Breaching the Ivory Tower
by Noam Lupu

It should come as no surprise that, according to two recent studies, the majority of professors at the country's major research universities voted for John Kerry. Because appointments in universities are made by committees made up of current professors, conservatives conclude that right-leaning candidates are being unfairly kept out of the Ivory Tower. The problem for liberals is not just that the claim of a liberal bias is specious at best, but more importantly that it paints conservatives as the underdog. And what American doesn't root for the underdog?

The "liberal bias" claim has found a voice in David Horowitz, a pundit who heads a Los Angeles-based conservative think-tank. Horowitz, who holds a bachelor's degree from Columbia and a master's from the University of California, Berkeley (both in English) considers himself an outsider to the academy. If he were a liberal, he argued in an interview for The Chronicle of Higher Education, "he could be an editor at the Times or a department chairman at Harvard University." Horowitz neglects to note, of course, that the minimum requirement for a professorship at Harvard is a doctoral degree. He dropped out of his Ph.D. program because, as he put it, there was "nothing to research that was interesting anymore." (For the record, the late Susan Sontag, the definition of liberal, also was never offered professorships for lack of a Ph.D.)

Feeling unfairly underappreciated by the academy, Horowitz penned and campaigned for the Academic Bill of Rights, now under consideration in 16 state legislatures and still on the table in the House of Representatives. The document demands that universities hire professors with a plurality of political opinions, and that they teach a range of competing views. This, the bill argues, would ensure academic freedom and "intellectual diversity."

These sound like liberal goals. But the brilliance of the bill is that its language is couched in the rhetoric of diversity while in fact being wielded as a conservative weapon against the liberal university. Its financial backers are conservative foundations, and its political sponsors are all Republicans. Horowitz's own comments on the bill reveal its true purpose to force universities to hire more conservative professors.

Opposition has therefore followed the Academic Bill of Rights to every state legislature, primarily coming from within the academy. Critics call the bill everything from Orwellian and McCarthyite to a "guileful attempt to sanction the Fox News agenda in the nation's universities." The more level-headed critics make three substantive arguments against Horowitz.

First, the fact that more liberals join the academy than conservatives does not prove favoritism. Horowitz argues that although hiring committees do not ask about a candidate's political beliefs, they can glean them from the candidate's written work. That may be the case for, say, political scientists or economists. But how exactly do a candidate's publications in biology or computer science reveal their political affiliation?

Clearly, something else is going on. Maybe it's self-selection: liberals are simply more likely to pursue academic careers. Or maybe the increasing anti-intellectualism of the GOP drove academics leftward. In the case of academic scientists, it's hard to imagine many could support the party whose officials reject evolution and oppose potentially life-saving stem-cell research.

Second, the university classroom is not the place for learning a catalogue of opposing interpretations. In fact, most professors regularly teach viewpoints different from their own. But ultimately they are expected to explain how they analyze the available evidence. If you want objective, cut-and-dried information, take a correspondence course. The purpose of attending a research university is to learn how scholars think, how they make sense of the world.

Horowitz cites the extreme example in which a biology professor used class time to screen Fahrenheit 9/11 during last year's election campaigns. This, of course, was an egregious abuse of authority. But most universities — including the university in question — have internal procedures for dealing with such abuses.

Lastly, the big question about the liberal bias argument is what's at stake. Horowitz claims that liberal professors only teach their viewpoints, biasing our nation's youth into looking at the world through liberal lenses. But even though more and more Americans are attending college, the number of liberals has hardly skyrocketed. And let's not forget that George W. Bush and John Kerry attended the same liberal university. So either the indoctrination isn't working, or there is no indoctrination.

Still, Horowitz has managed to convince a large following that the Academic Bill of Rights should become law (it has already passed the Georgia legislature). The question now is what effect it will have.

In all likelihood, the answer is very little. The same politicians supporting the bill are those who oppose school quotas, so it will be difficult to enforce diversity. Frustrated conservative candidates might now have recourse to sue universities that do not hire them, but it's not likely many will win. More importantly, there simply are not that many conservative academics waiting in the wings. Understandably. It's hard to imagine many aspiring anthropologists, for example, supporting the nomination of John Bolton (the man who said, "Diplomacy is not an end in itself if it does not advance US interests.") And none of this is likely to have any impact on private universities: As the 2000 Boy Scouts case showed, private organizations are allowed to discriminate.

Of course, it's unlikely so many state politicians are being duped into believing the bill will successfully diversify political views in the academy. But for the few determined ideologues and Horowitzes among them, Republicans see this as just another battle in the culture wars. On one side are the lawmakers who, despite controlling the presidency and both houses of Congress, manage to look like the victim. On the other side are liberal professors within the university, arguing on principle with Horowitz's proposals and failing to convince most voters. All of which perpetuates the image of a battle between liberal insiders and conservative outsiders (remember that George W. Bush ran as a Beltway outsider in 2000?)

What critics of the Academic Bill of Rights need are Democratic lawmakers who can show voters how reactionary legislating "intellectual diversity" really is. Debating the bill on principle from within the academy merely reinforces the myth of a liberal cabal victimizing conservative academics. So far, Democrats have remained relatively mute. And while political deals will probably mean the bill passes in only a handful of states, conservatives will have perpetuated their myth. Until liberals recognize this, conservatives will win — as they already are winning — the public relations war.

E-mail Noam Lupu at noam at flakmag dot com.

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)