Is debate in peril?

LITTLE ROCK — I teach Education Policy at the University of Arkansas, and just took part in a delightful university forum on testing and homework.

Like President Barack Obama, I’m an education reformer who tends to want more of each. That probably makes me a minority on campus. For that reason, my colleague Paul Hewitt, a former school superintendent and something of a reform skeptic, asked me to discuss the anti-homework Race to Nowhere, whose title seemingly parodies the Obama administration’s education Race to the Top grants. Paul wanted to make sure that different viewpoints were represented.

The free and frank exchange of views was great fun, but not all that unusual at the University of Arkansas. A year ago my department sponsored a great debate on school choice after showing the film Waiting for Superman. I’m told that last fall the University of Arkansas law school held a spirited debate on the First Amendment and academic freedom the same week two campus organizations debated gay and lesbian marriage.

When the University of Arkansas sponsored these events, no one picketed. No one called names. No one shouted down anyone. The campus police were neither invited nor needed. None of the faculty taking part feared for their tenure, or wondered if supporting the “wrong” side would mean teaching 8 a.m. classes in perpetuity. In short, the University of Arkansas tends to support the free, civil exchange of ideas. Some folks even change their minds as a result.

Unfortunately, a just-published report from the National Association of Scholars suggests that this sort of thing would not happen at the University of California. In “A Crisis of Competence: The corrupting effects of political activism in the University of California” (available online), the association reports that among Stanford and Berkeley professors, Democrats and those from further-left parties outnumbered Republicans 17-1 in the humanities and 21-1 in the social sciences. Like all universities, mine leans left, but unlike UC, we retain significant ideological (and demographic) diversity, meaning that both students and faculty are exposed to different points of view.

Of course none of this would matter if ideology had no impact on the research questions scholars ask, and ultimately the findings that result. Unfortunately this is not the case. Sociology professors have steadfastly avoided studying New York City’s success fighting crime, much less encouraging other cities to copy the New York Police Department. By the 1970s, the American people had come to the realization that Aid to Families with Dependent Children was not working; yet some academics even now liken welfare reform to the Holocaust.

Education schools too often ignore successful schools, while advocating ever more resources for programs which fail children but support our friends or our views. Middle East studies programs quite properly question Israel, but too often avoid criticizing Arab movements, leaving students ill-equipped to understand a complex region. Similarly, some comparative-government specialists refuse to admit that Marxist regimes murdered more than 80 million people, while free markets took China from starvation to prosperity. (Why don’t universities host speakers who suffered under Communism, just as we quite properly fete civil-rights veterans?)

In short, a politically correct ivory tower has real-world costs.

In addition, the National Association of Scholars report makes a case that more than a few UC professors use their classes for indoctrination rather than education. Radical professors can do this because they lack moderate and conservative peers who might act as a healthy reality check.

Just as fish don’t know they are in water, far-left faculty may not recognize that regular folks are alternately amused and offended when professors refer to GOP politicians like former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as Nazis. Often, their undergraduates are too intimidated to tell them. No wonder 58 percent of the public sees faculty bias as a serious problem.

Over the long term, intellectual talent gravitates to places that prize free speech, and deserts dens of conformity. That means that UC is headed for a fall unless it again embraces the free exchange of ideas. A century ago, captains of industry built great universities like Berkeley just as today a new breed of tycoons-the Waltons, Tysons and Hunts-are building the University of Arkansas.

Unless UC reforms, the future belongs to us.

———◊-

———

Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. He co-edited The Politically Correct University and co-wrote President Obama and Education Reform: The Personal and the Political.