What Does It Mean to be “Balanced” in Academia?

On Sunday January 9, 2005 a panel devoted to the history scandals was held at the American Historical Association's annual meeting. Mr. Hollinger delivered the following paper.

One of the apparent academic scandals recently publicized by the media is the alleged lack of balance in the academic profession, including the discipline of history, but also the other social sciences and humanities, and even the physical and biological sciences. This scandalous lack of balance, often said to follow from a scandalous pattern of discrimination in faculty hiring, is measured in several surveys given wide attention in the New York Times, other mainstream newspapers, and especially on cable news channels. The surveys measure the number of Republicans and Democrats in various academic departments and campuses and they measure the degree of sympathy faculty express for the government of Israel and for the Palestinian opposition to that government. Balance, in the discourse to which I refer, is defined in terms of political orientations in general and party affiliation in particular.

I thought of this putative scandal while reading the highly engaging papers by Ron Robin and Jon Wiener. I want to discuss this additional scandal, which I believe marks an important moment in the relationship of academia to society, by way of extending the scope of the inquiry that Ron and Jon have undertaken.

I note that in all of the cases Ron and Jon analyze, the parties all assume that there is a set of rules that governs the behavior of the scholar, and that the points at issue are exactly what those rules are, how important or trivial the rules are, who sets the rules, who decides what shall count as a violation of the rules, and who actually enforces the rules. Hence a vital element of any perspective on academic scandals, we learn from the two papers before us, is the location and texture of the boundary between a professional community on the one hand, and the larger society on the other. Jon especially explores the power of constituencies outside academia to determine just which violations of academia’s own rules shall be treated as important and how severe or mild the penalties shall be.

This relation between the authority of academic institutions as responsive to the peer review process and the authority of government as responsive to the dispositions of the public is really, really, really up for grabs in the current controversy over “balance” in academia. I want to outline the situation as is has been developing in the last year, provide some examples, clarify the challenge that this controversy presents to historians and other professional scholars, and suggest some ways in which we as scholars, as historians, and as citizens in a democracy, might meet that challenge.

Let’s begin with how this scandal comes before the public through the media. I am going to quote from an article published in the New York Times in late November.

“a national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement,…”

“a separate study of voter registration records, … found a nine-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans on the faculties of Berkeley and Stanford. That study, which included professors from the hard sciences, engineering and professional schools as well as the humanities and social sciences, also found the ratio especially lopsided among the younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183 Democrats versus 6 Republicans. “

“The political imbalance on faculties has inspired a campaign to have state legislatures and Congress approve an "academic bill of rights" protecting students and faculty members from discrimination for their political beliefs. The campaign is being led by Students for Academic Freedom, a group with chapters at Berkeley and more than 135 other campuses.“

Now to this I want to add, by way of relevant information, the fact that at least 19 state legislatures have members who are actively pushing legislation that would enact one version or another of the David Horowitz-drafted “Academic Bill of Rights,” which, whatever their enforceability, establish the principle that faculties themselves cannot be trusted to determine what counts as a balanced classroom presentation of an issue, or as a balanced set of public forums on campus as regards the Middle Eastern question and other comparably controversial matters. These bills generally quote from the classic statements of academic freedom enshrined in the charter documents of the American Association of University Professors, and ask that the ideals of the AAUP be actually enforced. I hold in my hand a copy of the one being discussed in my own state of California. These bills are generally accompanied by a lobbying effort that includes extensive anecdotal evidence to the effect that professors here and there have abused their professional authority by using the classroom to present politically biased versions of their subject matter, and/or that professors have abused in class individual students who express conservative political views or sympathy for Israel.

This state-by-state discussion, which I have been monitoring in my capacity as a current member of the national AAUP’s Academic Freedom Committee, partakes of the rhetoric of scandal that our two papers have explored. The scandal is that the professoriate has become a rotten borough. It is not a place for free and open debate. Rather, the professorate is an institutional complex that has been captured by a particular group of men and women who, while presenting themselves as a universal learned community, are in fact only one of many legitimate voices. The argument is made that we need pluralism, and that American academia today has replaced pluralism with a political monoculture.

In some versions of this argument, the case is made that we need now to extend the analysis developed in the last two generations concerning gender and ethnoracial status. If it is true, as was so often claimed, that the subtle dynamic of a search committee meeting or a tenure meeting is changed if there is woman present, or a black person, then so, too, the argument proceeds, does that dynamic change subtly when there is a Republican present. The case sometimes extends to another level, building, again, upon the recent past. Isn’t all of what goes on in academia political, anyway? Have not the postmodernists established that what used to be called disinterested scholarship is in fact in the service of this or that political interest, often concealed? Wasn’t Foucault correct to direct our attention to power/knowledge as a single formation? If the content of scholarship can be translated into political terms, do we not, in a democratic society, need to bring that scholarship under the supervision of democratic institutions, such as the legislature of the state of Colorado or Wisconsin or wherever?

And if proportional representation was the way to correct non-intentional discrimination against women and ethnoracial minorities, as the EEOC determined, does not proportional representation for Republicans and Christians become justified on the same basis? How do we know there is discrimination against Republicans and Christians? The EEOC got it right: we know on account of employment statistics.

This line of argument is sometimes presented in relation to specific fields, especially Middle Eastern Studies, where the charge is that scholarship and teaching have been taken over by partisans of Edward Said while the ideas of Bernard Lewis are devalued. A congressman in New York state named Wiener, no relation to Jon, I gather, has asked Columbia University to actually dismiss certain Middle Eastern Studies faculty on account of statements they are said to have made about Israel.

In the context of this increasingly animated discussion of “balance,” and the rhetoric of scandal in which it is formulated, it might be time to address directly just what “balance” is in an academic context. I will give it a shot.

I believe that To be balanced is simply to do an academic project professionally. To be imbalanced is to leave out of account something that the academic norms of evidence and reasoning in the interest of truth require you to take into account. These simple propositions demand restatement and elaboration at the present moment, when many academics themselves compete with academia’s critics in casting doubt on the ability of scholars and teachers to master rather than to be victimized by methodological fashions and ideological movements. There is good reason for doubt. Academic communities don’t always take into account everything that they should. Any honest academic with a modicum of experience will know of cases when a group of specialists has “blown it,” sometimes because blinded by ideological and methodological sectarianism. But the standard remains valid even if the performance is often imperfect. And the soundest corrections come about through another round of the application of evidence and reasoning, even if influenced by new and different ideological and methodological atmospheres. At issue, ultimately, is who decides what needs to be taken into account.

This question has been illuminated by my late Berkeley colleague Bernard Williams, in the book he published shortly before his death, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Williams reminds us that the entry fee into a learned discourse includes extensive and rigorous training, and the earning of the attention of one’s professional peers through the acceptance, in argumentation, of certain forms of reasoning and certain kinds of evidence. Cranks can and must be filtered out. “The orderly management of scientific inquiry,” Williams declares, “implies that the vast majority of suggestions which an uninformed person might mistake for a contribution” will quite properly be brushed aside. “Very rarely the cranky view turns out to be right, and then the scientists who ignored it are attacked for dogmatism and prejudice,” but “they can rightly reply, there was no way of telling in advance that this particular cranky idea was to be taken seriously,” and that if every such idea were allowed to command the attention of investigators very little progress in inquiry could be made. In a conclusion that might apply to a great range of the controversies between academics and their non-academic critics over whether this or that academic enterprise is balanced, Williams generalizes as follows: “People cannot come in from outside, speak when they feel like it, make endless, irrelevant, or insulting interventions, and so on; they cannot invoke a right to do so, and no one thinks that things would go better in the direction of truth if they could.”

In keeping with the wisdom of Williams’s formulations, we can observe that when the complaint of lack of balance is invoked in relation to the institutionalized discourse of a scholarly community, the complaining party is often one that has lost the argument within that community, and is trying to unseat a leadership which has won an argument fair and square by the community’s rules. The complaining party appeals to a larger constituency—sometimes even the public as a whole, and their elected political representatives—claiming that the community in question has been biased, and has unfairly discredited ideas that deserve more respect. Complaints that religiously warranted evidence is not taken into account by scholarly communities is a prominent example of this syndrome. “Creation science,” it is said, has been ruled out of serious consideration by secularists who have abandoned the “open mind” that true inquiry demands. Calls for “balance” can thus conceal efforts to revise the structure of plausibility so that types of evidence respected in a pre-secular era can be again treated as relevant.

But complaints of lack of balance are not always so easily set aside. Before we are tempted by the complacent conceits to which Williams’s defense of academic professionalism can all too easily lead— nobody who is not themselves a Ph.D. in a given field has any standing to criticize; within our own academic discourses, whatever is, is right; within our communities whoever wins an argument deserves to have won it— let me hasten to acknowledge that throughout the learned world, and especially in the humanities and social sciences “what needs to be taken into account” can be an issue within professional communities of the utmost integrity, and that the boundaries of the learned communities sometimes blur. Professional inquiry takes place in political and social contexts that inevitably affect the questions asked and the answers sought. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the history of science and scholarship knows this. The inventory of ideas essential to the discovery of evolution by natural selection came to Darwin through the capitalist political economy of Great Britain, not the Hindu religion or the social system of Manchu China.

These caveats against Williams’s defense of academic professionalism require us to recognize that some journalists and popular writers will master a subject matter thoroughly enough to earn the right to be taken seriously by a professional community, and that the questions and answers that define research and teaching do change from time to time through the critical, self-correcting mechanisms that are central to the academic professions. Also, we need to remember that any particular disciplinary community exists within what we might see as a series of concentric circles of accountability in an informal but vitally important structure of cognitive authority. This structure of cognitive authority is imperfectly understood by many of academia’s critics, yet it is the foundation for “peer-review” throughout the learned world. It demands a summary description here.

In order to maintain its standing in the learned world as a whole, a given community must keep the communities nearest to it persuaded that it is behaving responsibly, and it must also, partly through the support of these neighboring communities, diminish whatever skepticism about its operations might arise in more distant parts of the learned world, and beyond, in the society which scientists and scholars do, after all, serve. So the structure of cognitive authority moves out from particle physics to physics to natural science to science to the learned world as a whole, and then to the most informed members of the public. The farther you get from the technical particulars of the field, the less authority you have to decide what should be going on, but in a democratic society there is some authority distributed all the way out. It is the job of deans and provosts to keep abreast of these trans-disciplinary conversations, and to pressure particular departments and schools to change their way of doing things—to achieve, indeed, balance—if the parts of the learned world most qualified to judge are truly dubious about their research programs and their attendant teaching and public service activities.

Once this structure of cognitive authority is kept in mind, some of the most widely reported complaints of “imbalance” in academia are unpersuasive on their face. In the absence of more than statistical evidence that an English department has actually discriminated against applicants on the basis of their proclaimed political views, the mere fact that 90 percent of the department’s faculty are found to be registered Democrats provides no legitimacy whatsoever for changing the hiring practices and priorities of that department. The same goes for religious orientation. If the professoriate as a whole, or the discipline of sociology, or a given department of biology, is found to be less Christian than the population of the United States at large, that is not necessarily a lack of balance. What does matter, and greatly, is, first, the fidelity of the department to the broad contours of the learned discipline it is charged with representing on a given campus and second, the assurance that those contours are determined by the distinctive aims and methods of the relevant scientific and scholarly communities.

Now, I hope we can agree that there is nothing illegitimate about asking for professional accountability as long as it is, indeed, professional. Demanding this accountability need not be the serving as a cat’s paw for some external and nefarious authority, “doing their dirty work for them.” The learned community owes it to itself, as well as to the society which it serves, to make sure things are done professionally. That community must not neglect this responsibility, as it is sometimes tempted to do, for fear of being seen as someone else’s agents. No doubt this is a question the Katz Committee asked itself when investigating Bellesiles at Emory.

Our colleagues in Middle Eastern Studies do have to be prepared to explain what they are doing and why. In the event that Bernard Lewis is ignored and Edward Said is crowned king of the field— a claim that I am not for a moment declaring to be true or false, nor making a judgment about how the ideas of either of these giants should be evaluated— our Middle Eastern specialists can be expected to have reasons for this intellectual emphasis capable of persuading colleagues in neighboring fields, in keeping with the “concentric circles” to which I alluded above. But we have to be willing to listen carefully to what our colleagues say back to us. They may have the right balance already on Said and Lewis, and on Israel and the Palestinians. If they don’t, they are more likely to find it if they can count on the rest us for an honest, professional conversation.

How conversations of that kind can shield academics from extra-academic pressures is shown by the remarkable cases of economics and philosophy, two communities that, like Middle Eastern Studies, address a range of issues on which many members of the public have strong opinions. President Bush is far from the only American who, when asked to name his or her favorite philosopher, would respond as he did: “Christ.” Popular taste is not the standard for a professional community, and the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth do not dominate our philosophy departments. But Economics and philosophy invite attention here because these two cases can prompt us to wonder if academic professionalism sometimes errs too much on the side of disciplinary autonomy, and not enough on the side of cross-disciplinary accountability. Leading philosophy departments might be on sound footing when they decline to offer courses on the philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, but whether they pay as much attention as they should to the sub-field of philosophy of religion is a more difficult question.

Economics and philosophy are potentially among the most broadly ranging of all the humanistic and social scientific disciplines, dealing with issues of truly enormous cultural and political significance. Each is ostensibly responsible for a much greater range of phenomena than English literature, Art history, astronomy, geology, or psychology, yet both, paradoxically, have developed and maintained in the United States during the last several generations two of the most tightly bounded professional communities in all of academia. Philosophers, especially, are quick to say, “Oh, but that’s not philosophy,” when asked about a host of kinds of theoretical work being carried out in the humanistic and social scientific disciplines. Economics and philosophy are among the disciplines which resist the most successfully the pressures from deans and provosts, and from colleagues in other departments, to address questions that end up, partly by default, finding their way into the scholarly writings and teaching of professors of English, French, anthropology, history, political science, rhetoric, religious studies, business, and law.

Are departments of economics in the elite universities of the United States balanced in the choice of topics their faculties address in their scholarly work and in issues around which their curricula is organized? Do these departments have enough specialists in area studies (in the economy of China or of India or of Russia or of the United States), and do they devote enough attention to the study of economic institutions and to Marxist theories? Are departments of philosophy in the elite universities of the United States balanced in the choice of topics their faculties address in their scholarly work and in the issues around which their curricula is organized? Do these departments have enough specialists in applied ethics, in theory of culture, philosophy of religion, and in the study of the great Asian philosophers? A scientifically oriented philosophy department on a prominent West Coast campus was asked by a dean a few years ago to expand its scope in order to connect more fully with the theoretical issues of concern to humanists in general, but to this impertinence the philosophers responded by asking to be transferred to the natural sciences division of that campus on the grounds that what they did had much more in common with the theoretical physicists and the mathematical biologists than with what was going on in English and History and Classics. The request was denied, an example, perhaps, of provostial courage, but the department was also allowed to continue in its old ways, an example, perhaps, of provostial cowardice?

I raise these questions not to offer my own answers to them, but to insist that the questions themselves are fully appropriate, and to remind us that these questions are answered routinely, if implicitly, whenever provosts, deans, and faculty oversight committees approve of the allocation of institutional resources. The cases of economics and philosophy can remind us how academia really can protect its disciplinary communities from outside interference if it really wants to, and one wonders if our colleagues in Middle Eastern Studies are any less balanced than our colleagues in economics and philosophy?

I stress uncertainty here because the structure of cognitive authority in academic institutions, while the right frame of reference for discussing the case Middle Eastern Studies, does not provide a fortress into which scholars in that field can retreat from the balance debates. Those debates can be responsibly engaged, but they take place on a contingent surface. Professionalism is an imperfect apparatus, but it is better than the alternatives available in our time. For us to complacently shrink from the obligation to defend academic professionalism at this time would be, in my opinion, a GENUINE scandal.