There is a lot of sturm und drang on the right about how “liberal” the academy is in the United States. There are real discussions to be had about the relationship between education and worldview, the value of genuine viewpoint diversity, and the degree to which the partisan affiliation of a given faculty member has much effect on the content of instruction (or doesn’t).
Speaking as a retired professor and administrator, and especially as a political scientist, I am not unsympathetic to the notion that a given person’s political views could have an impact on their behavior. But I also would add that first, it is not surprising to me that the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to have more tolerant and expansive views (sometimes referred to as “liberal”). And, second, I don’t think that partisan politics matters as much on a day-to-day basis on college campuses and classrooms as commentators claim.
Given that all (or close thereto) of our political class (broadly cast as elected and appointed officials as well as the chattering class) have college educations, it would seem pretty obvious that going even to elite schools does not result in uniform liberal outputs.
All of that could be expanded into thousands of words, but are here mostly as context and prolog to the following. If the goal of certain activists is to demonstrate how the problem with the modern university is a lack of point-of-view diversity, then doing things like hosting a white supremacist rather substantially calls into question what the real goals are and they are more about power and reactionary politics than about real concerns about intellectual diversity.
To wit, via The Guardian: Florida university to host extremist after DeSantis-led lurch to right. The invitee is Steve Sailer.
Sailer, 65, of Los Angeles, California, has no known academic qualifications in biology or any other scientific field. He has publicly claimed a BA, an MBA and a period of corporate employment that ended in 2000.
But he has been instrumental in the revival of eugenic thinking under the euphemism “human biodiversity” (HBD), has drawn on the ideas of self–described eugenicists and scientific racists, and has appeared on conference stages alongside prominent white nationalists and antisemites. His work in turn is cited by white supremacists: the Guardian found dozens of favorable references to Sailer on the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront.
His central claims include the idea that social racial categories – Black, white or Hispanic – have a biological basis, and that this is revealed in differences in intelligence and other attributes.
Scientists say this is wrong.
[…]
Sailer regularly claims that Black people around the world are less intelligent or more primitive than white people, along with advancing other bizarre claims and racist stereotypes.
In an essay in Noticing entitled Hair Hysteria, Sailer writes: “After having read hundreds of their op-eds and the like over the past few years, I’ve discovered that the No 1 topic young woman-of-color journalists want us to listen to them talk about is … their hair.”
He then proposes a cause that casts these Black professional women as primitive and irrational: “Due to the decline in prestige of white men, with their tiresome science and rationality, older ways of thinking are growing in influence. And hair plays an important role in Haitian voodoo and Southern hoodoo magic.”
The piece is long, and this is just a sample. I commend the whole thing as it is educational.
To me, all of this raises questions as to what a more “conservative” university means to people like Ron DeSantis and Chris Rufo.
Sailer’s appearance at NCF is the latest example of far-right influence there since what Rufo has described as the “takeover” that established “political control” over the university. Rufo, a DeSantis appointee to the NCF board of trustees, has advertised Sailer’s event, posting on X on 6 September: “We’re launching a dialogue series at New College of Florida” with Sailer and Wilfred Reilly scheduled to talk about “race, crime, and statistics”.
It is worth noting that Sailer is not an academic.
Michael Lind, a professor at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, has written critically about Sailer, Richard Hanania and others he has branded “eugenicons”. In a story for Compact, he wrote that the work of Sailer and other like-minded writers “seldom rises above the level of stereotypes”.
In a telephone conversation, Lind called Sailer “an unintellectual person’s idea of an intellectual”.
Chris Rufo, one might recall, came to prominence and was a main driver behind the moral panic over Critical Race Theory. It is telling, I would argue, that one of the main topics that people who claim to be interested in viewpoint diversity end up being more obsessed with race, especially with points of view that seek equality for human beings. Moreover, their positions end up summing to being especially concerned with white people, if not the supremacy thereof.
Look, I am open to criticisms of the American academy. But elevating people like Steve Sailer rather undercuts (to put it mildly) the notion that the goal here is free inquiry or promoting viewpoint diversity. Rather, it comes across as giving the imprimatur of a university to a pseudo-intellectual crank whose life work is promoting racist views. I suppose, in some gross fashion that is “viewpoint diversity” but some viewpoints aren’t worth promoting. This is like the physics department inviting a flat-earther. I mean, sure, that’s a different point of view, but it is also one that simply does not deserve the legitimacy that is conferred by being asked to speak at a university.
There is a difference between viewpoint diversity and extolling racists. All this is is Rufo and friends telling on themselves.
A bit of a side trip on the broader topic:
I talked about a lot of this type of issue in a post from 2022: George Will on UATX (Part II)
Speaking of UATX (i.e., the University of Austin), I ran across this description, which strikes me as apt from Sarah Jones writing at The Intelligencer (Who’s Afraid of Higher Education?–which I also recommend):
And as a private institution, the University of Austin will retain the broad freedom to censor students and faculty as it sees fit — as does Liberty and my alma mater. What we’ve got, then, is a Bible college for libertarians. Those disturbed by progress will find shelter on campus. Pledging freedom from wokeness, the University of Austin actually seeks freedom from free exchange. There is a soupçon of social liberalism, which extends no further than equality for LGB people and not to trans people and which is too inadequate to greatly distinguish the school from other conservative institutions. In this university, Falwell would see kindred minds. There’s nothing new here.
To be clear: I am not saying that the American academy should be exempt from criticism–far from it. But it is always concerning when the critiques about diversity of thought end up really being about the already privileged not wanting to talk about issues of social diversity if not blatant white supremacy.
I mean, if your main concerns are CRT, DEI, “cancel culture,” and “wokeness” then it raises questions about what your goals are because, with those issues in your crosshairs, you seem to be mostly concerned with protecting the privileged position of whites in the society and/or being motivated by cable news buzzwords than intellectual prowess.
If you want to critique CRT, that’s fine, but do so as a theorist who understands what they are talking about, not as a pundit squawking talking points on cable news.
