The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured an article lamenting the lack of “diversity” in my discipline. Philosophy, so goes the article, just hasn’t been welcoming toward minorities and women.
Thankfully, such enlightened departments as that found at Penn State University have endeavored to “decolonize the canon.”
Of course, academia isn’t in the least bit interested in promoting the only diversity that can, or should, mean something in an institution of “higher learning.” Its equation of “diversity” with gender and racial representation is part of the problem.
Indeed—and I say this as someone who is an academic who happened to have grown up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Trenton, NJ—there exists far more intellectual diversity at the corner bar than can be found in your average college or university.
Not only does the data confirm the endless anecdotal evidence that legions of academic dissidents like myself have acquired over the years. The data reveals that academics are moving even further to the left.
The most recent study available was conducted by the University of California. Its findings were released a little more than three years ago in the November of 2012 issue of Inside Higher Education.
The study identifies five ideological or political categories: “far left,” “liberal,” “middle of the road,” “conservative,” and, finally, “far right.” What it finds is that faculty of all ranks from both universities and colleges, institutions that are private and public, large and small, religious and non-religious, self-identified as “far left” to a significantly greater extent than they had just three years earlier: In 2008, 8.8% so self-identified. In 2011, that number had risen to 12.4%.
