Potentates of the Classroom
The third world in which the professoriat lives is that of credentialism. By credentialism I refer to the possession of expertise and deference to that expertise. Such credentialism exists in only one arena - the classroom. Elsewhere, college and university faculties exercise expertise within peer competition in which deference is excluded or severely dampened. Many professional journals and academic publishers review submissions for publication, for instance, with both author and reviewers unknown to each other. For NSF and NIH, the expertise of authors of a proposal is evaluated by peer reviewers - are they trained and intellectual capable of doing what they propose to do? In other professional forums, such as society meetings and testimony to government, expertise is also judged and not accepted with deference.
The classroom is the professional exception; there, faculty members exercise nearly complete authority with autonomy. They expect - and receive - deference from students. Students rarely have the knowledge to challenge professorial opinion. This deference not only flatters the teacher's ego, it also promotes the illusion that the professor's opinions must be true. This heady experience induces professors to take more extreme intellectual positions in the classroom than they can support with reason and evidence. It leads them to diminish or fail to mention professional views opposed to their own. It confirms their sense of rightness in their own political opinions and encourages them to politicize disciplinary learning.
I do not claim that such petty intellectual tyranny is universal; it is, however, a universal tendency. All college graduates have an outstanding professor, who outlines positions pro and con on an issue, who qualifies her own hypothesis to the limits of tested evidence, who explains the strongest case for the opposing view, and who provides annotated bibliographies on every issue for students to read and form their own opinions. Such teachers are, however, the exception. All college graduates have the more typical experience, especially in the social sciences and humanities, of professors whose swelled heads lead them to abandon caution in presenting their own views to their students.
We should keep in mind the narrow arena of deferential credentialism when we consider the claims of the complete politicization of faculties to the Left. In the arena of professional research scholarship, to which the public rightly pays no attention, politicized scholarship is usually criticized by some scholar, if not, of course, by political allies of the author. Since the 1960s, social science and humanities scholarship has been split between Old Left and New Left, between Marxists and post-modernists, both on the "Left", between Marxism and free-market theorists, between post-modernists and rationalists, among many professional divisions. These oppositions are the result of competitive peer review. The divisions are intellectually healthy. They are evidence that competition and peer review are good for academia.
Most faculty escape the rough and tumble of professional criticism in the world of published scholarship, however, because they don't publish much. Their major professional venue is the classroom, the departmental meeting, and the lunch room. Remember that craftsmen faculty, unlike stars, are not high profile contributors and publishers in the arena of university competition. Their primary sense of themselves is expressed and reinforced in the classroom and within the voting alliances of like-minded colleagues. The insularity and complete politicization of the craftsmen's personnel world leads to strident views.
Our discussion explains why universities are politicized, why the politics are vicious, and why most professors are true believers in their political views; but we have not explained why their politics are Liberal and Left, rather than conservative. This is our task in our next article.
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