The Informationist

On the Source of Academic Bias

Larry Arnn, the President of Hillsdale College, published an interesting essay about American higher education in the Fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books. For wahtever reason, the editors have chosen not to make an on-line version of this essay available even to those of us who subscribe (at least as of the time that I pen this blog entry). Good luck to the rest of you! In any event, his essay motivated me to draft some thoughts of my own, which I have dutifully submitted as a letter to the editor in somewhat edited form. While my musings are working their way from my desk to the editor’s trash can or recycling bin shaped icon, I’m posting my thoughts here, where they will remain forever enshrined in someone’s cache buffer somewhere.

Larry Arnn has done an excellent job in cataloging and confronting the crises facing American higher education. Our universities have indeed become bizarre combinations of subjectivity and indoctrination: Professors are free to define their own truths, shorn of any necessary connection to underlying values, and consistent only with the orthodoxy of their fields. Students must accept the truth that the Professor chooses to impose—often at the suppression of the student’s own beliefs and values—or risk severe reductions in their grades. I read Arnn’s essay intently, hoping to find an insightful answer to the challenging problems that he outlined. It would be an understatement to say that I was disappointed when his only suggestions were that we “return control of college to private people” and refocus on the Western canon.

My quibble is not with these suggestions themselves; they are both excellent. Nor, for that matter, do I disagree with Arnn’s belief that government intrusion in higher education has exacerbated many of its problems. My disappointment stemmed from his omission of the fundamental structural defect that renders higher education reform impossible. Internal faculty governance creates the ultimate insider/outsider problem.

In American higher education today, faculty members dictate hiring, firing, and promotion of junior colleagues; curriculum design and the division of courses into requirements and electives; the acceptability of contributed articles to prestigious journals; the appropriate paths for research in their fields; and the availability of public and private research funding. Academia is an area without near-term market criteria. As a result, all evaluations rest upon reputation and peer approval. Decisions, once made, are rarely revisited. Responsibility for directing academic research and discourse in a given field rests with an internal komissariat charged with promoting and extending the field’s orthodoxy.

Consider the plight of two newly minted Ph.D.s advocating different research agendas, one consistent with the orthodoxy and one that threatens to undermine it. The orthodox candidate is likely to find a fine appointment, and a prestigious perch from which to build a career. The unorthodox one will have to fight his way onto a third-tier faculty, and then scratch for every advantage not normally afforded to those at “lesser” schools. Years later, if the unorthodox approach turns out to be correct, the luminaries of the field will never resurrect this third-tier academic and acknowledge their own humility; they will simply switch their approach without ever admitting the change.

Early in my career, I was an Assistant Professor in a top-20 Computer Science department. My teaching and research were in Artificial Intelligence—an area in which political bias is hard to discern, and in which “right” answers really are (or at least were, in the late 1980s) unknown. It was a field in which, every few years, the luminaries announce a new grand insight and chose a new direction for research. All lesser researchers are required to follow in their wake. Those of us who refused found top-tier publishing and funding opportunities foreclosed—only to watch as, several years later, those responsible for the foreclosure explained how their ample funding had led them to conclude what we unorthodox types knew all along.

(As a result, I eventually found myself forced to choose between a career as an academic and a career as an honest scholar. I chose the latter. Thirteen years later, I still feel pangs of regret when I visit campuses or research institutes. I miss the collegiality, I miss teaching, and I miss the exchange of ideas. Nevertheless, I fully recognize that had I stayed, my choice of topics to investigate would never have been my own. As things stand, I have been able to pursue the line of inquiry that first got me into CS: my belief that access to information should make the world a better place. Twenty years ago, I saw myself as a computational social science being forced into an engineering mold. I am pleased to see that the field is finally catching up).

That experience taught me many lessons—some about myself, others about academia. The most salient message about academia was that its bias is structural. Those who feel that, at the very least, the Humanities and the Social Sciences suffer from a liberal bias are correct. What they miss is that the “liberal” part is coincidental; the true problem is structural bias. Were we to replace all members of all American faculties with new personnel tomorrow, we discover that over the course of a few decades the bias would return. It would be as extreme as is today’s bias, though its direction would likely differ. Take it from an old Comp. Sci. professor—changing your inputs may change your outputs, but if your internal rules remain intact, you’ll never solve the problem.

The outputs of modern American academia seem so inappropriate because the system that produces them is so fatally flawed. Tenure, faculty governance, and peer review all create a central-planning mentality, where anointed leaders set agendas, junior aspirants vie to nudge those agendas along increasingly extreme tangents, and rewards flow to those who most impress the respected insiders. The opinions of outsiders—the vast majority of Americans, including educators, scholars, and professionals who are not tenured members of a faculty—are irrelevant.

We cannot fix higher education in America until we confront these structural issues. Those of us who long for a confrontation must acknowledge that most proposed reforms risk creating different, and potentially greater, problems. After all, if we can’t trust those mired in academia to make sound judgments about their own institutions, whom can we trust? In most areas, the answer is the marketplace. In the absence of short-term criteria for assessing customer satisfaction, success, or value, however, simple market mechanisms may prove inadequate.

So how should we structure our universities? If I had the answer, I would provide it. I had hoped to gain some new insights from Arnn’s essay. I was disappointed (but not surprised) when I did not.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 11/02 at 03:31 PM in The Not-Quite-Yet Information Economy, American Government, Politics, and Domestic Policies