[The Montana Professor 18.1, Fall 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Michael Berube
New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
344 pp., $26.95 hc
Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
hgonshak@mtech.edu
By now, all academics, unless they have been teaching at the North Pole, must be familiar with the conservative charge that American higher education today is run by left-wing professors who brainwash students into credulously swallowing their politically correct dogma. Professors are probably also aware of the most prominent current manifestation of this right-wing crusade--conservative firebrand David Horowitz's campaign to have state legislatures pass an "Academic Bill of Rights," which would mandate, among other things, that "no faculty member will be excluded from tenure, search, and hiring committees on the basis of their political or religious beliefs," that "students will be graded solely on the basis of their...appropriate knowledge of the subjects...they study, not...their political or religious beliefs," and that "faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination." In his many writings and public appearances, Horowitz has also advocated insuring by fiat that professors objectively introduce students to all viewpoints on controversial topics, including ones with which they disagree, and has even called for conservative affirmative action in university hiring practices--that is, the deliberate hiring of qualified conservative professors in order to achieve ideological diversity on campus. The ultimate success of Horowitz's campaign remains uncertain, but, at present, legislatures in California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington, and Ohio have considered measures bearing some resemblance to Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights," while Georgia and Colorado have adopted "nonbinding resolutions" prohibiting liberal professors from intimidating or indoctrinating conservative students. (For a thorough discussion of Horowitz's proposal, see the Fall 2006 issue of The Montana Professor, which includes the text of Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights" and an essay by Horowitz himself, along with essays both for and against the bill.)
As his book's title implies (particularly those quotation marks carefully placed around the word "bias"), Michael Berube's What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? attempts to defend academia against the allegations hurled by Horowitz and other right-wing critics, arguing that their charges are partisan and unfair, and insisting that the contemporary American university, while no utopia, is actually a flourishing institution making an important contribution to our nation's democracy by introducing students to a range of perspectives and disciplines, thus helping turn them into informed, critically-minded citizens. An avowedly liberal professor currently teaching English at Penn State, who has served on the Modern Language Association's Executive Council, Berube is one of academe's most articulate defenders. Studding his book with pertinent examples from literature, current affairs, and his own experiences in the classroom, Berube writes in a lucid, lively style which eschews the impenetrable jargon infecting so much academic prose. Nonetheless, while What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? scores several sharp hits against academia's conservative attackers, presenting some plausible defenses of the university, I highly doubt the book's confused, at times contradictory arguments will succeed in convincing anyone on the Horowitzian right to switch sides, or even persuade many still straddling the fence in this debate.
To his credit, Berube makes a strong case that Horowitz is not above manipulating the evidence to fit his agenda. For example, Horowitz alleged on Fox News that a student from an unnamed Colorado college was forced by her left-wing political science professor to submit an essay on why George W. Bush is a war criminal, only to have the professor flunk the student when she turned in a paper instead on why Saddam Hussein is a war criminal. In reality, however, the professor's assignment asked students to explore how leaders considered heroes by their own people are often denounced by outsiders, and the professor himself proved to be a registered Republican who told a reporter for Inside Higher Education that he would have happily clarified the true nature of the assignment had Horowitz or any of his supporters bothered to contact him. Berube also astutely questions whether mass media's frenzied limelight is the best forum in which to conduct these debates intelligently, and he wonders as well if political legislation is the ideal mechanism with which to correct putative problems in academe. The latter point seems especially valid after Berube quotes some of the lemming-like prose of some Republican legislators who have backed Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights," such as Ohio State Senator Larry Mumper, who informed the Columbus Dispatch with McCarthyite fervor that "80 percent or so of them [professors] are Democrats, liberals or socialists or card-carrying Communists" (26).
Other Berube rebuttals against academe's conservative accusers, however, are less persuasive. For example, Berube argues that conservatives, having achieved an ideological monopoly in Washington, the corporate world, and large swaths of the media, are incensed that academia is one of the few social institutions they do not control and that the real motive of their campaign against liberal professors is an attempt to eliminate one of the last bastions of independent thought remaining in America. He writes, "Conservative screeds about anti-American campuses thus have to be seen, in part, as expressions of right-wing outrage and disbelief that liberalism still survives.... They can't believe that there are still so many annoying liberals out there with a substantial presence in an institution that does not allow for a rapid rate of turnover or takeover" (276). But does this charge hold up? First, it is far less clear after the 2006 midterm election (which occurred just after Berube's book was published), when Democrats regained the House and Senate from a Republican Party mired in scandal, that the Right does firmly control American politics. More importantly, Berube's argument is a red herring. If, in fact, conservatives are correct that a liberal majority among the professoriate are brainwashing their students, that's what matters, not what might be the underlying agenda of their critics.
But what is most puzzling and inconsistent about What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? is how often Berube freely acknowledges the validity of many conservative complaints about the alleged liberal bias in academe. For example, he cites as accurate a recent poll conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute of 55,521 faculty members from 416 institutions which found that the percentage of self-described liberal faculty was 48 percent, while professed conservatives composed only 18 percent, commenting, "That 48-18 differential is pretty significant" (41). He adds, "We don't deny that we outnumber conservatives, and we admit that we have a near monopoly on departments in the arts and humanities" (70). It seems Berube regrets this left-wing hegemony, remarking, "These days I often think my field is so pervasively liberal-left that smart young conservatives will shun it altogether.... Put...another way, I often wish I had more conservative colleagues in literary study" (82-83). As this passage suggests, Berube fears that any ideological monopoly must be deleterious to an academic discipline: "When all the substantial disagreements are arguments among leftists and liberals, the premises of argument are inevitably skewed--especially in those lefter-than-thou circles in which the most 'oppositional' position claims for itself the greatest moral authority. And when an entire department or an entire field of inquiry produces a uniform moral mist, it's no wonder that after a while it will attract only those aspirants who like breathing the air" (83). Berube admits that these conditions produce, at minimum, a difficult working environment for conservative faculty and students: "I have spoken to a number of conservative faculty and graduate students in literary study in recent years and they have all sounded one theme: in their daily rounds in the workplace, they know they must negotiate the fact that almost every one of their colleagues assumes that all of their colleagues are liberal.... Theirs is, without question, the position of minorities in a majority culture" (84-85).
What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? also contains cogent criticism of such darlings of much of the academic left as Michael Moore and Ward Churchill: Berube faults his fellow liberal profs for letting political agreement blind them to Moore and Churchill's vicious America-bashing and looney left-wing conspiracy theories. Finally, Berube relates a personal experience showing how, as a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Virginia in the mid-1980s, he was himself a victim of what he perceived as authoritarian political correctness, when an Asian student in one of his composition courses, to whom he had given a well-deserved "C" as a final grade, accused him of racism. She went to the head of the university's writing program, claiming he had given her a low grade because she was a foreigner. (Even though she actually was born in northern Virginia, the student maintained that Berube was unaware of this fact!) Without notifying him of the student's allegation, the university conducted a full investigation, ultimately clearing him of the charge. Berube reflects: "Quite apart from my own involvement with one of these proceedings at the very outset of my teaching career, I believe that any day on which 'liberals' decide that teaching assistants need to be investigated without their knowledge and without the right to respond to their accusers is a bad day for the ideal of social justice" (131).
I confess that I am baffled as to how, on the one hand, Berube can support so many conservative criticisms of academic PC, and yet, on the other hand, can emphatically reject the case made by Horowitz and his backers, concluding his book with a panegyric to American academe today as a democratic paradise in which we professors "spend so much of our time and energy trying to promote a lively critical pluralism in our classroom, and trying to ensure that every reasonable proposition is open to reasoned debate, even when we feel strongly about the subject under discussion" (295). This gaping contradiction at the heart of What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? makes the book almost schizophrenic, with the work containing a manifest text praising the university and a latent text decrying it, as if beneath Berube's impeccable liberal exterior lurks a mini-David Horowitz dying to get out.
A possible explanation for this contradiction is that, based on his book, Berube appears to be a liberal professor from whom conservative students have nothing to fear, who really does thoughtfully entertain all points-of-view in his classroom, including opinions with which he vehemently disagrees; if anything, Berube seems excessively concerned that right-wing students should feel comfortable expressing themselves in his courses. Naturally, this is eminently to his credit, but Berube makes the mistake of assuming that all his liberal colleagues are as open-minded and undogmatic as he is, writing, "What we [liberal professors] love more than anything is critical intelligence, and we don't assume that all forms of critical intelligence will wind up on the political left; on the contrary, we know it's illiberal to think that. Any liberal professor will tell you the same thing; we'd much rather read a well-written, well-argued conservative essay than a careless, shoddy liberal-minded screed" (139). In short, Berube presents himself as the rule rather than the exception among liberal profs, but offers absolutely no proof to support that claim. But if liberal professors not only overwhelmingly dominate the arts and humanities but vie among themselves to see who can trumpet the most "oppositional position," as Berube acknowledges, does it not stand to reason that some degree of bias is probably entering their classrooms?
Professors will probably draw conclusions about alleged liberal bias in academe based primarily on their own experiences. Space prevents me from listing numerous personal examples, and prudence prohibits me from discussing my own Liberal Studies Department at Montana Tech (except to note that the department is aptly named). Those caveats aside, I would say that my roughly 25-year career in higher education (as a teaching assistant, instructor, and professor) has convinced me that Horowitz is on to something. In my previous appointment at Virginia Tech, I saw plenty of what Berube accurately labels "lefter-than-thou" feuding in the university's English Department; for example, two professors loathed one another with the passion of a thousand suns because one was an essentialist radical lesbian feminist and the other was a social constructionist radical lesbian feminist. To the rest of the world, the professors were two peas in a pod, but, in the ideologically driven world of our English Department, their arcane differences over the fine points of left-wing dogma rendered them bitter antagonists. Moreover, at a literary theory conference I attended in the 1990s, an African-American professor boasted publicly that her literature course was a smashing success because a conservative student had been persuaded to vote for a Democratic candidate, Andrew Young, for Congress. And, at another conference I went to hosted by the right-wing Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative University of Washington history professor told me that a colleague of his in Women's Studies decides whom she will sign up for her invariably over-enrolled Gay Literature course based solely on whom she believes can best be enlisted as a gay rights activist.
I am a liberal myself, but I firmly believe that the aim of education must be to teach students to think for themselves, not be transformed into activists for any political cause. It is because such thinking does not prevail in academe today that Horowitz's campaign has gained traction, despite his own political extremism and fondness for underhanded tactics, not to mention his dubious legislative "solutions." Sadly, despite all its good intentions, What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? has little worthwhile to add to this vital national debate.
[The Montana Professor 18.1, Fall 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]