Sunday, February 26, 2017
How Not To Address Liberal Bias In Academia
Following up on my previous posts (links below): Bloomberg View: How Not to Address Liberal Bias in Academia, by Megan McArdle:
Politically, academia is about as unbalanced as Norman Bates. Attempts to justify it contain eerie echoes of a 1950s CEO explaining why blacks and women simply weren’t qualified to ever do anything more taxing than make coffee and sweep floors.
I have argued about this topic before, and I am not going to rehash. Accept, arguendo, that academia isn’t balanced. The problem is bigger in some disciplines, smaller in others, but there’s nowhere that the skew doesn’t show up to some extent. Nor is it simply caused by academia hewing to its good old empirical priors while American politics moves wildly in other directions; academia has moved sharply to the left. What should we do about it?
Well, the first thing we should consider doing is “nothing.” As a public policy choice, "nothing" is far too often undervalued — indeed, often ignored. But as I like to say, the existence of a problem does not imply the existence of a solution. It does not guarantee that any plausible cure will be better than the disease.
And how big a problem is this, really? Yes, it’s hard on conservatives who may find it harder to get that academic job they’ve always wanted. But as any statistician will tell you, expecting every subgroup to exactly mirror the larger population is folly. Unless you can show that this is having a big impact on academia, and the larger society that depends on its research — and show that you’ve got a solution that will actually make academia better rather than worse — then probably “nothing” is what we should do.
Liberals who have been nodding along, and any conservatives who disagree, will notice that these are, of course, exactly the arguments that have long been leveled against “affirmative action.” And some conservative lawmakers have apparently decided that affirmative action isn’t so bad after all. In at least two states, legislators are pushing language that would force the state university system to be more politically representative by incorporating more conservatives.
These measures do not seem overlikely to pass. But the mere fact that they are being put out there is interesting, because for years conservatives have been saying they didn’t want quotas. Now maybe some do.
(Hat Tip: Greg McNeal.) Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:
- Conservatives Are Not Welcome At AALS (Jan. 4, 2017)
- Iowa, North Carolina Bills Would Require 'Partisan Balance' In Faculty Hiring (Feb. 22, 2017)
- Stanford Provost: Academia Is Its Own Worst Enemy (Feb. 23, 2017)
- 28 Conservative/Libertarian Law Profs Demand That AALS Address Political Imbalance Of Law School Faculties (Feb. 25, 2017)
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/02/how-not-to-address-liberal-bias-in-academia.html
Comments
Eventually, failure to address this kind of issue will result in the devaluation of the authority and import of law school faculty opinions and scholarship. That is how it is likely to play out; not by being moderated, but by the institutions themselves becoming less respected. Just like what has happened to the news media.
Posted by: ruralcounsel | Feb 27, 2017 4:53:01 AM
If affirmative action is the appropriate way to deal with other forms of discrimination (both overt and those discerned through the use of disparate impact analysis) in academia, why should it be off the table for dealing with the systemic discrimination that conservatives of various stripes face within academia?
Posted by: Evergreen Dissident | Feb 26, 2017 9:31:51 PM
There's lots you can do. What you can do is take away the academy's privileges and its modes of insulating itself. You do that through juxtaposed state and federal legislation
1. Improve primary secondary schooling and through this agency reduce the propensity of people to purchase higher education services. A key element would be replacing public agency as a vehicle for service delivery with philanthropic schools some of which would be financed by vouchers and some of which would be financed by tuition (but never both). Another would be making use of state regents' exams for quality control, rather than directly regulating pedagogy or teacher training. Another would be closing state teachers' colleges in favor of a revised certificate program that was light on methods courses and heavy on hands-on apprenticeship
2. Understand tertiary schooling as being of two sorts: later education and higher education. The one sort would replicate secondary schooling and would prepare students to take regents' examinations (predominantly but not exclusively in vocational subjects); it's home would be in today's network of community and technical colleges. Higher education would consist of advanced study of academics and the arts conjoined to occupational schools.
3. State legislation which would provide for a controlled vocabulary in the nominaiton and definition of academic, artistic, and vocational subjects and define the universe of subjects for which schools might take tuition or accept vouchers to study.
4. State legislation which would provide for periodic audits of the state college and university system, identifying programs which are magnets for marginal students and programs which have chronic trouble attracting competent students and would be authoritatively closed by the comptroller (but including a circuit breaker which would provide for a single designated refuge for a low-subscription academic program within a state's whole network of institutions).
5. A revised degree architecture. For academic and arts programs, you'd have your choice of 1, 2, 3, or 4 years of study of a discrete subject, with a degree awarded after the completion of each year and a research doctorate consisting of a dissertation atop the four years of study. For vocational study, you'd have a variety of options adapted to the discipline in question, with the calendar year 16 course program being modal.
6. Finance private higher education with tuition, donations, and endowment income, and not one dollar in government grant money. End also government loan guarantees and hypertrophied creditor protection for the purveyors of student loans.
7. Finance public higher education with donations, endowment income, and voucher redemptions, and not one dollar of discretionary appropriations or anything else from the general state treasury or federal treasury. Have higher education funds financed by state income surtaxes with an abiding set of rates (with exemptions and thresholds adjusted each year in accordance with changing nominal incomes). Adjust redemption values accordingly each year. Distribute vouchers through competitive baccalaureate examinations and admit students to institutions per a queue system derived from preference cards submitted by aspirants. Two features: public financing of higher education would be a fixed share of discoverable personal income; and schools would lack discretion over the identity of their entering classes of freshmen and transfers.
8. Sell off consequential athletic facilities and programs to private investors. You can locate a commercial farm-team system for the NFL and NBA at these loci. They'd be juxtaposed to the campus, but a separate corporation.
9. Finance community and technical colleges with tuition, endowment income, and donations. Discontinue any appropriations from state or federal treasuries. Rather, hold referenda every once in a while in a given catchment on a bond issue to add to the endowment of the local community college. Should such an issue pass, county governments in the catchment would be compelled to issue, in quanta apportioned according to the total personal income of each county in the catchment.
10. Allowing for clinical faculty, tutors, and laboratory instructors at the margins, have a uniform set of ranks for the bulk of the faculty. Instructors would be on renewable contracts of < 5 semesters, Lecturers would be on renewable contracts which would range from 5 semesters to 13 semesters, and Professors would have continuous tenure. Professor slots would be rationed at a given institution (say, no more than 38% of the regular faculty) and among programs and departments within. Promotion to professor would generally not occur prior to age 52 or with much less than 20 years of f/t service at some portfolio of institutions. Pro-rating part-time service, retirement after 35 years of f/t service would be mandatory. Allocate no more than 1 p/t faculty member to each unsegmented department and no more that 1 p/t faculty member per segment in departments which have segments. 'Segmented' departments in an arts and sciences faculty would be history, sociology, political science, biology, and perhaps geology.
11. Allowing for some dispensations for denominational institutions, have all trustees for state community and technical colleges elected about as you would school boards. You might have, say, a nine member board elected quadrennially - some on an at large slate and some from single-member districts, with ordinal balloting the order of the day.
12. Allowing for some dispensations for denominational institutions, have all trustees for colleges and universities elected by the alumni registered to vote within a given geographic ambo. Aspirants would register with the state board of elections, which would then hold a postal ballot, sending a ballot to each voter on the rolls along with a prospectus consisting of a one-page statement by each aspirants. Trustees would serve 4 year terms, and be administered an oath of office wherein they would acknowledge their responsiblity for the academic quality and integrity of the school.
13. Compel institutional purveyors of research degrees to publish each year a prospectus which summarizes the study and teaching career of each person admitted to such a program over the previous 30-odd years. As in, 'adjunct, Knox College, 1987-90. Asst. prof, Elmira College, 1990-95. Lost track after that, or 'departed program without completing degree, 1992'. Also, distribute berths for graduate research degrees according to state regents exam results, allowing departments discretion over retention and stipend-distribution only.
14. Restructure select occupational programs. Teacher-training is remarked on above. Other targets would be social work, law, and library administration. Social work ought be dismantled as a discipline, and its work parceled out among schools of professional psychology, schools of [non-business] administration, and schools of public safety and security. Schools of museum and library service should offer brief certificate programs in various aspects of museum, library, and archives work, heavy on apprenticeships. Law schools might offer a 16 course calendar year program supplemented with certificate programs of varying length in specialized areas of law (with only a minority of schools offering a supplementary academic program for aspirant judges and legal scholars).
15. Take actions which break down the wall between higher education and the professions and between higher education and secondary education. Allow displaced professors a fast track to a secondary teaching certificate as well as an indemnity, and insist that occupaitonal faculty hire a certain share from the ranks of working practitioners.
16. Require institutions, public and private, to publish an audited report each year on the demographics of the stock and flow of their student body, faculty, administration, and staff, most particularly (re their students) the statistics on the antecedent examination scores of demographic subsets. That done, end the applicability of anti-discrimination law to higher education (as you should do re commercial enterprises and landlords).
Posted by: Art Deco | Feb 27, 2017 9:27:06 AM