More Money Than Brains (13 page)

The Spellings Commission was Bush’s attempt to initiate some
NCLB
-style “measuring is the gateway” accountability measures at the post-secondary level. The only disciplines that the Spellings report refers to are the
STEM
s: science, technology, engineering, and math. Save for a glancing reference to foreign languages, which are important because America needs to sell things to people who talk funny, the report makes no reference whatsoever to the humanities or liberal arts. Those terms don’t appear once in seventy-six pages of buzzwords. Instead, we see thirty-six references to accountability, nineteen to consumers, sixteen to efficiency, and fourteen to employers.
⁸

The conversion of universities into job-training centres, and the increase in college enrolment for that same reason, is seriously exacerbating our ignorance and anti-intellectualism. It should be the other way around. Higher levels of post-secondary education ought to lead to more lively intellectual debates, a greater respect for civilization and culture, and a more nerd-friendly public. The volume and vehemence of
anti-nerd invective make it clear that this is not the case. It’s a paradox worthy of Yogi Berra, like the club nobody goes to anymore because it is too popular. Put a B.A. on every wall and they become wallpaper. University has become a rite of passage rather than a right or responsibility.

The university has grown increasingly anti-intellectual, adopting the pragmatisms and populisms of the culture at large and increasing its roster of explicitly careerist programs. This only brings in more knuckleheads who should not be in university. This only creates more bullies who hate university and bash nerds.

Plenty of people enrol in college and end up failing to complete their degree or taking much longer than advertised to finish it. In fact, 42.5 per cent of American students who sign up for a basic four-year degree do not manage to complete it within five years.
⁹
There’s an achievement gap here too, with a greater percentage of low-income and minority students taking longer to finish, or never finishing at all. (Again, as with K–12, Canadian students do a bit better, with only 15 per cent failing to complete.)
¹⁰

Many students quit because they can’t hack the cost, can’t afford to pay tuition and lose income. Others cannot hack the classes and course work. Presumably these ex-students, who have little to show for their efforts but a heap of debt, bafflement, and resentment, dislike whatever reminds them of the tedious, useless life of the mind. The same is likely true of the students who managed to slide through on the least possible effort and see their E-Z degrees as proof that college is just a costly joke.

The university is one of the places where we see the love-hate relationship with knowledge very clearly. Whenever a post-secondary education story gets posted on the
Globe and Mail
or
New York Times
website, for example, trolls swarm the board, fulminating about cutting off their public funding. They rejoice at the thought of murdering every seemingly impractical discipline, hanging the last art history prof with the guts of the last philosopher, the better to serve science, engineering, and business, the only fields of inquiry that justify their existence with tangible benefits.

Or cranks get in a huff because fags, feminists, and radical minorities have seized control of the ivory tower. The other really loud complaint about universities is a political one. They, like the bathroom in that kitschy anti-commie poster, are breeding Bolsheviks, as the majority of professors in the humanities and sciences skew liberal-to-lefty.

Conservative columnist Barbara Kay, writing for Canada’s
National Post
, went so far as to suggest that left-wing bias at universities was the most serious problem affecting the nation. Here’s a smidge of her screed, which is typical of the genre: “From their ivory towers our leftist ecclesiastics rigorously monitor the four credos from which no dissent is permitted: relativism (each to his own ‘truth’ except the truth of relativism, which is absolute), feminism, postcolonialism and multiculturalism (cultures trump civilization).”
¹¹

You can find far less grammatical variations on these themes all over the Web. This is another of those get-you-coming-and-going-arguments, like the anti-nerd allegations listed in the first chapter. Do we believe in no truth, or are we
radical activists for the other isms that we propagate as truths? Are we po-mo nihilists or politically correct true believers? Anti-Christs or new priests? And isn’t civilization made up of, um, cultures?

To be fair, there are some leftist dogmatics in academe, surely as there are Tories on Bay Street or Republican millionaires in Texas. But if you think that this hardcore minority of tenured radicals are turnin’ anyone not already that way inclined, you are paranoid. Boring doctrinaire leftists are lunch for Kay and her ilk. They goad a very special minority to become hot-headed doctrinaire rightists. And those students keep doughty right-wing columnists permanently supplied with column fodder, with tattletales and fresh outrages:
My prof said Stephen Harper was awfully chubby for a robot. Can we fire/sue/stone him?

I may have lefty sympathies, but the last thing I want to see in a student paper is what I think. I make that very clear in every class I teach. I’m there to provide information and assistance, and it’s their job to think, to come up with their own ideas and back them up with evidence or research. I don’t grade them on what they think but how well they think and express it. And that’s how most of my colleagues roll too.

It is awfully disingenuous for righty dogmatists to claim they are flying the flags for truth, objectivity, and science when they are incensed about other values such as God, family, patriotism, and capitalism. The constant righty slurs against relativism are lazy and sloppy, displaying an ignorance of the very tradition they pretend to defend. Relativism is not some sulphurous vapour from the seditious 1960s; it’s been there all
along. Classical thought is not some marble temple of absolutes. It includes sophists and the original cynics and skeptics. Michel de Montaigne, the Renaissance thinker whom many nerds call the inventor of the personal essay, was hardly some po-mo nihilist. His essay “On the Cannibals” is a classic example of a relativist argument: the people of the New World may have some barbaric habits, but they have the decency to eat dead men instead of torturing living ones in the name of decency and religion like hypocritical Europeans. Conservatives’ kvetching about relativism is another expression of their desire for authority, their nostalgic longing for the absolute wisdom of Big Dad.

I’m sympathetic to pleas to keep the university open and genuinely liberal in the old John Stuart Mill sense. I just don’t think that’s what most of these prof-bashing types are asking for. Rather, they want some kind of conservative staffing parity, one that would make the university subject to the same shift – down and to the right – that we’ve seen in public discourse and political life. Such complaints ignore the fact that faculties such as business and economics swing the other way politically. Then there are all those fundie schools, like Liberty University and Bob Jones, where you can skip all the secular hedonism and stick to the English that was good enough for Jesus.

The right presumes that scores of conservative nerds are getting blacklisted from academia by the commissars of correctness. But analysts have argued that the liberal majority in the arts and sciences is the result of a self-selecting process driven by the personal values that influence
political ideologies. A paper by the husband-and-wife – and Republican-and-Democratic – team Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner looked at the different factors that influence students in favour of grad school and academia, including liberal bias. They argue that self-identified conservatives are more interested in having families and making money, whereas self-identified liberals and lefties value creativity, flexibility, and doing meaningful work more than money or babies.
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Consequently, conservative students tend to cluster in the professional faculties, which are more likely to result in money and babies sooner rather than later. Lefty libs do enjoy a slight edge in the professorial schmoozing sweepstakes, but the differences between lefties and cons are statistically insignificant when it comes to grades and professorial support. Further more, both ideological camps clean the clocks of self-described moderates, who do worst of all. This research was presented at the very conservative American Enterprise Institute, in conjunction with a conference called “Reforming the Politically Correct University.” The Drs. Woessner do argue that keeping the classroom apolitical, or balanced, might help incubate more conservative grad students, but they also advocate liberal policy initiatives to close the con gap: better pay and more family-friendly workloads.

The most high-profile figure in the anti-lefty-prof campaign is David Horowitz, who has cranked out countless op eds and a couple of books about the scourge, inventorying the U.S.’s most scurrilous socialists and tenured radicals.
The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America
is precisely that,
a shit list of the leftiest lefties in all of academe, an omnium-gatherum of the most egregiously anti-American honky-haters, Palestinian-huggers, eco-feminists, and unabashed Marxists.

A former lefty radical himself, Horowitz is very adept at using progressive language to serve his retrograde cause, couching his campaign in terms of intellectual diversity and plurality. This means that he and his fellow-travellers in the right-wing media and think tanks, the very people who bitched longest and loudest about quotas and affirmative action, are now demanding quotas for conservatives. The people who shat a brick about campus language codes and anti-discrimination policies are now trying to craft them. It’s a political twist analogous to the Creation Museum’s use of Enlightenment trappings to advance anti-Enlightenment beliefs.

What is the logical extension of calls for political parity on all academic issues? Business profs forced to assign socialist critiques of the system as a counterpoint to their steady diet of “yay for capital”? Medicine profs giving equal time to crystal healing and homeopathy? And why stop there with the sensitivity to delicate student sensibilities? Should my English syllabus ditch the divine Emily Dickinson and replace her with the latest chick lit out of respect for the differently literate or the poetically challenged?

Of course not. This isn’t about learned judgments but ideological ones. Some groups have even gone so far as to declare that they will be monitoring and recording professors, searching for more scary, traitorous quotes. In 2008 the conservatives at the National Association of Scholars announced they were starting something called the Argus Project. Just like that
Greek mythology guy all covered in jeepers peepers, so too shall conservative scholars have eyes on campus as volunteers scrutinize the nation’s colleges to see if anyone conducts “politicized teaching, requires ideological adherence, or sustains slights to conservative students.”
¹³

Any reasonable person will recoil at the sight of phrases such as “requires ideological adherence,” and no responsible prof, regardless of his or her ideological stripe, would request such a thing. Required
factual
adherence is quite another matter, though, and that’s where this issue gets quite swampy, when groups such as creationists also cry academic freedom in defence of their nonsense.

The word that really slays me, though, is
slights
. It’s pretty paternalistic and patronizing to assume that a thinking adult, or at least somebody who has expressed an interest in becoming one by signing up for higher ed, cannot hear opposing or critical views without getting the vapours or feeling brainwashed. This charge also assumes that students are too dumb to recognize ideological bias, even though they fairly marinate in it while watching
TV
or surfing the Web.

Once we get the professors on a short leash, do we monitor student-on-student slights too, like when Chomsky Junior gets into a nasty dust-up with Mr. College Conservative in their political philosophy seminar? You can’t have the totally neutral or balanced college that right-wing rhetoric romanticizes unless the students come to college ideologically pristine, untouched by their parents’ steady diet of Fox News or
BBC
World, or their peers’ interest in kicking Iraqi ass or saving Darfur.

I’ve spent time on both sides of the campus divide that professional alarmists like Horowitz keep conjuring, which is why I find so many of the right wing’s claims wildly exaggerated and pointlessly polarizing, statements that exist for the express purpose of enriching the speaker by inflaming everyone else. I have walked among the bow-tied and the Birkenstocked, the monarchists and the Marxists. I’ve studied and taught the Great Dead White Men they recommend and the po-mo studies they revile as sophistry in the service of sedition and sodomy. Not once did anyone shave my head and shame me like a Vichy traitor for serving both sides of the culture wars.

There aren’t many Horowitzian anti-extremist extremists. Much of this “grassroots movement” for students’ rights is Astroturf, artificially kept alive on Fox News and talk radio, louder than it is large. These groups’ websites hardly teem with popular outrage. No
Indoctrination.org
has collected a measly 178 complaints in the past seven years. Students for Academic Freedom, Horowitz’s super-fun student fan club, no longer has a forum to report ideological abuses. Last time I saw it, there were around four hundred complaints, some of which were obvious goofs, such as people saying that their economics prof was indoctrinating them with capitalism. Then there were some malcontent loons claiming, “they woodnt let’s me into aPHD,” whose issues are more personal than political.