March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? V Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:25 PM EST I concede that Michael Barone’s column is bereft of statistical evidence, and I embrace what I take to be the call for some impressionistic evidence. My impressions are more sanguine than are Mr. Barone’s, but I do not think everything he says is wholly mad. For example Barone wrote, “The default assumption predisposes them (educated Americans) to believe that if there is slaughter in Darfur, it is our fault; if there are IEDs in Iraq, it is our fault; if peasants in Latin America are living in squalor, it is our fault; if there are climate changes that have any bad effect on anybody, it is our fault.” Thinking this over, I am pretty sure that many academics I know would reject the charge about Darfur but accept the other three allegations (the U.S. is a prominent cause of Iraqi IEDs, immiserated Latin American peasants, and global warming). I accept one of them myself—I think American carbon emissions are one plausible cause of global warming—but I do not think we are the chief cause of poverty in Latin America. Iraqi IEDs are trickier. Had we not toppled Saddam, who monopolized violence much more effectively than does the current Iraqi government, there might be no IEDs, but Iraqis and foreigners who use IEDs are surely a significant cause of IEDs, as are the Iranian and Syrian governments, and Saudis who help finance the practice, and you could spend a lot of time in faculty dining rooms—I do—and not hear too much about those latter causes, compared with the first one. I have seen studies claiming that Democrats outnumber Republicans among younger faculty as much as 30 to 1 in some academic disciplines, and that ratio may have some effect on how some subjects are taught. Do American academics keep their politics out of the classroom when they are teaching undergraduates? I strongly suspect that some do and some don’t, but the latter impression is based on student gossip and muckraking journalism, not direct observation. An odd thing about teaching is that academics only rarely see one another do it, and when they do, the fact of observation may affect what is being said on those occasions. I am cheered by Alex Burns’s remark that he “can’t recall the last time one of my professors denounced a historical figure or field of study.” In my experience, academics pretty regularly denounce historical figures and fields of study when talking to one another, but I take Mr. Burns’s word for it that they keep it out of the classroom at Harvard. I share part of Mr. Burns’ surprise at Barone’s celebration of Adam Hochschild. I have taught King Leopold’s Ghost, and my memory is that one of its weaknesses is a tendency to take as typical of Western imperialism one of its most ghastly and greed-maddened episodes. It also seems to be one of the more commonly taught books on imperialism in Africa, and it occurs to me that very few if any of my students seem to know that late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century European imperialism was often a money-losing proposition and had many quite powerful non-economic motives. My students must be getting their notions from somewhere, and it would not amaze me if they are picking up some of them at college. But that does not mean that academics on the left are effectively controlling the mental life of educated America. Barone is not alone in claiming that the sorts of history books on sale at a chain store do not look too much like the ones on sale in college book stores. Perhaps more to the point, an article in today’s New York Times suggests that when academics drift too far from the rest of the society, or from a profession practiced outside the academy as well as within it, the result may not be ever more effective propaganda but increasing irrelevance. The article notes that law reviews are apparently less and less influential on judicial decisions. The Times does not speculate that a reason for this is politicization of the law schools in one direction while the judiciary is politicized in the other, but that would be my guess about one cause of this phenomenon. Similarly, when the academy moves to the left, think tanks pop up on the right and produce more and more of the “expertise” consumed by the government; the universities were once monopoly producers of “expertise,” but no longer. Tenured academics can be pretty insulated from the rest of the society, with the perverse result that the rest of the society may wind up being pretty insulated from the academy.
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