Professors and Their Politics
Publication Year: 2014
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Introduction
If journalists, op-ed writers, and reformers are to be believed, American higher education is in crisis. True, college and university enrollments are at an all-time high. But amid skyrocketing tuition costs, reports that undergraduates are studying—and learning—less than in decades past, moral scandals around college athletics and executive pay, rising international competition, and the appearance...
Part I: The Lay of the Land
1. The Social and Political Views of American College and University Professors
Neil Gross, Solon Simmons
In 1955, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld set out to study how American social scientists were faring in the era of McCarthyism. Lazarsfeld employed interviewers from the National Opinion Research Center and Elmo Roper and Associates to speak with 2,451 social scientists at 182 American colleges and universities. A significant number of those interviewed reported feeling that their intellectual...
Part II: Explaining Professorial Liberalism
2. Political Liberalism and Graduate School Attendance: A Longitudinal Analysis
Ethan Fosse, Jeremy Freese, Neil Gross
Graduate and professional education—the training and certification of students beyond the baccalaureate level—is a crucial part of the American higher education enterprise. As of 2010, more than 1.8 million people were enrolled in graduate or professional degree programs in the United States. The number of graduate and professional degree students grew at a rate of about 4 percent per year...
3. Nations, Classes, and the Politics of Professors: A Comparative Perspective
Clem Brooks
Resurgent scholarly interest in the politics of the professoriate is a welcome development.
Ideas matter, and knowing the specific groups and occupations that
control their production and dissemination is important. Because of their institutional
locations, professors are perennially poised to exert influence.
Should the professoriate be understood as a resource for left-wing ideologies...
4. Political Bias in the Graduate School Admissions Process: A Field Experiment
Ethan Fosse, Neil Gross, Joseph Ma
Because professors play an important role in imparting knowledge to the young, advising policymakers, and helping to steer national debates, much effort has been put into explaining why they tend to be on the political left, as the introduction and first three chapters of this volume show. Social-scientific theories of the phenomenon range widely, with some scholars highlighting the purported mismatch...
Part III: The Student Experience
5. The Effect of College on Social and Political Attitudes and Civic Participation
Kyle Dodson
By many accounts, the postwar expansion of higher education represents one of the most dramatic and socially significant transformations of the past six decades (Schofer and Meyer 2005; Walters 1986). The percentage of young Americans enrolled in higher education increased from approximately 14 percent in 1940 to over 60 percent in 2008 (Arnett 2000). Scholars have linked this expansion to an...
6. “Civil” or “Provocative”? Varieties of Conservative Student Style and Discourse in American Universities
Amy J. Binder, Kate Wood
In 2004 and 2007, members of the College Republicans on a campus we call Western Flagship University staged an eye-popping event called the Affirmative Action Bake Sale.1 The bake sale is a well-known piece of political theater that conservative students put on at many universities across the country, wherein members of right-leaning campus organizations sell baked goods at a higher...
Part IV: Formative Periods
7. Naturalizing Liberalism in the 1950s
Andrew Jewett
In the 1950s, Paul Lazarsfeld’s pioneering analysis of the American professoriate’s political commitments coincided with the consolidation of a substantial shift in those commitments. After the late 1930s, the political culture of the American academy changed as the Depression-era dynamics of economic recovery and antifascism gave way to a global struggle against communism. Most...
8. Challenging Neutrality: Sixties Activism and Debates over Political Advocacy in the American University
Julie A. Reuben
In 2003, David Horowitz launched the organization Students for Academic Freedom to rid the university of what he saw as political preaching (Horowitz 2007). Horowitz has used this group as a platform to lobby state legislatures to investigate charges of political indoctrination at public universities and to pressure colleges and universities to adopt the “Academic Bill of Rights,” a document...
Part V: Institutional Change and Its Limits
9. Activism and the Academy: Lessons from the Rise of Ethnic Studies
Fabio Rojas
The twentieth century witnessed numerous profound transformations of the academy, ranging from the rise of the American research university (Vesey 1970) to the global expansion of higher education (Frank and Gabler 2006) and its increasing integration with the for-profit sector (Powell, Owen-Smith, and Colyvas 2007). One important development was the proliferation of disciplines and areas...
10. Rationalizing Realpolitik: U.S. International Relations as a Liberal Field
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
According to the traditional tale that international relations (IR) scholars tell their students in introductory courses,1 U.S. international relations ought to be among the most politically conservative of the social sciences. After all, the usual IR “lore”—“its ritualized understandings of the titanic struggles fought and challenges still to be overcome” (Ashley 1986, 259)—revolves around three supposed...
11. The Merits of Marginality: Think Tanks, Conservative Intellectuals, and the Liberal Academy
Thomas Medvetz
Since the 1960s, the loosely bounded organizations known as public policy “think tanks” have multiplied in many countries around the world (Garnett and Stone 1998; McGann 2012; McGann and Weaver 2000; Stone and Denham 2004; Weaver and Stares 2001). Although think tanks defy easy classification, the United Nations Development Program (2003, 6) defines them provisionally as...
Conclusion
From one point of view, it is something of a surprise that we find ourselves today in a new phase of conflict over the form and direction of the American university. After all, seen as an industry, American higher education enjoys an advantage over its international competitors that is rare in this globalized era. In the most recent...
Contributors
Amy J. Binder is a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2004) and Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (Princeton University Press, 2012, with Kate...
E-ISBN-13: 9781421413358
E-ISBN-10: 1421413353
Print-ISBN-13: 9781421413341
Print-ISBN-10: 1421413345
Page Count: 352
Illustrations: 15 line drawings
Publication Year: 2014
OCLC Number: 881429745
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Professors and Their Politics
