Dicentra steers us to an article by Jere P Surber, a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver. Professor Surber is explaining why the humanities incline so heavily to the left. In doing so, he reveals a surprisingly explicit note of personal and collective envy:
Who, after all, would want to preserve a situation in which others who are equivalently educated and experienced – doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, colleagues in other areas, and, yes, chief executives – receive vastly more compensation, sometimes by a factor of 10 or 100?
Professor Surber feels undervalued by the base calculus of the market and clearly he’s essential to the working of the world. How can it be that doctors and engineers are thought more valuable more than him, a professor of philosophy? Society must be transformed to correct this abomination. To illustrate the magnitude of the injustice at hand, the professor shifts from resentment to self-congratulation:
Studies that must – simply must – lead one to the higher plains of the left. Note the implicit conceit that non-leftist outlooks lead to simplistic conclusions, unlike those who turn by default to the state and its enlargement.
Readers may think that a liberal arts education should expose students to a variety of viewpoints and ideas to be tested. But apparently that messy and time consuming business is no longer necessary. Professor Surber and his peers have already determined the only respectable position.
This boldness prompts Jonah Goldberg to raise an obvious question:
The academic left is of course renowned for its rigour and impartiality, its open-minded enquiry, and a willingness to engage honestly with challenging ideas.
And there’s another, incidental issue to ponder. It perhaps has some relevance to the aforementioned complexity. In many arts subjects, especially those tethered only loosely to evidence, logic or practical verification, there’s often pressure to avoid the obvious and prosaic, even when the obvious and prosaic is true. The obligation to be unobvious, if only for the benefit of one’s academic peers, may help explain the more fanciful assertions from some practitioners of the liberal arts.
Consider, for instance, Duke’s professor miriam cooke, who refuses to capitalise her name, thus drawing attention to her egalitarian radicalism and immense creativity. Professor cooke’s subtlety of mind is evident in her claim that the oppression and misogyny found in the Islamic world is actually the fault of globalisation and Western colonialism, despite the effects predating their alleged causes by several centuries. Professor cooke also tells us that “polygamy can be liberating and empowering” – a statement that may strike readers as somewhat dubious. It does, however, meet the key criteria of being both edgy and unobvious.
Meanwhile, Professor Surber’s self-regard continues to tumesce. He has fathomed all of history and it validates him:
In short, if you haven’t reached a similarly leftwing conclusion, you haven’t achieved sufficient complexity and nuance in your thinking, you peasant.
Luckily, we can count on Professor Surber and his peers to guide us to the light, such is their benign magnificence. They may be cruelly underpaid and underappreciated, but by God they’re better than us and they will save us from ourselves. I perhaps don’t need to mention how egalitarian politics are often signalled in this grand and superior manner. I will, however, mention Robert Nozick’s essay Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?, in particular the following:
Feel free to ease my animus with the buttons below.
An envious arrogant leftwing academic. Shocker. Anyway stop bitching and hand over your money. He deserves it more than you.
Right on dude.
Surber: “There’s no secret that the liberal arts are the lowest-compensated sector of academe,”
Yes it’s a real outrage that surgeons earn more than professors of gender studies.
“Yes it’s a real outrage that surgeons earn more than professors of gender studies.”
Quite. But that does seem to be Surber’s thinking, and presumably the thinking of many of his peers. Perhaps he imagines that he, or someone equally clever, could impose on us a more virtuous economic system whereby people are paid in accord with the value they assign to themselves based on their estimated cleverness, and irrespective of what the customer is willing to pay.
“Look, you savages, I’m thinking about the human condition in nuanced and complex ways. Where’s my fur coat?”
Why are we being so harsh on these academics? They work in this profession even though they know they’ll be compensated less. In the pursuit of truth, they are willing to be (financial) martyrs. And it’s about time you knuckledraggers acknowlege this. They’re BETTER than you, and they are paid less, which they accept with dignity, which also makes them BETTER than you. Anyone sensing a theme here?
I love the tired Sarah Palin references at the end. If only she’d been a liberal academic she would have….? Would have what? Seen the light? Been a proper elite? Known her place? What?
“Who, after all, would want to preserve a situation in which others who are equivalently educated and experienced – doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, colleagues in other areas, and, yes, chief executives – receive vastly more compensation?”
Ha. He doesn’t get it. Doctors, engineers, CEOs and scientists are more USEFUL than a professor of philosophy. Even lawyers are.
Is passive-aggressive behavior part of training themselves “to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition”, or do people with this sort of emotional disorder naturally gravitate towards the Liberal Arts?
Was thinking about the CEO, Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer vs liberal academic. I like to think of a jobs utility by whether or not it fits in the following statement:
“Oh no, I’ve got a problem with X, I’d better call a Y”.
Where X is a real-life day to day situation and not simply a scenario. And where Y is some sort of profession. If there is no X where you NEED a Y, then Y’s value to society is deemed less than a Y where there exist multiple X’s.
Lets play a fun game. Say Y is a Gender Studies Professor, or Philosphy major. See if you can come up with a real day to day situation where you NEED them.
But gender studies is the fourth emergency service.
What’s funny, sort of, is that Surber is both condescending and parochial, as if a mental life was for His Tribe Only. Despite telling us at some length just how clever he is, and how clever leftist academics are (compared with Sarah Palin), Surber doesn’t actually provide much of an argument. He just tells us, repeatedly, that his tribe has the only view worthy of respect.
As one of the commenters (#36) notes in reply, “As a partisan matter, it doesn’t make sense for liberals to go out of their way to rehabilitate and explore conservative ideas, but as an academic matter it’s quite a different question… There are serious conservative ideas and ways of thinking about politics and society, but the academy, in its general culture, acts as if there aren’t… That’s partisan, not academic behaviour.”
You could, I think, add “classical liberal” and “libertarian” to “conservative” in the sentence above. And the more politicised and partisan the humanities become – the more territorial they are – the less incentive there is to engage in good faith with contesting ideas. It’s much easier to pretend that rival viewpoints have no serious intellectual or moral basis.
Note Surber’s sole contribution to the discussion following his article, in which he depicts his numerous and varied critics (from across the political spectrum) as “those who merely want to posture, pontificate, ‘conserve’ the status quo, turn back the clock to some imagined ‘better time’ – or whatever other aims fuel their obvious passion.”
The framing of his critics (whether ‘conservative’ or not) as “want[ing] to turn back the clock” is simply evasive and disingenuous. It’s a tribal cartoon – one that undermines his own claims of “complexity” and “nuance.” And this is Surber’s very first manoeuvre, one he repeats several times, and on which he hangs his credibility. Also disingenuous is the reference to his critics’ “obvious passion,” which implies, sneerily and dishonestly, that no serious and rational points were awaiting his reply.
Surber’s dismissive comment and failure to engage with criticism suggests he’s unable to step outside of his own conceits, even when pressed repeatedly, which isn’t an ideal trait for a professor of philosophy. Instead, he resorts to dishonesty, evasion, straw men and more tribal condescension. Note Surber’s tone and compare it with that of his more articulate critics (whose points Surber takes care to ignore, possibly because they jar with his ‘conservative’ caricature). Instead, he acknowledges only the most asinine replies, thus conjuring an image of himself as both besieged and validated.
Does it sound like the professor is arguing in good faith?
“It’s real simple: Those who have less and want more will tend to support social changes that promise to accomplish that”
Either that or they’ll find a way to GET more through honest means, rather than asking Big Daddy Gubmint to take it from others to give it to you.
Or they’ll thank God every day that they have anything at all (especially in the industrialized West) and be contented with having WAY more than is needed to survive, even if the neighbors have WAY WAY more.
‘we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways’
Complex, nuanced — sure, I can accept those. As you point out, David, academics esteem those characteristics most highly. But there’s something pathetic about the inclusion of ‘productive’. It’s certainly true that academics produce extraordinary quantities of verbiage, and in that sense, they may be productive, but it is another question entirely whether their output is actually useful. (I’m not speaking of faculties of science and engineering….)
I think this fits in with the way that “social studies” has morphed into the “social sciences”. There is a need to compete(!) with the hard sciences, which became quite popular in the 1800s and early 1900s, to the detriment of the liberal arts, and the way to compete is to show that you are doing hard work, even if it doesn’t amount to anything than a few words on a page.
I am reading Hemmingway’s Moveable Feast right now, and I am taken by the way that he talks about all the “work” he does each day, writing in the cafe. I like his writing style, and appreciate that writing can actually be a profession, but to make it sound like people who dig ditches for a living is a bit much…
I suspect both Kant and Aquinas, to pick a couple almost at random, had a far superior intellect to the good professor, a more complete education, a vastly greater understanding of how to think about the world, and, naturally, a much more valuable body of work. Despite all this, they failed to achieve that oneness with fashionable liberalism that Prof Surber seems to the think is the natural resting place of great thinkers.
In the 20thC, how many truly great minds belonged to people that way? Chomsky would include himself among them, I imagine, but I don’t. And Nietzsche just wasn’t bright enough, I suppose.
‘Yes it’s a real outrage that surgeons earn more than professors of gender studies.’
He genuinely seems to believe this, which is quite staggering.
Didn’t these dolts used to find a rich, old woman to support them, ie: John Kerry?
Excellent takedown of Surber’s obvious high regard for himself and his ideas. To JP Surber, it’s not the marketplace that should determine the price his work and ideas are worth, it’s his having them in the first place.
Nice work if you can get it.
Their intellect will be rewarded in heaven. Oops, liberals do not believe in God and besides coveting your neighbors property is one of those commandments the statist just cannot get around. Sucks to be them.
As somebody with a BA in History who started out in engineering I find this: “It is because we liberal-arts professors… have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us are liberals.” to be hilarious.
Nothing in the liberal arts is complex or productive. Maybe nuanced. God I miss those days of being a history major. I could do nothing, write total crap, and still get A’s.
The lowest of those entering post high school education can get a doctorate in philosophy. I know, I watched several of them agonize through their studies, spending countless hours lifting those 12-oz dumbells for endless days.
I can’t help but notice the parallels between what liberals think of themselves vs. what they think of conservatives and that scene in the Princess Bride with Vizzini and The Dread Pirate Roberts.
Humanity has shifted to a Utopian view due to state indoctrination. Thus, our children learn from people that have ZERO real world experience and not their parents steeped in the real world. Lenin knew it.
Every time that a collectivist society has been forced (or fooled) on to humanity it has been a failure. Some large where 100s of millions die, some small where the populace is merely hungry, re-educated, and shorter than they should be. One constant is there will always be fear and misery. Yet, the left always works to bring this inevitable result to pass. I believe this is the classic definition of insanity.
Anyone who was subjected to Critical Literary Theory in the 90’s (like myself) knows what a wondrous pile of wasteful bullsh*t it all is. It’s an exercise in mental masturbation for masturbations sake; not for stroking the intellect, but for generating a bizarre, incestuous way of collective thinking that produces, literally, nothing of substance, worth or value. There is no sincere heft to it. Where else can you spend a full 45 minutes arguing over the correct pronunciation of Nietzsche? (It’s actually “NEE-CHA”, by the way.) The humanities are mostly for barmy susceptible chicks and the guys who want to screw them: for people who too often fear their hands or fear being exposed at some pretentious mixer. Sure, the screwing part was wonderful, but there was little challenge in it. Memorize three trivial poems or cite some obscure feminist author (the name “Aphra Behn WILL get you laid on campus) and it’s fish in a barrel time. Reading some bent treatise and finding it “deep” and telling others “it’s deep” requires little skill. It’s kinda like the guitar – anyone can do it. Humanities types, and I know many, insist their scholarship promotes critical thinking, but find no irony that they all come to think basically the same way – especially politically. Studying the humanities (of which I embarrassingly have two degrees) did less for me in four years than a three month course in car repair at the local tech school a few summers back. The kids under the hood were more real, sincere, genuine, capable, no BS people than 98% of the fey hipsters I studied with. Being able to fix a woman’s car is a hell of a lot sexier than reciting Rimbaud poems to her; or playing guitar for that matter.
shooting fish in a barrel…
David @ 16:05 wrote:
“Perhaps he imagines that he … could impose on us a more virtuous economic system whereby people are paid in accord with the value they assign to themselves based on their estimated cleverness …”
That very economic system has already been imposed by an entertainment-media complex that demands its highly untalented actors, entertainers and performers to be compensated millions for their mere fifteen minutes of fame on stage or screen.
If I could buy them for what they are worth and sell them for what they think they are worth, I could retire tomorrow.
Perhaps the reason that liberals trend to the fields of study that pay less is that they have a personality that makes them complacent in receiving lower pay? Maybe conservatives have more drive to be better off financially and not willing to settle for not being compensated according to their level of education?
In all honesty, this all comes down to economics. It is all about supply and demand. The demand for the services of liberal arts professors is low and their pay is reflective of that demand.
Who is this guy, Chauncy Gardner? Look how erudite I am, I use big words to prove to the great unwashed how superior my way of thinking is. He sounds a lot like his messiah BHO. Funny, I was just telling my 17 year old daughter that I’ll help her through college as long as she doesn’t take the equivalent of “basket weaving 101” in other words I’m not paying for a degree in “Liberal Arts”. I’d rather she have a useful degree, you know something that helps her to get an actual job not just another Liberal Professorship at a liberal college.
It was said that Baise Pascal invented differential equations so he could amuse himself with a form of mathematics that was useless. Of course, differential equations are now at the core of engineering and science.
A liberal arts education in the humanities should be so lucky.
“In many arts subjects… there’s often pressure to avoid the obvious and prosaic, even when the obvious and prosaic is true… Consider, for instance, Duke’s professor miriam cooke, who… claims that the oppression and misogyny found in the Islamic world is actually the fault of globalisation and Western colonialism, despite the effects predating their alleged causes by several centuries.”
Spot on.
Concerning Neyney’s comment, We who pay those tuitions while they require the students to take these almost useless classes (to keep the liberal arts majors employed) should rise up and say ENOUGH. Many of these technical graduates are better than those who were required (forced) to take the philosophy classes. Their only purpose is to keep them in a paycheck. We all know it even though it is complicated.
To paraphrase Robert Nozick, why then do contemporary intellectual elitists feel entitled to the highest rewards their society has to offer and resentful when they do not receive this? Intellectual elitists feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. The answer of course is ironic, but only to them. Being that there are so many liberal intellectual elitists in our free market society, their wages are, rightfully so, hopelessly depressed. It’s too bad for them especially considering the number of liberal intellectual elite clones matriculating from colleges and universities each and every year. The ever increasing the pool of liberal intellectual elites is sure to keep their wages suppressed for generations to come.
If left wing ideology is so complex and sophisticated why are so many of its adherents as dense as they are?
I would like to see this goof solve a coupled set of partial differential equations of four variables (e.g. Navier-Stokes) and apply it to a real life problem. Then he would realize how stupid he is to think liberal arts are even close to engineering and the hard sciences.
There’s no secret that the liberal arts are the lowest-compensated sector of academe, despite substantially more advanced study than business instructors and the equivalent of those in the natural sciences
Liberals arts PhDs have “substantially more advanced study” than physics or math PhDs? Since when?
Who, after all, would want to preserve a situation in which others who are equivalently educated and experienced … receive vastly more compensation
You would think somebody who claims to think “in complex, nuanced, and productive ways” wouldn’t push the credentialism fallacy.
From Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton to the brain dead of Hollywood, the intellectual superiority of the left never fails to assert itself
“If left wing ideology is so complex and sophisticated why are so many of its adherents as dense as they are?”
They’re not dense; they’re *substantive*.
maybe he’d get paid more for his “intellectual thoerizing” if it wasn’t so provably erroneous. i.e. left leaning. its not that he’s ignorant; it’s just that he knows so much that isn’t so. and doc, i’m a cpa, and YOU ain’t underpaid. TRUST me. i know how much everybody makes. i do taxes for 10 of each of them, everyone. all of you people. engineers, professors, professional sports athletes, lawyers, single mother daycare moms, plumbers, cia officers, hvac repairmen, congressional aides, doctors, dentists, speach writers, truck drivers, salesmen, small business owners, lobbyists, primary school teachers, active duty mil, retired people, poor people, rich people, dead people. everybody. i know what you make. and they make. and i know how much all of you work, and them. YOU AINT UNDERPAID. you piece of merda. (thats latin pal)
Fred,
You don’t know what I make.
As a college professor myself (Information Systems), I’ve long noticed that there is a much higher conservative to liberal ratio in the hard sciences and business disciplines than in the humanities. The business schools are anathema to so many libs because they essentially teach capitalism, which liberals abhor. The hard sciences (e.g., physics) are avoided because they seek objectively right and wrong answers based upon evidence and logic, which liberals abhor.
I guess it’s a heckuva lot easier to be a professor in a field where nobody can check your work (What do you mean there is no such thing as a “male lesbian?”) and there is no consequence for being wrong even if it could be checked.
I am a former Proessor of the history of art (I think that qualifies me in the humanities and liberal arts). As such, my response to Prof. Surber is : “What tripe this is!”
Liberal arts professors are more nuanced than engineers who must take into account the dynamic load on every bolt in the bridge they design?
Give me a break!
Liberals have found sanctuary in the libreal arts because liberals deal primarily in theory which cannot be proven (i.e., opinion). Thus they are free to theorize and when nothing works, the justification is that the theory is not wrong, it was not implemented correctly (or not explained fully). There is no hard and fast proof to hold their feet to the fire; they can be as philosophically sloppy as they care to be as long as they can cover well.
Imagine, by contrast, an engineer justifying a deck collapse because Americans are just too overweight; if they would loose weight the deck would not collapse.
Furthermore, a politically liberal academia is a very recent phenomenon. Throughout most of academic history, since the founding of the first university in the 11th century (Bologna, Italy) academic faculty have been overwhelmingly conservative. Prof. Surber, let’s see how you nuance your opinion away from that pesky fact.
And all this time I thought Liberal Arts was invented so people could go to college with out any math skills
A further comment on some of the opinions above regarding the liberal arts in general.
Don’t denigrate liberal arts disciplines just because you find some morons leading classroom discussions.
I treasure my under graduate and graduate work in art history. It exposed me to an incredible amount of information in many many disciplines, but more importantly, it taught me how to think critically. Even more importantly, it trained me to be able to use that critical thinking process in other fields and endeavors.
To say that a univeristy degree should simply produce the possibility of a good job is to reduce university education to that of a trade school. Those who would do that are the antithetical extreme of Prof. Surber; both points of view are equally invalid.
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.”
Robert A. Heinlein quotes (American science-fiction Writer, 1907-1988)
The professor may have inadvertently hit on something…
How many Right thinking professionals would be satisfied with a low paying career stuffing envelopes for 20+ years?
Now, how many of those same professionals would LEAP at the chance to work with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN for the same abysmal pay?
Enjoyment of your career is an overarching factor in the decision to pursue it, and compensation is merely one component thereof. However a larger part of enjoyment comes from challenge and stimulation.
So the professor is right… Leftists dominate the fields of Liberal Arts because those fields ARE “nuanced, complicated, and advanced” … for those who are hobbled with the critical thinking abilities of leftists.
Complexity is relative… I apologize if that’s not “unobvious” enough, but it comes with the moniker.
I’ll be a witness to the fact that studying the “nuances” of literature and history for six years can be fun. But there comes a point, where you gotta make a living, and then it’s off to the sophistry of business or law school. Succinctly, I don’t regret the German lit degrees and I don’t regret the law license, either.
Regards.
I received an email from my Students Union not too long ago in which the author started by blithely asserting his horror and lack of understanding that anyone could vote for the BNP or UKIP. There was no reference to the SWP though, who recruit heavily on campus. It is no surprise that many of my compatriots (post Pants Bomber) defended freedom of speech in the University Islamic Society but only months before had felt more than comfortable demanding that Nick Griffin be refused the right to speak anywhere.
Now, that isn’t to say I agree with the BNP, UKIP or Nick Griffin but this intolerance, this immovable world view, is endemic in universities and actively harms academia. An open mind might be like a fortress with its gate unbarred but too often what I see around me are lonely ivory towers, isolated from any challenge or change by unconscious prejudice.
David said:
“Perhaps he imagines that he, or someone equally clever, could impose on us a more virtuous economic system whereby people are paid in accord with the value they assign to themselves based on their estimated cleverness, and irrespective of what the customer is willing to pay.”
Well, perhaps he does. But then, since he, as a liberal-arts professor, has “studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics”, one can only assume that he understands only too well how kindly the great command economy states of the 20th century treated intellectual free thinkers, not to mention how well they treated the less important members of their societies.
“It exposed me to an incredible amount of information in many many disciplines, but more importantly, it taught me how to think critically. Even more importantly, it trained me to be able to use that critical thinking process in other fields and endeavors.”
I value my education in Spanish Lit, too, but I really can’t remember when I was *forced* to think critically. I don’t remember a professor saying, “now, that’s a logical fallacy,” or of really smacking me upside the head for lazy thinking. Yeah, I got some comments on this or that paragraph in a paper, but it hardly constituted RIGOR, because I was never forced to redo it.
Linguistics? That’s different. It’s the closest thing to real science the Humanities has, because you have to work with observable phenomena, map it out, and be very rigorous in your classifications. Take a look at a map that shows where a particular phoneme varies geographically sometime and tell me there isn’t rigor involved.
John Derbyshire chips in here:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTNkMTgzYzk4Y2Q4NjgwMzhhMmZkMDZjZjczZDMwNmM=
here
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Culture/2cultures.html
“right side of history”
I wonder if Prof. Surber thinks that the French Revolutionaries were on the right side of history. Was Napoleon on the “right side of history”? Was the Reign of Terror the right side, or the wrong side? If we resurrected all of those disembodied heads, wouldn’t they tend to disagree with the resurrected peasantry. Was Robespierre on the right side of history when he advocated razor-edged justice, and was he on the right side of history when he experienced it a bit later?
I have a feeling only Prof. Surber, with his simplistic bifurcation of history along some (necessarily) subjective right/wrong axis, can give us an answer that he’d agree with.
Science!
Pretty much all I see of Prof. Surber’s diatribe is self-justifying rationalization. Unsurprising, really, and indicative of at best superficial self-awareness.