Professors and Their Politics

Introduction

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 of online learning technologies that call into question the traditional faculty role, critics have been busy suggesting that the system has reached a breaking point (e.g., Arum and Roksa 2011; Delbanaco 2012; Hacker and Driefus 2010; Taylor 2010). Public confidence in higher education is down, as measured by opinion polls, and it is in this context that a variety of proposals for reform have been floated. These range from plans to overhaul the curriculum to calls for more seamless transfer arrangements between community colleges and fouryear institutions, efforts at increasing transparency around college pricing and postgraduation job placement, and manifestos for a “revolution in global online higher education” (Friedman 2013). Politics is a subtext in many of these discussions. Critics and reformers on the left argue that the root cause of higher education’s malaise is that colleges and universities have been remade by the forces of neoliberalism (Kleinman, Feinstein, and Downey 2013; Kleinman and Vallas 2001; Newfield 2011; Rhoten and Calhoun 2011). Having adapted all too well to the market sensibilities that came to pervade other social spheres beginning in the 1970s, institutions of higher education are now said to suffer from a withdrawal of state support—which has required the offloading of operating costs onto students—from the embrace of low-road employment strategies, from too much willingness to bend to the whims of corporate donors, and from practices of “academic capitalism” involving the forging of new and unsavory relationships between universities, science, and the knowledge economy (Slaughter and Rhoads 2009). But it is not just the institutions 2 Professors and Their Politics that suffer. So, too, according to this line of thought, do their personnel and students—and through them, democracy, as American higher education, catering increasingly to the affluent, retreats from its historic twentieth-century role as a leveler of social inequality and provider of public culture. Conservative business elites, politicians, and wealthy alumni are sometimes portrayed as hidden hands behind these developments. On the other side, conservative intellectuals and commentators do nothing to hide their deep dissatisfaction with American colleges, which they see as bastions of liberal or even radical politics. If the system is in need of reform, conservatives argue, it is because the professoriate, one of the most left-leaning occupational groups, has watered down educational standards to make room for pedagogy that borders on indoctrination, has resisted accountability standards, and has placed its own preferences—for esoteric research and low teaching loads—above those of students (e.g., California Association of Scholars 2012; Riley 2011). This book, a collection of original studies on the politics of the university by sociologists, historians, and a scholar of international relations, does not directly weigh in on these debates. Setting aside both sweeping political-economic interpretation and partisan polemic, it addresses in social scientific terms questions to do with the relationship between higher education and politics—with a special focus on the faculty—as politics is conventionally understood: contestation over the power of the state. What in fact are the political views of American academicians today? What policies and parties do they favor? What accounts for their views and for the views of students? Do professors’ political commitments carry over into their research and teaching and, if so, to what effect? And what kinds of reactions outside the university are generated by professorial or student politics, real or perceived? In exploring questions like these, the book marks a turn in the sociological study of colleges and universities, signaling a recognition—once common but now too often ignored—that institutions of higher education may be as important for their interchange with the political arena as for their other societal effects. At the same time, although the book does not take a stance in current policy discussions, by virtue of its close examination of academics and their politics it sheds light on an important part of the terrain over which higher education reformers struggle—and thus, we hope, will be of as much interest to the higher education policy community as to social scientists. The American college...