The Chronicle

Issue date: 2/13/04 Section: Editorial
Last update: 1/18/06 at 11:39 AM EST

After two days of venomous, hate filled e-mails from self-described "conservatives," I am convinced that there is a large group of people in the country who are not at all interested in a calm rational discussion of the issues raised by the recent ad in The Chronicle taken out by the Duke Conservative Union. However, in the hopes that there are a larger number of people more interested in the issues, and less interested in spitting venom, I would like to clarify the comments attributed to me in The Chronicle article of Feb. 10.

First, unlike some of the people interviewed for the story, I accept the DCU's contention that the distribution of political views of Duke's faculty is significantly different from, and to the left of, the United States population as a whole. As a philosopher of science I see this phenomenon as worthy of exploration and explanation. I'll return to that shortly.

In my response to The Chronicle reporter I gave a quote from John Stuart Mill that I thought was quite funny. I now see that the humor is not much appreciated in this context. Furthermore, as a political philosopher Mill is a hero to both the left and the right. So, except to say that we should all read more Mill, I'll leave him out of this. There is another point where I suspect wide agreement can be reached, namely that there are a large number of classes at Duke that are apolitical. Suppose you find out that your math professor is a socialist or a libertarian. Why should you care? I hope that most members of the DCU would not care.

What they do seem to care about is the political views of the faculty teaching history, literature, philosophy, political science and (I assume) economics. Let me stick to philosophy. Again, here I think there are courses where the political leanings of the professor are exactly as relevant as those of your math professor. As a graduate student I was a teaching assistant in a logic course taught by a socialist. He used the textbook written by his colleague, a conservative Republican. If the teacher has been a Republican and the text written by a socialist I don't think the class would have been any different. But what about courses in philosophy of law, ethics and social and political philosophy? Here I accept that the course content might well be different were it taught by a conservative Republican vs. a liberal Democrat. Different, but not radically different. If you study 20th century poltical philosophy, you will read John Rawls (the textbook definition of a late capitalist liberal) and Robert Nozick (perhaps not textbook libertarian, but libertarian nonetheless).

There seems to be a widespread perception that professors reward students for agreeing with them and penalize those who disagree with them. That has certainly not been my experience; not as a student, nor a professor. Philosophers value good argumentation. If your professor is a Rawlsian and you offer a strong argument for preferring Nozick's position to Rawls' you will be rewarded. You don't need to agree with your professor in order to learn from him or her.

So I agree with the DCU that conservative Duke students will in fact take a large number of their courses with a significant political content from professors whose politics differs from theirs. Why not see this as an opportunity to hone your political thinking rather than see it as an obstacle to the sort of education you want?

Finally, let me go over what I did and did not say. The DCU seems to believe that the difference in the politics of the faculty vs. the population as a whole is due to hiring bias. The claim is that we liberals only want to hire other liberals. The process for hiring faculty in our university is largely decentralized. The hiring units in universities are departments, not the administration. I did not presume to speak for other departments, but I did categorically deny that there was any such bias in the hiring practices of Duke's philosophy department. None of us would want such a bias to be there, and in virtually all cases there is no mechanism for it to be there.

Typically, we know nothing about the candidates' politics until after they are hired.

If one looks carefully at what I was quoted as saying in The Chronicle, I did not say that all conservatives are stupid, nor even that most conservatives are stupid. I will go on the record as saying that some conservatives are stupid, but so are some liberals; there is plenty of stupidity to go around. The serious and interesting issue is how do we explain the surplus of liberals in academia. If we rule out the hiring bias hypothesis, what's left? The phenomenon could be due to the political indoctrination of new hires. But given the independent nature of most academics this is not at all credible. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the only viable hypothesis left is something like the following: There is a statistical association between the qualities that make for good academics and those that lead to left-leaning political views. Said another way, a larger proportion of academics are likely to be liberal, but certainly not all, and this may also vary by field and subfield because of the nature of knowledge, learning and the advancement of knowledge in that field. But, stated this way the hypothesis still remains incredibly vague. What qualities, what traits are we talking about? What causal relations underlie these statistical associations? These questions are worth exploring, but I think the hypothesis is right headed.

If conservative Duke students object to being taught by liberal professors, there is not much they can do about it in the short term. But over the longer haul they could change the political landscape of leading research universities. Study hard, do well in school, go on to get a Ph.D. and get yourself a job teaching at a university. But if you do you might find that political indoctrination is not really what animates academic life.

Robert Brandon is the chair of the Philosophy Department.