The Guardian and Journalistic Mediocrity: Musings on an Article About the Political Leanings of Academia in the Guardian

 

Recently the American page of the English newspaper The Guardian, one of the few quality newspapers left in a world of sub-mediocre newspapers and gossip rags (which The Guardian is in part as well), published an article entitled “US Universities are Moving to the Right: Will it Help Them Escape Trump’s Wrath?” What is remarkable about this article is how mediocre it is, something journalism at its best generally is these days. In fact, this article points up how little social science capital and savvy most journalists have.

This article notes a 2016 study by a professor of business, a developer of health economic solutions for the private sector, and a professor of economics  of the 40 “leading" universities in the US (mostly research universities that are members of the Association of American Universities). This study showed that a majority of faculty in the Humanities and the Social Sciences skew Democrat and, since the Democrats are popularly regarded as liberals in the US, liberal. Before I go on I should not that one might and should wonder about what the 2016 study left out namely,  the political and ideological leanings of faculty in agriculture schools, business schools, medical schools, dental schools, and veterinary schools are and why those who did the 2016 study did not study those academics as well.

But let’s assume for the moment that the 2016 study is correct, a conclusion that other studies could be used to raise questions about, and that the Humanities and Social Sciences (they also include journalism and law schools in these categories which is problematic) are filled to the brim with liberals. The question that needs to be asked about this is why is this the case? Why are those in the Humanities and Social Sciences liberals.

The answer to that question is rather obvious and is backed up by a host of social science qualitative studies. The higher the educational level achieved by someone the more they are to vote liberal in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Educational level, in other words, is the key variable here.

Why is this the case? The answer to that question is also obvious. Higher education faculty, particularly those in the Social Science, have generally been, to quote Nick Lowe, nutted by reality. They know, for example, that while some may assume that crime is higher in urban areas data has, in the past, shown that crime is higher percentage wise in rural areas.

Now this fact, the fact that higher education in the Social Sciences is a reality check, does not mean that there aren’t political and ideological conservatives in the ivy halls of academe and that there can’t be more political and ideological conservative intellectuals (real conservatives not the fake populists who claim the conservative mantle) in higher education. There are intellectual conservatives in American universities and there can be more. For a conservative who currently teaches in the ivy covered walls of the Ivy League I give you Niall Ferguson who holds a well paying job at Harvard and whose books, unlike his homiletics, skew empirical. 

Moreover, one might argue that if ideology is broken in surveys of politics and ideology in American education into a number of more nuanced criteria, such as religion to take one example, often a marker of a more conservative sensibility at least on one level, one might find interesting cultural and ideological contradictions or seeming inconsistencies. Studies of the religious sensibilities in American higher education, for example, show that even in the hard sciences there are a significant number of academics who believe in god even in these supposed secular anti-Christian days. Exploring cultural factors might, in other words, give us a more nuanced picture of the cultures and ideologies of academe.

But back to the nutted by reality argument, the fact is is that right wing populists, who are in no way intellectual conservatives, have been socialised into mythic or what David Graeber might call bullshit history and social science. Such a history and social science are often if not always fake history and such a history and social science should not be taught in academe save in literary studies or in classes on how cultural and ideology create reality in some human populations because they are fake history and fake social science. They are not science. Real science has to be vetted by empirical reality. They are instead ideology.

The thing is is that Trump and his ilk may argue for an affirmative action programme for “conservatives” in higher education, itself a paradox and perhaps an irony given that they oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes (save for themselves it appears). What they really want is power, exclusive power, and they know that to achieve this they need to transform higher education into a politically and ideologically correct image and mirror of themselves. And they are, at the moment more than willing to engage in an inquisition of higher education in order to obtain this power.

I want to end this essay by suggesting to the authors of the study on political and ideological attitudes among academic social scientists and humanities scholars that they do a similar study of political and ideological attitudes among the police in the United States. What I think they will find, if Staten Island is prologue, is that there needs to be an affirmative action programme for liberals and Democrats in America’s police forces, an institution that is not only full of right wing populists who vote Republicam but a healthy dose of proto-fascists if not full fledged fascists.