ProfessorBainbridge.com

Challenging conventional academic "wisdom"

Notable & Quotable: Jonathan Haidt on Identity Politics https://t.co/uUa1uvDHbQ via @WSJOpinion
‘Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education.’

— Professor Bainbridge (@ProfBainbridge) November 24, 2017

Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse in recent years as “implicit bias.” https://t.co/Olh8KwfCBM

— City Journal (@CityJournal) November 22, 2017

Notable & Quotable: Adventures in Title IX https://t.co/WP5aeR9Y3O via @WSJOpinion
‘It was clear why the Title IX report tried so hard to impugn my collegiality: it was providing the source material for additional complaints.’

— Professor Bainbridge (@ProfBainbridge) November 24, 2017

Revitalizing Catholic Higher Education

Collett, Teresa Stanton, The Urgency of Restoring the Catholic (and Catholic) Nature of Higher Education (2017). Leisure and Labor Conference, Ignatius Press (2017, Forthcoming); U of St. Thomas (Minnesota) Legal Studies Research Paper No. 17-14. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3055458

This essay reflects upon the overwhelming trend of secularization in American Catholic higher education that has led to colleges and universities largely abandoning their liberal arts heritage for a more “instrumentalist” approach to education. This trend is part of what Pope Benedict XVI has identified as the “crisis of cultures” where Western concepts of reason are increasingly detached from their cultural and spiritual roots, resulting in an inability to speak to anything beyond the material world and our current understanding of it. I argue that we must resist the operational atheism that afflicts most American education, including many schools that are identified as religiously-affiliated. This atheism results resulting in what Pope Emeritus Benedict has called “the presumed completeness and use of liberty as the ‘criterion of everything else.’” This absolutizing of liberty with no higher moral criterion leaves us unable to address pressing problems as a community and specifically excludes an contribution from communities of faith.

Brian Leiter's right

How should a Dean who understands academic freedom respond to public controversy about faculty writing? https://t.co/ZIHPQcLSWM

— Professor Bainbridge (@ProfBainbridge) October 2, 2017

The college kids are turning away from free speech and I find that scary

WaPo:

A fifth of undergrads now say it’s acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes “offensive and hurtful statements.”

That’s one finding from a disturbing new survey of students conducted by John Villasenor, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and University of California at Los Angeles professor.

... when students were asked whether the First Amendment protects “hate speech,” 4 in 10 said no. This is, of course, incorrect. Speech promoting hatred — or at least, speech perceived as promoting hatred — may be abhorrent, but it is nonetheless constitutionally protected.

Somedays I wonder if this is what living in the Weimar Republic felt like.

George Mason Trumping Harvard

Bloomberg reports:

Securities and Exchange Commission nominee Hester Peirce is just the latest George Mason University affiliate to fill a key regulatory position in the Trump administration.

Trump has selected six top officials from the suburban Virginia's law school renamed last year in honor of the conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia after his death and its Mercatus Center. Mercatus promotes itself on its website as the “world's premier university source for market-oriented ideas.”

That's the same number of faculty former President Barack Obama had nominated at roughly the same point in his tenure from Harvard Law School ....

The administration's emphasis on the private sector, markets, growing the economy, and reducing barriers for people to be economically productive is “all within the sweet spot of the law school and Mercatus,” David K. Rehr, senior associate dean and law professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School, told Bloomberg BNA.

John McGinnis on "Why the Academy Will Remain Mostly Unwelcoming to the Right"

John offers four reasons, the middle two of which particularly resonate for me:

Second, many professors who have been hired in part because of the multicultural program of the modern university or are otherwise committed to it will fear that conservatives and libertarians are hostile or indifferent to the preferences that support the program.  Thus, some professors are likely to believe that hiring more conservatives and libertarians threatens a core institutional commitment of the elite university.  And since most faculty hiring requires a consensus, not a bare majority, such a group does not have to predominate for it to block politically diverse hires.

Third, political polarization is on the rise.  For instance, more people than ever do not want to their children to marry someone of a partisan affiliation different than their own. One of the reasons that academics moved left in the 1960s was the polarization created by the Vietnam war that led the left to taking up refuge in the academy where they could more easily attack capitalism and convention.  The Trump era is another polarizing wave and this time it will reinforce the always present temptation of academics to avoid associating with people they believe have distasteful, even immoral views.

I used to think the main factor was not bias but rather a form of networking effect (which ws not to say that bias didn't exist or that it was unimportant).

But nowadays I tend to think John's third factor is becoming dominant. The importance of that factor was rammed home to me during the election when one of my UCLAW colleagues told me it made him "sad" to have to be on the same faculty with someone of my views (and/or, I suppose, my way of expressing those views) on Trump, snowflakes, higher education politics, etc...

You've got to figure a lot of progressive academics feel equally "sad" about having conservatives down the hallway and are becoming more so as society becomes more polarized. If that's right, that it is inevitably going to have a huge impact on faculty hiring (among other things). Conversely, it'll also have an impact on whether conservatives opt to try for an academic career and when those who make start looking for an exit strategy.

Things professors wish they could say

Advice for academics with failed projects on their hands

Sometimes the best thing an academic can do is admit that a project is never going to amount to anything and pull the plug. When that happens, I recommend permanent file deletion of all relevant materials so as to eliminate the temptation to try to resuscitate it. Shred any paper documents.

Kill it. Burn the carcass. 

And move on.

Surviving a career in higher education

This seems like sensible advice:

There are several lessons that American professors can draw from [recent] events:

1) Never object to a diversity policy publicly. It is no longer permitted. You may voice concerns in a private conversation, but if you do it in a public way, you are inviting a visit from a mob or punishment from an administrator.

2) Do not assume that being politically progressive will protect you (as Weinstein and the Christakises found out). Whatever your politics, you are eventually going to say or do something that will be interpreted incorrectly and ungenerously. This is especially true if your university offers students training in the detection of microaggressions.

3) If a mob comes for you, there is a good chance that the president of your university will side with the mob and validate its narrative (as the presidents at Yale and Evergreen have done, although the presidents at Middlebury and Claremont McKenna did not).

4) If a mob comes for you, the great majority of its members will be non-violent. However, given the new standard operating procedure (which I described in a recent Chronicle article entitled “Intimidation is the New Normal”) you must assume that one or more of its members is willing to use violence against you, and you can assume that many members of the mob believe that violence against you is morally justifiable.

Sending me to my room: The briar patch as "punishment" for straying faculty members

There's a very nasty faculty fight raging at Duke Divinity School over a toxic mixture of identity politics, academic freedom, free speech, and collegiality (or the lack thereof). Rod Dreher has been following it, if you care.

One aspect, however, struck me as particularly funny. DDS Dean Elaine Heath is quite cross with faculty member Paul Griffiths and sent him this letter:

She's punishing him by not letting him go to faculty meetings or committee meetings!

I am reminded of the Br'er Rabbit stories my grandmother read to me when I was a youngster. (They're probably banned these days as being insufficiently PC.) In my favorite, the rabbit has been caught by the fox. Br'er Rabbit asks the fox to do anything he likes except to throw the him into the nearby briar patch, which the fox proceeds to do. Of course, the briar patch was precisely where the rabbit wanted to go, because he was at home there and the fox could not follow.

I don't know how things work at DDS. But most faculty I know (and I most definitely include myself) would regard being banned from coming to faculty and committee meetings as being tossed into the briar patch.

Or, if you prefer a more modern analogy, it's like sending a kid to his room where he's got all of his toys to play with.

 

Are political donations a useful proxy for academic ideological leanings?

Josh Fershee points out their limitations:

I am particularly interested in (and a bit skeptical of) the use of political donations as the proxy for ideology.  I understand why the authors used that proxy: the information is available and it does, as Adler says, provide for comparisons.  My skepticism is not about their process or choice, but merely about whether it tells us very much about legal ideology. I think it tells us primarily about political party. And even there, in a primarily two-party system, it only tells us about preferences between those two parties, and if the data is primarily presidential, about those two specific candidates. 

My point is that legal ideology is often different that political party choice. When choosing between two parties, we all have priorities of our views, too. For example, I am a far bigger believer in the ability of markets to solve problems than many of my colleagues.  I am more skeptical of government intervention and increased regulation than many of my colleagues. But because of a few priorities that tip my balancing test, I would almost certainly come out "liberal" in using my modest contributions to political parties as the assessment of my ideology. ...

Here's how I'd assess my own legal ideology: When it comes to economic regulation, my thinking is much more in line with former law professor and SEC Commissioner Troy A. Paredes than I am with, say, Elizabeth Warren. When it comes to business entities law, I am far more Bainbridge than Bebchuck.  For environmental law, more Huffman or Adler than Parenteau.

Well, at least we know for sure he's on the right side on business entities!

"A fraternity was told it was ‘appropriating culture.’ Administrators won’t say which."

Just go read the whole thing and then join me in a heavy sigh and world weary shake of the head.

Jonathan Adler on the need for law school intellectual diversity

Adler:

The existence of ideological imbalance on law school faculties has been documented in numerous studies. Analyses of law school hiring, political contributions, and legal scholarshipall find left-right disparities. While most law schools have a few token right-leaning professors, these scholars are often relegated to “private law” subjects (e.g., business, contracts, intellectual property), and are less prevalent in “public law” subjects (e.g., constitutional law).

Indeed, most major law schools have fewer conservatives or libertarians on their faculty than can be found on the U.S. Supreme Court.

As a consequence, at many law schools, students rarely encounter the forceful articulation of right-of-center views. Thus it should be no surprise that many who study in American law schools fail to understand such views. Reading a book or some court opinions can only do so much.

Training lawyers requires teaching students how to understand and get inside the arguments of those with differing interests, outlooks, and orientations. It requires developing the ability to understand and articulate points of view that one does not believe. Doing this effectively requires exposure to differing points of view, and that’s difficult to achieve when faculties are ideological monocultures and echo chambers.

Go read the whole thing.

A first hand look at the campus purge by a progressive who ran afoul of the radical mob

From today's WSJ:

Two years ago, Northwestern University professor, noted feminist and cultural critic Laura Kipnis found herself targeted by student protesters when she wrote an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education questioning the campus panic about sexual violence. The students went so far as to file a Title IX “hostile environment” complaint against Ms. Kipnis. Ultimately she was cleared of any wrongdoing, but it was a Kafkaesque ordeal at the hands of what she calls, in her new book, the school’s “midwestern Torquemadas.” Thankfully, the experience did not silence her but made her all the more determined to challenge prevailing politically correct mores about sexual politics and free speech.

In “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” Ms. Kipnis tells the story of her own experience and the incidents that inspired her essay. It’s a disturbing tale of the abuses of Title IX, the federal law intended as a safeguard against sex discrimination. But the book is also a scathing indictment of the state of American feminism.

This story is a key cautionary tale in how revolutions eventually turn to eating their own.

The silence of UCLA about the silencing of Heather Mac Donald

William McGurn offers a compelling critique of the recent incident at Claremont McKenna in which respected conservative speaker Heather Mac Donald was effectively silenced by a radical student mob:

Ms. Mac Donald had been invited to talk about her book “The War on Cops” at Claremont McKenna College’s Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. Among her arguments is that if you truly believe black lives matter, maybe you should recognize “there is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition” than the police who protect the law-abiding minority residents of high-crime neighborhoods.

You can imagine how well that goes over. At City Journal, Ms. Mac Donald offers a first-person account of that ugly evening. The day before, she says, event organizers told her they were considering changing the venue to a building with fewer glass windows to break. Such are the considerations these days on the modern American campus.

That evening Ms. Mac Donald ended up live-streaming her talk to a mostly empty auditorium as protesters outside banged on the windows and shouted. As a result, she could take only two questions before authorities deemed it prudent to hustle her out for her own security. ...

Today it’s common to lament the cheap and polarized politics in Washington. But no one asks whether this might have something to do with a generation of students indulged in the view that they should never have to hear an opinion different from their own. How much easier it is to bang on windows, block an entryway and drop your F-bombs than, say, engage the formidable Ms. Mac Donald in genuine argument.

This strikes close to home because an appalling similar incident happened just a few days before hand at UCLA. As Mac Donald explains:

My hosts, the UCLA College Republicans, had titled my presentation “Blue Lives Matter,” which campus activists viewed as an unspeakable provocation. After I finished speaking and welcomed questions, pandemonium broke out. Protesters stormed the front of the classroom, demanding control of the mike and chanting loudly: “America was never great” and “Black Lives Matter, They Matter Here,” among other insights. ...

At 8 PM, the organizers decided to end the event, and I was hustled out of the room with a police escort.

To my knowledge, the UCLA administration has not addressed the disruption of my presentation and interaction with students.

I complained to the Chancellor and the head of "UCLA Equity, Diversity and Inclusion" about the lack of any official statement, let alone any official action. <sarcasm>To my surprise, nothing happened.</sarcasm>

I remain outraged by the way my employer's supine administrators allow unruly mobs to intimidate and silence conservative voices on campus. Especially because if the show had been on the other foot, and a conservative mob had shut down a progressive speaker, there would have been crying sessions, CrossCheck Live discussions, official campus statements of support, creation of a hate speech database, and probably police intervention. But I'm not holding my breath that anything will ever be done to protect those of us who decline to fall into line with the hegemonic far left liberalism that pervades this campus these days.