the good luck to be born into relatively wealthy families. In other words, as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won't have to worry about inequality.
I'm not quite ready to give up on race-based affirmative action -- racial disparities are still far too persistent in all areas of American life. But I think Michaels's basic point is a good and challenging one. Some of the fault lies with a privileged liberalism which prefers not see to its own institutions challenged. But, unfortunately, I think it's also fair to lay some blame at the feet of identity politics. When everything becomes about observable differences in social identity, structural inequality -- class-based and otherwise -- goes out the window.
So discussion in class this afternoon turned to the dichotomy between conservative rhetoric of personal responsibility, and social science which tells us that people's life choices and life chances are impacted greatly by larger social structures. We take a break (3 hour class), and I get to talking with the professor about our "Democracy Day" actions last week, and ongoing concerns about how difficult Hampshire makes it for students to have any say in decision-making. He transitions back into class by making a joke about viewing a student's problems as a failure to take personal responsibility vs. the product of how the institution is organized.
The more I think about it, the more I think the comparison makes sense. Obviously decision-making at Hampshire College as an issue pales in comparison to racial disparities in health and health care, but I really think it's the same basic phenomenon operating. Surely no progressive-oriented person at Hampshire would argue that poor people don't vote in national elections because they're lazy, so why is it okay to make the same argument about Hampshire politics? Could it be that some of the same factors affecting political participation generally -- lack of available time, understanding of the process, alienation from decision-makers, and sense of political efficacy -- affect participation in decision-making at Hampshire? And shouldn't we expect decision-makers to be concerned?