Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Changing the Politics of Academe

In the last two weeks, I haven't been able to post much. I've had several topics I really wanted to write about, but because I've been so busy, I avoided any post that couldn't be completed in a hundred words or so. Things are finally back to normalcy, so I'll probably be blogging regularly again.

During the time of my semi-hiatus, I kept running into posts about the politics of Academe (political-type politics, not office politics). I've discussed this before in this space, but I'll tease it out a bit more.

First off, as I look at these various posts, I find that the authors (on both sides of the political divide) seem to be incapable of thinking of others except in the most caricatured way. Frankly, it's shameful. The low point is when one poster accuses professors of other political views of having "appalling dullness of the spirit." Ah, yes, that's exactly the problem -- since I can't really marshal an argument against another position, it must be dull of the spirit! That's the ticket!

Let's stop pretending, shall we, that the stronger argument always wins out in Academe. Let's also stop pretending that each field doesn't have its own establishment, and that the establishments aren't sometimes highly politicized. The MLA, for example, is very highly politicized, and anyone contending otherwise may want to consider that honesty is a virtue.

Is there a "marketplace of ideas" in Academe? Yes, there is. The stronger argument does not always win out, but it generally has the edge over weaker arguments. The real marketplace in Acadame isn't some platonic place where ideas are traded -- it is the marketplace we are all familiar with, good old-fashioned hard cash. In the end, money wins the day.

In my field, for example, we could offer lots of reasons that the study of English literature is a romper room from leftist politics, and many of those reasons are probably simultaneously true. At the end of the day, though, it all comes down to money. The path to financial success is easier for leftist literary scholars, and so many more pursue that path.

Imagine, for example, a conservative literary scholar has managed to navigate the shoals of graduate school, freshly-minted with Ph.D. Now comes the time to publish that dissertation. Now Jane Scholar finds herself trying to find a publisher, and discovers that not many academic publishers are friendly toward conservative scholarship. Eventually, though, Jane Scholar manages to find a publisher, a few tiers down from the top.

On the basis of her book, what kind of job does she find? If her politics are conservative, she probably can hope for little more than to have her book ignored; if it gets reviewed, the reviews will be hostile. She'll find herself scrambling for work in a tough market, near the bottom of the academic heap.

Once she gets her job, it will probably have a heavy teaching load (a problem that cuts across the political spectrum at the bottom). Her writing of more books and articles will be slowed down because of that load. Journals, too, aren't produced for free; they take money. If Jane Scholar wants tenure, promotion, or a new job at a better school, she needs to get published. Most academic journals are far more friendly to liberal scholars than conservative scholars. Ditto for academic conferences, etc.

What is Jane Scholar's fate? She might not be able to publish enough to get tenure, and she'll fall out of Academe. She might get tenure, and spend her career in the trenches. If she's prudent, she'll do what so many other conservative scholars do -- either fake being liberal (much more common, I think, than most people imagine), or try to do scholarship that is completely apolitical. While there is nothing wrong with apolitical scholarship, her liberal colleagues aren't bound by the same restrictions.

So you are a conservative group/publication/random person who wants to change the politics of Academe, are you? Is legislation going to work? Political pressure? Endless griping in blog posts?

One thing, and one thing only, will change Academe -- money. See your mouth? Put your money in it's current geographical location. Fund some well-paying named chairs. Create some conservative academic publishing houses (Regnery is not enough) and publish some first-tier scholarship. Fund some swank academic conferences in desirable locations. Create grants for research. In other words, put up some cash!

You would think that conservatives would understand the motivating power of money. If scholars could sudden publish openly conservative work, could get their travel funded and their research supported, and found themselves getting tenure and promotion because they were able to publish prolifically, you would have a lot more openly conservative scholars in Academe (and probably some fake conservative scholars as well). Until then, all things being equal, liberal ideas will win out in the academy, because liberal ideas can get people published, tenured,a nd promoted. Conservatives outside of Academe need either to put up some cash or stop the griping.

9 comments:

  1. Now, Richard: You claim I libel my colleagues.

    But I think my point was that even if such were true, and some on the left really ARE bad people, conservatives need to stop griping and work harder.

    You are slamming me for agreeing with you! How much harder you must you be on those who dare DISagree!

    Curmudgeon, thy name is Nokes....

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't really see how you think I'm agreeing with you. Your post accuses our colleagues of "simple laziness, and an appalling dullness of the spirit." Your comment here again suggests that conservative faculty are lazy, and that they need to "work harder."

    I cannot agree with you that conservative faculty are lazier or duller of spirit than liberal faculty (indeed, I did not name you in the original post or connect that quote with you because I assumed it was an overstated intemperate comment). My point has to do with *money*. The problem isn't that our conservative faculty are sitting on their buttocks -- the problem is that conservative critics outside Academe don't commit money to conservative academics in the same way that liberals do. Instead, conservatives have set up a handful of think tanks. That's fine as far as it goes, but they can't opt out of universities and then complain that they are unwelcome there.

    As for the charge of being a curmudgeon, alas, it is true.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Conservatives have been VERY good at creating and funding think tanks and centers and ISI and conservative youth organizations to formulate, indoctrinate (I'll use that word here in a neutral sense), and diseminate conservative ideology on the political stage. Yet when it comes to literary scholarship, say, they do nothing but pay lip-service to the Canon and the Eternal Verities and all that other stuff windbags like Harold Bloom go on and on about.

    Conservatives spend a lot of money attacking liberal academe and portraying it as a vast conspiracy to indoctrinate (in a non-neutral way, this time) poor, defenseless kids into commie pinko, blame-Amerikkka-first, terrorist-loving homosexuals intent on destroying truth, justice, Christianity, and the American Way via gay marriage and Foucault, but they don't seem to spend any money doing the sorts of things you suggest, which they've done so well in other, more politically-useful fields (like history, foreign policy, law, etc.) I mean, they've had lots of success in those fields, so why not duplicate it? Why continue to howl about the oppressive Liberals and not apply their own tried and true methods of creating and alternate, and eventually powerful, conservative literary academic realm?

    And, BTW, I'd really like to know (and I'm really being honest in my curiosity) what conservative scholarship would look like. Besides doing away with most, if not all, Theory talk (something I could get behind, definitely), what would a conservative scholar write that they can't now?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Frank,

    I assume by "conservative scholarship" in that context you meant "conservative literary scholarship." It is hard to say exactly what it would look like, since it would undoubtedly have many different schools of thought just as current leftist literary scholarship does.

    Broadly, my guess would be that it wouldn't end all the Theory talk, and would probably re-invigorate it as left and right duked it out, but it would end Theory Cant and the presumption of consensus (the latter being, I think, the most destructive force in scholarship today). I think we would find less scholarship grounding itself in French theorists, and more in the work of literary types (e.g. we would less frequently hear the phrase "As Kristeva argues," and more often hear the phrase, "As Homer demonstrates").

    Aesthetics might come back -- though the immanent return of aesthetics has been predicted about as often as the return of Christ. The problem is that when you kill off Truth, you kill off Beauty. If Truth were resurrected, Beauty as a concept might revive as well.

    In the current political environment, we might also see a school that was about promoting the values of Western culture depicted in literature, especially against the values of Islam.

    Of course, much scholarship would be little affected. My own textual scholarship (focusing on the material text) has a natural tendancy toward being apolitical. Apolitical scholarship would probably get a small boost, though, as it became less politically suspect.

    All of the above, though, is fantasy, not prediction. I don't see any signs that non-academic conservatives are going to do anything more than complain about leftist ideologues in the humanities. Ironically, because the humanities are so poorly funded, the amount of money it would take to make a real change is relatively small.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Prof. Nokes:

    Let me try to isolate where we disagree, since you claim we do. You said:

    You would think that conservatives would understand the motivating power of money. If scholars could sudden publish openly conservative work, could get their travel funded and their research supported, and found themselves getting tenure and promotion because they were able to publish prolifically, you would have a lot more openly conservative scholars in Academe (and probably some fake conservative scholars as well). Until then, all things being equal, liberal ideas will win out in the academy, because liberal ideas can get people published, tenured,a nd promoted. Conservatives outside of Academe need either to put up some cash or stop the griping.

    Now, I have (with collaborators, who obviously did most of the work, given my own lack of ability) secured half a million in funding from the National Science Foundation, nearly $2.5 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and nearly $1 million from various think tanks and foundations.

    There is PLENTY of money out there, if one will but roll off one's big arse and go after it. I thought you were calling for our people to be more active, more entrepreneurial, that sort of thing. Good conservative values. But I was wrong. You were calling for conservative faculty to do NOTHING, and to wait for conservative sugar daddies to bankroll them, without any effort on the part of the conservative academics. Fair enough, I was mistaken. It had not occurred to me that conservative faculty were excused, simply by their intrinsic merit, from the actions the rest of the world expects from those seeking funding.

    There are two (at least) possible responses you might make to my claims.

    1. Munger is not a real conservative. He cannot be, because he has attracted outside funding, and we all know "real" conservatives can't do that. (That sort of response would be the "dullness of spirit" bit I mentioned. If you think that the success of others MUST be due to their selling out, it is a balm to excuse one's own indolence.)

    2. Munger is simply a fool. The narrow part of the social sciences where he lives allows the successful pursuit of outside funds, but in the rest of the social sciences, and more particularly the humanities, few such sources of funding exist. So, narcissist that Munger is, he generalizes his own privileged and pampered life to those who toil in trenches where support is not available.

    I would trust that you were not making argument #1, as it is beneath you.

    Argument #2 (or some third claim I have not thought of) might well carry the day for you, though. I have no answer to it, at least not a good one.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Aside from the big arse and sugar daddy bit, I think we've finally found where we dis/agree, since the gist of objection #2 is where I would respond (though I wouldn't call you a fool, narcissist, etc.). Objection #1 would be silly, since the merits of your argument do not hinge on how "real" of a conservative you may be ... and if you designate yourself as a conservative, I'll take you at your word.

    I'm told by my friends in the hard sciences that they use a $10-$1 formula for applying for money (you have to put out enough applications for ten times the support you'll need, because you can expect only about 10% funding). I don't know what the figure is in the humanities, since my own grant applications haven't even approached the 10% mark.

    Perhaps I just write a poor grant (though I've had them vetted by successful grant writers), but more often the problem is that granting institutions for the humanities will often forbid the grant from resulting in a book publication, a conference, or acquisition of permanent equipment (I've had grants specifically denied because they would result in one of these things). Instead, literature-type grants tend to focus on pedagogy (e.g. projects to teach poetry to kids in the inner cities) and encouraging work by marginalized groups (first time women writers, minority writers, etc).

    Of course, in my own case, my work is pretty apolitical ... and has been a topic of some long discussion between some scientist friends and me (actually, I've logged so many hours talking about the grant situation, I can't believe I've never blogged on it). If you wouldn't mind the suggestion, I'd very much like to read a post on your blog about your take on grant-writing in the humanities.

    ReplyDelete
  7. How refreshing to see Americans writing "arse". My warmest congratulations.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Just another service of the Wordhoard, Dearieme. More arse per post than any other major medievalist blog.

    ReplyDelete
  9. "First off, as I look at these various posts, I find that the authors (on both sides of the political divide) seem to be incapable of thinking of others except in the most caricatured way."

    Much of what passes for intellectual activity currently, and not just in the USA, no better than a caricature of itself. I find that both "liberal" and "conservative" are pretty useless terms unless you are counting chips in the power game. (X "liberals" in the Senate, Y "conservatives" in the Academic Senate.)

    Having more and better funded "conservatives" in academia is hardly a cure for the abuses of "liberalism" when "conservatism" in regards to non-academic issues is so corrupt and incoherent. Somebody else can chime in on the illiberalism of "liberalism" and find plenty to back up that assertion, too.

    And on a more trivial matter, can anyone explain to a non-literary scholar why every shiny but untested possibility is enshrined as a theory from day one?

    Though maybe that's not a trivial matter at all...

    ReplyDelete