The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
"Far from Representing a Powerful Avant-Garde Leading the Way to Political Change, …
the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports."
From Prof. Michael W. Clune, in the Chronicle of Higher Education; the whole piece is much worth reading, but here's one passage:
The second problem with thinking of a professor's work in explicitly political terms is that professors are terrible at politics. This is especially true of professors at elite colleges. Professors who — like myself — work in institutions that pride themselves on rejecting 70 to 95 percent of their applicants, and whose students overwhelmingly come from the upper reaches of the income spectrum, are simply not in the best position to serve as spokespeople for left-wing egalitarian values.
As someone who was raised in a working-class, immigrant family, academe first appeared to me as a world in which everyone's views seemed calculated to distinguish themselves from the working class. This is bad enough when those views concern art or esoteric anthropology theories. But when they concern everyday morality and partisan politics, the results are truly perverse.
In return for their tuition, students are given the faculty's high-class political opinions as a form of cultural capital. Thus the public perceives these opinions — on defunding the police, or viewing biological sex as a social construction, or Israel as absolute evil — as markers in a status game. Far from advancing their opinions, professors in fact function to invalidate these views for the majority of Americans who never had the opportunity to attend elite institutions but who are constantly stigmatized for their low-class opinions by the lucky graduates.
Far from representing a powerful avant-garde leading the way to political change, the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports. The hierarchical structure of academe, and the role it plays in class stratification, clings to every professor's political pronouncement like a revolting odor.
My guess is that the successful Democrats of the future will seek to distance themselves as far as possible from the bespoke jargon and pedantic tone that has constituted the professoriate's signal contribution to Democratic politics. Nothing would so efficiently invalidate conservative views with working-class Americans than if every elite college professor was replaced by a double who conceived of their work in terms of activism for right-wing ideas. Professors are bad at politics, and politicized professors are bad for their own politics….
The piece offers many other arguments as well; again, much worth reading in its entirety.
