Jere P. Surber, a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, is either a world-class satirist who has written a hilarious parody of explanations of the liberal arts professoriate’s liberal bias or (and I suspect much more likely) the author of another attempt at an explanation that is actually an example, to the point of being an unintended caricature, of the liberal bias in the academy that he purports to explain. (Yes, those two links are to the same Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Well, Naturally We’re Liberal.”)
Surber offers three explanations, “all of them what common sense might predict, all rather obvious, and none in need of fancy research involving such things as ‘occupational role modeling’ and ‘vocational engendering.’”
1. Class envy
First, … virtually all instructors in the liberal arts are aware of the disparity between their level of education and their financial situation…. You don’t have to be a militant Marxist to recognize that people’s political persuasions will align pretty well with their economic interests. It’s real simple: Those who have less and want more will tend to support social changes that promise to accomplish that; those who are already economic winners will want to conserve their status.
“Who, after all,” Surber asks,
would want to preserve a situation in which others who are equivalently educated and experienced — doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, colleagues in other areas, and, yes, chief executives — receive vastly more compensation, sometimes by a factor of 10 or 100?
Oh, I don’t know. There must be some unlettered troglodytes who believe that such high-paid individuals offer more of what more people want, or some similar morally deficient market explanation. But I suppose all Surber is saying here is why liberal academics such as himself don’t like markets.
2. Deep knowledge of history
A second reason that liberal-arts professors tend to be politically liberal is that they have very likely studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics. Conservatives, who tend to evoke the need to preserve traditional connections with the past, have nonetheless contributed least to any detailed or thoughtful study of history.
History, you see, is not at all ambiguous, convoluted, dense; it teaches a clear lesson that only people who understand it, and its accompanying “complex cultural dynamcs,” are, well, smart enough to understand:
… if you actually take the time to look at history and culture, certain conclusions about human nature, society, and economics tend to force themselves on you. History has a trajectory, driven in large part by the desires of underprivileged or oppressed groups to attain parity with the privileged or the oppressor…..
As President Obama recently put it, any open-minded review of history (and perhaps especially American history) teaches at least one clear lesson: There is a “right side of history,” Obama said — the side of those who would overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition.
Everybody knows that conservatives never “actually take the time to look at history and culture” (or at least most liberal arts professors know that). Moreover, if He said so, it must be true. But wait; there’s more:
If you don’t study history, whether because it doesn’t pad quarterly profits, isn’t sufficiently scientific or objective, or threatens your own economic status, then you won’t know any of that. But most of those in the liberal arts have concluded that there really isn’t any other intellectually respectable way to interpret the broad contours of history and culture. They are liberal, in other words, by deliberate and reasoned choice, based upon the best available evidence.
Conservatives are to History, in short, what astrologists are to astronomy, Holocaust deniers are to the Holocaust. You can be sure, in short, that Prof. Jere P. Surber is, though “biased” in his own words, is biased only towards Truth. He is so open-minded that he would, after his continuing deep study, gladly learn other lessons of History and be a regular viewer of the Glenn Beck show if only those lessons were there for his always-probing intellect to discover.
3. Liberal arts professors are liberal because they have been taught by liberals, who have “values”
Finally, most liberal-arts professors come from a background of liberal education, which emphasizes the role that values play in human affairs…. More important, they’ve learned that values inevitably conflict, and they have developed the skills to interpret these clashes with nuance, envisioning various forms of resolution or mediation….
It is this open perspective on what types of values can be considered legitimate, the various ways they can be approached, and the different redefinitions or reconfigurations that they may assume that most differentiates liberal-arts faculty members from their colleagues in business, law, medicine, or the natural sciences. (I don’t mention the social sciences here, because there is no longer any really meaningful line that can be drawn between the humanities and the social sciences.) All of those other fields are structured around specific values that remain relatively fixed: profit and exchange in business; justice and social utility in law; health and wellness in medicine; objectivity, explanation, and prediction in the natural sciences. The liberal arts are distinctive because they are open to considering any of those values outside their narrow professional contexts.
In short, liberal arts professors, unlike their less liberal colleagues in other fields, are open-minded.
Those are the three reasons. Surber’s conclusion:
It is because we liberal-arts professors have a personal stake in our relative economic status; we have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us are liberals. Most of us agree with President Obama that there is a “right side of history,” and we feel morally bound to be on it.
Those of you without access to the Chronicle of Higher Education may think I’m making this up, but I assure you I’m not. I’m not that clever, and could never write anything this humorous.
But I do have an explanation that’s not that different from Prof. Suber’s but is much shorter: liberal arts professors are liberal because they’re liberal arts professors; being liberal is in their job description.
