Free Speech in American Universities

At about the same time that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was speaking at Columbia University and being insulted by his introducer, the university's president, liberal law professor Lee Bollinger, former Harvard president and former Secretary of the Treasurer under Clinton, Larry Summers, was being disinvited to address the University of California Board of Regents after being denounced by University of California faculty as a symbol of gender and racial prejudice, and Erwin Chemerinsky, a left-leaning constitutional law professor, was being reinvited to be dean of the law school of the University of California at Irvine after being disinvited, apparently because of concern about his politics.

What can we learn about American universities todayf rom this confluence of bizarre events? We can learn that the nation's elite universities are well to the left of the population as a whole. Not that "left" is quite the precise term for Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier who would like to see Israel wiped off the face of the earth and may well be seeking nuclear weaponry in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory. But his status as an enemy of the United States and a leader of a revolutionary Third World state that overthrew a monarch (the Shah of Iran) allied with the United States makes him more acceptable to the left than the Democratic Jewish ex-president of Harvard who dared to raise the question whether there might be a genetic explanation for the fact that the female distribution of IQ is flatter than the male, although the means are the same, the distributions largely overlap, and thus there are plenty of women in the scientific and other professions who are more brilliant than many of their male colleagues.

Throughout most of the history of higher education in the United States, colleges and universities were on the same political wavelength as the nation as a whole. When I was a student at Yale College in the 1950s, the politics of the student body was revealed by the fact that when during the 1956 presidential campaign Adlai Stevenson gave a talk at Yale (which I attended), he was roundly booed, though not by me, and of course Eisenhower went on to win a landslide reelection.

The faculty and students of the colleges and universities moved to the left in the 1960s, along with much of the intelligentsia--journalists, pundits, young lawyers, teachers, congressional staffers, and the like. But, curiously, when beginning in the late 1970s, and accelerating with the election of Reagan in 1980, the country as a whole moved right, the colleges and universities stayed where they were--not the students, who had moved with the times, but the faculty and the administrators. And there they remain, not all of them of course; but the humanities, and the social sciences except economics, and the law schools (but of course not the business schools), and the admissions offices (with their zeal for affirmative action), are well to the left of the population as a whole, and to the left of their students. This is especially true of the elite private and public universities and the leading liberal arts colleges, apart from Catholic institutions.

The reasons are mysterious. One may be the attraction--also mysterious--of Jews for left-wing causes, an attraction that the embourgeoisement of American Jews and the virtual disappearance in America of Christian anti-Semitism has not eliminated. Jews occupy a disproportionate number of faculty positions at elite colleges and universities.

Probably another reason for the left's influence in higher education is that Americans who came of age during the late 1960s, a portion of whom were radicalized then, are today in senior positions in many faculties. (A man or woman who was 18 in 1968 is 57 today.) A third reason may be the dearth of other outlets, besides faculty politics, for political activism today. There is no serious left-wing movement in the United States. There is a strident Republican right influential in the Republican Party, but the strident Democratic left exerts little influence on the Democratic Party. You can post an angry comment on MoveOn.org, but that cannot be a very satisfactory mode of political expression compared to frightening the University of California's Board of Regents into embarrassing itself by disinviting a Democrat of Larry Summer's stature and distinction, or épater-ing the bourgeoisie by inviting Ahmadinejad to thunder against Bush and the West from a perch on Morningside Heights.

An ironic counterpoint to university leftism is the increasing, and increasingly successful, imitation of business firms by America's colleges and universities. The leading universities are becoming giant corporations with multi-hundred-million dollar (or even billion dollar) budgets. As they grow, they need and so they hire professional management. Professional university management, in turn, takes its cues from its peers in the business sector. So we have universities deeply involved in hedge funds, greedy for supracompetitive investment returns, engaged in the commercialization of scientific research, angling for applications for admission by the children of the rich, manipulating their statistics in order to move up in U.S. News & World Report's college rankings (for example by fuzzing up their admissions criteria, so that they get more applicants and therefore turn down more and so appear more selective), exaggerating the job prospects of their advanced-degree graduates, bidding for academic stars by offering high salaries and low teaching loads, and, related to the bidding wars, creating a two-tier employment system with tenured and tenure-track faculty on top and tenure-less, benefit-less graduate students and temporaries on the bottom to do the bulk of the teaching. And so the modern American university system allows its faculty and administrators to live right, while thinking left.

I have no view on SCHIP; the commenter who assumes I oppose it because I am a reactionary beast does not have an accurate fix on my political views. I am not familiar with the particulars of SCHIP, but I would be inclined to favor free health insurance for all children (up to age 18), financed by means-testing Medicare and social security, because careful attention to the health of children will reduce their health problems and health expense in later life. Government spends much too much on the elderly relative to the young, presumably because children don't vote.

Also, my blog post did not mention Rumsfeld or the Hoover Institution, which has appointed him to a temporary visiting lectureship. I am far more critical of Rumsfeld than my fellow blogger Becker is. The Iraq war has been a fiasco, and much of the responsibility must be borne by Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense throughout most of the war. But should that disqualify him from a quasi-academic appointment, if he is otherwise qualified, as he surely is? I shouldn't think so.

I accept correction for having described Larry Summers's controversial talk as stating that female IQs are "flatter" than male IQs. What I meant and I hope the context made clearer than the term I used is that there is more variance in male IQs than in female ones--the distribution of male IQs has longer tails than the distribution of female IQs. So assuming the same mean IQ for the two genders, there are more male geniuses and male morons than there are female geniuses and female morons. That is an arguable proposition with some support in evolutionary biology.

It is important though highly controversial to explore the genetic causes of differences in human achievement or behavior in order to avoid an inaccurate sense of how much discrimination is responsible for differences across races, genders, etc., in behavior and achievement. For example, the female crime rate is grossly lower than the male crime rate. Is it plausible that the difference is wholly unrelated to genetic differences between men and women?

One commenter asks: could it not be that the reason that university faculties are disproportionately left leaning is that leftist policies are more intelligent than conservative policies, so that university faculty, being of above-average intelligence, are naturally more likely to support leftist policies? There are two objections to this suggestion. The first is that political opinion in faculties is not uniform across disciplines. Economists, for example, are more conservative on average than teachers in the humanities, but they are not less intelligent. Second, while today there is a widespread feeling that conservatives have lost their way, in the past the left has frequently supported policies that we know in retrospect were mistaken, such as communism, socialism, highly progressive taxation, urban renewal, rent control, populist theories of antitrust, heavy-handed public utility and common carrier regulation, progressive education, unilateral disarmament, pacifism, syndicalism, and anarchism. Both Left and Right have much to be embarrassed about.