The education special issue of National Review is in part available for reading online. The first article is a discussion by Victor Davis Hanson on why universities (he concerns himself with the US but the arguments are at least as applicable to Canada) are so radically left. His conclusion, that one generation of radical professors has poisoned the atmosphere on campus but that the damage will be limited to their tenure, is optimistic. I don't share his optimism.
First of all, he argues that the anti-Vietnam War students grew up to become professors and brought their politics with them. This is largely correct. The larger point, though, is that students in general were not particularly anti-Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact young men under 25 were the second highest supporters of the war (after men 26-35), and it is this cohort who became junior faculty in the early 1980s and are running the show today. (For more discussion of this see David Frum's How We Got Here.) So the ascension of radical liberals of that generation didn't represent the university conceding to some massive wave of demographics, it represented the concentration of a small part of the student population into academia.
Second, Hanson is right that today students are much less liberal than their professors. His conclusion that these more-balanced students will in the years to come bring more balance to the faculty, though, doesn't follow. The real question isn't "what are the politics of today's undergrads," after all, since the great majority of undergrads don't set foot on campus again after they graduate. More relevant are the political leanings of graduate students, since it is from this much smaller pool that future professors are drawn, and any look at graduate student societies active in Canada today will indicate that they are not particularly politically diverse. (McGill's Graduate Student Society has a special Queer Student representative, since presumably the needs and interests of homosexuals diverge so radically from those of heterosexuals.) It is also a mistake to assume that intellectual diversity amongst students will have an inevitable "trickle-up" effect on faculty composition; as long as leftists can influence admissions, funding and hiring decisions, which they certainly do, they will favour their ideological offspring over all other candidates and maintain the link between radical left politics (at this point to the left of Moscow and arguably Beijing) and the professorial classes.
Perhaps Hanson's optimism is more justified in the US. When the best universities have tuition that is higher than a respectable income in Canadian dollars, and when universities are as dependent as the major American schools are upon alumni and corporate donations, there is a degree of accountability that is largely lacking from Canadian universities, with their tremendous degree of government funding. More students go away from home for university in the USA than in Canada, too, which means that choices are greater; outside of Ontario high school graduates are strongly influenced by geographic proximity, and perhaps this leads to issues such as intellectual integrity and politics being left out of the decision making process. It is very hard to see any reason for believing that Canadian universities will change in the near future.
Posted by Clio at September 27, 2003 04:56 PM