The Biggest Bias in Higher Education is Not Political or Ideological Per Se
The Biggest Bias in Higher Education is Not Political or Ideological Per Se
More than anything, the academy reflects the interests, values and perspectives of highly-educated, relatively affluent, urban and suburban whites.
In order to understand biases and exclusion in academe, it’s best to consider who comprises it. Professors, for instance, are overwhelmingly relatively affluent, urban and suburban whites who graduated with terminal degrees from the top programs in their fields.
These kinds of folks don’t just dominate academia. They are the primary producers and consumers of most content produced in the “symbolic professions.”
People who share this background tend to vary in dramatic and systematic ways from most other Americans. They perceive and think about the world differently. They have different emotional tendencies than most people. They have highly idiosyncratic political preferences and modes of engagement. And then tend to be disdainful and intolerant towards those whose perspectives diverge from their own.
These differences, which are large under ordinary circumstances, grew much larger and more salient after 2011 -- including and especially in higher ed – fueling mistrust and polarization around academic institutions, professors, and their teaching and research.
When people talk about these differences, they often focus narrowly on political affiliation or political ideologies: professors are overwhelmingly Democrats and tend to identify with the “left.” However, in many respects, this misses the forest for the trees.
For instance, understanding these institutions as “left” can’t easily account for the militant response schools mounted against students protesting the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza. Nor can it explain why higher ed institutions are some of the most hierarchical and parochial institutions in America. Nor can it be easily reconciled with the central and growing role these institutions play in the production and legitimation of inequality.
In reality, colleges and universities have never been woke. Instead, it’s more apt to understand these institutions as oriented around the interests and worldviews of highly-educated and relatively well-off urban and suburban whites – often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged in society – “social justice” discourse notwithstanding.
We can see this reality at work, for instance, in how efforts to make it easier to purge or censor scholars for coloring outside the “correct” ideological lines tend to undermine conservatives, yes, but also racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, faculty from nontraditional backgrounds, contingent faculty, and faculty at land-grant public universities.
These trends are actually interrelated. Ethnic and religious minorities, immigrants, Americans from small towns and rural areas, etc. are significantly more likely to be socially conservative than urban and suburban whites from relatively well-off backgrounds. People from less affluent backgrounds and less prestigious schools are less likely to be “up” on contemporary moral and intellectual fads – they’re less likely to know what the “correct” thing to do and say is and, as a consequence, are more likely to run afoul of highly refined rules and norms.
Put another way, inculcating an environment that is hostile to more ‘traditional’ values and worldviews, although typically carried out in the name of diversity and inclusion, will often have the perverse effect of excluding, alienating and/or creating a more precarious situation for those who are already underrepresented and marginalized in elite spaces.
When we try to understand why it is that so many ‘people of color,’ or people from low-income, immigrant backgrounds or otherwise ‘nontraditional’ backgrounds feel as though they don’t ‘belong’ in symbolic economy spaces — whether we’re talking about elite K-12 schools, or colleges and universities, or professional settings — this is likely a big, and underexplored, part of the story. Rather than being insufficiently progressive, these institutions may instead be too homogenous and extreme in their ideological and cultural bearings. They may be too fiercely oriented around the idiosyncratic (ostensibly emancipatory) belief systems of white elites, and too oriented around serving their agendas.
Relatively affluent, highly-educated, urban and suburban whites are the Americans most likely to self-identify as feminists, antiracists, environmentalists, “allies” to LGBTQ people, etc. They’re the people most likely to have mastered “social justice” discourses. They are the people most skilled at leveraging institutions to punish people who say or do the “wrong” thing with respect to race, gender, sexuality, etc. If universities seem “woke,” this is downstream from the fact that these institutions are dominated by a narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society who deploy “social justice” as a weapon in their struggles over power, resources and status.