I have to go walk Cosmo and the prospect of picking up his droppings is more appealing than picking up Paul Krugman’s. But duty calls. Paul Krugman’s latest column is a peripatetic tour of liberal fantasyland.
His argument is that American universities are dominated by non-registered Republicans on their faculties for good reason and that complaints that this reflects a “liberal bias” in hiring are off-base.
Well, first of all, it’s not just liberal bias, it’s left-wing bias. Self-described liberals are often perceived as right-wing in much of the academy. A self-identified pro-McCain Democrat might as well show up to a job interview wearing bear skins and carrying a flint axe. In some corners of academia a Frantz Fanon-quoting English professor is considered “mainstream.”
Krugman notes, interestingly but obviously, that self-selection is a major factor. I do think there’s a lot to this. People of a leftish bent want to change the world by speaking truth to power–in the classroom, in the newsroom, in the art gallery.
But Krugman also notes that engineers and other faculty in the hard sciences are also disproportionately liberal. It’s not just in the humanities. Good point.
What he–Mr. Prize-Winning Economist–neglects to mention or consider is that engineers in the private sector make good money. Ditto many scientists. Indeed, I don’t have the data to back this up handy, but it would hardly surprise me to find out that the most liberal members of the science faculty are probably the least likely to be able to find work elsewhere. I’m sure there’s a market for private-sector biodiversity experts, but something tells me it’s smaller than the market for electrical engineers. Never mind when the last time a Marxist hermeneuticist got a job with Union Carbide.
Now this isn’t necessarily the most flattering explanation for Republican PhD holders. A liberal might argue, “Aha! See? Republicans are more greedy!”
Maybe. Sure, sometimes. But my Dad’s explanation always sounded more plausible. Conservatives are more normal. Greed may keep someone from joining the Peace Corps. But temperamentally conservative people see their investment in an academic degree as, well, an investment. Silly rabbits.
It’s a ticket to a better life where they can raise a family, buy a home, even help in their community. This seems to me to be the human or natural impulse. The desire to go straight into academia is the more abnormal one. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. Some people, liberals and conservatives alike, just love teaching. Others want to give something back. Yet others are terrified of the real world. Some science types can explain how a quark travels through 12 dimensional space, but are absolutely clueless about how to make toast. And, some liberal crusaders have the selfish desire to shortchange their families in order to turn the classroom into a secular pulpit where they are the center of attention.
Indeed, nobody who has had prolonged exposure to certain types of professors can deny that ego plays no small role in why some people become tyrants of the classroom.
But none of this is of much interest to Krugman. So how does he explain it (beyond one small throwaway paragraph on self-selection)?
Creationism! Christian Jihadism!
The creationism charge is largely supported by an appeal to the authority of an April Fool’s parody in Scientific American. The Christian Jihadism is proven by a quote from the most famously liberal Republican in the House of Representatives, Chris Shays. “Even Republicans like Chris Shays,” Krugman writes, “concede that it has become the “party of theocracy.”
How would Krugman respond if I wrote, “Even Democrats like Zell Miller concede that the Democratic party has become ‘the party of pacifists.’”?
Krugman cites some moronic state legislator in Florida (or, to be fair, a state legislator in Florida with a moronic idea), who wants conservative students to be able to sue their professors if conservative ideas aren’t respected. From there he leaps to the conclusion that “Soon, biology professors who don’t give creationism equal time with evolution and geology professors who dismiss the view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old might face lawsuits.”
How frightening! The scrotal-tightening horror of such a prophesy fills me with dread. Indeed, if this were an Airplane! movie, a giant spear would fly through the room and stick in the wall behind Lloyd Bridges for extra dramatic emphasis. Thwaauunnnggggg!!!!!
And I should be careful about characterizing the Florida legislator’s idea as moronic, relying as I am on Krugman’s version of events–and not just because he picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. Krugman’s facts are sloppy.
Krugman says that Pat Moynihan announced in the 1970s that Republicans had become the “party of ideas.” Wrong. He said it in 1980. He said the transformation began to occur in the 1970s. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Moynihan reaffirmed that the Republicans had the ideas. This isn’t petty Gotcha!ism, his goofs undermine Krugman’s argument because the transformation of American academia into a carnival of left-wing jackassery was very far along by the 1980s. So this “values issue” thesis Krugman is bleating about doesn’t quite work. In the 1980s and 1990s, dozens of books came out exposing, ridiculing, and lamenting the takeover of the academy by nutty left-wingers and the left-wing takeover only accelerated. I am unaware of any mass-migration of PhD-holders to the GOP during this time. And yet we are supposed to believe some school-board fights about creationism are deterring a new generation of academics from becoming Republicans.
He also says that it was 30 years ago when the Left was attacking science and now it’s the right. Huh? The Social Text fiasco was in the 1990s. And a slew of books about the postmodern Left’s hatred and abuse of science have come out ever since. There was Higher Superstition, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, The Flight From Science, etc. I guarantee you that among PhD candidates in America’s leading universities, for every “conservative” who believes the world was created in six days there are 100 who would think “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was really onto something if it hadn’t been exposed as a hoax. And all of this leaves out the well-publicized anti-science lying-for-justice we get from environmentalists and public-health advocates. Does no one remember the 1990s Left’s fetish with Neo-Luddism and their apologetics for the Unabomber?
I realize that Krugman isn’t a postmodern intellectual, but he uses facts like he is. I don’t like the resurgence of creationism and I’m unfavorably disposed to intelligent design. But Krugman is living in a self-serving fantasy world if he thinks the issues he delineates have anything to do with why academia is dominated by liberals, left-wingers, radicals, Fabian Socialists, eco-feminists, et al. This is the classic narrative for the tenured liberal professors who run almost every major university (N.B. I said “almost”). We keep those crazy right-wingers out not because we don’t like what they say, but because they’re anti-modern Huns, sky-god-believing apes, who would tear apart the faculty lounge like in one of those old Samsonite commercials. And then they’d use those mortar board hats like a toilet.
I’m sorry, I’ve known too many brilliant young scholars who dreamed of academic careers who were barred by the grotesque intellectual bigotry of a few tenured priests who couldn’t tolerate serious questioning of their worldview to just let this nonsense go. Krugman says that Republicans are against science and that’s why real academics are shying away from the Republican party. And here I assumed that woman who got the vapors from hearing Larry Summers cite data she didn’t like was probably a liberal Democrat. Hah, interesting. I’ll look harder for her at the next Vast Right Wing Conspiracy meeting.
Here’s a better example than anything Krugman musters. And I cite it simply because it was something I read just yesterday. These things happen every day. The historian John Moser, who has just written a fascinating biography of J. T. Flynn, recently went to the Organization of American Historians conference. While there he happened to mention to a colleague that he voted for Bush. She responded, “And yet you write books.”
And yet indeed.