DCU sparks varied reactions

Administrators had mixed reactions to a Duke Conservative Union advertisement in Monday's edition of The Chronicle that claimed the University lacks intellectual diversity. While most said DCU's interpretation of an imbalance in political affiliations among University deans and faculty members in certain departments was misleading, others said the data they uncovered could, in fact, hint at an underlying need for change.

In the advertisement, formatted as an open letter to President Nan Keohane, DCU alleged that a number of humanities departments "have become increasingly politicized over the past few decades" and, furthermore, that this politicization has had "a significant impact on the daily workings of their faculty members."

The advertisement listed the break-down of faculty members' political affiliations--Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated--for each of eight humanities departments, based on a cross-reference of Duke's departmental faculty lists with North Carolina voter registration records. According to DCU, 142 of the faculty members and deans included in the survey are registered Democrats, 28 are unaffiliated and 8 are registered Republicans.

"The purpose of the ad was basically to bring to light the fact that the faculty in many humanities departments are completely skewed toward the left," said Madison Kitchens, executive director of DCU. "Their viewpoints don't represent a broad, diverse intellectual balance of opinions, but rather a monochromatic look at certain subjects."

Burness added that it would be difficult to adjust an imbalance in political affiliations among faculty members because the University's hiring processes do not take such affiliations into consideration.

"When departments are making choices about whom they select as members of the faculty, I don't think party registration is a litmus test," Burness said.

Indeed, department chairs said their hiring decisions are based in no way on a candidate's political affiliations. "I don't know the political affiliation of all of my colleagues in philosophy, nor do I care," said Robert Brandon, chair of the philosophy department. "Our last hire was in the history of modern philosophy. We hired an expert in Kant and Newton. Politics never came up in the interview."

Burness noted that the same policy holds in the selection of University administrators, from the president down to the department chairs.

William Chafe, dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences, defended the University's current hiring practices.

"Political perspective should never be a consideration in a faculty appointment," he said. "Nor should there be an effort to have the number of Democrats or Republicans reflect national norms. In that case, over half the faculty would not vote or have a party affiliation. Rather, the key is openness to intellectual discourse, embrace of free speech and a belief that the quality of an argument is the key to its success."

Kitchens argued, however, that the University does show a bias in its hiring process--not necessarily based on political affiliations, but remotely indicative of such.

"The University isn't looking at party registration when it is hiring, but it is looking at what faculty members' research interests are, where they fall on certain issues, and whether they toe the ideological line," Kitchens said. "I don't think it's a coincidence that 32 Democrats are in the history department, and zero Republicans. We're not saying the University needs to hire more Republicans, but rather that it needs to be open to conservative perspectives in the hiring process."

Kitchens noted that DCU had not intended to advocate an absolute balance between Republicans and Democrats in the faculty. Rather, he said, the group wants to be sure that both sides of political argument are given heed in classes that deal with political matters.

Furthermore, he said, though the imbalance in political views may not show up in any particular classroom, it is evident in the University's course offerings.

"Certainly there's been an incredibly disproportionate focus on race, gender, class consciousness and post-modern thought in Duke's course offerings," Kitchens said. "We're not saying there should be conservative classes to take their place, but we are saying the University should look at the subjects it offers in a more objective manner.... The University does not necessarily need to offer a course in conservative thought, but it does need to provide some balance so that students can decide for themselves which they choose to take."

A number of chairs of humanities departments said they were surprised by both the DCU's findings and conclusions.

"My sense is that a University community represents all opinions, and somehow just your party affiliation seems a very odd way of sampling it," said Maureen Quilligan, chair of the English department, noting that she has never received any complaints of professors' bias in her department. "Besides, there are many differences within Republicans and within Democrats, and Republicans certainly are not the only conservatives."

John Thompson, chair of the history department, similarly questioned DCU's usage of party registrations to make their point. "The interesting thing about the United States is that the political spectrum is very narrow," he said, noting that other countries, such as Canada, represent a much broader sampling of political leanings. As such, he said, the question of political affiliation in the United States becomes relatively trivial.

Kitchens acknowledged that party affiliations were not a perfect test of ideological groundings. He said DCU merely intended to use the party registration data to demonstrate an imbalance, lacking a more accurate ruler.

Thompson also questioned the data presented in the advertisement. His department was by far the most imbalanced of those presented in the advertisement, with 32 Democrats, four unaffiliated and zero Republicans. "Not only do we not have 36 members of the department, but three or four members are foreigners, so aren't even registered to vote," he said.

Some argued that the political imbalance within the humanities departments is to be expected, and in no way reflects the University's lack of commitment to true intellectual diversity.

"We try to hire the best, smartest people available," Brandon said of his philosophy hires. "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.

"Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too."

Burness also noted that the humanities may be particularly oriented toward Democratic minds. "If you were to look at most business schools, you might find more people that were Republican than Democratic," he said. "If you look at the humanities in general, there's a great deal of creativity that goes on. In a sense it's innovation, and a perfectly logical criticism of the current society, in one form or another, that plays itself out in some of these disciplines. It doesn't surprise me that you might find people in humanities are more liberal than conservative."

Burness added that the course imbalance Kitchens described was also not surprising. He argued that, because gender and race are lively forms of scholarly inquiry today, it is natural that a number of courses should treat these subjects.

Michael Munger, chair of the political science department, was not so quick to dismiss DCU's arguments, although he noted that a balance of political affiliations within a department is not necessarily the answer.

"The solution is not to have 15 Republicans and 15 Democrats in one department. If everybody forced students to write papers based on a faculty member's particular perspective, that's still not diversity," he said. Rather, he said, the classroom, not the department, must be depoliticized.

"In at least one case, a department chair has said they thought the function of Duke was to rid conservative students of their hypocrisies," Munger said. "If that attitude were widespread, then yes, we would need to hire more conservatives." Munger noted, however, that he did not believe the attitude to be widespread.

The issues raised by DCU's advertisement are hardly new to higher education or to Duke. The University celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Bassett Affair--a landmark case in which the Board of Trustees decided to support one of the University's professors, despite the unpopularity of his views--in Dec. 2003. Munger stressed that Duke is the "best place I've ever been for ideological diversity."

More recently, the issue of academic freedom--or of what a professor can or cannot say in the classroom--sparked controversy after current senior Matt Bettis accused history professor Gerald Wilson of "blatant indoctrination" in his class, "History 97D: American Dreams/American Realities."

Bettis dropped the class after attending for one day, claiming that a seemingly innocuous joke Wilson made had in fact pointed to an implication that opposing political views would not be welcomed. Bettis wrote an account of the experience for the Sept. 9, 2003, issue of FrontPageMagazine.com, which caught the attention of David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and leader of a national campaign to erase political bias from the classroom. At the center of Horowitz's effort is an "Academic Bill of Rights," which he is currently trying to push through Congress and state legislatures.

Kitchens said it was merely coincidence that the DCU advertisement ran the same week an article was scheduled to be printed in The Chronicle of Higher Education about political imbalance in higher education. The article, entitled "Patrolling Professors' Politics," is set to appear in the journal's Feb. 13 issue and leads with Bettis's claims.

"There was no tactic in our timing," Kitchens said. "We just wanted President Keohane to be aware of the situation and hopefully to respond to it. Either that, or quit heralding diversity when in fact she knows her faculty is anything but diverse in opinion."

Keohane was in New York at the time the DCU advertisement ran in The Chronicle. She said she had not yet seen the advertisement, but would consider it when she returned.