Blinded by Majority

Professor Mark Bauerlein of Emory University traveled from Atlanta, Georgia to Millersville, Pennsylvania for hearings on academic freedom in late April to share his thoughts on how bias in academia becomes institutionalized.

“If we get too much uniformity, too much agreement on debatable issues, too little dissent, then the group slides into complacency, insularity, and groupthink. Within the group, attitudes harden. As the years pass and the members reinforce each others’ opinions, those opinions start to look like more than just opinions. They become the truth. To agree with them is simply to be rational and ethical. Anybody who disagrees with them isn’t just wrong—he’s wrongheaded. And in the case of a professional body such as the professorate, the general opinion becomes a professional one as well. Those who dissent from it are un-professional,” said Bauerlein before the state House Select Committee on Academic Freedom.

These ideas then become standards of the disciplines, instead of being recognized as opinions, which is why terms like “social justice” which have loaded political meaning become written into curriculum goals and something all students of a discipline should embrace, he continued. Bauerlein said that many schools of education such as the Social Justice Education Program at the University of Massachusetts include social justice as an educational principle.

Penn State University and East Stroudsburg University both use social justice in their mission statements, which is a problem because “this is quite clearly an ideological demand, for ‘social justice’ is idealized codeword for various government-managed policies of income and resource distribution,” said Bauerlein.

The English professor defined this as the institutionalization of bias and explained that it becomes the way in which dissenters are kept out unconsciously. Sharing the views of everyone else makes you eligible, rejecting those views makes you ineligible, Bauerlein explained.

“If you spend all your time in the academic world among a conformist group, you don’t realize what has happened—that certain opinions have been converted into disciplinary norms. You don’t notice how much submerged political bias lies in the ordinary premises of your daily work,” said Bauerlein who has not spent his entire career within the academic community. He has also worked in Washington, D.C. for the National Endowment of the Arts Office of Research and Analysis until a few months ago.

Bauerlein does not doubt the sincerity of professors who deny being politically biased in their work. They simply can’t see it. Job candidates are not asked about their voting preferences and professors have no recollection of attacking Republican students, because it doesn’t work that way said Bauerlein. If a student wants to become a teacher, but is a libertarian and believes in the free market, a program in which teachers and administrators constantly praise the concept of “social justice” without it being open to debate is going to make the student feel estranged and likely will cause them to drop out, according to Bauerlein.

An even bigger problem is that this diminishes the quality of education, Bauerlein suggested. “The problem with group bias isn’t primarily that most of the professors adhere to one political line. It’s that the education our students receive passes through a tapered filter, resulting in an impoverished curriculum,” he said.

Bauerlein said he does not know the best remedy for fixing institutionalized bias, but suggested “affirming the intellectual values contained in the Academic Bill of Rights.” He also asked the committee to ask Pennsylvania school leadership to “review their curricula and remove political elements such as ‘social justice’ from the requirements and mission statements.”

Rep. Gibson C. Armstrong, R-Lancaster, asked Bauerlein why the academic community mostly opposes the Academic Bill of Rights. The answer, according to Bauerlein, is that professors have a great deal of power over students and do not like being challenged to defend that power structure. He also suggested that ABOR is seen by them as upping the stakes.

Armstrong also asked if professors should keep political ideas to themselves. Bauerlein did not think so, rather he thinks professors should present their own views with balanced subject matter such as including both Marx and Hayek in economic discussions.

Committee member Lawrence H. Curry, D-Philadelphia, then asked Bauerlein to discuss two of his previous written works, but read only a sentence from each. Curry accused Bauerlein of being contradictory in his remarks without giving any context of the two articles.

Curry interrogated Bauerlein, clearly unconvinced that academia has a problem, and certainly not that is it his responsibility to fix it.

Bauerlein told Curry that he disagrees with advocacy in the classroom, to which Curry responded with a demand to know what advocacy is. “Creating agents of social change” is advocacy said Bauerlein.

Curry then asked who should fix the academy if it is to be fixed from the outside. Bauerlein suggested legislators, organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), at which point Curry insisted that ISI has a political agenda. Bauerlein disagreed saying “they are traditional—not political.” “But their board is conservative. They have an agenda,” Curry exclaimed.

Then Curry wanted to know what balance in a classroom looks like. “Balance is not plurality of all views because some things are controversial and some are not,” replied Bauerlein. Curry insinuated that this would allow holocaust denial viewpoints to be taught, but Bauerlein disagreed. He said that “falsification of the historical record [such as holocaust denial] is not balance.”

In addition to this, Curry told Bauerlein that he had not shown how the academy becomes political and also asserted that graduates today are not failing. Bauerlein then cited the influx of Asian PhD students into America as a proof of the U.S. educational crisis, which is even further reinforced by other facts. Such as knowledge comparisons of U.S. students and those in other countries, and top 100 businesses are spending billions on remedial writing programs for their new hires, Bauerlein said. Curry, however, seemed to remain thoroughly unconvinced.

Julia A. Seymour is a staff writer for Accuracy in Academia.