To the Editor:
Professor Ruth’s essay about legislative overreach in the operations of public universities in Texas and Florida raises concerns which I share (“Authoritarians Come for the Academy,” The Chronicle Review, August 14). However, the piece focuses on the danger to democracies when freedom of thought and expression in the academy is challenged from without, while ignoring the more serious challenges to free thought, free expression, and diversity of opinions from within the academy itself, and the relationship between these two threats.
I have been involved in several different colleges and universities for forty plus years now, as a student, law student, active alumnus, guest lecturer, senior administrator, and trustee. Over that time I have experienced the evolution of campus environments from left leaning, but with reasonable ideological balance and a rigorous exchange of conflicting ideas, to one that in too many places today most resembles a progressive echo chamber. This leftist bias is visible in official communications, casual campus conversations, hiring committee deliberations and candidate litmus tests, marketing materials and mission statements, new academic departments, curricular changes, invited speakers and topics, disinvited speakers, honorary degree recipients, and what feels and looks like indoctrination about political topics. It’s also visible in the data suggesting an extraordinary percentage of faculty and students are self censoring, both in and out of the classroom. A multitude of ideas and beliefs that are “mainstream” in our society are unwelcome on campus. These are, I’m sad to conclude, the direct reasons for the political interventions that Professor Ruth and I both bemoan.
Through generations of self replication, and increasingly hostile attitudes toward libertarian, and conservative perspectives, the academy has destroyed any semblance of ideological balance. Fifty years ago, when higher ed was almost universally considered a public good worthy of support, the professoriate was about 55 to 65 percent on the left or left leaning, leaving a significant percentage to represent an alternative view. Since then, there has been a radical change in the makeup of the academy. Data today suggests a left to right ratio between 10 and 20 to 1 is common in most institutions, while our society remains equally divided between right and left. (A survey by the Harvard Crimson last year suggests the ratio at Harvard is a stunning 82 to 1.)
No academic discipline has been spared this purge of unorthodox political thought. It’s worse than the numbers would suggest, as human nature (as well as the tenure and promotion system) drives the one moderate or right leaning faculty member or grad student left in a department to keep his mouth shut about her “unorthodox” beliefs or questions, lest they suffer the wrath of their colleagues. The admiration Americans had for higher ed is plummeting, much faster than the decline seen in institutions generally. Our fellow countrymen have seen these changes, and they are reacting through their elected representatives. That should not be seen as remarkable, surprising, or indeed undemocratic. What’s remarkable is that it took this long to begin. (I wonder how long it would have taken us liberals to intervene politically, if the shoe were on the other foot. In my state of Massachusetts, would the perennially Democratic legislature continue their support for our state university unabated if the faculty skewed 10 to 1 to the right?)
Do we in academe wish to reverse this outside interference before it gains more steam? If so, we need to reverse the conditions which created it. We need to embrace diversity of ideas everywhere on campus. We need to recruit conservatives back to graduate schools and the professoriate by making them, and their views, welcome. We need to model constructive disagreement, in the classroom and out. We need more open debates on big issues, with speakers who actually have fundamentally different views. And we need to stop the practice of student indoctrination in extreme leftist orthodoxy.
Let me be clear that I believe all views, including extreme leftist ones, should be welcome on campus. I have held some of those views myself. But colleges and universities must not allow themselves to preach the “truth” of any particular orthodoxy. To do so is antithetical to the purpose of our institutions, which is to say antithetical to the open and free exchange of all ideas, and the correspondent pursuit, and dissemination, of knowledge. We should remember to embrace all who seek the truth, but fear those who claim to have found it, whatever their ideology. Until we change, we should expect much more of the political intervention we disdain.
Jim Gray
Associate Vice President
Smith College
Northampton, Mass.