The Light of Self-Interest
As the university professoriat is divided into two classes, stars and craftsmen, so there are two major reasons for their attachment to the Left end of the political spectrum.
The rise of the current generation of leftist stars began in the U.S. in the 1960s, which revived Marxism, and the 1970s, which introduced post-modernism. Marxists and post-modernist scholars opposed the academic establishment of the 1940s and 1950s. This establishment worked for two decades to build an American position in the social sciences and humanities, drawing in part on anti-Marxist theorists of Europe. The Americanist theories fell out of favor as the controversy over the Vietnam War radicalized American universities. Disillusionment with America's prosecution of the war undermined the moral authority of Americanism for many college and graduate students and new faculty members.
Instead of Americanism, radicals found inspiration in Marxism and post-modernism. These two ideologies unify disciplinary theories of knowledge with political theories of the disciplines. Both Marxism and post-modernism are anti-positivist. As ideologies, they deny the possibility that scientific and scholarly disciplines can exist intellectually independent of the political positions of scholars working in them. Marxism and post-modernism simultaneously advance knowledge in the social sciences and humanities and criticize that advance. These radical ideologies generated research programs that involved overturning and revising a generation of American scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. It was impossible to participate in this radical research program without being politically radical, because the ideologies claimed that one's work as a scholar/scientist and one's political values could not be separated. As a result, the emergence of stars sponsoring radical philosophies also meant increasing the prominence of the radical politics.
We have already remarked about the important role of the top research universities in the advanced training of professors who end up teaching at second and third rank colleges and universities. Concentration of doctoral training led to the diffusion of radical academic philosophy and radical political views from the top of the academic profession downward. Just as the radical ideology required the stars to share a radical political view in order to do academic research, it also required such commitment from the graduate students being training by the stars.
Since professors and college teachers of the craftsman class do not have highly productive research careers, the unification of radical politics and radical research theories wears out. As these professors take jobs away from the universities dominated by their star-mentors, their radical politics diminish too. This natural weakening of radicalness does not explain commitment to the Democratic Party, however. For that commitment, we need to look at the nature of the university itself.
For craftsmen, colleges and universities are models of the collectively organized, subsidized, noncompetitive welfare state endorsed by radical politics. Craftsmen professors live a middle class life without having to work hard for it. No doubt some professors do work hard; it is necessary, if a professor desires to be a star, to work 60 hours week. If the professor has no desire to be a star, she can work a 30 hour week; so many professors simply coast. They have nine-month contracts. They supplement their income with junior level administrative jobs that could be done by a community college graduate. A significant portion of the craftsmen professor's career is thereby subsidized like welfare.
In this situation, the political affiliation of professors is not the result of their special insight about America. Their affiliation does not spring from supposed gifts of natural genius. College professors align themselves with the Democratic Party simply as an expression of their self-interest in enjoying a welfare state.
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