From the Iowa City Press-Citizen:
Breakdown of UI facultyIt was just a couple months ago that the UI History department was revealed to have 27 Democrats and zero Republicans.
Out of 2,527 people:
• Democrat: 1,173 (46.4 percent)
• No party: 397 (15.7 percent)
• Republican: 205 (8.1 percent)
• Not registered: 752 (29.8 percent)
• There are 18 departments at UI with at least 10 registered faculty voters that include 80 percent or more registered Democrats, including Spanish and Portuguese, social work and community and behavioral health.
• There are 21 departments with at least 10 registered faculty voters with one or fewer Republicans, including the College of Law, teaching and learning and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
• There are seven departments with at least 10 registered faculty voters with zero registered Republicans, including history, anthropology and religious studies.
• If there is a Republican stronghold, it is in internal medicine, where there are 33 registered Republicans, or about 14.7 percent of registered voters. However, that also is the department with the largest number of Democrats. Internal medicine has 131 registered Democrats, which makes up 58.5 percent of the department.
• The department that comes in second is also the same for both parties. Pediatrics has 76 registered Democrats, or 61.8 percent, and 18 registered Republican voters, or 14.6 percent.
• Nursing has the third most registered Democrats with 66, or 74.2 percent, while anesthesia has the third most registered Republicans with 12, or 25.5 percent of the department.
• The departments with at least 10 or more registered voters with the highest percentage of Republicans are cardiothoracic surgery with four voters, or 36.4 percent, management sciences with six voters or 33.3 percent, urology with four voters, or 33.3 percent, otolaryngology head neck surgery with eight voters, or 29.6 percent, and biomedical engineering with 10 voters, or 27.8 percent.
• Possibly the most political department -- political science -- is 69.2 percent registered Democrat, among registered voters. There are 18 Democrats and two registered Republicans.
What do you do about it?
Well, you can't force people to switch their political affiliation and "affirmative action" based on political party preference is a ridiculous idea.
You pretty much have to keep pumping out these stories to the public in order to wake people up to the fact that "diversity" at the University of Iowa is a crock and that those in charge of it are hypocrites.
Oh, and you make fun of them. You ridicule them.
The "diversity" types, I mean. Not the Republicans the university "accidentally" hired. Ha ha! Because you know somewhere deep within the University of Iowa there are people wanting to "politically cleanse" the school of all Republicans. They're almost finished, by the looks of things.
What is this supposed to prove?
ReplyDeleteYeah, when people advance through their studies and start to gain perspective and education they tend to become more progressive.
This isn't specific to the University of Iowa, this is academia. It also has something to do with the marketplace of ideas. Isn't the purpose of inquiry in general to find out which ideas "float to the top."
Do you think there's this huge surplus of conservative professors out panhandling because they can't get a job? Of course not, it's because when informed people are given time to study and think about issues and ideas, they often find at least some elements of progressive thought appealing.
And if there were a bunch of panhandling Republican poli sci professors, wouldn't that just be the free market having it's say?
Thats funny, --when people progress through their studies they become more progressive. How about the really smart, the ones who grasp higher ideals go into private jobs and what is left teach at UI.
ReplyDeleteI guess I don't understand why it's assumed that the "really smart" people go take jobs in private enterprise?
ReplyDeleteUnless you move from the premise that taking jobs in the private enterprise is naturally what smart people do, which I think is kind of a weird premise to start from, then I'm not sure what you mean.
I made no claims about academics being "smarter" than others, just that they think about issues, assuming their rational, weigh the relative evidence that they get and make a decision about the kind of world they want to live in. They also have the benefits of world class research facilities and are conversant in how to use the facilities. While this doesn't make what academics say wrong or right, it does, at the very least, leave them uniquely susceptible to making an informed decision. Which, of course, does not mean that they have the informed decision maker market cornered.
You take a large number of academics making these kinds of inquiries on a large scale and it turns out that they are in general agreement on various issues.
Right or wrong, it's one more piece of evidence that we ALL use to make our personal decisions about what kind of philosophy we choose to support or policies we wish to implement.
I also think that, at least in some respects, you're providing a false dichotomy. In the law school, for example, many of the faculty have spent a significant amount of time in the private sector. This, to me, wouldn't suggest that they've been insulated, but rather have a relatively broad perspective about the value of the various political philosophies being offered.
The only thing I really don't get is this talk about "higher ideals." I assume it's something about god. Please explain.
At his economics blog, Greg Mankiw recently linked Marc Linder's homepage at the UI College of Law because of Linder's 1977 book, The Anti-Samuelson.
ReplyDeleteSo the number of Marxists on the UI law faculty is at least as great as the number of registered Republicans. : )
Not that I have anything against Professor Linder, and perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps UI already has such an expert. But I believe it would be of greater value to have someone equally knowledgeable about (and not hostile to) the classical liberal ideas of Bruno Leoni.
See here for an online book by Leoni, Freedom and the Law, and see the url's below for related articles from the 1988 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (pdf):
www.stephankinsella.com/texts/aranson_leoni-retrospect-liggio-palmer-reply.pdf
www.tomgpalmer.com/papers/palmer-aranson-harvard-v11n3.pdf
Leoni was a friend of Nobel Prize winner F.A. Hayek, and his thinking was along the same lines. Unlike Hayek, though, Leoni was an attorney or a specialist in the law. He died tragically in an auto accident in 1967.
A few years ago, I was channel surfing and happened to catch Brian Lamb interviewing some longhair professor who sounded pretty interesting, Mark Edmundson, on C-Span's Booknotes. So I watched. His book was Why Read? I found out later that this was the last Booknotes Lamb ever produced. Interestingly, I also found out later (on the web) that a article by Edmundson in 2004 apparently had something of the same effect as the book The Closing of the American Mind did in 1986:
Mark Edmundson’s Harper’s Magazine article "On the Uses of the Liberal Arts" is reported to be the most photocopied essay on college campuses over the last five years. Ruminating on his essay and the intense reaction to it, Edmundson exposes universities’ ever-growing consumerism at the expense of a challenging, life-altering liberal arts education.
I hardly ever watch such things. But I found Edmundson to be engaging, honest, and knowledgeable and enjoyed watching the whole thing. Lamb's last question (on his very last Booknotes) was whether Edmundson had ever read The Road to Serfdom, by F.A. Hayek.
Somewhat telling, but to his credit, Edmundson said he had never heard of it. He planned to read it.
For a quick primer, I would also recommend Hayek's 1945 article, The Use of Knowledge in Society.
Mark Bauerlein, who penned the recent Register op-ed about the UI history department, had an article related to this topic in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2004, Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual.
I dare say that I may be more knowledgeable of the work of Leoni and Hayek and related authors than anyone on the UI law faculty. And that isn't saying much.
If I am mistaken, I would be interested in what those in the history department have to say.
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ReplyDeletePS: Any problems with the pdf links (the urls), because they run off the margin, simply triple-click so your cursor highlights the entire line (and copy it to another browser window or tab), or swipe all the way from the left to the right (and it should highlight the entire url, including the part you cannot see).
ReplyDeleteI find the premise because one is involved in academia and has access to "special" knowledge that he/she thinks more of what kind of world they want to live in is a bit silly. They have no special access to knowledge or better ideals or think any more than anyone else about the world they would love to live in. I think perhaps the better example of why there tends to be more liberals on college campuses is due to hiring processes. (Higher ideals is wisdom but God could be a good answer, too.)
ReplyDeleteA link to the condensed (Reader's Digest) version of The Road to Serfdom is available at the bottom of my above link, "The Road to Serfdom." I've never actually read the condensed version.
ReplyDeleteHayek's writings are voluminous, but The Constitution of Liberty provides a fuller exposition of such ideas.
For the YouTube generation, an illustrated version of the Road to Serfdom is available here. : )
A couple of years ago I happened across a new constitutional law textbook, The American Constitutional Order: History, Cases, and Philosophy.
ReplyDeleteYou can find the Table of Contents at that link.
And here is a review:
A recent essay in the HARVARD LAW REVIEW by Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson criticized the current study of constitutional law for being preoccupied with the opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court. The consequences of this preoccupation, these leading constitutional theorists maintained, are inadequate attention to JUSTICE and too much SPECIALIZATION by academics.
THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER, a new constitutional law casebook by Douglas Kmiec and Stephen Presser, is a notable exception to Balkin and Levinson's thoughtful concerns. As Kmiec and Presser remark in the Introduction to their casebook: "Cases emerge from history, and history itself reflects centuries of philosophical understanding. Our aim, therefore, was for a constitutional text that, quite simply and openly, puts cases in context" . . . .
I have only scanned it, but it appeared to me that one could more than adequately learn what the American (constitutional) law "is" from it, as well as pick up a lot that you won't find in other casebooks. In fact, compared to others it appeared less 'stuffed' with thousands of opinions, each followed by hundreds of questions (which can leave readers wondering what the point is).
As for Kmiec's constitutional law philosophy, you get a lot from the text. But a 1997 article in the Harvard Journal for Law and Public Policy, "Natural-Law Originalism - Or Why Justice Scalia (Almost) Gets It Right," provides more. That issue also includes other articles about natural law (scroll down to Summer 1997 for the cites).
I've noticed in the past that Kmiec is sometimes included in panel discussions on The Newshour on PBS.
Shannon--
ReplyDeleteI think you're missing the main point: that there's really nothing that can be done to stop people from having a certain political viewpoint. Academics tend to have a more progressive worldview. Like I said before, this makes them neither right nor wrong, but, like State 29, I see little state sponsored solution that is necessary. Whine if you will, ridicule if you will, but there big boys and they can make decisions for themselves.
I also think you need to make sure that that you're engaging honestly with the text that you're engaging with. If nothing else, you can put this constructive criticism to use in the future.
For example, there are several assertions in your last comment that I take issue with:
1.
"I find the premise because one is involved in academia and has access to "special" knowledge that he/she thinks more of what kind of world they want to live in is a bit silly."
First of all, I never used the word knowledge and certainly not the word "special." Why you would put that in quotes is beyond me. As anyone can see from reading the above comment, here is what I said:
"They also have the benefits of world class research facilities and are conversant in how to use the facilities. While this doesn't make what academics say wrong or right, it does, at the very least, leave them uniquely susceptible to making an informed decision. Which, of course, does not mean that they have the informed decision maker market cornered."
Not only do I not say they have access to "special knowledge" (do you see, same words you used), I explicitly provide that they don't have the market cornered.
2. You also wrote:
"They have no special access to knowledge or better ideals or think any more than anyone else about the world they would love to live in."
Again. I made none of these claims. In fact, I agree with all of that. Read my note again if you are unsure.
3. You also wrote:
"I think perhaps the better example of why there tends to be more liberals on college campuses is due to hiring processes. (Higher ideals is wisdom but God could be a good answer, too.)"
Once again, I have the same problem with this analysis that I had with the original post. Are we really to believe that there are a bunch of out of work conservative professors begging for spare change?
I think the reason that there are more liberal academics follows, if anything, some very basic rules of supply and demand.
I hope this clears up some misunderstanding.
Thou doth protest too much.
ReplyDeleteI try to avoid the parsing of words, because like most people, I have better things to do.
But really: "uniquely susceptible to making an informed decision" is hardly that different from "'special' knowledge."
A definition of "unique":
1. Being the only one of its kind
2. Without an equal or equivalent; unparalleled
together with a usage note:
For many grammarians, unique is the paradigmatic absolute term, a shibboleth that distinguishes between those who understand that such a term cannot be modified by an adverb of degree or a comparative adverb and those who do not. These grammarians would say that a thing is either unique or not unique and that it is therefore incorrect to say that something is very unique or more unique than something else. Most of the Usage Panel supports this traditional view. Eighty percent . . .
And "susceptible":
2. accessible or especially liable or subject to some influence, mood, agency, etc.
What good is being "uniquely susceptible" to making an informed decision if it doesn't result in special knowledge? You explicitly say they don't "have the informed decision maker market cornered," but at the same time you imply precisely that academics are more likely to have special knowledge.
Or should I also link the definitions of "special" and "knowledge."
I saw nothing 'dishonest' with that use of those terms. "Special" appeared to me to be put in quotes precisely because it wasn't a direct quote, but rather paraphrasing. Perhaps it should not have been, but this is just a blog, and I fail to see how it is all that inaccurate characterization of what you said.
You also said earlier:
"Do you think there's this huge surplus of conservative professors out panhandling because they can't get a job? Of course not, it's because when informed people are given time to study and think about issues and ideas, . . ."
It sounds kind of special to me.
A person uniquely susceptible to being informed seems to me more likely to achieve the logical outome: special knowledge.
Myself, I think someone on a law faculty with as many Marxists as registered Republican might instead be more uniquely susceptible to groupthink.
Furthermore, one might reasonably believe that would have an effect on the people they hire.
As to whether there is a "huge surplus" (a strawman) of conservative professors "panhandling" to get a job, obviously economic incentives matter.
There were two recent posts here about a history professor who didn't get an interview for an interview for a position at the UI (here and here). Now, if someone with a "bachelor's degree from Harvard, doctorate from Cambridge; two books, one with Cambridge University Press; laudatory recommendations from distinguished historians; and a growing record of public commentary in national periodicals" can't even get an interview with the University of Iowa history department, one might logically believe that this would affect the career decisions of conservative Republicans who might otherwise consider an academic career.
Particularly when the department is already 27-0 Democrats?
The thinking process might go something like this:
Let's see, someone with degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, two books, and laudatory recommendations from distinguished historians, can't even get a job interview with the University of Iowa. I wonder where I might stand after investing all that time and money to achieve, what in all likelihood would be lesser credentials?
It is rational to believe that such an outcome has a chilling effect.
In the former USSR, the expression of certain thoughts were more likely to result in a to trip to Siberia. It is rational to believe that that resulted in fewer people expressing those thoughts.
It hardly can be considered a "huge surplus," but according to Bauerlein in that article from the Chronicle for Education:
Although I've met several conservative intellectuals in the last year who would love an academic post but have given up after years of trying, outright blackballing is rare. The disparate outcome emerges through an indirect filtering process that runs from graduate school to tenure and beyond. . . .
I've seen similar thoughts expressed in articles before (e.g., David Brooks). This is one reason why so many go to work at think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Insitute, and so on.
This is hardly a new phenonmenon. The two great Austrian economists, F.A. Hayek, and his friend and teacher, Ludwig von Mises, had difficulties securing positions in American universities in the 1940s and thereafter. Hayek was able to get a position at the University of Chicago, but not in the economics department - and his salary was paid by a conservative foundation, the Volker Fund. Nearing retirement, when Hayek learned that he would not qualify for a university pension, he took a position at a German university. Similarly, von Mises was able to conduct an economics seminar at NYU - but his salary had to be paid by the Volker Fund.
Ironically, the year Mises died, 1973, Nobel Prize winner and M.I.T. professor Paul Samuelson predicted in his best-selling introductory Economics text that the U.S.S.R. might catch up with the U.S. in per capita income as early as 1990 and almost certainly by 2015. At the time per capita income in the U.S.S.R. was roughly half that in the U.S. In contrast, Mises predicted in 1920 that the economic system U.S.S.R. was certain to fail (and on a sidenote, his personal papers from Vienna were later discovered in a secret Soviet vault after it did). In 1974, Hayek appropriately also won a Nobel.
Both Mises and Hayek were certainly well qualified for full professorships in the United States. It was specifically their ideas about economics that prevented them from being hired.
Perhaps you agree with all of this. But I wouldn't consider the above "whining" but rather simply stating facts.
I agree, the parsing is getting lame. I regret using the word "uniquely." That, coupled with my later caveat that academics don't have the market cornered made for an internal contradiction I should have avoided.
ReplyDeleteMain point reiterated: I don't find it surprising that someone who actively tries to inform himself (academic or not) will find some elements of progressive thought appealing.
Some may disagree. Welcome to the eternal debate.
Clearly it's not going to be a 50/50 split as far as political ideology on campuses, and whichever side thinks it's not being represented is going to cry foul.
As for Mises and Hayek, I commiserate. I always find it disheartening when people get screwed over.
Ironically, it is my understanding that the reverse is true right now with regard to economics programs nationwide. It is much more difficult to be Keynesian and be published, make tenure, etc., than to be a proponent of the University of Chicago school of thought and do the same. You sound like economics is your thing, so feel free to sound off on this.
The only way that proponents of alternative schools of economics will change this situation is by the sheer force of their arguments and thought.
In conclusion, I feel like there is very little we are disagreeing about.
You want to take part in academia, you'd better be ready to persuade the jury of your colleagues. If you can't, then maybe, like in Mr. Hayek's case, history will redeem you. Then again maybe not.
I should really be studying for finals.
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ReplyDeleteClearly it's not going to be a 50/50 split as far as political ideology on campuses ... whichever side thinks it's not being represented is going to cry foul. . .
ReplyDeleteOf course it isn't even close to 50:50. With this report (and, for example, a history department that is 27-0 registered Democrats) - obviously - just one side is going to 'think' it is not being represented.
The fact it is a publicly-funded institution makes it all the more reprehensible. If it were developing a UI "school of thought," maybe not (like, say the Wisconsin in the late 19th and early 20th centuries). UI has some outstanding faculty, but I am not aware of any new way of thinking it is propagating as an institution.
To me it is more reminiscent of Iowa Public Television airing its new documentary about Henry A. Wallace 4 times in the two weeks just before the 2004 general election. And just recently I noticed IPTV aired a program called 'turning points in history' (or something like that) in the middle of the night. Its obvious bias should make anyone interested in objective analysis vomit.
Similarly, a few years ago PBS did a 4-hour documentary on JFK: No mention of his tax cuts.
Ironically, it is my understanding that the reverse is true right now with regard to economics programs nationwide. It is much more difficult to be Keynesian and be published, make tenure, etc., than to be a proponent of the University of Chicago school of thought and do the same. . .
For good reason (if true).
Not that Hayek or von Mises would agree with either.
There is a lot of info about the Austrian School on the internet for anyone interested.
Some links:
von Mises Institute (home study)
link1
link2
Foundation for Economic Education
(see various links there)
Young Americans Foundation
(scroll down to recommended reading - economics)
The Austrian Economists blog
Cato Institute (home study)
Having taken my graduate theory courses from a former student of Samuelson's, I know well the highly mathematical approach. Methodological differences exist to be sure. But a good understanding of the Austrian approach only complements your understanding. Even if one does not ultimately agree with the Austrians, he or she gains a far superior understanding of the history of economic thought than one gets from a typical PhD program in economics. In hindsight, in fact, judging by the 'storyline' that accompanied my notes - that to most people likely appear indistinguishable from a physics lecture - I would be surprised if my former instructor were not also well versed in Human Action and Man, Economy and State (prior to attending university).
Furthermore, should one examine the methodological differences in greater detail, you gain an even more thorough understanding of history and of the history of Western philosophy and ideas.
Good luck on your finals.
PS: To clarify, I did not mean to say IPTV's documentary on Henry A. Wallace was that biased (unlike the other program mentioned in that paragraph). As a matter of fact, it was probably appropriately corrective.
ReplyDeleteIt was its airing 4 times in the two weeks immediately prior to the 2004 election that I question.
The father of the (now) current governor of Iowa, as I recall, was involved in its production.
I didn't notice it when I linked that site.
ReplyDeleteFor anyone interested, The Austrian Economists blog has a recent post linking to an excellent discussion: Podcast on Austrian Economics.
It includes quite a bit of discussion of how the Austrian approach compares that of others.
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