paying-attention

There is an interesting item in today's "Inside Higher Ed" about a retired professor misquoting someone in a column he wrote.

Edward Bernard Glick's column in The American Thinker, titled something like "How our Marxist faculties got that way" included the following remark, in quotation marks and attributed to the head of the psychology department at Duke: "No. We don’t hire Republicans because they are stupid and we are not. Why should we knowingly hire stupid professors?" Although the remark turned out to be apocryphal at best, it captures the way we all suspect that many educated people, especially toilers in the higher education trenches, think. The assumption is that (1) conservative Republicans are stupid, and (2) people with Ph.D.s are more intelligent and open minded than the population as a whole.

These statements only hold up to the most biased and cursory scrutiny. Many people with graduate degrees are highly intelligent, thoughtful people. Another group of them (smaller than the first, I hope) is composed of those who had the time, money and endurance to become extremely well-informed in one narrow area of expertise, or who were able to jump through the requisite set of higher education hoops, but whose natural inclination or habits of thought have become narrow as well. This second group tends to be over-impressed with their own accomplishments and thoroughly convinced that it makes them better than people with less formal education.

As for the assumption about conservative Republicans, it may seem hard to refute. Suffice it to say that George W. Bush, James Dobson and Lou Dobbs do not constitute the entire universe of Republican and conservative thought. Just as an example, most of us do not think that the problem with Richard Cheney or Karl Rove is their lack of cleverness, intelligence or cunning. I could digress further here on the absolute necessity for all social, economic and educational levels to employ their own critical thinking to truisms from both left and right, but you must catch my drift.

By the way, the real quote that Glick heard third or fourth-hand from a report on National Public Radio (a treasure trove of "progressive" attitudes) was this, from former chair of the Duke philosophy department Robert Brandon: “I don’t know the political affiliation of all of my colleagues in philosophy, nor do I care,” Brandon had told the [Duke] student paper. “Our last hire was in the history of modern philosophy. We hired an expert in Kant and Newton. Politics never came up in the interview.” Brandon had gone on to say “We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”

Judge for yourself whether that means what Glick's misquote implied.

Labels: conservative, higher education, liberal, PhD, progressive