The moral of this story might be that you shouldn’t put a burr under the saddle of somebody with practically unlimited funds to get even with. While playing a golf round the president of Bowdoin and prospective donor Thomas Klingenstein had an argument about Bowdoin’s radical politics and fixation on divisive identity politics. Here’s what happened next:
After the essay appeared, President Mills stood by his version of events. A few months later, Mr. Klingenstein decided to do something surprising: He commissioned researchers to examine Bowdoin’s commitment to intellectual diversity, rigorous academics and civic identity. This week, some 18 months and hundreds of pages of documentation later, the project is complete. Its picture of Bowdoin isn’t pretty.
Funded by Mr. Klingenstein, researchers from the National Association of Scholars studied speeches by Bowdoin presidents and deans, formal statements of the college’s principles, official faculty reports and notes of faculty meetings, academic course lists and syllabi, books and articles by professors, the archive of the Bowdoin Orient newspaper and more. They analyzed the school’s history back to its founding in 1794, focusing on the past 45 years—during which, they argue, Bowdoin’s character changed dramatically for the worse.
Published Wednesday, the report demonstrates how Bowdoin has become an intellectual monoculture dedicated above all to identity politics.
Some facts that support the report’s findings:
One of the few requirements is that Bowdoin students take a yearlong freshman seminar. Some of the 37 seminars offered this year: “Affirmative Action and U.S. Society,” “Fictions of Freedom,” “Racism,” “Queer Gardens” (which “examines the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and traces how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces”), “Sexual Life of Colonialism” and “Modern Western Prostitutes.”
Regarding Bowdoin professors, the report estimates that “four or five out of approximately 182 full-time faculty members might be described as politically conservative.” In the 2012 election cycle, 100% of faculty donations went to President Obama. Not that any of this matters if you have ever asked around the faculty lounge.
I don’t know the truth of this dispute. But I do have a suggestion for resolving it. I propose a sort of intellectual Turing test. Bowdoin’s faculty should deputize one of their identifiably left-leaning faculty members and one of their few “politically conservative” members to produce written statements of the political views of the other side, stated as accurately and fairly as they can. In other words let the left-leaning faculty member write a statement of political principles using what he or she believes is the voice of people who take more “conservative” views and let the right-leaning faculty member write a statement using what he or she believes is the voice of someone with left-leaning politics. Publish the two statements and let the world decide.
I suspect it would probably be a useful educational exercise.
I was curious about how the wiki page would characterize the Turing Test. In reading the page, I found this:
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I immediately thought of Ramsey’s maxim (Frank Ramsey was a brilliant mathematician/philosopher at Cambridge University and close friend of, and strong influence on, Wittgenstein). The maxim goes something like this: In any philosophical dispute between two diametrically opposed theories, there’s usually some unspoken premise that both parties agree to which is false.
FWIW, I think the Turing Test, while very interesting, doesn’t shed a great deal of light on the question of human consciousness. Whether your version could shed some light on the prejudices of academics is an interesting question.
Most liberal arts academics are writers and any competent writer could do a decent job of presenting the opposing point of view (in a field where they have some basic knowledge.) STEM people I think would have a harder time of it.
They would have little difficulty presenting the official views of the opposition. Still, I would like to see more conservatives willing to enter academia. Most of the time, one’s leanings will make little difference, but it would occasionally broaden things. By and large, profs dont really talk about their policial leanings in class. (It should be noted that hiring the National Association of Scholars is somewhat akin to hiring the DNC to rate Obama’s job as president.)
Steve
Michael, are you familiar with the “no true Scotsman” fallacy? You’ve just given a near-perfect example of it. It may be true that “most liberal arts academics are writers” but how many of them are competent writers?
I honestly have no idea and I have no fixed idea of what the outcome of my little experiment would be. I can tell you what my suspicion is. I suspect that the best that the the left-leaning scholar would be able to provide is a parody of what somebody with views different from his or her own would believe while the right-leaning scholar would be able to present a pretty realistic imitation of his left-leaning colleagues for very much the same reasons as black folks understand white folks better than vice versa.
It’s also possible that the best either side could do was a cartoonish parody. I think that in order to imitate somebody else’s ideas realistically I think you’ve got to see the sense in them, you need to have a certain amount of sympathy for them.
I know at least one non-academic writer that set forth to write a main character that was a pro-life evangelical Christian, in large part because he was decidedly not. And he wanted to flex his brain muscles to see the world (favorably) through another’s eyes.
I very much doubt that this is an exercise that an academic has any interest in. A liberal arts academic wants to contribute an explanation to human behavior. I was a research assistant for a psych professor, and working landscaping for a few other professors. Cloistered as monks.
Popular writers would probably do much better. Lawyers would probably do much better.
“I suspect that the best that the the left-leaning scholar would be able to provide is a parody of what somebody with views different from his or her own would believe ”
You really have to be a bit more nuanced here. Folks in philosophy, history, and political science departments would probably give a very good account of the “other side” (whatever that is).
I suspect that they think they would which is different from being able to do so. Remember: many if not most of them have never known anyone who didn’t hold views similar to their own in their adult lives. They rely on third party accounts that are heavily invested in self-justification.
I spent about a third of my life living, literally, in the middle of the campus of a large university. Most of my friends were faculty members. Their provinciality was extreme.
I was thinking of a question along the lines of, “Give an account of the fundamental tenets of conservative political philosophy.” Perhaps I misunderstood the question you would ask.
Philosophy, probably yes. Poli Sci / history, I think it depends.
Philosophy majors tend to get the highest grades in law school, which during the first year rewards the ability to think from both sides of a conflict. (Whether they may good lawyers, I don’t know. The old saw is that an “A” Law student would make a good law professor, a “B” student would make a good judge and a “C” student will make lots of money) I think Philosophers have a higher ability to think abstractly about a system and are generally smarter than the other liberal arts majors.
A Poli Sci / history professor whose area of concentration is removed from current events is probably unpredictable, but at least not highly politicized. A professor of Kievan Russia is most likely interested in getting into the heads of his time period. A professor of Women’s studies of Western civilization is unlikely in my interactions to articulate a view of “the other” with any sympathy.
What I had in mind was their attempting to be someone who holds those beliefs and explicate them in that light. I think that Michael is on the right track: a successful novelist could probably do it. Very few academics are successful novelists. Most successful novelists are not academics.
In his latest comment PD is getting around to my view.
The technique you describe is one used in counseling and conflict resolution. I’ve witnessed sessions of this, and it’s mind-spinning to hear the array of descriptions given. What I’ve generally observed is that the person having the most visceral animosity towards another, tends to use subjective emotions versus more objective facts, in describing the positions, traits, values of their foe. In doing so exaggeration of intention, as well as an overall distorted, adversarial image, is a common conveyed outcome from people who have arbitrarily cast judgments on those having different POVs.
Politically, this is seen in the far reaches of the ideological spectrum. The far right look at the left as ‘libtards,’ while the far left describe the right as mirrored replications of truculent cave men, or knee-jerk cowboys. The sad part, of the majority of academia being so left-sided, is that they seem to feel their opinions are the only ones that matter. Consequently, there is little non-judgmental discussions dealing with opposing viewpoints, meaning almost zip critical thinking when it comes to offering a student opportunities to formulate their own ideas from a non-biased class presentation of an issue.
So, whether it’s global warming, where green house gases have been an irrefutable ‘scientific fact’ since the production of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” to pro-life and pro-choice conflicts, where a person is warring on women if they don’t support the latter, to big government/mass dependency being more compassionate vs small government/self-reliance governance being callused and hard-hearted (and on-and-on) — there is little middle ground between the hard social progressive left towards the right, or the hard right thinking the left is taking this country to social decadence and ruin in one swift move.
Melting these two harsh opinions, IMO, is difficult to impossible too, unless a more open less virulent forum is cultivated to debate such heated conflicts. However as long as unmitigated rancor prevails, with the Michaels of the world calling republicans scum, and his Limbaugh counterpart constantly belittling all liberals, little will be resolved……
“Most successful novelists are not academics.”
Heh. I had to add this.
Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated
That Nabokov.