Steve Teles on Academia

He and I look at the problem differently

In the current issue of National Affairs, Steven M. Teles writes,

At my own university, I would be hard-pressed to name a single tenured professor in the social sciences and humanities who is openly right of center in any reasonable understanding of the term.

The university's ideological narrowing has advanced so far that even liberal institutionalists — faculty who believe universities should be places of intellectual pluralism and adhere to the traditional academic norms of merit and free inquiry — are in decline.

Much further down in the essay:

Liberal-institutionalist faculty members should be explicit in arguing that moderates and conservatives would enrich their intellectual communities — that they would be valued for what they could bring to the university's intellectual pursuits. While conservative scholars could contribute useful perspectives to a range of fields, it would also help for liberal institutionalists at top research universities to offer positions in subjects that are disproportionately appealing to right-leaning scholars. Finally, these faculty members should think about putting pressure on the non-academic departments of the university, such as student life, that are in many cases even more ideologically narrow than academic departments.

I have met Teles, and I like him. His heart is in the right place. But I have a very different perspective on this issue.

Consider three questions:

1. What is the problem?

2. How did it come about?

3. What is the solution?

In my reading, Teles answers this way:

The problem is that faculty includes so few conservatives that universities lose out on the benefits of ideological diversity.

It came about because of “path dependence.” A gradual rise in the proportion of faculty on the left made the university environment increasingly unfriendly to conservatives, leading to still higher proportions of left-wing faculty and even less friendly environments for conservatives.

The solution is for “liberal institutionalists” like Teles to form organizations to encourage making universities more friendly to conservatives. It seems to me that Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy organization is exactly what Teles is calling for, and so far it has failed in its mission. In the essay, Teles never mentions Haidt or his organization.

Instead, my answers to the three questions are:

The problem is that faculty talent has been diluted. The average faculty member at a university today is not as bright as the average faculty member at a comparable institution 50 years ago.

Today’s faculty may have CV’s that look good on paper. They know how to play the publication game. They have much better resources for doing research than faculty had fifty years ago. But what they produce is dull, cookie-cutter work. If it were never published, no one would miss it.

The problem came about because universities stopped hiring on the basis of talent. Instead, they started hiring to meet diversity requirements. In economics, this meant hiring women because they were women. I gather that in the past female economics graduate students were mistreated. That is inexcusable. But the solution should have been better conduct within the economics profession, not the mass recruitment of mediocre female economists.

Jeremy Horpedahl and I documented how published research in economics has become concentrated on gender, race and inequality. This year it got even worse. These are not the most important topics in economics. And even if they were, it is not as if the papers being published have achieved important breakthroughs.

Even without affirmative action, there would have been some dilution of talent in academia, because universities over-expanded. As I wrote recently,

The trouble with higher education is bloat. The student bodies are bloated. The faculties are bloated. And the administrations are bloated. If colleges and universities were right-sized, many of the problems with higher education would be taken care of.

The solution is for universities to shrink. Get rid of the bottom half of the students (at least), and come up with something else from them to do between age 18 and 22. Shrink faculties accordingly. Shrink administrators even more.

Affirmative action assumes that the talent pool is large. You can pick more women and minorities out of that abundant talent pool, without compromising standards. In fact, the talent pool is small, and it took large sacrifices in standards to bring women and minorities up to “representative” levels.

Teles seems to have in mind adopting affirmative action for conservatives. If so, then his idea of the solution is adjacent to my idea of the problem.