Dartblog

The New York Times’s very unfortunate Stanley Fish has recently been on a tear about the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Evan Coyne Maloney, the director of “Indoctrinate U,” which is the premier film on the pallid state of higher education. (In full disclosure, I ought to note that the producer of the film, Thor Halvorssen, is a friend and former colleague of mine.)

Maloney, in his film, provides documentary evidence of the wantonly political atmosphere of the modern college classroom—an atmosphere in which one politic is always wrong, and the other is always right. (So to speak.) FIRE, a non-profit collection of smart young lawyers, does the dirty job of defending college gays, conservatives, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and lovers of Shakespeare against the hard knuckles of college administrations. (A recent example: A university president emailed out to her studentry proclaiming a ban on handguns in the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech. A pro-gun student argued against the ban; he was suspended; FIRE intervened; he’ll soon be reinstated, no doubt.)

Anyway, the Times’s Fish thinks all of this is a lot of baloney despite the existence of droves of aggrieved, who can never organize, can rarely retain attorneys, who have no media machine, and who can express their stories only through a thousand rinky unread campus newspapers. The only think useful about Fish’s comments is the lesson that, for all the zest a film like “Indoctrinate U” will inspire, no one has done a terribly good job of explaining how the bias works, or why it is so insidious, or what might finally end it.

Probably the best writer on these more important subjects is Emory English Professor Mark Bauerlein, who in addition to being a fine writer is a man whose kindness must place him in the top 1% of American English professors. I’ve mentioned his recent essay here before. In short, the problem is not that college professors are stiltedly lecturing on the same old subjects. It is that the bias has been built into the studies themselves. So disagreeing isn’t disagreeing: it is failing adequately to grasp the subject at hand: failing to engage: it is anti-intellectual.

At present I am able to witness firsthand the marriage of politics and academic inquiry, because in search of a bachelor’s degree I have enrolled in an anthropology class on the U.S.-Mexican border. As anthropology once was, this would have been a useful exercise for me, and a broadening of my horizons. Instead, though, the class—not by dint of the professor, who happens to be very kind and engaging, but by force of the modern academic climate—is objectively anti-American, anti-Westphalian, pro-illegal immigration, constructivist, anti-market, and collectivist. These are political stances that the science need not—and therefore must not—take.

None of them presents a serious problem, because I am able and willing to oppose these stances, which are asserted relentlessly and uncritically in the literature. But in my heart I know that I am being cheated, because I am learning more about how to write a strident op-ed about the Arizona Minutemen or Tom Tancredo than I am about the science of anthropology.

The trouble with schools, I am trying to say, has nothing to do with professors presenting facts in a biased way. It has to do with academia seemingly having no more need for facts. Having transcended the weary world of objects and measurements and history—where honest debate was once had about which facts matter more, and about what the facts really mean—the age of grand relativism has dawned, where subjects like anthropology assert a political point of view, and proclaim that dissension is tortuous, undebatable.

This is a fine point. Pointing out an inconsistency in a few anecdotes, as Fish does, is like shooting fish in a barrel. But I would challenge Fish to read Professor Bauerlein’s essay, and then see if he isn’t convinced.