My Failure as an Indoctrination-Crazed Lefty Professor (Part 1 of 2)
I taught in US colleges and universities for my entire 43-year career (with some visiting gigs in Canada and other not-America places along the way). I am politically progressive. Did I indoctrinate my students and change their political views to mirror mine? Not even close, nor did my colleagues (including my conservative colleagues). Even so, the unshakable belief that "liberal universities" are poisoning the minds of the young is an article of faith on the political right.
The drumbeat of panicky accusations against professors is omnipresent, but despite its stale familiarity, it is ever more important to push back against this disinformation at a time when the Trump White House is in full-on attack mode against American higher education. Here, I will have some fun with a particularly silly version of anti-university sanctimony from a Trump cabinet secretary and a New York Times columnist, followed (mostly in Part 2 of this column later this week) by an analysis of what we in fact know about these issues as an objective matter.
But first, the fun.
One of the lightest of lightweights in the Trump Administration is Sean Duffy, a former reality TV performer who somehow found himself being tapped as the US Secretary of Transportation. Two Sundays ago, John Oliver's show began with a short summary of a beyond-cringe reality TV series, the "Great American Road Trip," that Duffy and his family created and appeared in this summer. Originally hyped with great fanfare by Duffy and Administration sources, the show ended up as a rump run of four episodes that were unloaded onto the web to be viewed by almost nobody.
For the purposes of this column, the key part of that segment was a contrived family drama about whether Duffy's daughter would attend Harvard College. Duffy and his wife apparently are horrified that their daughter would even consider going to Satan's playground, so they decided to show some of their surely-spontaneous discussion with her in their show. As we will see shortly, it is jaw-droppingly stupid.
What makes any of this worth an extended discussion here, however, is not Duffy's daft ideas themselves but the friendly corrective that he received in print from conservative New York Times columnist David French. As it happens, I recently mentioned French in passing in a column discussing people who know nothing about federal borrowing but who confidently present themselves as Very Serious People by saying empty-but-scary things about government debt. Leading into that discussion, I noted that French fills
a conservative slot at that paper but is not what I have pointedly described as a "conservative diversity hire." Even so, French yesterday revealed himself to be deeply shallow when it comes to his understanding of economics. (One example: "Unless I harm someone else, it’s not the government’s job to determine whether I’m virtuous enough to enjoy liberty, including economic liberty." Wow, now there is a clear guide for setting the rules of the economic game. "Economic liberty" means nothing without rules, so the idea that there is a no-government zone of freedom is as naive as it is useless.)
In the column to which I was responding, French was, to be very blunt, deep in dipshit territory -- and I mean deep, as in "Heart of Darkness" deep. And that truly is a problem, because he used that column to lay out his political philosophy, a decision that one can only call an unforced error. He unintentionally revealed that he has simply dressed up his ideological priors with a "freedom as a default" story, where his every deviation from that default has a just-so story to justify it and everyone else's deviations are dismissed as some version of liberals not trusting people to know what is best for themselves. It is honestly depressing to get a peek behind the curtain and find a self-important man presenting ad hoc prejudices as profound matters of philosophy.
That is a subject to which I surely will find myself returning someday soon, but my interest here is in the whole university indoctrination thing. And on that subject, I should emphasize that French was not veering out of his lane (as he was on economic matters, for example). His pre-NYT career was, in fact, spent litigating against supposed "cancel culture" on US campuses, which means that when he writes about campus issues now, his errors and misleading comments cannot be dismissed as those of an unfortunate bloke who is making rookie mistakes. Attacking universities is what drove the guy for years, but what he says here holds up no better than his paeans to liberty.
French begins his response to Duffy (which was published before Oliver's show ran, but which used the same widely circulated video clip that Oliver had shown) with a summary of the issue:
Rachel Campos-Duffy, a host of “Fox and Friends Weekend” and (along with Duffy) a former reality television star on MTV, talk about prohibiting their daughter from going to Harvard as an undergraduate.
The clip begins with Campos-Duffy saying that she’s “nervous” about her daughter Paloma going to Harvard. “We spent a lot of time nurturing and providing formation for our kids,” she said, “giving them an environment where they are steeped in faith and values.” It worried her to even think about dropping them off at a school that would “undermine that or try to undo all those things.”
The scene switches to a conversation between Duffy and Paloma, in which Duffy tells his daughter, “If I send you there, I think what happens is they have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds.”
Duffy told Paloma that she didn’t have to believe what he believes but he did not think that Harvard gives students a “well-rounded picture” of competing ideas.
Did I already say jaw-dropping? A supposedly sentient adult said on camera that the people at Harvard "have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds." French further quotes Duffy saying that Harvard is "so good at it. You’ll see young people go to a conservative school with a conservative family, and they get perverted and contorted." The response by French is obviously going to be better than that, and he in fact leads the piece by saying that the Duffys should allow their daughter to attend one of the most prestigious and selective universities in the world.
Pointedly, however, French says that doing so "would be good for [Duffy's children], and it would be good for Harvard." So we can all see where this is going. French is warming up to say that Harvard truly is both Sodom and Gomorrah but that those heathen need to be exposed to good conservative Christians like the Duffy kids. He calls the conversation "relatable" and says that he has had conversations with conservative parents over the years who "wonder if they’re sending their kids into the lion’s den. The concern seems especially acute with young women — that they’ll leave home as Laura Ingalls and come back as Lady Gaga." He then drops this bomb:
Before you laugh at that idea, please realize that this perception is almost entirely the fault of elite educational institutions. They’re the ones that have created a left-wing ideological bubble. They are often extraordinarily intolerant of dissenting views. Peers and professors do sometimes make life difficult for conservative students.
Peers and professors sometimes make life difficult for all students, and there are plenty of professors and students who try to enforce right-wing rightthink, but never mind.
Notably, French holds himself out as something of an expert witness, a product of a conservative college who went to Harvard Law School and thus can testify that it is possible somehow to survive the professionalized corrupting of young minds. "I’ve experienced this myself, both as a student and as a lawyer ... My three years at Harvard were also three of the best years of my life, in part because they were so challenging."
So this invites me to offer myself as an expert witness as well, but only to testify that French almost surely knows nothing about Harvard College. He spent three years at Harvard Law, which means that he was from his very first day in Cambridge overwhelmed by the all-encompassing law school experience and has little to no personal knowledge of what the undergraduate experience is like today, or even what it was like when he was spending his days in the Law Quad.
Why is this important? I went to Vassar College for undergrad and then enrolled in the Harvard Economics Department's Ph.D. program. We graduate students had nothing to do with undergraduates, largely because we were so busy but also because the College students viewed us as outsiders who had not even gotten our BA's from Harvard. My contact with Harvard's undergrads was greater than most, however, for three reasons: (1) For many years, I was a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses in Economics and Social Studies, (2) I was the advisor to the undergraduate Speech and Parliamentary Debate Society throughout my graduate student career, and (3) Harvard College hired me to create and administer a new program to allow alcohol to be served at undergraduate events, in compliance with a then-new state law restricting such drinking.
Among those three factors that brought me into uniquely close contact with undergraduates, the second one was by far the most time-intensive and involved the most candid conversations with students who viewed anyone over the age of 22 as ancient. Not once did I hear anyone talk about hanging out with Harvard Law students -- and this, mind you, is a group of students who chose to join the debate team and in large numbers eventually went to elite law schools. They tolerated me, but almost all non-undergraduates at Harvard are simply in separate worlds from the college students.
So "I was there, and I can tell you what it was like" depends on what the "there" is that one is describing. Saying that three years at Harvard Law gives one testimonial competence re the intellectual atmosphere at Harvard College is something like saying that I have been to Albany and thus know what things are like in Brooklyn Heights.
But French also relies on the years with his anti-"monocolture" litigation group, where he "represented student after student who was subjected to a sometimes shocking level of censorship, stigma and isolation at the nation’s most exclusive universities. Harvard has been one of the chief offenders." I wonder what the lawyers on the other side of those cases would say. More to the point, however, French's only attempt to provide anything resembling evidence is to say that his former group ranks Harvard "245th out of 257 colleges and universities it measures" for "free speech." And how is that determined?
Sadly, 47 percent of Harvard students report self-censoring at least once or twice a month; 79 percent of Harvard students say that shouting down a speaker can be acceptable, at least in rare cases; and 32 percent say that using violence to stop speakers is also acceptable, again in rare cases.
That’s a sign of a sick free speech culture. That’s Harvard’s fault, not Duffy’s.
No, that is a sign of a ridiculously unscientific survey method, coupled with willfully dishonest spin. How is it possible that only "47 percent of Harvard students report self-censoring at least once or twice a month"? I self-censor at least once or twice a day. That is what one does when interacting with other human beings in any society. And without knowing what those "rare cases" are, we can have no idea whether to be fearful or heartened about the survey responses to the "shouting down" and "using violence" questions.
Can French truly think of no instance in which shouting down a speaker would be acceptable, and no circumstance in which violently stopping speakers might be called for? And even if he can come up with no examples for himself, can he truly say that only in "a sick free speech culture" would other people be able to imagine extreme, rare cases? Does he believe that none of the students in the 79 percent and 32 percent are conservative, such that it is only the minds that have been captured by the imagined liberal monoculture that are sick? French has an awful lot of confidence in conclusions that he bases on awfully flimsy evidence.
Even so, French somehow manages to come through all of that nonsense and emerge with an opinion that dismisses the notion that American higher education is a vast left-wing indoctrination factory. As I will discuss at the beginning of Part 2 of the this column later this week, he gets there in the most self-satisfied and unhelpful way possible, but a win is a win. After quickly dispensing with that, I will then move on to a discussion of more serious analyses of the question of campus indoctrination.
It should surprise no one that this hoary right-wing talking point withers under even minimal scrutiny.
-- Neil H. Buchanan