anti-political-correctness correctness
Always remember the new principle we learned about today: If 213 people are on one side of an issue, and 203 are on another side...That's clear proof of the existence of a monoculture.
The faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard voted today to express their lack of confidence in the leadership of university president Lawrence Summers:
"Voting by secret ballot in a Faculty meeting at the Loeb Drama Center, 218 professors voted for the lack of confidence motion, 185 voted against it, and 18 abstained."
Shortly after taking that vote, the faculty voted to mildly censure Summers for his much-discussed remarks on women and science, as well as for other aspects of his management style:
"Two hundred fifty-three professors voted for that motion, which was submitted by Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol. One hundred thirty-seven professors voted against the motion, and 18 abstained."
In both instances -- but particularly in the first -- the faculty were divided, and many professors declined to cast votes formally criticizing or rebuking the president of their university.
And so, predictably, the take-away lesson has already begun to appear on the web: The academic monoculture, steeped in moronic leftist political correctness, has attacked brave Larry Summers, proving its lockstep stupidity:
"Harvard continues to discredit itself with the American public. The faculty is trapped. If Summers resigns, this extraordinary example of political correctness will come back to haunt Harvard, and the entire academy, for years."
Folks, what do you make of the 185 professors who declined to support a no-confidence declaration against Summers? Or the 137 who declined to vote for a mild censure? Or the 18 who declined to vote on either measure?
It's truly amazing how much some (apparently not-terribly-bright*) people will work to manufacture a false vision of an academic monoculture. Call me a cultural Marxist, I guess, because I still think -- even though it's obviously so left-wing of me -- that facts matter.
Get it straight: Nearly half of the Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty chose, today, to not support a no-confidence measure against Lawrence Summers; 218 voted for a declaration of no-confidence, while 203, in one form or another, did not. Say that to yourself again and again, out loud, until you figure out what it means.
(*Wrote this while feeling unkind -- my apologies for being an asshole.)
ADDED LATER:
Take a moment to look at this op-ed piece in the Harvard Crimson, especially the opening paragraph:
"Let’s be clear about one thing: 218 Faculty of Arts and Sciences professors (out of 690) secretly voted lack-of-confidence in Larry Summers because they think he’s a schmuck."
The College of Arts and Sciences is one of Harvard's nine schools. The faculties of eight colleges have not cast no-confidence votes or otherwise formally attacked Larry Summers. At the College of Arts and Sciences, 218 out of 690 faculty members have cast a no-confidence vote. So as I read it, the numbers for the FAS vote are: 218 approved the no-confidence measure; 185 voted against; 18 abstained; and 269 didn't bother to attend the meeting where the vote was taken.
Academic monoculture! Academic monoculture! They're like robots in lockstep! (Let's publish a blog and call it Powerline!)
posted by Chris Bray @ 6:05 PM
10 Comments:
Summers made a bland comment backed up by evidence. The fact that any academics supported even mild censure is a disgrace.
Your point is well noted about the lack of a monoculture, though.
For the sake of argument, even if his comment wasn't bland, and wasn't supported by evidence, I would have hoped that academics -- who live by their (well, our) freedom to communicate ideas that other people might find offensive -- wouldn't have censured him. (Although they might also have other reasons for not liking the guy, so who knows?) I don't think the censure is a great thing, but it's clear that somewhere around 200 faculty members at Harvard didn't think so either. Is what I'm saying. Yeah.
Were the motions a specific response to his statement, a response to the larger friction between Summers and the faculty, or a piling-on-while-the-guy's-vulnerable? I tend to sit somewhere between the second and the third. While Summers's comment riled a number of faculty, the censure didn't come out of the blue, and I'm guessing that dozens voted for both measures without caring too much about his statement other than that it came from the guy's lack of tact that they had seen in many, many other ways.
I was voting against both. An abstract of many other blog articles with a similar opinion is on my physics blog:
A sad day for Harvard
Parsing the faculty vote is like figuring out the fine differences between Marxist factions before the Revolution in Russia. The point is anyone even near general agreement has a raging case of political correctness. The academic left remains a lodestar for determining sanity. If you're on the opposite side of any issue, toss away the medications.
Yeah, like his lack of tact in not supporting divestment in Israel and stating that doing so amounted to a tacit form of anti-semitism. Or urging a specific tenured academic not to put his job duties second while pursuing other forms of careerism.
All of these types of issues form a nexus of political thought.
Summer's manner may be abrasive at times, but have these Harvard faculty encountered themselves?
Okay, nearly half of the faculty did not support the motion. The fact that more than half did is simply a disgrace for Harvard. The faculty has made themselves a laughing stock. They have done this while a goodly part of the faculty at Colorado University has voted to support Ward Churchill no wonder how he raves. And yet they don't understand how these two notorious cases bear on each other in the public eye and diminishes them.
Moreover, Summers has grovelled his apologies while simultaneously making all kinds of helpful initiatives to promote women faculty -- such as allowing them a longer period of time to get tenure when they have substantial parental duties and many other innovations. He's actually used this opportunity to create helpful initiatives.
So Summers has bent over backwards not only to be conciliatory after the fact, but to do some groundbreaking work to change the situation of women academics at Harvard. But none of this is sufficient. Their anger won't be abated until his blood is ritually spilled.
Remember last year when the liberals kept screaming about how George W. Bush won't admit his mistakes? And that showed evidence yet again about what a primitive type he was.
Well here's a cautionary tale. Larry Summers did admit his mistakes and apologize, over and over, and change policy in its wake. And what has this earned him? A vote of lack of confidence by the FAS faculty at Harvard. This goes to show you just how helpful an apology for "his mistakes" in the midst of a war would have been to GWB. An admission of mistakes would have been used only to help bring down the leader, which was clear enough at the time.
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. If Salem is divided between radical and moderate witch hunters, you've still got a witch hunting monoculture. You can't burn the witches and then brag about how much diversity there is because a sizeable minority only wanted to flog them. Except for a very, very few, like Pinker and Mansfield, even those who defended Summers publicly, agreed that Summers' remarks about women in science were, if not shameful, at least unfortunate. Yet, according to Pinker, who ought to know, both what Summers said and the academic caution with which he said it, made his argument to use Pinker's word, "unexceptionable."
Part of the problem of a monoculture is that its members don't recognize it, precisely because it is one. When practically everyone abhors, or feels bad about, an insider saying things that outside the monoculture are understood as reasonably debateable, that means you've got a monoculture, however diverse the views within it are about how much to deplore or punish the misdeed.
It would have been so cool if right after the vote the faculty had made Summers drink a cup of hemlock.
Mr Bray,
Thank you for your post. It was the first place that I saw the actual results of the vote. It really made a difference. And, it is rather reassuring.
Of course it's only not a monoculture in the sense that there's a hard left and a decent left, and a handful of "Other".
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