Yesterday's post touched on the "work" of right wing bomb thrower David Horowitz, who has been hammering away at the "liberal bias" charge in academia for quite a while now. I'm not the only person who has taken note of the speciousness of his claims. In the latest Columbia Journalism Review Nicholas Lemann writes the following:
Horowitz has been campaigning for some time against ideological bias in universities — journalism schools and law schools are only his latest targets. What he says he is for is the kind of ideological balance that he didn’t find on professional school faculties, which is an idea that sounds much more commonsensical and innocuous than it really is. The great American universities in their current form are the result of their having embraced, in the late nineteenth century, the “German model” of higher education, in which professional scholars conduct disinterested research according to strict rules. The idea of objective journalism emerged at about the same time. So did institutions like think tanks and professional associations. All these Progressive Era inventions were aimed at creating trained experts who would rise above their personal passions and biases in order to expand knowledge in ways that would benefit the public. Columbia’s journalism school was founded by Joseph Pulitzer in precisely this spirit.
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At the very least, to carry out Horowitz’s program would require our asking prospective faculty members (and, perhaps, students, too) to tell us their political views, which we don’t do, and which seems intrusive to me. What’s more important is that Horowitz assumes that everything we teach has a political view embedded within it. Journalism is not physics, but most of what we teach does not have any obvious ideological content. There is not a liberal or conservative way to teach students how to write clearly and accurately and quickly, or how to work by high ethical standards. Almost all the craft-style teaching we do in the various journalistic media, and much of the subject-matter teaching, have no ideological dimension that I can see. To follow Horowitz’s prescription would be to make our school more ideological, not less.
Just so. Lemann points the heart of the problem, and to my mind, this result is no accident, but is the very agenda that Horowitz is pursuing. Once you've created an expectation of ideological inspection at universities, you can begin to target individual faculty members on the basis of their ideology, targetting them for denial of tenure or for elimination of their programs because they don't tow the proper ideological line.
But there was another dimension of Lemann's article that I thought was worth pursuing as well. He points out that the ideal of objective journalism, when properly practiced, requires the scholar to put aside personal bias and report the facts as they occur. In any quantitative field, you'll find the same committment, but what happens in nonquantitative and/or qualitative fields, like, say, Religious Studies.
In my case, I'm a Christian theologian doing my scholarly work out of my Christian convictions. My work is rooted in my deepest commitments. Although I can and do make arguments for atheism in my classes, in order to analyze them and get my students thinking about them, my research presumes the existence of God and the truth of Christian doctrine, and then proceeds from that.
This doesn't imply that no debate takes place among theologians. Far from it. Some of the best times I had as a graduate student took place when I was precepting for a class taught by two professors with very different theological positions. But here's the rub: Neither of them was arguing from a position of neutrality. They were invested in their positions, as I'm invested in mine. Does this bar us from the realm of acceptable academic discourse? I think not. The way that we do our discourse is different, but it's still scholarly discourse.
Within my department are many scholars who have commitments to particular religious worldviews, and there are also several who don't subscribe, at least explicitly, to a particular religious worldview. How we each "do" religious studies is in some way rooted in the commitments we bring to the field. Thus, a Jewish ethicist and a Christian ethicist can converse about the similarities and differences in their approaches, and do so with an Islamic ethicist to bring in yet further nuance to the conversation. In the process, we each come to a better understanding both of our own ethical approaches and the approaches of other traditions. This is the kind of scholarly inquiry that is perfectly well placed within an academic setting. But it doesn't require ideological neutrality. What it does require, however, is for us to lay our cards on the table in conversation.
What Horowitz wants is not for us to lay our cards on the table, but to hire for specific ideological allegiences. Whatever the similarities and diversities within our department, one thing we don't screen for is political ideology.
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