In light of the recent thought policing of students at Delaware University, and similar efforts elsewhere, Robert Maranto’s article on academic monoculture may help explain how such absurdities come about, and persist, apparently unchallenged from within these institutions. 

At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-centre view portrayed in a positive light… Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors’ political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology…

I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves. Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach… A leftist ideological monoculture is bad for universities, rendering them intellectually dull places imbued with careerism rather than the energy of contending ideas.

In an environment supposedly geared to the cultivation of critical thinking contending ideas should be grist to the mill. Responding to dissent, even outlandish or ill-informed dissent, may prompt us to revisit our own ideas about the world and our own political assumptions – assumptions that are not infrequently arrived at by unconscious imitation or a kind of peer group osmosis. It generally helps to know why we think whatever we think, especially if claims of unassailable righteousness are being staked upon it – and disagreement is, very often, how that insight comes about. And yet, as we’ve seen, great efforts are being made, often successfully, to eliminate debate and the testing of ideas.

Update:

KC Johnson asks whether events at Duke, Colorado, Delaware and Columbia are merely shameful anomalies or evidence of something more systemic.

Related. And. Also.

On identity politics in the classroom. From Education’s End, by Anthony Kronman.

The more a classroom resembles a gathering of delegates speaking on behalf of the groups they represent, the less congenial a place it becomes in which to explore questions of a personally meaningful kind, including, above all, the questions of what ultimately matters in life and why. In such a classroom, students encounter each other not as individuals but as spokespersons instead. They accept or reject their teachers as role models more on account of the group to which they belong and less because of their individual qualities of character and intellect. And the works they study are regarded more as statements of group membership than as creations of men and women with viewpoints uniquely their own.

Related: On Humanising the Humanities. And.

Given recent posts on the University of Delaware’s bizarre indoctrination programme and my comments on corrupting students’ probity, it may be worth revisiting an extract from an interview with Theodore Dalrymple, presented here in longer form. The second paragraph below was brought to mind by Dr Shakti Butler’s claim that “all white people” are racists. I was trying to imagine how a student might react to this assertion and, given the context, how disinclined they might be to respond realistically – and what that unrealism might entail.

My father was a communist though he was also a businessman. Our house was full of communist literature from the 1930s and 40s… It was always clear that my father’s concern for humanity was not always matched by his concern for men, to put it mildly, for whom (as individuals) he often expressed contempt. He found it difficult to enter an equal relationship with anyone, and preferred to play Stalin to their Molotov… I think the great disjunction between my father’s expressed ideas (and ideals) and his everyday conduct affected me, and made me suspicious of people with grand schemes of universal improvement…

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect, and is intended to.

Examples of how the obvious can be ignored with great determination can be found here, here, here and here.

A victory for FIRE: 

“The University of Delaware has dropped an ideological re-education program that was referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The program’s stated goal was for the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy and environmentalism… Universities often cannot defend in public what they try to do in private, and the situation at Delaware was no exception… While we are pleased that this program is over, it is stunning that it ever existed at a public university in the United States.”

Meanwhile, at the University of Maine, at Tufts, at Duke, and in Seattle’s public schools…

Via the comments to this, The Thin Man directs readers’ attention to an extraordinary story regarding the University of Delaware and its efforts to correct improper thought:

Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

The University’s “Life Diversity Facilitation Training” document also includes the following definitions:

REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behaviour by people of colour toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give “preferential treatment” to people of colour over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’ [Page 3]

And,

A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of colour (called “blaming the victim”). Responsibility for perpetuating and legitimizing a racist system rests both on those who actively maintain it, and on those who refuse to challenge it. Silence is consent. [Page 3]

The training document is “presented” by Dr Shakti Butler, who is described here as “a creative and visionary bridge builder” and an “inspirational facilitator”, whose “consulting, writing, and lecturing style supports her use of mind, body, and Spirit or Consciousness as an approach to challenge deeply embedded beliefs and generate new questions.” Presumably, Professor Stanley Fish has no objection to “bridges” being built in this way, or to the term ‘racist’ being applied to “all white people… living in the United States.” And presumably he still believes that students “don’t have to worry” about the spread of campus speech codes and other neurotic sensitivities. Again, I beg to differ. One of the surest ways to erode a person’s probity is to make them repeat in public, among their peers, things they know to be untrue. The more ridiculous the lies, and the greater the mismatch with reality, the greater the effect. That is what is happening here.

Update, via the comments:

Like many other “activists”, Butler obviously isn’t opposed to racism per se. She isn’t arguing for a reciprocal moral principle – i.e. that people shouldn’t be prejudged on the basis of their skin colour or country of origin. She’s simply encouraging paranoia, victimhood and disaffection among students, while apparently indulging her own bizarre racial revenge fantasies. Fantasies which others may begin to share after prolonged and coercive exposure to this lurid nonsense. Having redefined racism as “prejudice + power”, is Dr Butler concerned by her own abuse of influence, or the power wielded by academic institutions like Delaware, or Duke, or by other likeminded educators, administrators and activists? Is she troubled by her own unsupported, overtly racist, efforts to indoctrinate? It seems not. Perpetuating this anxious, non-reciprocal outlook may be politically useful to some leftist ideologues and opportunist pressure groups, or those with serious mental health problems; but it isn’t clear how believing “all white people” are racist helps anyone see further than the colour of a person’s skin. 

Update 2:

Delaware’s Vice President for Student Life, Michael Gilbert, responds to FIRE’s criticisms – evasively and inaccurately. In turn, FIRE responds to Gilbert, rather well, I think. Significantly, Gilbert makes no mention whatsoever of Dr Shakti Butler’s overtly racist and paranoid training document, despite its key role in Delaware’s “diversity facilitation.”

Update 3:

One down in Delaware.

Update 4:

On emasculated liars. 

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