Tenured Radicals

A review of Michael Bérubé's new book, "What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?" showed up in the NY Times Book Review this Sunday. I have not read it, but have seen Bérubé, a fellow Penn Stater, speak and read his blog fairly regularly, so I think I understand his schpeel. Alan Wolfe's treatment is not bad and he correctly focuses in on a crucial point:

Conservatives control all three branches of government and have their own newspapers and television stations. Still they complain [Left-leaning professors] because "they can't believe that there are still so many annoying liberals out there with a substantial presence in an institution that does not allow for a rapid rate of turnover or takeover." Conservatism's political victories, Bérubé points out, may not be as impressive as they first seem, not in a culture in which gay people kiss on multiplex screens and young people share few of the moral certitudes of their elders. Without the university, and its ability to influence the minds of young adults, conservative success is transient, and conservatives know it.

What Wolfe does less well is to explain fully Bérubé's argument on how the (undeniable) Left-bent does little to indoctrinate. Bérubé argues that very few faculty go on propagandistic rants and are regularly evaluated by students on their "willingness to let students express themselves" as well as their "respect for students as individuals." Further, adjunct faculty are so insecure and desperate for tenure that they're hardly willing to be off-putting to students.

The more important question to me is the whether professors can really influence students. As someone recently commented, if "tenured radicals" could really affect students that much, all students would be reading all the text and writing multiple drafts of papers. That said, from my own experience teaching, I do think the emphasis faculty place in classes can make a difference. In a recent Political Sociology course, we reviewed major conceptions of power: pluralist, Marxist, elitist, corporatist, etc. (Full Disclosure: I don't particularly see any of the views as completely correct, but I encourage students to critique all of the theories, especially the vernacular pluralist view most Americans hold). To represent the corporatist model of power, I showed the documentary, The Corporation. While I thought all of my lectures were exciting and engaging, apparently, the movie was far more effective than I am because for the rest of the semester a majority of the students were convinced that corporations wield all the power in our society. Now, I think it's more accurate to see society as organized by corporations than constructed by individuals with equal access to power, but there's certainly more to it than that. Despite my attempts to get them to critique that view or consider views that envision certain people or non-corporate institutions (e.g., the state) as having power, they really liked the idea of corporate rule. All of that is a longwinded way of saying that the content of courses do have some effect on students' thinking, but instructors often don't have much control over what content will speak to them.