In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Paul Bloom asks the question. He offers a couple of explanations, starting with a fanous old one from Noam Chomsky:
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent and who don’t know how to be submissive. … [The schools] reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. … Most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they’ve been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years.
But Bloom favors a different explanation, that professors are afraid to offend because their lives depend on getting along with their colleagues. Starting with getting hired:
Let me tell you about a search committee I was once on. We were looking at senior candidates, and someone’s name came up — a person of considerable accomplishment. And then a member of the committee said something like, “I hear she’s difficult. Not really a good colleague.” And we all moved to the next person. . . .
The point here is not just that it’s good to be liked. I’m sure that helps, but I’ve seen people secure great jobs due to their accomplishments as scholars and scientists, even if they weren’t especially popular. Instead, the point is that it’s bad to be disliked — even by a small proportion of people. If 90 percent of the field adores you and 10 percent will describe you as “difficult,” you’re likely screwed, career-wise.
Bloom goes on to discuss a study I referenced here before:
The negative effects of having unconventional views aren’t limited to search committees. A 2012 study of about 800 social psychologists found that conservatives (about 6 percent of the sample) fear the negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues, and so they shut up about them. They are right to do so. The same study finds that many of these nonconservative colleagues, particularly the more liberal ones, tended to agree that if they encountered a grant or paper with “a politically conservative perspective,” it would negatively influence their decision to award the grant or accept the paper for publication. They also tended to agree that if they had to choose between a conservative candidate and a liberal candidate, they would select the liberal one.
But the real issue is with a minority of more extreme professors who exercise a sort of hecklers' veto:
while most professors are upset at the censorious nature of their colleagues, a minority believe that a proper response to someone who expresses a taboo view is “ostracism, public labeling with pejorative terms, talk disinvitations, refusing to publish work regardless of its merits, not hiring or promoting even if typical standards are met, terminations, social-media shaming, and removal from leadership positions.”
Given this censorious minority, the reasonable response is risk aversion. Don’t say anything that will piss off these colleagues — and that includes not making statements that they find politically or morally unacceptable. If you’re not careful in this way, you run the risk of not being hired, not getting tenure, and having your career damaged in all sorts of other ways.
I would add a third factor here. Some professors mainly want to be left alone, but the more ambitious want to be part of a group of cool people doing cutting edge things. Scholarship in this sense is a conversation, so what many academics want is to be part of such a conversation, with people who take what they say seriously. Getting cancelled for conservative views would keep you out of many such conversations.
Academia is a social enterprise, and as such prone to all the troubles that can afflict any community. Over the past 20 years deference to angry leftists has been a serious one. These days MAGA folks are doing their best to shift the bias in the other direction. I doubt they will have much success, but maybe it will embolden those who have had enough. For example we have seen a bunch of schools drop the "diversity teaching statement" nonsense.
The social nature of academia will always make these issues difficult, but we can do a lot better.
2 comments:
1/2
Is professors not being "brave" enough actually a problem? What does that even mean?
Do other countries have "braver" professors? If so, surely we should be asking how and why they achieve not? (Assuming we actually DO want "brave" professors... whatever that means.) And if not, then... is this actually a problem in the first place?
If the topic is "braver" professors, and we're noting that conservative professors feel like they can't express themselves... isn't that simply a lack of bravery on their part? It's not brave to speak out when you risk nothing - it's brave to speak out DESPITE there being a risk associated with it.
You don't solve the problem of "bravery" in professors by removing the risks associated with them speaking a certain way - quite the opposite. Isn't that just coddling people who lack "bravery"? Isn't that just supporting "cowardice" and "coddling" people who lack "moral fiber"? And isn't that the sort of thing the conservatives claim to truly hate?
2/2
I do wonder, though, why liberals don't feel troubled in the same way. Is it that conservatives face some unique risk associated with what they wish to express? That when liberal professors speak out, the content of their speech doesn't carry the same possibility of negative consequences?
Could it be that... certain "political beliefs" are simply... not as valid as others, in the context of a field dedicated to learning about and understanding reality? That when you goal is to collect knowledge and pass it along to others in an effort to educate people about the truth, perhaps right-wing notions are just... "wrong"... somehow?
There's the old "joke" that reality has a liberal bias. But it's not a joke. It's a pattern that crops up EVERYWHERE, all across the world, despite massive differences in who liberals are from country to country; how local governments and institutions are set up and operate; et cetera.
When the Civil Rights movement was in full swing, conservative professors whined about the unfairness of the new situation where they might be denied a grant if they shared their racist, bigoted beliefs. When modern Feminism was taking hold and transforming society, they complained about how they felt they had to hide their sexist, chauvinist beliefs or suffer negative consequences.
When the world challenged the evils of Colonialism, conservative professors decried that they could no longer stand up and loudly proclaim their belief in the rightness of Imperial rule by the "civilized" peoples of the earth! In the age when Monarchies were finally being discarded en masse in favor of Republics, conservative professors bemoaned that they could not openly be Royalists, lest they face the cruel injustices of liberal scorn!
But no... I'm sure THIS TIME, it's not just that conservatives are once again learning they are on the wrong side of history, and that their views are simply incompatible with modern understandings of reality and fact... it must SURELY be the other thing, where they're the poor, mistreated victims of those big mean liberal bullies who hog academia all for themselves!
/s
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