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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

MORE RESPONSE TO UD'S POST ON LIBERAL BIAS IN THE UNIVERSITY
[See various posts below.]



A fellow academic blogger, Professor Blogger, writes:


Dear UD,

I was very interested in your depiction of faculty bias as not
"represent[ing] intellectual and institutional betrayal and corruption on a
truly significant scale." Presumably your experiences in academe have led
you to this determination that a few radical hotheads have given faculty a
bad name.

Nevertheless, I hope that you will consider my own experience, chronicled in
the link below. I began my graduate education in American literature but had
to finish it in another field because I am not a Marxist (cultural or
otherwise). I think that incidents like mine do, in fact, represent a
significant corruption, since they amount to a litmus test for graduate
degrees. Perhaps you disagree about its severity, or perhaps you think that
my situation was an anomaly. I offer it for your consideration.

http://profblogger.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_profblogger_archive.html#108638850735791945.

Yours,
Prof. Blogger




Here's an excerpt from the link:


"Graduate students learn that in order to succeed in graduate school, it is necessary to adopt a leftier-than-thou-art posture. In a single class, a student may simply adopt an a-political approach, but in the years it takes to earn a graduate degree, eventually the student will be forced to articulate a political position.

In the Professor's experience, most graduate students will, at that time, buckle and pretend to hold political and religious convictions that they do not. Those who successfully navigate graduate school carry that same pretense on to the job market. In his own case, the Professor had too much history to fake his way through, and so had to work his way to his degree as an un-closeted Christian, which eventually led to his political conservatism becoming public knowledge.

This nearly derailed the Professor's graduate education. At one point the graduate director informed him that he needed to adopt a Marxist approach to his work, because the institution was not in the business of granting Ph.D.s to the unemployable. Although, dear reader, you may take this as an example of outrageous discrimination (and it was), Prof. Blogger would like to suggest we also consider it as a moment of rare honesty. In fact, it was very nearly true that a non-Marxist could not get a degree from that institution. Prof. Blogger, however, changed fields and managed to find a committee of faculty who, though they shared the graduate director's political and religious affiliations, did not share his opinion that non-Marxists should not be given opportunities.

But it was a very near thing. In certain fields, primarily in the liberal arts and social sciences, religious or political conservatives rarely make it to the job market. Prof. Blogger suspects that many of the most egregious cases of discrimination are performed by faculty who secretly sneak off to church or temple, or vote Republican at the polls. These closeted conservatives may feel the need to burnish their lefty credentials frequently, lest they be discovered and purged."




Much to think about here. I agree that "in the liberal arts and social sciences, religious or political conservatives rarely make it to the job market." As for active purging of conservatives in various departments, UD is ready to believe it happens, but she continues to think it's pretty rare, and that, as Professor Blogger recounts, when it does happen, there are solutions (Prof. Blogger changed fields). She also thinks that there are ways to keep your head down, dissemble, and privately laugh at everyone while doing perfectly well in your graduate education.

UD does not know how long Professor Blogger has been out of graduate school; nor does she know what graduate school he attended. But the portrait PB paints of a lockstep Marxist collective running his department is out of date. Not even the Intellectual Diversity people speak of Marxism very much; they speak of liberalism. Indeed the very fact that the few surviving Marxists in the American academy are considered dinosaurs by pretty much everyone suggests an evolution away from irrelevant forms of leftism and toward a more centrist orientation.




But anyway, maybe it is largely a matter of personal experience. Personal experience and personality. UD, at the University of Chicago, studied with the genial and tolerant Wayne Booth (who UD seems to recall having been both religious and on the left); UD has always been by nature both libertarian and contrarian. She enjoys being left alone as much as she enjoys being at odds with everyone. This combination of enjoyments seems to have meant in her own case that the subversion poseurs of the academy in which she grew up were a challenge and a diversion, not a nightmare.

Then too, her gaze was always outward, on eternity - to people like Gillian Rose, Christopher Lasch, and Albert Camus - rather than fastened on whoever the local yokels were at any given moment.