The End of Liberal Professors?

The comments section for yesterday's most-emailed Times front-pager about the wave of retiring liberal boomer professors seems to consist mostly of "good riddance, dirty hippies" etc. etc.  And like many people I'm occasionally amazed and appalled by the way the academy seems to provide a comfortable home for various unrepentant terrorists, unapologetic Stalinists, conspiracy nuts, and fraudsters/morons. But it's also obvious that such people are few and far between--most liberal professors, I'm guessing, are a lot like the retiring UW-Madison scholar in the article, Michael Olneck, who is described as follows:

His father was a Socialist. Right out of high school, in 1964, Mr. Olneck organized support for the Mississippi Project’s black voter-registration drives. Later, he took a bus to Washington to protest the war in Vietnam, served on the strike coordinating committee atHarvard during the American invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and demonstrated atPresident Nixon’s inauguration in 1973.

In other words, he fought for civil rights when many people were trying to extend the nation's centuries-long subjugation of minorities. Then he fought for getting the country out of a war it ruinously decided to extend, followed by protesting the criminal Nixon administration. Frankly, I'm glad someone who ended up so decisively on the right side of history chose to spend his career teaching young Americans. Better professor Olneck than one of the many people, still alive today, who were wrong on all counts. 

The article contrasts Olneck with one his colleagues, Sara Goldrick-Rab, a 31-year old assistant professor in the same department. But, oddly, the author focuses as much on differences in their methods as their politics:

Like many sociologists and education researchers, Mr. Olneck said that today both the kinds of analyses and the theories that prevailed when he was in college have changed. Overarching narratives, societal critiques and clarion calls for change — of the capitalist system or the social structure — have gone out of style. Today, with advances in statistical methods, many sociologists have moved to model themselves on clinical researchers with large, randomized experiments as their gold standard. In their eyes, this more scientific approach is less explicitly ideological than other kinds of research. Ms. Goldrick-Rab has embraced such experiments..."

I kind of see where the author is going with this, but I don't think it really holds water. Dealing exclusively with theories and narratives isn't necessarily radical (see Broder, David) and there's nothing inherently moderate or non-ideological about data-focused research. It all depends on what kinds of questions you're trying to answer and how you talk about results.

And in point of fact Dr. Goldrick-Rab happens to be liberal by any conventional use of the term. I first met her a few years ago during a conference here in DC. It's true that she likes data -- I couldn't help but notice during our group "break-out session" (boy, do I hate break-out sessions) that while everyone else was offering anecdotes and opinions, she kept citing actual research and actual results to support her positions. Later she came up to me at lunch, introduced herself, and told me in the nicest possible way that she was going to be publishing a paper in which she concluded that many of my recently-voiced ideas about college graduation rates were wrong. She's since published some really interesting work on student transfer and community colleges, among other things, and her new financial aid project, mentioned in the Times article, looks to be ground-breaking. But at the same time it's pretty clear from reading the blog she co-writes with her husband Liam that she's very focused on social justice and other liberal priorities; she's just using the best available quantitative methods to do her work. 

So it appears that the liberal professoriate is alive and well. And if younger faculty members like Sara are any indication, that's a good thing.