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Objectivists and Academia
By Diana Hsieh @ 9:28 AM
I aspire to the heights of insightfulness to which Robert Campbell regularly ascends with ease. I was particularly struck by his recent post to OWL (password required, but reprinted below) concerning the treatment of Ayn Rand in academia. It was too good to languish in the closed archives of OWL, so I am posting it here (with permission, of course). The full post follows, with some minor corrections from Robert himself.
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 21:57:55 -0400
From: Robert Campbell <robertlcampbell@earthlink.net>
To: OWL <objectivism@wetheliving.com>
Subject: OWL: Academics' treatment of Rand, from an institutional perspective
Even as Ayn Rand is definitely beginning to draw more attention from academics, the traditional expressions of distrust continue.
Many Objectivists range from ambivalent to hostile toward academia--at least the academic humanities and the social sciences.
Many academics consider Rand beneath notice--definitely in the humanities, sometimes in political science and sociology. (I haven't encountered much of this kind of reaction in psychology, but then Rand has never had a high profile in psychology.)
Paul Bryant (8/8) contends that academic rejection of Objectivism is a legitimate response to Objectivists' failure to recognize central academic values.
>While it is certainly true that academics often react
>to objectivists in a hostile, emotional manner I do
>not think that this has anything to do with a fear of
>something inherent in her doctrine... As a rule
>academics feel that the more competing positions there
>are, the better our chances of arriving at the truth.
>Rather, in my own experience, the reason that
>academics react so strongly to objectivists is because
>they often experience objectivists as being
>unreasonable individuals that refuse to engage in open
>and fair discourse.
None of us need reminding that there are Objectivists who behave in the manner that Bryant describes. (We can find them at the Ayn Rand Institute, if not closer to hand.)
But how about the substantial number of (non-Objectivist) academics who fail to live by the values Bryant mentions?
>Academic discourse is predicated on a certain ethics
>of communication or discourse that 1) believes in
>respect for other persons engaged in debate, 2) fair
>and *accurate portrayal* of various positions being
>debated, and 3) a willingness to give up a position
>once it has been demonstrated to be untenable.
Academics have had to contend with the "information explosion," and this cannot be done without some pretty strong mechanisms to filter out material not worth spending their reading and thinking time on. Still, academics frequently exhibit what looks like good old-fashioned intolerance and exclusionism. (One sign that there are driving forces besides needing to concentrate on what you have time and energy to handle is lack of acknowledgment that you might be missing something. When coping with information overload is your main concern, there is an accompanying willingness to admit that your filters are fallible and heuristic--sometimes they will let through stuff that isn't that useful and exclude stuff that would be very useful. Exclusion that has zeal behind it is often being practiced for other reasons.)
I have seen lots of exclusionism at work in psychology that has nothing at all to do with Objectivism--it does not even target the ideas of non-academics. Exclusionism rears its head when attachment theorists agree among themselves not to reply in print to a hard-hitting criticism of attachment research, when information-processing psychologists write ignorant dismissals of Piagetian theory, when Piagetians engage in uninformed putdowns on information-processing research, and on and on.
Substantial numbers of academics break every rule that Bryant cites. They may fail to show respect; they may refuse to give adequate study to positions with which they disagree, rather than doing their homework and then moving on to the views they think are more promising; they may cling for dear life to positions that have fared poorly in debate. (For instance, an analysis of postmodernism that I find rather convincing traces it to a refusal to acknowledge the failure of the socialist ideal. Most pomos reside in academia.)
What's more, established academics have various mechanisms of exclusion at their disposal that Bryant does not mention. Academics can influence who gets hired, who gets reappointed, and who gets tenure (in their own departments--and if they are big names, more broadly within their discipline). They act as gatekeepers to paper sessions at conferences, to book publication by academic publishers, to publication in journals--and pubs in journals are the lifeblood of most academic careers. (In psychology, the top journals eventually reject 75 to 95% of all submissions; there are philosophy journals that reject 98%. Those who have carefully studied the process--like David Hull in evolutionary biology, or Peters and Ceci in psychology--do not come away agreeing with the editors' official view that every last rejected manuscript was of manifestly inferior quality to those that made it through the gate.)
So, if you are an academic, you do not *have to* abide by the ethics of discourse that Bryant champions. You may practice it because you genuinely believe in it--and I agree with Bryant that academics ought to believe in it--but if you decline to do so, there is a good chance you will not be penalized. Instead of putting your best efforts into understanding your opponents' points of view, responding to their arguments, and admitting when you are wrong, you may instead work to keep their papers off conference programs, or to make sure (in disciplines where research is more expensive) that their grant applications are not funded. You may refuse to reply in print to their published criticisms, or ignore them because they are on the wrong side of a disciplinary boundary--maybe just a specialty boundary. If you have high enough status in academia, you will not experience much pressure to reply to criticism, unless it comes from another high-status person. And you may well feel that replying will accord your opponent more publicity--or make your opponent's arguments look better--than not replying.
In an extreme form of exclusion, academics may look on some people as not worth being scholarly about. Robert Nozick once suggested that Ayn Rand (whom he did take seriously, whatever we might think of some of his readings of her work) was to most academic philosophers as Immanuel Velikovsky was to physicists and astronomers. Giving a close reading to the writings of a crank would be a waste of time, wouldn't it?
Rand is not the only one who has been singled out for this kind of treatment. If what Paul Bryant says about academic mores is always true, why would professors, not only in philosophy but also in the social sciences, be so reluctant to apply genuine scholarship to Herbert Spencer? Spencer died in 1903. Any Spencerite movement has been extinct for 4 generations; you will find no orthodox disciples haranguing their professors while they thump their copies of *Social Statics.* Yet people who owe intellectual debts to Spencer are afraid to acknowledge them, and others must either ignore him, issue the ritual denunciations, or do penance for having taken him seriously on any issue. (Less than a decade ago Daniel Dennett, after giving a favorable mention to one of Spencer's ideas about behavior and evolution, felt obliged to delouse himself spiritually--see *Darwin's Dangerous Idea*).
I believe that for Spencer, as often for Rand, the unforgivable sin is his (presumed) politics. (Dennett did penance by deploring the "callous to heinous" political applications that Spencer and others supposedly made of his ideas--without saying what any of the ideas or applications actually were.) I say presumed, because if you don't bother to waste any scholarship on him, there's a good chance you won't get an accurate grasp of his politics. Indeed, you might end up as far out there as the anonymous professor at McGill who compared Ayn Rand to the notorious Anglo-German theorist of racial superiority, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Bryant goes on to indict Objectivists for lack of scholarship.
>objectivists often misconstrue various
>philosopher's positions horribly, attacking straw men
>rather than the actual claims being made. This can be
>seen in standard objectivist portrayals of Kant and
>analytic philosophy. It's okay to have problems with
>Kant or with various positions in analytic philosophy,
>but it's not okay to misconstrue these positions.
Sure, you can find Objectivists who haven't done their homework on Kant or on analytic philosophy. You can also find mainstream academics who haven't done their homework, or insist on tendentious and distorted interpretations whose main attraction is that they support the academic's own program.
A few years ago, I had a discussion with a philosopher who is a proponent of post-Kantian moral and political theories. This person became indignant when I brought up Kant's essay "Religion within the limits of mere reason," which I thought raised some real difficulties for anyone who wants to travel a Kantian route in ethics. (Kant's notion that moral commandments emanate from the noumenal self, which is not in time, seems to rule out moral development--which as a developmental psychologist I find rather troublesome. Yet Kant also talks, in this essay, as though we can overcome "evil maxims" and reform our noumenal selves.) Whatever Kant said there, I was told, was irrelevant, as were any difficulties it seemed to imply for Kantian moral psychology. Why was it irrelevant to ethics? Because the essay was about religion. Did Kant think that made it irrelevant? Er, no--but on that issue Kant was just wrong! So who was straw-manning old Immanuel in this exchange?
I believe Bryant is loading the dice, then, by contrasting Objectivists at their worst with academics at their best.
These kinds of biased comparisons get made too often, because academics tend to be insensitive to the inner workings of their own institutions. It's as though everybody else has a sociology or an organizational psychology, but higher education is exempt from these forces, so nothing could be governing scholarly conduct except the proclaimed ideals. Whatever the cause may be, academics are often given to sanctimonious pronouncements that no careful observer would credit as descriptions of institutional reality. Several years ago a professor at the University of Virginia was quoted (in an article about challenges to the tenure system) that academia is so focused on merit that it never matters who you know. I've heard of no human organization, past or present, in which it truly never matters who you know. I wonder how many future human organizations will be like that.
This widespread institutional blindness matters because our system of higher education, as it has evolved over the centuries, has inherited many organizational weaknesses. To my understanding, at least, these work to make academia much less than the marketplace of ideas it could be, and encourage large numbers of academics to be hostile to marketplaces of any kind.
Institutionally, a state university (like the one I work at) combines two forms of non-market organization: a guild system (consisting of academic departments) and a government agency bureaucracy (pretty much everything above the department level). (Historically, the guilds were of the priestly variety, which might explain why completely secular academics can lapse into extreme sanctimony.) Private universities in the non-profit sector (very few American universities are run for profit) have the same basic structure, but the bureaucratic portion is not subject to civil service rules and laws about bidding for contracts, though it is heavily regulated in many other ways.
While the bureaucracy has been gaining on them for the past couple of generations, academic training is still the province of the guilds. Guilds select apprentices (grad students). Successful apprentices receive the Ph.D. (in most fields) and get hired to journeyman (Assistant Professor) positions. Whereupon their performance is closely scrutinized for another six years, at which time they go up for tenure (acceptance as a master of the guild.)
Understanding the guild system lends support to Neil Goodell's (8/8) comments about indoctrination.
>I use the term indoctrination in a broad sense. Much of graduate school
>training focuses on gaining advanced technical knowledge in the area of
>study. Part and parcel with this is also a thorough understanding of the
>methods by which this knowledge was/is discovered; or put more broadly, how
>a 'philosophy of science' is implemented in the field. Indoctrination
>encompasses all of this.
Neil identifies one source of pressures for conformity:
>Doctoral education is very much 1-on-1 and often of a quite personal
>(professional) nature. The advisor-advisee relationship is completely
>optional by both parties and there is no rule requiring that a professor
>accept a student. What this means is that professors will usually only
>accept students whose interests are similar to their own. The professors do
>this because it is these students that (1) they themselves are the most
>capable of advising (it makes no sense to be in an advisory role for an
>area you know little about), and (2) who will be able to advance their own
>career and professional goals.
>Although this method turns out capable graduates, it also perpetuates
>inbreeding so that only accepted methods and theories flourish; ideas
>starkly contrary to contemporary models die on the vine.
There is a further constraint that in the social sciences (which in this regard somewhat resemble the natural sciences and engineering) professors often need research assistants, to collect and analyze data and operate equipment. In the humanities there are few such needs, although the department's prestige, and often the mentors' standing in the field, still depend on training grad students and, to a lesser extent, placing them in academic jobs.
The pressures for conformity continue after grad school, since doing research or defending theories that your senior colleagues think ill of is not a secure path to tenure in most departments. Whether nonconformity will be punished depends almost entirely on the attitudes of the department chair and the members of the departmental tenure and promotion committee. And there are few penalties for narrow-mindedness on the part of any of these folks. (None of these pressures *guarantee* conformity. Some people are able to break through despite major institutional resistance. For instance, the most influential linguist of the second half of the 20th century, Noam Chomsky, could not get a job in a linguistics department after earning his Ph. D. A friend found a research position for him in an Artificial Intelligence lab, where he remained for 6 years until his first book made so much of a splash that a new linguistics department was essentially created around him. Some fields are big and fragmented enough, like psychology since around 1960, that institutional resistance is weaker, and easier to get around.)
Consequently, tenured professors (who, in theory, can do just about any research they want, advocate virtually any point of view, roil their colleagues at other institutions and criticize the administrative bureaucracy at their own to their hearts' content) usually do very little of these things. Most who might have been prone to buck the system have been weeded out, over 4 to n years of grad school and 6 years of tenure-track status. (Assuming, of course, that they get on the tenure track to begin with. The feedback loops from job placements back onto most graduate programs are extremely loose, so for over a generation there have been far more new Ph.D.'s in the humanities, and in some areas of the social sciences, than academic job openings This, in fact, is one of the forces that are gradually breaking down the power of the guilds.)
A lot of institutional analysis is needed. So is a lot of institutional change. There are almost certainly better frameworks for teaching--and for scholarly research--than the kinds of institutions in which they are going on now. But without a movement toward market higher education we will have no chance to discover most of them. These days, the *de facto* mission of most institutions of higher ed is maximizing administrative jobs. The only reason administrators haven't started pulling the plug on teaching and research is that teaching and research are able to bring in revenue (imperfectly, and from somewhat different sources) whereas no university has yet figured out how to pull in money simply for doing administration.
Jessica Milligan complained (8/14) about the obstacles in the path of prospective students of philosophy:
>I had no intention of going back to school, because I couldn't stand the
>bureaucracy, the rampant liberalism, and incredibly closed minded teachers
>(in the name of tolerance and political correctness, of course).
The left-wing political bias and closed-mindedness are common, though not universal. But the bureaucracy is pervasive. (Hmm. I suppose it isn't an accident that thought-policing does mean more jobs for career "Student Services" bureaucrats.) The bureaucracy needs cutting back, and the guilds need opening up.
Robert Campbell
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