Return to Playthings or Blasting Caps?
At last week's annual meeting of the Society for Military History, I asked a number of people about this business of the lack of political diversity within the academy. I got a number of thoughtful responses. Everyone found plausible the estimate of 80 percent liberals in the academy, though among academic military historians they estimated that percentage at only 60 percent, and among military historians in public history or the armed services, I think one may safely say the percentage is much lower.
I heard no one argue that academic gate-keeping blocks conservatives by means of denying them jobs or tenure on overt political grounds. As I indicated in my post, this is more plausibly the result of undervaluing fields of scholarship which tend to interest conservatives. Another way to look at it is that in the past 25 years or so the scholarship most valued in the humanities poses very pointed questions about why some groups have been denied access to the levers of political and economic power. These questions, and the conceptual frameworks and methodologies required to answer them, are apt to be most congenial to those whose personal views are left of center; and if you're not left of center when you embark on the intellectual journey sign-posted by these questions, the journey will almost surely make you one--though over the long haul you could wind up a neo-conservative.
One military historian, himself a conservative, argued that few young Republicans would self-select into a profession that virtually mandates that you will spend the next six to ten years of your life in poverty. There are few bohemian conservatives. This was said with tongue only partly in cheek. Personally I think it's one of the better hypotheses, because nearly everyone agreed that students who apply for graduate--not just those who get accepted, but the pool of applicants--tend to be politically liberal.
Military historians from beyond the United States, by the way, regard our ideas about "left wing" and "right wing" with bemusement. As far as they're concerned, the American political spectrum runs the gamut from A to B.
Military historians have so far been the only ones I've met who take the question of political diversity with any seriousness. I suspect that's partly because for them it has direct real world consequences --they tend to get pretty badly stereotyped, both intellectually and politically--but mostly because their identification with the academy is relatively weak. Many spend a lot of time and energy among people outside the academy, and on the whole I would say that in that respect that are truly cosmopolitian in the sense of spending time in both "blue" and "red" camps, to use the current blue state/red state taxonomy. By contrast, most mainstream academics I encounter seem to be bi-coastal in orientation; they may teach in a Red State, but on their internal map it's still Flyover Country.
I would go further. Maybe it's just the individuals I've approached, but whenever I've asked raised this question among "mainstream" academics, the question gets dismissed with a joke. Even worse, I have once or twice gotten the kind of silence that in academe unmistakably conveys the message, You have just transgressed a professional norm.
The academy is a profession. Like other professions it has three main attributes [per E. M. Carr-Saunders, a pioneered the study of professions]: 1) a body of expertise deemed important enough to society that it's given wide latitude in choosing and training its membership; 2) an acceptance of social responsibility by which the profession contracts with society that it will produce good, competent experts and that these experts will perform conscientiously; and 3) corporateness; i.e., adherence to a set of informal norms, customs and values that signal one's commitment to the profession. (A classic example, albeit stereotyped and perhaps dated, is that physicians take Wednesday afternoons off to go golfing.)
My sense is that most academics identify with the profession before they identify with a set of political beliefs, whether left wing, right wing, or centrist. Therefore they act much more quickly and energetically to enforce professional orthodoxy than they would a notional political orthodoxy. One could argue, I suppose, that to have leftist, liberal, or at least moderate political views has in fact become one of the corporate values of the academy, at least within the humanities. But my immediate point is that "political diversity" is not yet a form of diversity which the academic corporate culture takes seriously. Until it does, many academics, including those whose personal political preferences are conservative, are apt to respond to questions about political diversity with the Refusal to Engage, which in my experience is the most characteristic way by which academics enforce the corporate norms of the profession.
I heard no one argue that academic gate-keeping blocks conservatives by means of denying them jobs or tenure on overt political grounds. As I indicated in my post, this is more plausibly the result of undervaluing fields of scholarship which tend to interest conservatives. Another way to look at it is that in the past 25 years or so the scholarship most valued in the humanities poses very pointed questions about why some groups have been denied access to the levers of political and economic power. These questions, and the conceptual frameworks and methodologies required to answer them, are apt to be most congenial to those whose personal views are left of center; and if you're not left of center when you embark on the intellectual journey sign-posted by these questions, the journey will almost surely make you one--though over the long haul you could wind up a neo-conservative.
One military historian, himself a conservative, argued that few young Republicans would self-select into a profession that virtually mandates that you will spend the next six to ten years of your life in poverty. There are few bohemian conservatives. This was said with tongue only partly in cheek. Personally I think it's one of the better hypotheses, because nearly everyone agreed that students who apply for graduate--not just those who get accepted, but the pool of applicants--tend to be politically liberal.
Military historians from beyond the United States, by the way, regard our ideas about "left wing" and "right wing" with bemusement. As far as they're concerned, the American political spectrum runs the gamut from A to B.
Military historians have so far been the only ones I've met who take the question of political diversity with any seriousness. I suspect that's partly because for them it has direct real world consequences --they tend to get pretty badly stereotyped, both intellectually and politically--but mostly because their identification with the academy is relatively weak. Many spend a lot of time and energy among people outside the academy, and on the whole I would say that in that respect that are truly cosmopolitian in the sense of spending time in both "blue" and "red" camps, to use the current blue state/red state taxonomy. By contrast, most mainstream academics I encounter seem to be bi-coastal in orientation; they may teach in a Red State, but on their internal map it's still Flyover Country.
I would go further. Maybe it's just the individuals I've approached, but whenever I've asked raised this question among "mainstream" academics, the question gets dismissed with a joke. Even worse, I have once or twice gotten the kind of silence that in academe unmistakably conveys the message, You have just transgressed a professional norm.
The academy is a profession. Like other professions it has three main attributes [per E. M. Carr-Saunders, a pioneered the study of professions]: 1) a body of expertise deemed important enough to society that it's given wide latitude in choosing and training its membership; 2) an acceptance of social responsibility by which the profession contracts with society that it will produce good, competent experts and that these experts will perform conscientiously; and 3) corporateness; i.e., adherence to a set of informal norms, customs and values that signal one's commitment to the profession. (A classic example, albeit stereotyped and perhaps dated, is that physicians take Wednesday afternoons off to go golfing.)
My sense is that most academics identify with the profession before they identify with a set of political beliefs, whether left wing, right wing, or centrist. Therefore they act much more quickly and energetically to enforce professional orthodoxy than they would a notional political orthodoxy. One could argue, I suppose, that to have leftist, liberal, or at least moderate political views has in fact become one of the corporate values of the academy, at least within the humanities. But my immediate point is that "political diversity" is not yet a form of diversity which the academic corporate culture takes seriously. Until it does, many academics, including those whose personal political preferences are conservative, are apt to respond to questions about political diversity with the Refusal to Engage, which in my experience is the most characteristic way by which academics enforce the corporate norms of the profession.
Return to Playthings or Blasting Caps?
by Mark Grimsley on March 6, 2005 at 7:05 AM