[The Montana Professor 17.2, Spring 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Stanley Fish
Professor, College of Law
Florida International University
Stanley.fish@fiu.edu
Let's start right in. Intellectual Diversity is the rallying cry of a group of right-leaning academics and non-academics troubled by the fact that in most liberal arts faculties Democrats outnumber Republicans by a ratio of eight or nine to one. This is a matter of fact, and I stipulate to it. These same people believe that a faculty skewed to the left will teach to the left, and that therefore the students in our colleges and universities are receiving indoctrination rather than instruction. They fear too that this unhappy situation will not self-correct because in the course of things the liberal faculty will replenish itself by refusing to hire job candidates who support the policies of the Bush administration or defend the traditional canon of classic works or have a high regard (as I do) for the political philosopher Leo Strauss.
The phrase "intellectual diversity" has been promoted largely through the writings of David Horowitz and his followers. Horowitz, whom I count as a friend, was in his earlier years a left wing activist, editor of the magazine Ramparts, and a defender of the Black Panthers. But in later years, prompted in part by the murder of someone close to him, he moved further and further to the right, and is now widely thought of as the most prominent conservative critic of the academy.
Horowitz is quite forthright about his reason for hitting upon the mantra of intellectual diversity. Here is a recommendation he made to conservative students in April of 2003:
I encourage [you] to use the language that the left has deployed so effectively on behalf of its own agendas. [Say] radical professors have created a "hostile learning environment" for conservative students. [Say] there is a lack of "intellectual diversity" on college faculties and in academic classrooms. [Say] the conservative viewpoint is "under-represented" in the curriculum and on its reading lists. [Say] the university should be an "inclusive" and intellectually "diverse" community. ("The Campus Blacklist")
"Hostile learning environment," "intellectual diversity," "under-represented," "inclusive," and "diverse" are all in quotation marks. The message is clear: steal those liberal buzzwords; hoist them by their own petard. Behind the strategy is a genuine philosophical point many have made--I have made it myself--which is that it is not the abstraction "diversity" people fight for, but a condition of diversity that is more expansive than the present one, and expansive in a particular, favored direction. Raising the banner of diversity usually means let me and my friends in, not let everyone in. This fact about diversity--its incoherence as a general imperative--need not be fatal. You can use the term and make it clear that by it you intend a particular agenda, the inclusion, for example, of people of color, or of trans-gendered persons, or of the disabled. But then you will be somewhat vulnerable when someone with what you consider a malign agenda claims equal title, as Horowitz does, to the value you rely on in your argument. When Justice Powell declared in the famous Bakke case that "Diversity is clearly a constitutional goal for an institution of higher education," he left a legacy that is more than double-edged.
I shall come back to what Walter Benn Michaels has recently termed "the trouble with diversity," but first let me return to my account of intellectual diversity. The document that spreads its gospel is Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights, a brief statement of principles which in one form or another has been the basis of proposed legislation in the Congress and in many states, including Florida. The Academic Bill of Rights has a good part and a bad part. The good part insists that academic judgment must not be inflected or infected by partisan political considerations: The "intellectual independence of professors, researchers and students" must be protected, and "this means that no political, ideological or religious orthodoxy will be imposed on professors and researchers;...nor shall legislatures impose any such orthodoxy through their control of the university budget." I would go even further; not only should no political orthodoxy be allowed to dominate a college classroom or be reflected in the process of hiring and firing; no political views, even a diversity of political views, should be introduced into an academic setting at all. You can see, I think, where Horowitz and I will part ways. He begins with the conviction that lefties have taken over the academic world; and he wants to invoke the principle of intellectual diversity in support of his efforts to redress an imbalance. He wants the political views of his side represented. I want no political views, including my own, represented because I want academic activity, in the classroom and elsewhere, to be just that--academic.
But what could that mean? Isn't it the case that, at least in the humanities and social sciences, the materials to be studied are fraught with political and ideological implications? How could those implications be ignored or removed without producing a classroom experience that would be arid and just plain dull? Easy. What you do is regard the political and ideological implications of your materials as something to be studied and not as something you and your students vote on. The master rule was given long ago by Max Weber when he insisted that while canvassing for votes and trying to persuade others to your partisan views is perfectly appropriate in the political arena, it is perfectly inappropriate in the classroom. "It is one thing," says Weber, "to determine...the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture." I have coined an ugly word which, I think, captures Weber's understanding of what should and should not go on in higher education. The word is "academicize," and it is easily turned into a slogan on the model of Duke Professor Fredrick Jameson's famous advice to cultural critics--always historicize. My advice is always academicize, by which I mean always remove the materials you bring to the classroom from the context of their real-world urgency--where you ask and answer questions like what should we do now and which of the alternative courses of action is just and moral--and insert them into the context of academic urgencies--where you ask and answer questions like what is the structure of the arguments on either side of this issue or what are the historical antecedents of the present controversy or what is the relationship between this controversy and others now playing out in neighboring areas of inquiry? The more you ask this second kind of question, the less you and your students will ask, or even be interested in, the first kind. Academicizing a subject means draining it of the energies that animate partisan proponents of one position or another, and infusing it with the energies that come along with rigorous intellectual interrogation. And you can do this without losing the political significance of the subject; it's just that that significance becomes part of what is being studied rather an occasion for real-life decision making.
Consider as an example a matter familiar to all citizens of Florida: the Terry Schiavo tragedy. During the months when it was unfolding, nearly everyone in the state and in the country had decided views about what should be done and who should do it. How does one go about academicizing it? Here's what I do when I teach it: I discuss it as a contemporary instance of a tension that has structured American political thought from the founders to John Rawls--the tension between substantive justice--justice rooted in some strong sense of right and wrong--and procedural justice--justice tied to formal rules that stipulate the steps to be taken and the person authorized to take them. On one side were those who asked the question: what is the morally right thing to do about Terry Schiavo? On the other side there were those who asked the question: who is legally entitled to make the relevant decisions independently of whether or not we think those decisions morally justified ? Once these two positions are identified, their sources can be found in the work of Locke, Kant, Mill, Isaiah Berlin, and others, and the relationship between those sources and the Schiavo incident can become the focus of analysis. As this is happening--as the subject is being academicized--there will be less and less pressure in the class to come down on one side or the other and more and more pressure to describe accurately and fully the historical and philosophical antecedents of both sides. A political imperative will have been replaced by an academic one.
This can be done with any subject matter whatsoever; and it is what should be done with every subject matter introduced into the classroom. Moreover if it is done--if you always academicize--the danger that you might slide from instruction into indoctrination will be eliminated in advance because the political issues brought into the discussion will be there as the objects of analysis and not as options either to be embraced or rejected. There would be no need for a special vigilance or an exercise of will: if you have a clear sense of what your job is--to academicize and not to advocate--the problem of advocacy will never arise and no measures designed to guard against it will have to be put in place. This brings me back to David Horowitz, Intellectual Diversity, and the bad part of the Academic Bill of Rights. Horowitz, to repeat a point made earlier, is concerned with having a diversity of political views represented in the classroom and on the faculty. I am saying that representation would be an appropriate academic response only if the political views introduced into the classroom were being presented as alternatives the students were to decide between; but if they are presented as materials to analyze, the students are not being asked to decide between them but to understand them; the materials are de-politicized even if their content is political and there is no reason whatsoever to be concerned with political representation. And if the members of the faculty understood that it was their job to induce an understanding of alternative positions rather than to persuade students of the rightness of any one of them, it wouldn't matter what party they belonged to because their partisan affiliations would have nothing to do with the analyses they were performing. Intellectual diversity--the presence on the faculty of members of a diversity of political parties--would be beside any academic point.
It always was. Intellectual diversity has always been a demand not for intellectual but for political diversity, a demand based on the incorrect assumption that the two are intimately related and that there is a correlation between partisan behavior and academic behavior. What I have been saying is that, properly understood, academic behavior has nothing do with politics except as one of many possible subjects to be studied. The irony is that while Intellectual Diversity is urged as a way of fighting the politicization of the university, it is the politicization of the university, the requirement that the faculty display the same proportion of Democrats and Republicans as is found in the general population, which makes about as much academic sense as requiring the same proportion in the corporate boardroom or on the roster of the Florida Marlins would make economic or athletic sense.
Indeed, it's worse than that, for the call for Intellectual Diversity is implicitly and often explicitly a call for monitoring and enforcing it, and the belief of those who issue the call is that because universities cannot be trusted to do it themselves, legislators, governors, and trustees will have to do it for them by passing and implementing legislation like Florida House Bill 837. In that bill we read that students have a right "to take reasoned exception to the data and views offered in any course of study," that students have a right to the introduction in a course of "a broad range of serious scholarly opinion," and that "the fostering of a plurality of serious scholarly methodologies and perspectives should be a significant institutional purpose." Sounds innocuous, but the bland words barely mask an effort to take instruction out of the hands of instructors by holding them to curricular quotas and threatening them with student law suits if they fail to comply. First of all, students do not have any rights except the right to competent instruction, and one part of being a competent instructor is the ability (and responsibility) to make judicious--not legislatively imposed--decisions about what materials and approaches are to be taught. The decision to include or exclude a particular approach should depend on the instructor's academic judgment and not on the need to display a mandated balance by some measure that is never announced, but is, we know, the measure of how many so-called conservative voices and approaches are represented. You shouldn't be reduced to saying I guess I'll have to look for one of these because I don't have enough of them on the syllabus. You should instead be asking is this text or methodology really important and worth devoting precious class time to? And the fostering of a plurality of perspectives would be an appropriate educational purpose only if pluralism were a prime academic value, which it is not. The prime academic value is truth, and in some areas of inquiry the number of perspectives thought to be useful in determining truth is small. Should teachers be forced to introduce a perspective just because it is out there and is supported by a group of true believers? "Yes," would be the answer of Representative Dennis Baxley, the author of HB 837, who when asked for an example of the kind of professorial behavior that might lead to a grievance cited the refusal of Biology teachers to discuss Intelligent Design when students raise questions about it. The overwhelming professional and disciplinary consensus is that the theory of Intelligent Design is not the answer to any scientific question and that therefore study of it should take place in cultural studies courses. The overriding of that professional consensus proposed by Mr. Baxley is a naked example of the political agenda that will always be found just below the surface of apparently benign slogans like Intellectual Diversity, pluralism, and balance--all bad ideas.
But if Intellectual Diversity is suspect because it is a political rather than an academic imperative, doesn't that accusation apply to diversity imperatives in general? Aren't they all political and not academic? That is a genuine question and the answer to it is not immediately obvious. What would have to be shown is that although Intellectual Diversity fails because there is no educational rationale for requiring an equal mix of Democrats and Republicans, other forms of diversity do, in fact, have an educational rationale. As you know, many have been proposed throughout the years including the beneficial effects to minority students of having a role model sitting behind the teacher's desk and the advantage to all students of interacting with people who come from a diversity of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. I am not here to pass judgment on these and other rationales, but I would sound a note of caution. The educational rationale of diversity imperatives must be demonstrated and not merely asserted; above all, it cannot rest on a claim either of virtue or justice, because, while virtue and justice are undeniably great values, they are not academic ones, and academic values must guide any determination of what is and is not an appropriate academic policy. It could be objected that if academic values, detached from questions of virtue and justice, were the sole determinant of university policy, programs like Women's Studies, African-American Studies, Latino Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies would either never have been established or would have been established even later than they were. This is undoubtedly true, and one must acknowledge the historical role politics and politicking have played in bringing these important and fruitful areas of inquiry into the curriculum. But the history that led to the inclusion of an area of study cannot be the reason either for maintaining it or expanding its operations. When, in my capacity as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, I gave the welcoming remarks at a luncheon celebrating the inauguration of a Native American Studies Program, I said this to the assembled group. "What brought you here today is a history of political activism provoked by decades and even centuries, of non-benign neglect, disdain, and outright exclusion. Now that you are here your first obligation, as academics, is to forget that history. From this day on you must acquaint yourself with academic norms and resolve to abide by them and not make the mistake of confusing the political work you have already done with the work that now lies before you." In short, I was telling them to academicize, which is, as you can see, my first and last word.
[The Montana Professor 17.2, Spring 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]