I offer some thoughts in response to Devin Foxall's article (The Dartmouth, Jan. 29, 2002, "Horowitz: Polls prove colleges' left-wing bias") on the political and cultural opinions of Ivy League humanities faculty as reported by the poll conducted by David Horowitz and Frank Luntz.
First, there is no reason to dispute the results of the poll. As a highly regarded (Republican) pollster, I believe Luntz employed a sound methodology and produced realistic numbers. My response focuses on the implications of the numbers.
According to Horowitz, "... 40 percent of Ivy League (humanities) professors [identify] with the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union]; zero (percent) identify with the Christian Coalition." From this he concludes, "You have a discrimination against conservatives, against Republicans, against Christians; there's no diversity." In and of themselves, however, Luntz's numbers do not prove discrimination and I would interpret them differently.
So far as Dartmouth's history department is concerned, the chair, Professor Mary Kelley, says that no attempt is made to determine the political opinions of applicants for positions teaching in the department and Dean Jamshed Bharucha offers similar thoughts.
Both fail to acknowledge that such attempts need not be made at all since the entire applicant pool is almost certainly to be liberal or leftist. How does that happen?
First, most, if not all, history and English/cultural studies graduate students are leftist to begin with, according to, for example, Todd Gitlin, author of "Marching on the English Department While the Right Wing Took the White House," in "Twilight of Common Dreams." (All cited sources except possibly Carter and Murray are, I believe, current or former leftists.)
Next, job descriptions produce a left bias by, for example, calling for a specialization in social, labor or gender history as opposed to military or political history; or they require European literary theory rather than critical editions of individual works, according to, for example, "Professing Feminism ..." by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge and "Signs of the Times" by David Lehman.
Finally, the names of certain thesis advisors --and even whole institutions -- can readily be identified with leftist agendas. Students of Howard Zinn, Eric Hobsbawm and Natalie Zemon Davis, for example, are unlikely to be Patrick Buchanan supporters. Nor are humanities Ph.D. graduates from UC-Santa Cruz.
An examination of the history faculty webpage bears this out.
Thus I maintain that while Luntz's numbers are correct, Horowitz's charge that they result from discrimination is not. And while Horowitz's claims that "free thought and intellectual debate are stifled," may also be correct, it seems to me that this stifling is not confined to Ivy League humanities departments, but now pervades American public culture, retarding frank discussions of race, class, gender -- not to say worldview issues.
Here's a quick couple of examples: Stephen Carter, speaking of evangelical-fundamentalist Christians such as himself, argues in "Culture of Disbelief" that to be taken seriously by the mainstream public "the religiously devout [must] act as if their faith doesn't really matter." Recent examples can easily be found: witness the deep discomfort evidenced in the New York Times with President Bush's term "axis of evil" or his charismatic belief in God. Or the outcry in Europe that ensued when Berlusconi opined that the West was superior to the Islamic world. This "stifling" transcends the Ivy League, which is not its source.
Moreover, Horowitz suggests that the left tilt and a lack of a right rebuttal might somehow be transmitted to students.
Based on my own experience, I find this a dubious proposition. City University of New York's humanities faculty is far to the left of Dartmouth's, and the undergraduates at Baruch College where I teach are not only well aware of this -- they laugh about it in the elevators. (Ouch.) And they remain a very conservative lot. As Charles Murray observed in "Public Interest" in the late '90s, self-styled left-wing campus gurus are "figures of fun" to the undergraduates in the Ivy League.
Conversely, when I was at Dartmouth the faculty was virtually 100 percent conservative DWEMs -- "dead" white European (lineage) males. That didn't stop me and many other Greeners from sailing through, in my case, 25-plus years of fairly radical leftist views. (The end for me was Tiannamen.)
There's an irony here, actually. We campus radicals were "gonna change the world, re-arrange the world" (in the words of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young). Many of us are now frankly admitting in print that, in part, we went into higher education to further that goal. (I'm just a bit less guilty here; arithmetic Riemann surfaces can have no political preference.) We've made the "Long March through the institutions" (Danny "the Red" Cohn-Bendit). And now that we're at the helm, we find that we're not exactly winning those undergraduate hearts and minds, now are we?
Go figure.
