Editor’s Note: This week’s Clarion Call is by Peter Klein. Klein is professor at the University of Missouri. A longer version of this essay originally appeared on the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute on November 15, 2006. He received his A.B. from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1988.
Intellectuals, particularly academic intellectuals, tend to favor socialism and interventionism. How was the American university transformed from a center of higher learning to an outpost for socialist-inspired culture and politics?
As recently as the early 1950s, the typical American university professor held social and political views quite similar to those of the general population. Today — well, you’ve all heard the jokes that circulated after the collapse of central planning in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, how the only place in the world where Marxists were still thriving was the Harvard political science department.
More generally, American higher education often looks like a clear case of the inmates running the asylum. That is, the students who were radicalized in the 1960s have now risen to positions of influence within colleges and universities. One needs only to observe the aggressive pursuit of “diversity” in admissions and hiring, the abandonment of the traditional curriculum in favor of highly politicized “studies” based on group identity, the mandatory workshops on sensitivity training, and so on.
A 1989 study for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching used the categories “liberal” and “conservative.” It found that 70 percent of the professors in the major liberal arts colleges and research universities considered themselves liberal or moderately liberal, with less than 20 percent identifying themselves as conservative or moderately conservative. (Of course, the term “liberal” here means left-liberal or socialist, not classical liberal.) More recent surveys find the leftward tilt has, if anything, increased.
Why do so many university professors — and intellectuals more generally — favor socialism and interventionism? F. A. Hayek offered a partial explanation in his 1949 essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism.” Hayek asked why “the more active, intelligent and original men among [American] intellectuals … most frequently incline toward socialism.” His answer is based on the opportunities available to people of varying talents.
Academics tend to be highly intelligent people. Given their leftward leanings, one might be tempted to infer from this that more intelligent people tend to favor socialism. However, this conclusion suffers from what empirical researchers call “sample selection bias.” Intelligent people hold a variety of views. Some are lovers of liberty, defenders of property, and supporters of the “natural order” — i.e., defenders of the market. Others are reformers, wanting to remake the world according to their own visions of the ideal society.
Hayek argues that exceptionally intelligent people who favor the market tend to find opportunities for professional and financial success outside the Academy (i.e., in the business or professional world). Those who are highly intelligent but ill-disposed toward the market are more likely to choose an academic career. For this reason, the universities come to be filled with those intellectuals who were favorably disposed toward socialism from the beginning.
This also leads to the phenomenon that academics don’t know much about how markets work, since they have so little experience with them, living as they do in their subsidized ivory towers and protected by academic tenure. As Joseph Schumpeter explained in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, it is “the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs” that distinguishes the academic intellectual from others “who wield the power of the spoken and the written word.” This absence of direct responsibility leads to a corresponding absence of first-hand knowledge of practical affairs. The critical attitude of the intellectual arises, says Schumpeter, “no less from the intellectual’s situation as an onlooker — in most cases also as an outsider — than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value.”
Hayek’s account is incomplete, however, because it doesn’t explain why academics have become more and more interventionist throughout the twentieth century. As mentioned above, during the first half of the twentieth century university faculty members tended to hold political views similar to those held by the general population. What caused the change?
To answer, we must realize first that academics receive many direct benefits from the welfare state, and that these benefits have increased over time.
Excluding student financial aid, public universities receive about 50 percent of their funding from federal and state governments, dwarfing the 18 percent they receive from tuition and fees. Even “private” universities like Stanford or Harvard receive around 20 percent of their budgets from federal grants and contracts. If you include student financial aid, that figure rises to almost 50 percent. According to the US Department of Education, about a third of all students at public, 4-year colleges and universities, and half the students at private colleges and universities, receive financial aid from the federal government.
In this sense, the most dramatic example of “corporate welfare” in the U.S. is the GI Bill, which subsidized the academic sector, bloating it far beyond the level the market would have provided.
To see why this government aid is so important to the higher education establishment, we need only stop to consider what academics would do in a purely free society. The fact is that most academics simply aren’t that important. In a free society, there would be far fewer of them than there are today. Their public visibility would no doubt be quite low. Most would be poorly paid. Though some would be engaged in scholarly research, the vast majority would be teachers. Their job would be to pass the collective wisdom of the ages along to the next generation.
In all likelihood, there would also be fewer students. Some students would attend traditional colleges and universities, but many more would attend technical and vocational schools, where their instructors would be men and women with practical knowledge.
Today, many professors at major research universities do little teaching. Their primary activity is research, though much of that is questionable as real scholarship. One needs only to browse through the latest specialty journals to see what passes for scholarly research in most disciplines. In the humanities and social sciences, it is likely to be postmodern gobbledygook; in the professional schools, vocationally oriented technical reports.
Beyond university life, academics also compete for prestigious posts within government agencies. Consider my own field, economics. The US federal government employs at least 3,000 economists — about 15 percent of all members of the American Economic Association. The Federal Reserve System itself employs several hundred. There are also advisory posts, affiliations with important government agencies, memberships of federally appointed commissions, and other career-enhancing activities.
These benefits are not simply financial. They are also psychological. As Professor Dwight Lee puts it:
Like every other group, academics like to exert influence and feel important. Few scholars in the social sciences and humanities are content just to observe, describe, and explain society; most want to improve society and are naive enough to believe that they could do so if only they had sufficient influence. The existence of a huge government offers academics the real possibility of living out their reformist fantasies.
It’s clear that there are many benefits, for academics, to living in a highly interventionist society. It should be no wonder that academics tend to support those interventions.
What about other public figures, people Hayek called “second-hand dealers in ideas” — the journalists, book editors, high-school teachers, and other members of the “opinion-molding” class? First, intelligent and articulate liberals (in the classical sense) tend to go into business and the professions (Hayek’s selection-bias argument). Second, many journalists trade integrity for access; few are brave enough to challenge the state, because they crave information, interviews, and time with state officials.
What does the future hold? It is impossible to say for sure, but there are encouraging signs. The main reason is technology. The web has challenged the state-university and state-media cartels as never before. You don’t need a PhD to write for Wikipedia. What does the rise of the new media, new means of sharing information, new ways of establishing authority and credibility, imply for universities as credential factories?
Moreover, as universities become more vocationally oriented, they will find it hard to compete with specialized, technology-intensive institutions such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix, the fastest-growing American universities.
Home schooling, the costs of which are greatly lowered by technology, is also on the rise. And traditional media (newspapers and network news) are rapidly declining, and alternative news sources are flourishing.
The current crises in higher education and the media are probably good things, in the long run, if they force a rethinking of educational and intellectual goals and objectives, and take power away from the establishment institutions. Then, and only then, we may see a rebirth of genuine scholarship, communication, and education.