John Shields
Subject: Don’t Damn the Dams
Bio: Professor of Political Science at Claremont McKenna
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is No Debate in College Courses. Our speaker is Jon Shields who is a Professor of Political Science at Claremont McKenna. Jon recently finished a study of nearly 30,000 college syllabi where he found that there is political bias in reading materials assigned.
I want to hear from Jon about what students are reading in class and whether there is real debate in the classrooms.
Jon, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Jon Shields:
The right has long overstated claims of indoctrination, but indoctrination is probably rare, largely because students are not putty that professors mold like clay. Students have their own minds, but that doesn’t mean that there are not lots of professors who are constructing courses that are one-sided.
The truth is that too many professors are not teaching scholarly disagreements. I know this is the case because I just completed a study with two colleagues here at the Claremont College Colleges with Yuval Avner and Stephanie Muravchik, and the study draws on a large database of millions of syllabi to assess whether the scholarly debate around three issues is being taught. The three issues we explored is racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the ethics of abortion and we found that the norm is to shield students from scholarly disagreement around these topics.
We wanted to know whether a spectrum of the most reputable and informed scholars is being assigned. They are not. For example, Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, shows up thousands of times in the syllabus database. For listeners who don’t know the book, it has been the Bible of Black Lives Matter. It argued that the Jim Crow system in the South that after its collapse mass incarceration was designed to reestablish Jim Crow and reassert the subjugation of black Americans. Alexander argued that mass incarceration is Jim Crow 2.0, except it’s worse since it seems colorblind and fair.
The book was a sensation on college campuses. It became the assigned reading on the topic of race and the criminal justice system, and it shows up in the syllabus database more than any other work on the topic. It appears in thousands of syllabi in US colleges and universities. Students should read and reckon with Alexander’s argument. It’s a book that I’ve taught myself. The problem though is that it’s very rarely assigned with any critics, even though it attracted a ton of scholarly criticism from some heavy hitters in academia.
One critic is James Foreman, Jr., author of a book called Locking Up Our Own. Foreman said we over punish, but we’re not living under a new Jim Crow because many black Americans themselves demanded tough policies when crime rates soared in the 1970s and 1980s.
It should be stressed, that Foreman is no marginal figure. He’s a distinguished law professor at Yale. His book won the Pulitzer. He’s a big deal. Yet his book is almost never assigned. His book is taught less than 4% of the time with Alexander’s book and other prominent critics of Alexander are assigned even less often, and that means that in most syllabi teach Alexander without any of her critics., She is taught with mostly scholars who are further to her left. That’s the norm.
We found the same pattern when we looked at the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Voices that are sharply critical of Israel are routinely assigned and those that are more sympathetic to Israel and Zionism are not. Textbooks that are assigned tend to be biased in favor of the Palestinian perspective.
In the case of the ethics of abortion, professors taught it in a somewhat less biased way. Pro-life voices are paired with pro-choice ones. Still the norm is to assign philosophers that defend the morality of abortion without any pro-life voice.
Why do these findings matter? Why is it important to teach a broader range of scholarly perspectives on these issues? We argue that it’s important because we have a responsibility to shape citizens. Young people need to understand the problems and controversies that shape public life so that they can become informed citizens, knowledgeable activists, and responsible leaders.
It’s a problem because we’re making the work of the MAGA-verse too easy to undermine the legitimacy of higher education. If we want to subvert the MAGA campaign against universities, the best thing we can do is simply do liberal education.
If we teach these scholarly controversies, it will be harder to accuse us of indoctrination. Notice we’re not calling for the depoliticization of universities. We want the opposite. We argue that we can only temper our political war over higher education by politicizing our courses. We don’t see another path toward restoring faith in higher education.
Larry Bernstein:
Why have the university faculty members abandoned debate in the classroom?
Jon Shields:
If you’re a young person, and you want to find debate, those conversations are much more accessible on the internet than they are inside universities. That’s a shame. There’s lots of reasons it’s vanishing from campuses. Some of my colleagues are anti-debate. because it’s polarizing. Because it locks young people into one or two positions when in fact, they should be seeking out some nuanced heterodox position.
Students should read a spectrum of voices on a particular topic. The example of race in the criminal justice system there’s not just two sides to that issue. There’s a whole spectrum. I teach Alexander, Foreman, and other books that are aligned on a whole continuum of thought.
Larry Bernstein:
Michelle Alexander spoke at my book club that included three former federal prosecutors. Each of them at the discussion disagreed fundamentally with Michelle’s thesis that they were locking up black men on petty drug charges. Each of them said that they had not done it themselves and were unaware of anyone else doing it at the federal level. One of them had also been previously a state prosecutor and said it wasn’t true at the state either. I don’t want to get too much in the details of the specific case, but there’s room for debate on her thesis.
Why does the faculty want to teach Michelle Alexander without offering the other side?
Jon Shields:
There’s a big chunk of professors who teach the book who are not social scientists.
They’re humanities people, they’re in English departments, they’re social workers, they’re in theology schools. They’re unaware that there’s a larger scholarly debate about this question because this isn’t their field Some of them might just be innocent, and we did find that English professors and humanities types that taught the book were the least likely to assign somebody like Sharkey or Foreman or any of the other critics that have weighed into the Michelle Alexander debate.
But I suspect, frankly, that most of them just got swept up in a moral crusade and they use the classroom as an opportunity to press those concerns onto their students.
Larry Bernstein:
Based on your research on college syllabi, Michelle Alexander’s book is one of the most popular books in the entire college curriculum, and there was a lack of alternative viewpoints offered. You found it to be pervasive across departments. English doesn’t have any balance, but neither do the political science, criminology, or sociology departments.
Jon Shields:
There are some professors who teach controversy, but we don’t find them in English or social work departments or other such places. We tend to find them in law schools and political science departments and those areas that do have some expertise in the criminal justice system.
Abortion is taught better maybe because the topic is taught by philosophers with expertise on the ethics of abortion.
Larry Bernstein:
Isn’t that an easier topic? You are either pro-choice or pro-life, and it is obvious that both sides need to be included for a proper discussion.
Jon Shields:
I suspected that there would’ve been more imbalance on the abortion issue, because there’s so little sympathy for social conservatism in the university and so few religious conservatives, and whereas criminal justice, you’re going to find a broader range of perspectives on that issue in the university than you do on abortion. And so, I would’ve anticipated the opposite, but it could be that something else is going on. But I would agree with you that you see a lot of unbalanced syllabi as political scientists teach the New Jim Crow poorly too, as do sociologists and as do historians, so it’s a global problem.
Larry Bernstein:
Why is Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow taught in English Literature classes?
Jon Shields:
A lot of English professors have not been teaching English literature for a long time.
They’ve been teaching cultural criticism, and it’s a small step to decide, let’s teach Michelle Alexander. I agree with you here. The tragic truth in the humanities, and certainly literature would be more popular if they decided to teach literature. Many students are hungry for it, and they can learn about Michelle Alexander’s book in other courses.
Larry Bernstein:
An argument that the Trump administration has made to Harvard is that there is a lack of viewpoint diversity. One argument that has been put forward is that you don’t need to be conservative to teach conservative thoughts, but what you’re showing is that they neglected to include conservative authors in the syllabi.
Jon Shields:
There are plenty of liberal professors who teach conservative ideas, but I also think it’s the case that the decline of conservative professors in the university means that fewer of those ideas get taught and conservative professors were the custodians of that tradition. And the other reason conservatives’ matter in the university is because they generate conservative ideas. If conservatives disappear from the university, there’ll be fewer future critics of tomorrow’s Michelle Alexander. The viewpoint diversity of the faculty shapes the universe of perspectives that find their way into books and articles, and ultimately in the classroom.
Larry Bernstein:
It’s true that there are very few conservative professors. They’re discouraged from getting a PhD. They don’t get elite appointments at major universities. They don’t get tenure. They’re challenged to get promotions. They choose a different life path, but that doesn’t mean that they will be absent from the public debate, that they can’t write books. Why do you think that the university system is important for dissemination of ideas and its creation?
Jon Shields:
To be part of the conversation in the university, it helps to be formed by the university There’s a rich conservative ecosystem outside of the university, but they also are always at risk of being ghettoized by the university and treated as pundits and journalists.
Larry Bernstein:
But even if conservatives follow the academic route, their books still will not be included in the syllabi.
Jon Shields:
They’re included insofar as anything gets included. It helps to be a James Foreman or Patrick Sharkey. Heather Mac Donald wrote a book called The War Against Cops, she is a scholar at the Manhattan Institute. I teach her work. She’s got interesting things to say. She doesn’t get assigned at all. It helps to be James Foreman, a law professor and an established figure. But you’re right, there’s still a lot of marginalization of those voices, certainly in the syllabi, and that’s regrettable.
Larry Bernstein:
Heather Mac Donald has been on my podcast twice previously (on woke art museums and defending the police.) I discussed her work with my nephew who was in high school in New York City, and he told me that Mac Donald’s work was taught in his high school classroom to show how she manipulated statistics. It seems like the same phenomena of political bias that you’re seeing at the university may also exist at the high school level.
Jon Shields:
We don’t have systematic knowledge about what’s happening in high schools. Mostly we just have impressions. What’s happening at my high school with my children, I’d say it’s biased in the ways that you’re suggesting. Although high schools have often evaded contentious issues. High school teachers have lots of reasons not to upset parents, so they tend to conform to the preferences and tastes of their local community. But that’s what makes our findings about college somewhat so tragic and disappointing. College was supposed to be the place where you left your parochial community and encountered a much larger universe of ideas. and that’s troubling. for me.
I’m drawing this argument from a book by Jon Zimmerman who wrote a book called The Case for Contention, and it’s focused on K-12 education, and it’s a history of how contentious issues have been taught in public schools. And one of the big arguments of that book is that high school teachers tend to avoid controversy because they don’t want to upset parents and they don’t have the job protection that we in the university have.
They don’t have tenure. And if they upset community mores or norms, they could be out of work.
Larry, I think you’re suggesting that high school faculty like professors are political animals too, and they have agendas, and I don’t doubt that, but I also think there’s, just based on the work Zimmerman has done that there’s reasons to suspect that they might be reluctant to embrace controversy than professors are.
Larry Bernstein:
I had Jon Zimmerman speak on the podcast twice but not directly on high school education. Zimmerman spoke on the podcast about Improving College Teaching and Taking Down Harvard.
During COVID parents got to observe high school and college classrooms online at the kitchen table. I heard about it from other parents and the press. I don’t feel like high school teachers shied away from their political positions because here is a situation where they know they’re on the big screen in front of 30 parents and they speak freely about their partisan positions. I would also add that I used to attend parent-teacher conferences, and the high school faculty were dogmatic in those discussions both on content and pedagogy.
Jon Shields:
It could be that in an age in which there’s so much sorting and we get blue and red communities, that it’s easier for high school teachers to indulge their dogma because they feel like the community is behind them and they’re not risking very much in being political openly.
Larry Bernstein:
I’d like to touch the third rail with the Israel Palestinian discussion.
I’m Jewish. I’ve read Zionist textbooks. Anita Shapira spoke at my book club about her college textbook on the history of Israel and the Palestinian conflict.
There are many Jewish professors at American universities, and it would be easy to include pro-Zionist materials into classes for sociology, philosophy, political science, law, etc. How did it come to pass that even with the substantial overrepresentation of Jewish professors, Edward Said who was a leading pro-Palestine advocate is by far the top choice for professors in their syllabi?
Jon Shields:
The field of East Studies became captured degree by disciples of Said and his ilk. The syllabus and the teaching reflect that transformation. It’s also the case that there are plenty of Jewish professors who are not Zionists and have embraced a critical view of Israel. I would’ve thought that this issue would’ve been taught in a more balanced way given that there are plenty of Jewish professors.
The issue isn’t taught that much. It’s touched on at the margins in courses in Middle East politics and history, but just straight up courses on the Israeli Palestinian conflict are rare. I would say just generally too many professors avoid teaching controversies. And the folks who do tend to be the loudest, most zealous and dogmatic, and there’s a big opportunity for normal liberal types who want to teach these issues in balanced ways.
I think it matters, for those universities that are training the next generation of elites who will go on to exercise power over our public life. A lot of colleges are good at encouraging civic virtues. They’re good at getting citizens to register to vote, but they neglect what they’re best suited to do, which is to inform students. And if we’re not teaching students to think about the complexity of our problems, then we’re just encouraging ignorant activism.
If you just read Michelle Alexander, you come away with the sense that our prisons are full of petty drug users. Lots of my students seem to believe it, and lots of activists got mobilized in anti-police activism.
I’m speculating here, but for some of those who do teach these issues in a one-sided way, they think my job here is to awaken my students to these great injustices. And so, they think they’re doing something good and important for our public life. I think it’s important to temper that moral outrage with some real knowledge. It’s critical that students encounter the full difficulty of some of these problems. And if we’re not doing that, then we’re not living up to our vocation.
Larry Bernstein:
Top universities seem to have lost the Republican party.
The faculty do not give money to Republicans. College professors have been assigning Edward Said and Michelle Alexander for a long time. Why are people upset now? What triggered the Republicans and conservatives against the university project in this moment?
Jon Shields:
Two things have changed. One is there are fewer conservative professors in the university than there were in the 1980s or 1990s, and thus the curriculum shifted further to the left since then. In addition, the Republican Party has become much more rooted in the working class. And so, the professorate and institutions like Harvard are an inviting target for the right in this moment.
It was all preventable. Had we done our jobs and taught these contentious issues in serious ways, we could have made us a less inviting target for this populist and avoided a lot of the headaches we’re experiencing now. Not to defend the administration, I’m not a fan of it, but we could have prevented its worst behavior.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about adding contentious debates in college classrooms?
Jon Shields:
One reason American higher ed is the best in the world is that it is does reform and reinvent itself. And I think that gives me some hope.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Jon for joining us. If you missed the last podcast, the topic was Don’t Damn the Dams. Our speaker was Patrick Allitt who is a Professor of History at Emory. Patrick also works with The Great Courses where he is about to release a series of lectures on rivers.
Patrick discussed the history of dams and why they were critical for the growth and financial success of the Western United States. Our second speaker was Darren Schwartz who is the What Happens Next Culture Critic and we reviewed two classic films: Chinatown and Deliverance.
I would now like to make a plug for next week’s podcast. The topic will be Betting on Sports.
Our speaker will be Steve Kuhn who is an entrepreneur who started a new firm called Sportspredict.com that allows the public to predict sporting events for fun and that will give you a predictor ranking.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Don’t Dam the Dams, here.
