What's Good about Islam?

What's behind David Horowitz's "Islamo-Fascism Awareness" week? A short supply of pinkos in the USA, observes Alexander Cockburn: "The left in America is really in very poor shape: near zero Commies, and really only a sprinkling of radical black profs, militant Lesbians and kindred antinomians to beat up on" ("So Much for Islamo-Fascism Awareness," CounterPunch, 27-28 October 2007). Right he is.

Leftists in the USA have built neither a mass communist party nor a mass social democratic party. The Red Purge of the fifties was so successful that few Reds remain in trade unions. There are only two institutions that leftists have managed to "capture" through a "long march" in the USA: academia and mainline Protestantism.¹ The former has been a target of Horowitz for a long time, as its conquest was never complete, its summit (boards of trustees and top administration) firmly in the enemy camp. It's only a matter of time before he turns to the latter.

Cockburn also contends in the aforementioned article: "Coalitions have formed to combat Horowitz's version of Awareness with superior Progressive Awareness about what is good or not so good about Islam" (27-28 October 2007). This I doubt. Rare are secular leftists who, though quick to point out what's "not so good" about Islam, wouldn't stumble if asked to explain what's "good" about it.

Average secular leftists are, in reality, as uncomfortable about encounters with Muslims as rightists. They, unlike rightists, tolerate Islam and even defend Muslims when they become victims of right-wing Islamophobia, but that is as far as they are willing to go. They still think it is a "tragedy" that Muslims, especially Muslim women, adhere to their faith, assuming it to be inferior to their own secular ideology: "Liberal-Leftist Islamophobia Watch (Part I)," Ihsan, 18 September 2007; and "Left-Liberal Islamophobia Watch (Part II)," Ihsan, 23 October 2007.² That won't do. We expect the religious to recognize that the irreligious are morally equal to them. So would they in turn. Unless and until secular leftists realize that Islam is as good a theology of liberation as Christianity and historical materialism, and vice versa, solidarity won't be forever.

1 Left-wing Jews might have "captured" at least Reform Judaism if not other branches had they remained within their faith community, but they have tended to reject their faith altogether. Indeed, Zionists' hegemony of major institutions, secular or religious, that claim to represent Jews is so complete that some Jewish leftists, exasperated, would even consider resigning from "the Jewish people":

Did you ever wonder what your last thought would be just before you died or believed you might die? Well, I did, and a few years ago in the waning moments before going under the knife for a life threatening operation I got my answer. As the nurses wheeled me into the operating room, what burst upon my consciousness was not, as might be expected, the fear of dying but a terrible angst at the idea of dying a Jew. I was appalled to finish my life with my umbilical cord still tied to a people with whom I can no longer identify. That this should be my "last" thought greatly surprised me at the time, and it still does.

What did it mean . . . and why is it so hard to resign from a people? (Bertell Ollman, "Letter of Resignation from the Jewish People," Dialectical Marxism)

2 For secular leftists' criticisms of Islamophobia on the Left, see, for instance, Deepa Kumar, "Danish Cartoons: Racism Has No Place on the Left," MRZine, 21 February 2006; Deepa Kumar, "Fighting Islamophobia: A Response to Critics," MRZine, 3 April 2006; Richard Fidler, "Ontario's 'Sharia Law' Controversy: How Muslims Were Hung Out to Dry," MRZine 27 May 2006; Rami El-Amine, "Anti-Arab Racism, Islam, and the Left," MRZine, 3 September 2006;

Cited by Henry A. Giroux and Sophia A. McClennen

I just noticed that my blog entry "Conservatives: Underrepresented in Academia?" (Critical Montages, 2 April 2005) was cited by Henry A. Giroux in his article "Academic Freedom Under Fire: The Case for Critical Pedagogy" (College Literature 33.4, Fall 2006: 1-42). The same entry has also been cited in Sophia A. McClennen, "The Geopolitical War on U.S. Higher Education" (College Literature 33.4, Fall 2006: 43-75). I admire their work, so I'm happy to learn that they found my blog useful.

Another blog entry of mine, "Working-class Academics" (Critical Montages, 5 December 2004), has been mentioned in Radical Teacher (March 2005): "Right/left Campus Monopolies." I like this magazine, too, so I'm delighted to be included in it.

Colleges and Universities as Working-class Institutions

Have American leftists fully grasped the implications of the changed relation between the working class and post-secondary education in the United States?

(The fancy word "academia," whether used to venerate or disparage post-secondary education, doesn't quite capture its reality in the United States, as the first two years of instruction at four-year colleges and universities as well as community college education function not unlike remedial classes for deficient high school education.)

A majority of American workers today experience post-secondary education. "More than half the U.S. population 25 and over in 2000 (52 percent) had completed at least some college education" (emphasis added, US Census Bureau, "Educational Attainment: 2000," August 2003). The younger workers are, the more likely they are to have college experience: "The rate of completion of some college was 58 percent among those in the 25- to 29-year age group" (emphasis added, US Census Bureau, August 2003). That's a momentous change since the 1930s and even the 1960s, two upsurges of class struggle in the United States (as well as the rest of the world).

Given the change, it's time to consider colleges and universities as working-class institutions rather than elite redoubts, without however putting blue-collar workers who have no college education (some of whom work on campuses as janitors, food workers, clerical workers, etc., colleges and universities being main employers in many cities and towns in America) on the political back burner. Because of the declining weight of mass production factories in the US economy (reflected in the big US trade and current account deficits), colleges and universities -- along with elementary, middle, and high schools -- are among the few remaining institutions where you can still find working-class youths en masse.

It's still important to organize workers at points of production, but the points of production have become increasingly fragmented (due for instance to the rise of mini mills, deregulation, outsourcing, offshoring, etc.), so it's more crucial than ever to organize workers at other working-class institutions such as schools as well as in working-class neighborhoods (in the form of community organizing).

Conservatives: Underrepresented in Academia?

Are there fewer conservatives in academia than there ought to be? A new study that suggests that there are is making a splash in the corporate media: Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte, "Politics and Professional Advancement among College Faculty," The Forum 3.1 (2005).

According to the Washington Post, the study was "funded by the Randolph Foundation, a right-leaning group that has given grants to such conservative organizations as the Independent Women's Forum and Americans for Tax Reform" (Howard Kurtz, "College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds," Washington Post, 29 Mar. 2005, C1). Caveat emptor.

What data did the study employ?

"The data come from the 1999 North American Academic Study Survey (NAASS) of students, faculty and administrators at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. This survey was conducted in 1999 by Angus Reid (now Ipsos-Reid), a survey research firm" (Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte, (2005, p. 3).

(The 1999 "North American Academic Study Survey" by Angus Reid? I've never heard of the study before. Has anyone? Can't find anything more about the "North American Academic Study Survey" through Google Scholar, LexisNexis, JSTOR, Project Muse, Social Science Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, and Worldwide Political Science Abstracts. Has anyone other than Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte gained access to the survey's data and analyzed them? If not, why not? It's a survey presumably taken six years ago, and no one has made a peep about it till now?)

Based on the obscure survey, Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte claim that "a sharp shift to the left has taken place among college faculty in recent years" (2005, p. 4):

Table 1. Ideological self-description of college professors and general public

	Professors (Carnegie 1984)	Professors (NAASS 1999)	U.S. Public (Harris 1999)	U.S. Public (Harris 2004)
Left/Liberal	39%	72%	18%	18%
Right/Conservative	34%	15%	37%	33%

(Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte, "Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty," The Forum 3.1, 2005, p. 4)

To show the "sharp shift," Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte played a statistical trick. Their NAASS sample is far less representative than the Carnegie study that they use for the point of comparison: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, The Condition of the Professoriate: Attitudes and Trends (Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1989). The NAASS's American sample consisted of "1643 faculty members" from "183 universities and colleges," containing "responses from 81 doctoral, 59 comprehensive and 43 liberal arts institutions" (Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte, 2005, p. 3), whereas The Condition of the Professoriate obtained data from "over 5,000 faculty employed at a variety of institutions from Two-Year Community Colleges to Research Institutions" (Tony Palmeri, "The Engaged University: The Ideas of Ernest Boyer," 25 Jan. 2002). Research has shown that faculty and students at research institutions are more liberal than those at primarily teaching institutions (see, for instance, Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, "War and Dissent: The Political Values of the American Professoriate," The Journal of Higher Education 65.5 [September/October 1994], especially p. 586; and Richard F. Hamilton and Lowell L. Hargens, "The Politics of the Professors: Self-Identifications, 1969-1984," Social Forces 71.3 [March 1993], especially pp. 608-609, 613-614, 616), so the NAASS's exclusion of two-year colleges and overrepresentation of doctoral institutions is a recipe for accentuating the proportion of liberals. In short, comparing the Carnegie study and the NAASS sample is like comparing apples and oranges -- it is impossible to infer any shift over time from two incomparable samples.

What if Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte turned out to have a point, despite their small and unrepresentative sample? They find that "academic achievement matters most" in predicting "the quality of schools in which faculty teach," but "ideology is the second most powerful predictor in Model I (beta=.09, p ≤.001), accounting for more than one-fifth as much variation in quality of institutional affiliation as does achievement (beta=.39, p ≤.001)" (Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte, 2005, p. 10). As you can see, though, the coefficient of correlation between ideology and institutional prestige is rather close to zero.

Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte still suspect that discrimination is at work, but a minuscule correlation between professors' politics and institutional prestige doesn't necessarily mean conservative scholars are discriminated against.

Here are two hypotheses for further research:

1. Considering academic and non-academic career prospects carefully, the best and brightest conservative young men and women, who would be qualified for academic careers at the most celebrated universities, prefer non-academic careers in business, politics, law, and medicine to academic careers, as tenure-track appointments are hard to come by and non-academic professional careers yield higher incomes on smaller investments of time and money than academic careers.


2. Conservative young men and women who do choose academic careers prefer more conservative though less prestigious institutions to more prestigious but more liberal ones and seek out the former for study and employment.

The first hypothesis is especially promising, in light of time to degree (extraordinarily long in the most liberal disciplines), attrition rates (higher in the humanities and social sciences than in science), employment opportunities (very poor for humanists and social scientists), and lifetime earnings (salaries barely keep up with inflation in academia). Take history, for instance. Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte find 77% of history faculty members are liberal, 10% conservative, 70% Democrats, and 4% Republicans (2005, p. 6). Would conservatives want to be in a history department?

The time spent working toward the history PhD, for instance, grew longer and now surpasses every other discipline. Among the new cohort of history PhDs, the time spent registered for graduate courses increased, from an average of 9 (in 2001–02) to 9.3 years. In comparison, the average for all fields was 7.5 years. Given the extended time spent working toward the degree, it is hardly surprising that the average age of new history PhDs increased by two-tenths of a year, to 34.9 years—a year-and-a-half older than the average for new PhDs in all fields. . . .

Despite their years of effort, the new PhDs reported declining success in finding employment after they received the degree. The proportion of new history PhDs who reported "definite employment" fell from 52.9 percent to 51.3 percent—reversing three years of improvement. This is still well above the low point of 44.9 percent in 1998–99, but it does fit with our reporting on the declining number of jobs being advertised.2 Among the rest, 26.8 percent of the new history PhD recipients reported they were still seeking employment when they received the degree, while 14.3 percent planned to take or seek a postdoctoral fellowship, and 7.7 reported that they were uncertain about their future. (Robert B. Townsend, "Survey Shows Marked Drop in History PhDs," Perspectives 43:2, February 2005)

Keep in mind that the employment statistics above does not take high attrition rates into account:

On the first day of graduate school, everyone is still a success. All of the students gunning for Ph.D.'s have lived an academic life of achievement: honor roll, summa cum laude, certificates, scholarships, and parents who praise their intellectual prowess. Yet as many as half of those bright students -- many of whom have never tasted failure -- will drop out before they can claim their prize.

In some humanities programs, only one of every three entering students goes on to earn a doctorate. No comprehensive national statistics are available, but studies suggest that the attrition rate for Ph.D. programs is 40 percent to 50 percent.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Institutions that make it [information about completion rates] easily accessible are in the minority. At the University of California at San Diego, a comprehensive table of completion statistics is included in the graduate school's annual report, easily found on the Web. Duke University's Graduate School includes links to a wealth of admissions, enrollment, and completion data for prospective students on its Web site. There you can learn very specific information about individual departments -- for instance, that the Ph.D. program in literature bucks the national trend. Of the 27 students who started from 1992 through 1995, 17 earned their degrees, and only 6 have withdrawn.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Even students who make it through the rigorous selection process to win National Science Foundation graduate-research fellowships finish their Ph.D.'s at a rate of only about 75 percent. That's just a bit higher than other doctoral students in the sciences.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . .[T]he pot of gold at the end of the Ph.D. rainbow may not be there for every candidate. For many of them, despite their love of the subject and their dreams of reveling in the life of the mind, the most logical decision may be to leave.

After a year in a Ph.D. program in history at City University of New York, Nicole Kalian left to take a job as a publicist with a book publisher. Hers was the sort of early attrition that almost everyone agrees is the best kind.

"I didn't see any prospects for when I graduated," says Ms. Kalian, who was shocked to read an article about new Ph.D.'s who couldn't find jobs as adjuncts on enough campuses to earn at least $25,000 a year. "It was frightening, and I could never really shake that thought from my head." (emphasis added, Scott Smallwood, "Doctor Dropout: High Attrition from Ph.D. Programs Is Sucking Away Time, Talent, and Money and Breaking Some Hearts, Too," Chronicle of Higher Education 50.19, 16 Jan. 2004, p. A10)

What is intriguing, dropouts, if anything, tend to have higher undergraduate GPAs and GRE analytical scores than those who complete Ph.D. programs!

(Smallwood, 16 Jan. 2004)

In conclusion, while Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte's research exaggerates the proportion of liberals and leftists in academia today, it is true that liberals (though not leftists) traditionally outnumber conservatives in the humanities and social sciences, particularly at research institutions that require a doctoral degree as a condition of employment. What should be conservatives' response to that? I submit that conservatives ought to congratulate themselves. Thinking like the proverbial Rational Economic Man weighing opportunity costs and maximizing utility, many conservatives made the economically correct choice of staying out of Ph.D. programs, especially academic sweatshops in the humanities and social sciences. Alternatively, conservatives might apply their favorite tool, neoclassical economics, to the issue: the problem is that salaries that the best and brightest conservatives demand are too high -- lower their prices, and there will be more demand for them in the academic labor market. Liberals and leftists, on the other hand, should proffer a left-wing remedy that addresses a right-wing grievance while solving at least some of the many problems that plague the life of the mind: increase tenure-track jobs massively, and raise faculty salaries as well as teaching assistant wages (especially in the humanities and social sciences) dramatically, in order to make academic compensation packages competitive with what plastic surgeons, corporate lawyers, business executives, and politicians turned lobbyists would expect. In short, give conservatives what they do not have today: financial incentives to become academics. Turn the ivory tower into a field of conservative dreams of big money: if you build it, they will come.

Working-class Academics

Steve Philion asks: "Anyone know some good sources on class backround of profs, especially left leaning profs? On the Marc Cooper discussion blog, he [Marc Cooper] and others are trying to claim that professors who are left leaning are mostly privileged wealthy elitists with no working class background to speak of" (LBO-talk, December 5, 2004).

Jim Vander Putten's summary of research on faculty's class backgrounds tells us that, institutions of tertiary education being greatly stratified, class origins of faculty and degrees of institutional prestige of their employers are positively correlated:

Lipset and Ladd (1979) reported results from the 1969 and 1975 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education faculty surveys that inquired into faculty background factors (i.e., ethnic origin, religious affiliation, historical assessment of family SES). . . . [T]hey identified that social class origin continued to influence who became a faculty member and at what types of institutions they were employed. More specifically, they found parallel results between institutional prestige and social class; more prestigious research-oriented universities employed faculty from higher social class at a disproportionate rate, and faculty offspring were most likely to work at the most prestigious schools; middle-class offspring trailed the higher social class group, while faculty from working-class and farm backgrounds were most likely employed at lower-status colleges. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There is evidence that one's social class exerts influence on the type of institution in which one can pursue the doctorate. Lang (1987) identified that higher education sustains a system with distinct status divisions that often make it difficult for individuals from modest backgrounds to enter top private universities. The findings on institutional prestige and social class have been confirmed by Boatsman and Antony’s (1995) study of the 1989 CIRP survey data on college and university faculty, in which they found that the trend of higher social class as being associated with higher institutional prestige has continued, even after controlling for age cohort, ethnicity, and gender. ("Get in the Truck: Working-class Faculty and Intent to Depart," May 29-June 1, 1999, pp. 2-3)

As "lower-status colleges" greatly outnumber "prestigious research-oriented universities," it is fair to hypothesize that the majority of college teachers come from working-class backgrounds, by the standards of the aforementioned researchers' works.

Statistically, "according to 1989 survey data, approximately fifty percent of the parents of all university faculty had attended college, were college graduates, or had finished an advanced degree," Kenneth Oldfield and Richard F. Conant report ("Professors, Social Class, and Affirmative Action: A Pilot Study," 2001), citing a 1997 study by Joseph M. Stetar and Martin J. Finkelstein. Oldfield and Conant's own analysis of the parental socioeconomic status (SES) of teaching faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) shows that, while the parents of UIUC faculty had higher socioeconomic statuses and levels of education education than the national averages, from a little less than half (measured by parental socioeconomic statuses) to two thirds (measured by parental educational attainments) of the faculty are not from privileged backgrounds:

Graph 1 presents the results of comparing the sample parental NPT [Nam-Powers-Terrie] SES (n = 821)6 against the national NPT SES (n = 122, 473, 499). Over half (51.6 percent) the faculty are in the two highest categories, while about twenty-two percent (21.8 percent) of the nation falls there, a 2.4:1 ratio. The differences are even more extreme for the lowest categories. Less than two percent (1.9 percent) of the faculty sample falls in the two lowest classifications, versus more than thirteen percent (13.4 percent) for the national population, about a 7:1 ratio. The KS [Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness of fit] statistic is significant beyond .001.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The findings for educational achievement are about equally divergent. Graph 2 shows the UIUC (n = 567) versus national comparisons (n = 51, 283, 636) for highest education by household. The differences are most pronounced in the highest category. Over one-third of faculty parents had more than an undergraduate degree, while only about 10 percent of Americans had this much schooling. The K-S statistic is significant beyond .001.

Graph 3 compares UIUC parental education (n = 1,133)7 against the state’s schooling (n = 7,293, 930). The UIUC parental schooling somewhat better reflects the statewide achievement, which is not surprising, since Illinois schooling exceeds the national average and the sample was not separated by higher educational attainment per household. Still, the UIUC figures for schooling-beyond-an-undergraduate-degree exceed the state’s by approximately three to one. The KS statistic is significant beyond .001.

In sum, this research shows that UIUC faculty members are highly unrepresentative for SES and educational attainment. The sample is especially heavily weighted toward the two highest occupational categories, and over half (54 percent) the respondents said that at least one parent had an undergraduate or graduate degree, versus 27 percent for the nation. These education discrepancies would have been more pronounced had we controlled for age. Thus, UIUC would be justified in using SESAA to diversify its faculty; the university should recruit and hire more lower SES candidates to be representative. ("Professors, Social Class, and Affirmative Action: A Pilot Study," 2000, pp. 17-19)

Lastly, it is important to keep in mind that most American social scientists who study classes (though their definitions vary) regard them as a matter of measuring and classifying individuals' incomes, social statuses, educational levels, and so on, in contrast to classical Marxists who would view all wage workers -- whether they have high or low incomes, more or less formal education, and blue-collar or white-collar occupations -- as stratified members of the working class. College teachers and researchers themselves, more often than not, subscribe to the former's understanding of classes rather than the latter's, so they believe that most of them are "middle-class" -- a belief that is an obstacle to their own unionization and solidarity with other workers.

As for politics of professors, my suspicion is that academia does not want a really radical and truly rich intellectual -- like Paul Sweezy -- because a left-wing person rich enough not to have to depend upon an academic salary would feel free to spout off all kinds of stuff, undeterred by any fear of losing the job. (As a matter of fact, most professors are liberal-to-moderate Democrats, not left-wing radicals of any sort.) The maximum political freedom in a capitalist society, under ordinary circumstances, may belong to people who are too rich or too poor to fear unemployment. Under normal business conditions (excepting extremely good and bad times), people who are in the middle do not have enough to make them independent of the labor market but may have too much not to fear the possibility of losing it.