The ivory echo chamber

By Brendan Loy

Crispin Sartwell, a self-described anarchist and a professor of philosophy at a small liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania, speaks the truth about academia:

Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. At the University of Colorado, for instance, one professor found that, of 800 or so on the faculty, only 32 are registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or physical education. ... [B]ecause there's a consensus, there is precious little self-examination; a slant that we all share becomes invisible.

Academic consensus is a particularly irritating variety of groupthink. First of all, the fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a doctorate leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing — that no one could disagree with, say, Obama-ism, without being an idiot.

That the American professoriate is near-unanimous for Barack Obama is a problem on many levels, but certainly pedagogically. Ideological uniformity does a disservice to students and makes a mockery of the pious commitment of these professors simply to convey knowledge. Professors are as herd-like in their opinions as other groups that demographers like to identify — "working-class white men," for example. Indeed, surely more so. ...

That this smog of consensus is incompatible with the supposedly high-minded educational mission of colleges and universities is obvious. But academics are massively self-deceived about this, which makes it all the more disgusting and effective.

(Hat tip: my dad.)