THIS DOES NOT HAVE TO BE DIFFICULT.

A Ryan Quinn essay in the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education asks "Can Colleges Achieve Viewpoint Diversity Without ‘Affirmative Action for Conservatives’?"  

As is often the case with these things, it's people who should know better using political party registrations as a proxy for faculty intellectual predilections, a form of potted demography only possible in states that require primary voters to declare a party preference (that's not necessarily an affiliation, as crossover voting is a thing) in advance of a primary election.

The essay reports on a recent conference that quickly deteriorates into the predictable talking points.

Jenna Silber Storey, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank, said she would do something she doesn’t know how to do in real life: “Create a more politically diverse faculty.”

“Faculty do not work in a day-to-day environment where they really have to tangle with people on the political right,” Storey said. “They don’t necessarily know deeply what people are thinking there.”

Another panelist, Dartmouth College President Sian Leah Beilock—a vocal advocate of “viewpoint diversity” in higher ed—objected. While she wants to ensure Dartmouth has faculty who promote “heterodox ideas and think in different ways,” she said, “I’ve pushed back on this idea that a faculty member’s political affiliation is the right way to assess this.”

Storey rebutted Beilock using an argument a supporter of equity or affirmative action might employ: “We would think it strange if we had universities that were very curious, for example, about what women think, what female authors have written, and we had a 90 percent male faculty. We would think that was a fact worth thinking about. It’s the same thing.”

Beilock concurred, but said she didn’t think looking at political donations—one way researchers have measured faculty political affiliation—is especially helpful. “I also worry that the response to this is affirmative action for conservatives, and I really worry about taking one particular quality and using that to decide who should be part of the faculty,” she said. Faculty should include “voices across the political spectrum,” she added, but “if we use the wrong proxy, we just end up in some of the same situations we ended up in before.”

Somehow, predominantly male English faculties of years ago were able to teach George Eliot or Jane Austen.  More importantly, dear reader, all that might be necessary is for scholars who work in or teach critical studies to treat its core premises as assumptions leading to testable propositions rather than as tight priors.

In principle, that is straightforward.

First steps:  But for emancipation, how much worse would black life be?  But for voting rights and public accommodation law, how much worse would black life be?  But for school desegregation, how much worse would black life be?  If you want to be provocative, but for urban renewal and the War on Poverty, how much worse would black life be?  Would a peer-reviewed journal publish research that suggested urban renewal or the War on Poverty actually worsened conditions relative to the baseline?

Next steps, somewhat harder: how much of the remaining "undeniable realities of inequality" is a residual effect of discriminatory policies?  Does that account for the entire residual?  If not, how much, and with what margins of error?

What comes out of the conference might be making things harder than they have to.

Steven Teles, a professor in Hopkins’s new School of Government and Policy, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that the Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative is about countering students’ perceptions that academe will discriminate against them for their views.

“Our objective is to convince heterodox liberal through conservative students that top phd program[s] (or at least many of them) are more open to them than they think,” Teles wrote. “I’ve met a number of young people through this program and the level of discrimination they perceive is often far greater than what I think is actually the case (that’s not to say there isn’t discrimination, but it’s not such that they can’t find a highly resourced program that’s a good fit for what they want to do).”

School of Government and Policy Dean [William] Howell told Inside Higher Ed that “there are a lot of spaces in higher ed that don’t just lean left; it’s that they consist almost exclusively of progressives. And conservatives, a good number of them, feel like these are unwelcome spaces, and they look to go elsewhere. And, oftentimes, elsewhere means leaving the academy entirely.”

Howell is trying to bring to his school “people who are radically underrepresented in higher education—and they certainly include people who are conservative,” he said. His mission coincides with the Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative’s, which operates as a university-level initiative.

He’s not trying to “offer safe harbor to people who are not troubled by the Trump presidency,” he said, nor has he “written down a set of rules that say we need X number of Democrats, Y number of Republicans, and will tolerate a certain number of people at the far fringes and some independents.” Instead, he wants to build a “more expansive community” to attend to “big challenges that our country faces,” he said.

“If what you want to do is grapple with hard, complex problems where the diagnosis of the problem itself requires that you be challenged from people who think differently—and that the articulation of any solution requires the building of coalitions of people who sit in different places ideologically—we’ve just got to do this,” he said. “And do this well, and do it unapologetically.”

The grappling with hard problems that don't lend themselves to pat solutions is what the tradition of scholarly inquiry used to be.  Might that tradition have been stressed or broken by people with tight priors doing a long march through the disciplines?  That's where the selection bias Minding the Campus contributor Nafees Alam notes comes in.

Consider what it means to become a scholar. The path is long and institutionally intensive. A typical academic has spent four years earning a bachelor’s degree, five to seven years in a doctoral program, and several more years navigating the tenure track. Along the way, the scholar has submitted to peer review, applied for grants from government agencies and foundations, served on faculty committees, and advanced through a hierarchical credentialing process administered by accrediting bodies, disciplinary associations, and university governing boards.

This is a system. It is layered, procedural, and bureaucratic. And the scholar, by definition, is someone who has navigated this system successfully, sometimes enormously so.

Here lies the selection bias that deserves far more attention than it currently receives. Scholars are survivors of an elaborate institutional filtration process. Those who found the system alienating, irrational, or stifling left along the way. They dropped out after college, during graduate school, or during the years of adjunct teaching before a tenure-track position materialized—if it ever did.

The people who remain in the professoriate are disproportionately those who found the system navigable, rewarding, and at least tolerably fair. This experience has consequences for political orientation.

When your personal biography is one of institutional success, you are naturally inclined to view institutions favorably. The university system worked for you. The grant-funding apparatus worked for you. The credentialing process, despite its many flaws, ultimately validated your effort and your talent.

It would be remarkable for someone with this biography to develop a deep, generalized suspicion of institutional authority. Why would they? The institutions they know best have, on balance, been good to them.

The leap from appreciating academic institutions to appreciating government is shorter than it may seem at first. Both are large, rule-governed systems that allocate resources through bureaucratic processes. Both rely on credentialed expertise. Both reward patience with procedure and comfort with hierarchy.

A scholar who has thrived within the university has, in a meaningful sense, already rehearsed the experience of thriving within a government-like structure. This may help explain why scholars tend to favor policy solutions involving more government coordination, more regulatory oversight, and more public funding. These are the kinds of solutions that feel intuitive to people who have spent their entire adult lives inside large coordinating institutions.

The scholar’s default mental model of how problems get solved involves committees, review panels, and institutional mandates. That is the world in which the scholar has solved problems and been rewarded for doing so. It is entirely natural for this professional experience to shape political instincts.

He concludes, "Scholars lean left in significant part because the system of academia selects for people who are temperamentally and experientially inclined to appreciate systems."  I have trouble squaring that with radical skepticism or critical theory emerging from what could be an extremely — choose your adjective — hidebound or conservative or insular institutional setting.

He is correct to note, though, that once a canon and curriculum emerges, disrupting it will be difficult.  "It's the 'unsympathetic readings' that might do more to help a scholar focus his thinking. Critical Studies are not, in any form, scholarship. Too many people, though, are so easily intimidated when their motives are questioned or when they're Kafka-trapped, to properly push back."

All the same, properly pushing back is not an artifact of how many faculty members ask for a Republican ballot on primary day; rather it is a consequence of a faculty member whether in the workshop or the common room or, heck, at the Friday wine-and-cheese asking the right questions.