Dan Klein provides a powerful synthesis of research on what’s wrong with left-wing domination of the humanities and social sciences. Even if you don’t want to watch the full video, read the slides!
My own thoughts: I don’t regard left-wing domination of the humanities and social sciences as the world’s most-pressing problem, or even the world’s tenth most-pressing problem. As I explained in The Case Against Education, educators simply aren’t very persuasive, so they do far less intellectual damage than you’d think. Indeed, despite their teachers’ biases, well-educated Americans tend to be social liberal but economically conservative. How is this possible?
If educators are as left-wing as they seem, why would education have such contradictory effects on students’ stances? The charitable story is that educators keep their politics out of the classroom. The more plausible story, though, is that educators are unpersuasive. The Jesuits say, “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” Society gives liberal educators the child until he’s fifteen, eighteen, twenty two, or thirty. But issue-by-issue, teachers are about as likely to repel their students as attract them. Educators could protest, “The problem isn’t that we’re unpersuasive, but that students are stubborn,” but students revise their opinions all the time. The longer they stay in school, the more they revise. They just don’t revise in a reliably liberal direction.
That said, left-wing domination of the humanities and social sciences bothers me more than many more serious ills. Why? Well, I am a professor, so…
1. Idealistically, I yearn for the humanities and social sciences to flourish, not fester.
2. Selfishly, I’d like the world of ideas to be an exciting, friendly marketplace, not a boring, neurotic church.
3. Paternally, at least two of my kids want to be professors. I’ve managed to create a Beautiful Bubble for myself, but I can tell they’ll have a tougher time than I did.
READER COMMENTS
Scott
Mar 6 2019 at 11:12am
There is a 4th reason you forgot: cultural values in the long-run. The humanities have a lot of influence on the arts and popular culture and therefore do play a role in creating a cultural hegemony which serves as the backdrop against which certain policies are or aren’t feasible. Ignasi Boltó has a great article about this: https://www.values4europe.com/blog/a-gramscian-approach-to-libertarianism-99/
David Henderson
Mar 6 2019 at 11:59am
Excellent slides (except for typos).
This is my 4th reason, which may overlap Scott’s a little: Those who come up with non-left views have almost no idea that there is a wide and deep literature to support their views. So they don’t argue nearly as well as they might. Of course, most wouldn’t bother arguing anyway, but if even 10% of those with non-left views knew about the literature, the world might be very different.
Weir
Mar 7 2019 at 4:39pm
“Clinton officially declared himself a supporter of the racist idea of personal responsibility when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) into law on August 22, 1996, with the next presidential election on the horizon.” That’s from a book called Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi.
Kendi is himself a supporter of the racist idea of personal responsibility. He completed a doctorate at Temple University. He published two books, and a third is out in August. He’s taken personal responsibility, which is racist, for his education and his career. It’s only for people poorer than himself that he preaches the opposite.
Being poor in America isn’t the world’s tenth most-pressing problem, but it’s a problem, and it’s made worse by professors and award-winning authors and by entire departments of the humanities and social sciences.
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