Professors and Their Politics

3. Nations, Classes, and the Politics of Professors: A Comparative Perspective

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 and activism? Are professors better viewed as reflecting the preferences of those holding similar positions in the class structure? When segments of the professoriate embrace radical or liberal views, is it due to conditions within their disciplinary fields or to tastes and preferences that prompted their career choices in the first place? These questions have been at the center of renewed scholarly interest in professors ’ politics. We now know a good deal more about orientations, institutional settings, and demographic trends, particularly with respect to professors in the United States. American professors are, for one thing, heterogeneous. This is due not only to the considerable diversity of colleges and universities but also to differences in values and outlooks across individuals and disciplines (see chapter 1 of this volume; Fosse and Gross 2012). To be sure, there is much that is distinctive and tangible about “professorial” identity and styles of reasoning (Lamont 2009). And when it comes to political parties and national politics, while some disciplinary fields such as business have their fair share of Republican identifiers, the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences are disproportionately Democratic in orientation. Overall, this lends the U.S. professoriate a distinctively liberal public profile, and such evidence has spawned wide-ranging commentary and debates surrounding charges of partisan “bias” among college faculty (Gross and Cheng 2011; Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte 2005; Woessner and Kelly-Woessner 2009). c h a p t e r t h r e e Nations, Classes, and the Politics of Professors A Comparative Perspective clem brooks Nations, Classes, and the Politics of Professors 83 These debates demonstrate the high stakes in scholarship on professors’ policy attitudes, and recent scholarship provides refined estimates and muchneeded perspective. By the same token, it is notable that the recent state of the art has been based primarily on the United States. Yet there are numerous political, institutional, and cultural attributes that distinguish the American context from other nations. Indeed, a hallmark of comparative social science is that there is not one but multiple types of democracy, market economy, and nations, more generally (Hall and Soskice 2001; Lijphart 1999; Lipset 1981 [1960]). Might this rich variation be harnessed to the new literature on the politics of professors? This scenario is my analytic focus in this chapter. A cross-national perspective has much to offer, extending and further situating the case of the U.S. professoriate . The comparative literatures I bring to bear also highlight some candidate mechanisms and instructive patterns of variation relating to the political institutions and class structure of nations. One focus of interest is the possible clustering of countries into ideal-typical regimes, an expectation that has been central to theory and research on welfare state development (Arts and Gelissen 2002; Esping-Andersen 1990; Huber and Stephens 2001). A second issue concerns the bearing of professors’ class location on their outlooks and actions, a point of enduring contention in midcentury social theory (Gouldner 1979; Mannheim 1956; Shils 1968), as well as in the more recent literature on professorial liberalism in the United States. To get comparative perspective, I use cross-national survey data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). The ISSP data are unique in providing a comparatively large sample of professors for analysis and enabling measurement of policy attitudes on key issues of relevance. The data cover a wide range of countries, including the North American, European, and Antipodean nations analyzed in this chapter. The ISSP data facilitate three points of constructive engagement between comparative scholarship and U.S.-centered research on the politics of the professoriate. The first challenge is to situate U.S. professors cross-nationally. Is the overall liberalism of American professors more (or less) distinctive when gauged against their cross-national counterparts? Using the ISSP data, I offer detailed portraits as to where American professors fall with respect to five major policy issue domains . Looking at the degree to which professors’ policy attitudes diverge from those of national publics, I also probe whether patterns of variation cluster into recognizable types of regimes. [3.146.105.194] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 04:48 GMT...