Epistemic Closure in the Echo Chamber of the Leftist Academy.

You know that it must be bad when it's noticed by a San Francisco Chronicle columnist:

Political activism has drawn the University of California into an academic death spiral. Too many professors believe their job is to "advance social justice" rather than teach the subject they were hired to teach. Groupthink has replaced lively debate. Institutions that were designed to stir intellectual curiosity aren't challenging young minds. They're churning out "ignorance." So argues a new report, "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California," from the conservative California Association of Scholars.

The report cites a number of studies that document academia's political imbalance. In 2004, for example, researchers examined the voter registration of UC Berkeley faculty. They found a ratio of 8 Democrats for each Republican. While the ratio was 4:1 in the professional schools, in more political disciplines, the ratio rose to 17:1 in the humanities and 21:1 in social sciences.

Over the last few decades, the imbalance has grown. The report (found at sfg.ly/HjXiyV) noted, "The most plausible explanation for this clear and consistent pattern is surely that it is the result of discrimination in the hiring process."

UC Berkeley political science Professor Wendy Brown rejected that argument. (Yes, she hails from the left, she said, but she doesn't teach left.) The reason behind the unbalance, she told me, is that conservatives don't go to grad school to study political science. When conservatives go to graduate school, she added, they tend to study business or law.

"If the argument is that what is going on is some kind of systematic exclusion," then critics have to target "where the discouragement happens."

OK. Freshmen sign up for courses that push an agenda of "social justice." Most professors may try to expose students to views other than their own, but others don't even try. The message could not be clearer: In the universe where politics and academia converge, conservatives are freaks.

That's how ideologues self-replicate.

The fallout isn't simply political. The association scolds argue, "This hiring pattern has occurred just as the quality of a college education has sharply declined."

Campus reading lists require trendy books instead of challenging authors, like Shakespeare, who can draw students deeper into the English language. Teach-ins are notoriously one-sided. College graduates today are less proficient as readers than past graduates. The National Center for Education Statistics found that only 31 percent of college graduates could read and explain a complex book. In 1961, students spent an average of 24 hours per week on homework; today's students study for 14 hours per week.

At the same time, grades have risen. "Students often report that all they must do to get a good grade is regurgitate what their activist professors believe," quoth the report.

While she had not read the report, Brown doesn't dispute that today's students have trouble writing a "deep, thoughtful essay" about a passage from Hobbes or Milton Friedman.

"If Shakespeare were required, I would be thrilled," Brown stressed. But: "Don't pick on liberals for this." Universities have cut back on core requirements because students, parents and alumni revolt.

That may be, but in ideologically lopsided academia, there aren't enough voices to stand up for educating students about, say, the U.S. Constitution. Besides - this is me, not the report - in pushing protests, faculty essentially have assured students that they already know enough to occupy Sacramento. Only a third of them can read and explain complex material, but students already know better than lawmakers and voters how best to pay for education. Why study?

The proof is in academia's acceptance of this imbalance. The old, discredited excuse about why women didn't work in management that I heard when I was young - because they didn't want to - now somehow works for the left when it comes to conservatives and academia.

As for UC administrators, "A Crisis in Competence" concludes, "far from performing their role as the university's quality control mechanism, (they) now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards."

Like so many other ailing institutions, they don't know how to change to save themselves.

Here is the report of the National Association of Scholars. The report offers these observations:

Moral and legal considerations show how the politicization of the classroom damages democratic government and the integrity of public life, but what is lost important for the purposes of this report is that politicization has devastating effects on the quality of teaching and research. Put simply, a college education influenced to any significant degree by political activism will inevitably be a greatly inferior education, and the same holds for academic research. Political activism will tend to promote shallow, superficial thinking that falls short of the analytical depth that we expect of the college-educated mind.The habits of thought that it promotes are in every respect the exact opposite of those we expect a college education to develop. There are many reasons why this must be so.

Results Over Process

First, political activism values politically desirable results more than the process by which conclusions are reached. In education, those priorities must be reversed. The core of a college education is disciplined thinking – thinking that responds to evidence and argument while resisting the lure of what we might wish were the conclusion. Disciplined thinking draws conclusions only after it has weighed the facts against all the plausible explanations of those facts. Strong political beliefs will always threaten to break down that discipline and bend the analysis in a direction that political considerations urgently want it to go.

Stunted Intellectual Curiosity

Second, the fixed quality of a political belief system will stifle intellectual curiosity and freedom ofthought when it dominates a classroom. In any worthwhile college education, a student’s mind musthave the freedom to think afresh and to follow wherever facts or arguments lead. But this freedom of
movement is constrained when the end process of thought has already been fixed in advance by apolitical agenda. Students will never learn to think for themselves if their thought processes must alwaysconclude by fitting into a particular set of beliefs. Intellectual curiosity is the indispensable prerequisitefor analytical power and depth: you cannot reach the latter unless you have the former. Strong political
commitments that dominate the classroom will stunt intellectual curiosity, and that can only mean that
they will also stunt the analytical power that is a crucial goal of college education.

And:

Lack of Openness to Competing Ideas

Fourth, political activism and academic thought are polar opposites in the way they deal with alternative explanations. When an academic scholar is becoming persuaded that a difficult research problem can be solved in a particular way, he or she knows that the next step must be a careful look at all the plausible alternative explanations, to see if any of them works as well. But this cannot be a perfunctory process: each of those other possibilities must be given the very best shot, and the most sympathetic
hearing. Academics know that they must do this if they are to develop new knowledge that will withstand the scrutiny of other experts in the field, and the test of time. This is the essence of the disciplined thinking that they seek to instill in their students.

But political activists tend to have a very different attitude to alternatives to their own convictions: they must be defeated. They do not deserve sympathetic consideration, for they are at best wrong, at worst evil. A genuinely academic thinker must be able to believe for a moment that his own preferred explanation is wrong, so that he can look very hard at the case for other explanations, but that is almost a psychological impossibility for the political or social activist.