Russell Jacoby
        History

            Compared to a faculty packed with radicals and their predictably radical stances, the often contrarian views of History professor Russell Jacoby can seem like a refreshing change of pace.  Watching Jacoby verbally pummel multiculturalism, diversity, and other radical excesses, one feels hopeful: here is a professor who doesn’t buy into all that nonsense.

            Indeed, Jacoby’s place in life seems to be that of the curmudgeon.  In a November 23, 2005 Los Angeles Times submission, Jacoby argued:

“The jargon of choice, a second cousin of diversity and multiculturalism, undermines intellectual integrity and coherence. “Choice” and “diversity” are universal passwords that unlock all doors. Who can oppose them without appearing authoritarian?

These terms dazzle an academic and liberal left, which regularly uses them to disassemble a curriculum. For instance, reformers some years ago floated to great effect a proposal “to teach the conflict.” If some instructors could not decide whether a classic English novel was homophobic or imperialist, they should “teach” the “conflict” and let the students decide.”

            Unfortunately, the motivation for Jacoby’s attacks on modern radical academia’s foibles are not for lack of common sense, or because he wishes to chart a reasonable Lieberman-like center-left course.  Rather, Jacoby wallops his targets because they’re not radical enough.  This complaint is the central idea of Jacoby’s celebrated book “The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe.” 

“Younger intellectuals,” Jacoby wrote, “no longer need or want a larger public; they are almost exclusively professors. Campuses are their homes; colleagues their audience; monographs and specialized journals their media. Unlike past intellectuals they situate themselves within fields and disciplines. ... Their jobs, advancement, and salaries depend on the evaluation of specialists, and this dependence affects the issues broached and the language employed.”  Jacoby’s criticism centered on his disappointment that his leftist brethren had abandoned the supposedly crucial need to engage the wider world.  Or, in more basic terms, Jacoby wanted a more politicized professoriate, not less.

            One imagines that, providing this summary of his views is accurate, Jacoby will be mightily pleased to find on this site the profiles of dozens of “active” UCLA professors who do not hide behind journals and conferences.  In fact, far too many UCLA radicals, contrary to Jacoby’s understanding, are actively proselytizing radicalism to their students and colleagues.  They evince no trepidation about joining protest marches, and eagerly join ad-hoc faculty groups pursuing radical causes or partisan media and political campaigns.

            Perhaps aided by his misconception of an apathetic, innocent university elite, Jacoby has taken upon himself the task of battling the new academic freedom movement promoted by groups like David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom.  In a long condemnation published in the April 4, 2005 issue of The Nation (a publication for which Jacoby has been a long-time book reviewer and occasional op-ed contributor), Jacoby took to task this alleged “New PC” for “Crybaby Conservatives.”  In a work heavily shot through with improbable accusations, Jacoby argued that the intellectual freedom movement is animated in large part by “the age-old anti-intellectualism of conservatives.”  Jacoby backed this inanity with a single piece of evidence, Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” conveniently omitting voluminous recent evidence that conservatives are deeply concerned about academia’s departure from true intellectualism.  One need look no further than books like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind to find conservatives who bemoan the growing dominance of moral relativism and post-modern psychobabble in academic study.  Jacoby no doubt knows of this strain of criticism, given that he has authored several books and a multitude of articles on this very same decline of education.  The throwaway charge of conservative anti-intellectualism thus serves to identify Jacoby not as a reasonable public critic, but as just another radical partisan.

            In his Nation op-ed, Jacoby also portrayed (in melodramatic fashion) the supposed plight of mild-mannered centrists pursued by the baying hounds of conservatism.  Jacoby made the fantastical claim that at one time, “an unreliable professor meant an anarchist or communist; now it includes Democrats.  Soon it will be anyone to the left of Attila the Hun.”  Such hyperbole, and from start to finish, but are Jacoby’s charges accurate?  Well, “Democrats” is a wide category.  If Jacoby would have us include in that group a faux-Indian radical academic fraud like University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill, with his seething denunciations of the “little Eichmanns” (workers who died in the World Trade Center attacks), then yes, the definition of “unreliable” professor has been expanded in recent years. 

            But as much as every professor believes it to be so, our modern day is no McCarthy era.  Ward Churchill has been afforded every due process right; he has faced no Congressional hearings, and at this time, despite national outrage, faces the terrible a prospect of…a golden-parachute buyout of his lifetime tenure.  If this is the fate that awaits the target of a modern witch-hunt, we’d better start giving out priority numbers because there’s going to be a line pretty soon.

            Jacoby only really warms to his theme after a few paragraphs of this folderol.  While pursuing his overall argument that academic diversity is just political affirmative action by another name, Jacoby offers the following thought:

“If life were a big game of Monopoly, one might suggest a trade to these conservatives: You give us one Pentagon, one Department of State, Justice and Education, plus throw in the Supreme Court, and we will give you every damned English department you want.”

            Jacoby here makes the valuable if inadvertent admission that radicals like himself view colleges and universities as simply another battleground for political wars.  It is this warped understanding of education, and the abusive practices that accompany it, which are the very reason that a student academic freedom movement is necessary.  Someone or something must remind faculty radicals that universities, and their state taxpayers and captive tuition-paying students who fund them, are utterly unique entities.  Need we actually enumerate higher education’s substantive difference from federal bureaucratic entities like the Justice Department or judicial authorities like the Supreme Court?  Simply put, colleges and universities exist to produce an intellectual product, not an ideological product.  Jacoby and his ilk endorse the politicization of academics precisely because they do not grasp the common-sense difference between Congress and the classroom.  To them, everything is power, everything is political; if “they” dominate certain institutions, “we” are entitled to dominate others.

            Continuing his assault, Jacoby then attacked a report on political imbalance issued by Santa Clara University economics professor Daniel Klein.  The survey, like previous efforts, collected data on the political party affiliation of university professors, with the basic partisan breakdown of Democrat vs. Republican receiving closest scrutiny.  Klein, as with previous studies, studiously declined to cast his results as incontrovertible evidence of actual in-class ideological discrimination, or discrimination on the part of hiring committees.  Nevertheless, Jacoby acted as if he had done just that, and declared, “No matter how well tuned, studies of professorial voting habits reveal nothing of campus policies or practices.”  This is foolish; even a partisan like David Horowitz, in the introduction to a 2003 study of the party registration of professors at 32 elite college and universities, made no such definitive claims about classroom bias or hiring discrimination.  The closest anyone has come to Jacoby’s straw-man misrepresentation was Horowitz’s argument that the massive faculty imbalance (10-1 Democrats to Republicans) found in the study constituted prima facie evidence of political discrimination.

            The response from Jacoby and others like him is simply to dismiss the idea of any discrimination.  As Jacoby responds,

“Nothing has shown that higher education discriminates against conservatives, who probably apply in smaller numbers than liberals. Conservatives who pursue higher degrees may prefer to slog away as junior partners in law offices rather than as assistant professors in English departments.” 

The answer is obviously not that simple, which Jacoby very well knows.  Where conservatives have brought forward evidence of political discrimination, it has been fragmentary and too often anecdotal.  Jacoby’s fallacious conclusion is that this weakness constitutes inverse proof that charges of hiring discrimination and professor indoctrination are simply a hoax concocted by power-mad conservatives.  The fact remains, however, that proving the charges will be expensive, tedious, and to some extent (particularly with hiring) reliant on indirect evidence.  The current gender discrimination class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart has been underway for years, and will continue for many more before a resolution.  The Wal-Mart lawsuit is backed by deep-pocketed trial attorneys who stand to reap stupendous fortunes if successful – and it is still fraught with uncertainty, subject to the great difficulties inherent in successfully prosecuting a claim of hiring discrimination.  It is pure laziness or egotism, on Jacoby’s part, to suggest that the absence (to date) of conclusive proof for something represents the conclusive refutation of the contention.  

Jacoby helpfully illuminates, after his main thrust, a few other of the more typical ancillary arguments over the issue.  Jacoby snidely suggests, “Perhaps [Daniel] Klein, the lead researcher, should explore Jewish and Christian affiliation among professors.  A survey would probably show that Jews, 1.3 percent of the population, are seriously overrepresented in economics and sociology (as well as other fields).  Isn’t it likely that Jews marginalize Christianity in their classes?”  What another magnificent straw-man argument.  Jacoby’s rhetorical question has a rather simple answer: to date, there is no appreciable evidence, even anecdotal, of anti-Christian teaching by Jews.  This is a pointless exercise anyway.  Even if there were anecdotal evidence of such a problem, Jacoby would no doubt suggest (as he does with the current dispute over political imbalance) that if there is no conclusive evidence of a problem, ipso facto, the charge is false. 

            Jacoby continues his article with a plaintive bleat about the odious state of his accommodations at UCLA.  We history professors, he complains, “are housed in cramped quarters of a decaying Modernist structure. Our classiest facility is a conference room that could pass as generic space in any downtown motel. The English professors inhabit what appears to be an aging elementary school outfitted with minuscule offices.”  He then compares this to the splashy environs of the newly constructed Anderson Business School, and delivers what he imagines to be a knockout blow:

“Conservatives seem unconcerned about the political orientation of the business professors. Shouldn't half be Democrats and at least a few be Trotskyists?”

As before, Jacoby has attempted to reduce the student academic freedom movement to mere political affirmative action.  As David Horowitz has tirelessly pointed out, there is neither such a requirement in his Academic Bill of Rights, nor even the suggestion of such a philosophical underpinning.  Student academic freedom is not about tearing the university asunder, but about repairing a number of serious weaknesses.  Nobody claims that the problem is insurmountable.  A certainly lucky few UCLA students take brilliant professors who can communicate both sides of an issue.  Nobody knows, or cares, whether these brilliant teachers are paleoconservative or bleeding-red Marxists.  Also admirable, to a slightly lesser extent, are those professors who in some way may reveal their own politics, but scrupulously present both sides of an issue.  But these professors are rare gems among the indoctrinationist gravel covering UCLA’s academic pathways. 

Far more common are the type of professors profiled on this website, professors who voluminous evidence proves are physically incapable of checking their politics at the door.  So returning to Jacoby’s dig about having 50% Democrats and a handful of Trotskyites teaching UCLA business courses, we see that the question is irrelevant.  One need not be a Republican to teach business, just as one need not be a Democrat to teach about the welfare state.  And for that matter, would Jacoby have us believe that Democrat students taught by the supposedly all-Republican professors of the Anderson Business School would not raise their voices in protest were their professors constantly attempting to indoctrinate them on partisan topics?  With what is basically a “shut up and take it” argument, Jacoby is sending us down a path of the lowest common denominator.  At base, Jacoby accepts the idea of the university as a place of political warfare.  In this radical warfare, Democrat sociology professors indoctrinate their students because (they imagine) Republican economics professors are indoctrinating their students.  This is no way to run a university, and it is a remarkably shoddy argument, even for Jacoby.

            Jacoby’s final argument is actually, on closer review, amusingly contradictory.  On one hand, Jacoby portrays professors as sophisticated scholars, uniquely suited for digesting competing theories and present only those that are credible.  Yet, should a state legislature pass the Academic Bill of Rights, an essentially toothless statute that simply encourages professors to present all “significant scholarly viewpoints,” Jacoby predicts a total curricular meltdown.  “Once the right to decide the content of courses is extended to students,” Jacoby writes, “the Holocaust deniers, creationists and conspiracy addicts will come knocking at the door – and indeed they already have.”  To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, a professor should know a significant scholarly viewpoint when he sees it.  So if a Holocaust denier comes knocking at the door, consider his arguments, and, if justified, dismiss him.  Jacoby deliberately presents the issue of academic freedom as a slippery-slope proposition.  If we allow conservative ideas in, he practically wails, why, we’ll have to let in crackpot ideas.  The underlying subtext, and the reason for Jacoby’s choice of extreme possibilities like Holocaust deniers and conspiracy addicts, is that the reader is meant to mentally associate conservatism with truly fringe ideas.  The issue of academic freedom need not be an all-or-nothing proposition.  

It is far from impossible to open the door a crack and let the ideas of the other 50% of this nation’s populace be presented in various classes.  In the field of Women’s Studies, the ideas of Christina Hoff Summers would be a reasonable balance against those of an Andrea Dworkin or Gloria Steinem.  On affirmative action, the ideas of a Thomas Sowell or a Walter Williams would be fair balance against the usual suspects like Bowen and Bok’s “Shape of the River.” 

 But as is typical, opponents always seize on the most extreme possibilities (the Holocaust deniers are a perennial), as though any proponent was expecting a perfectly scientific 50/50 balance on every issue, and a spot at the table for every theory.  Straw men, anyone?  Jacoby’s got them by the dozens. 

            In an overall review, the only thing that keeps Jacoby from being more intellectually dangerous is his apparent reluctance to engage in street-level activism.  Specific public policy advocacy is largely absent from his writing.  This stems in large part from his own intellectual enthusiasm for the idea of Utopia, the subject of his most recent books “Picture Imperfect”  and “The End of Utopia.” Unlike fellow travelers like Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, Jacoby lacks the typical radical's enthusiasm for the race/gender/class/sexual orientation matrix, a distaste that arises from two factors.  First, as already noted, Jacoby has taken that worldview out to the woodshed a good number of times.  A second aspect is the wide-ranging nature and iconoclasticism of his views, similar in character to those held by the “Last Intellectuals,” the loss of which Jacoby lamented in his 1989 book of that same title. 

            However unique his ideas, and his sometimes-brave willingness to break ranks with modern academic fads, the students who take his classes known Jacoby best.  It is there that the perception of an unpredictable maverick fades.  On one hand, reviewers laud Jacoby for his odd sense of humor (criticized by some as cynical).  One even notes Jacoby’s self-declared membership in the American Pessimists Association.  However, other reviews tell a far more typical tale.  One student notes, “he still thinks he's living in 1968 Paris,” and then offers the following analysis: 

“He joined the profession in the 60’s, fully convinced that the revolution was just about here and that he would be one of its intellectual leaders. Instead, he is faced with a free-market economy and in one of his recent books of “social commentary,” he laments the death of utopian ideals. When I approached him to do a paper on the Marxist conception of history and asked for comments back, he spent a half-hour in his office tearing it apart without a word of constructive criticism. Unless you are a Marxist or are content to regurgitate exactly what he says, under no circumstances should you take his class.”

            On the claim that Jacoby joined the professoriate in the ‘60s, the student is incorrect; Jacoby received his Ph.D. in 1974, and then taught at UC Riverside before finally moving to UCLA no later than 1994.  It would not be unfair, however, to note that Jacoby joined the radical intelligentsia perhaps as early as the late ‘60s, and his political and academic enthusiasms were shaped by the times.  As for the balance of the student’s claims, rejoinders from other students, obviously liberal, confirm the charges of classroom radicalism.  One reviewer notes that after a class with Jacoby, “You will begin to question the world around you.”  But perhaps most instructive of all is a third student who questions, “why everyone uses this review page to charge Professor Jacoby with the crime of being “stuck in 1968.”  Perhaps it’s because he doesn't prostrate himself before the bogus ideology of the “free market,” i.e. the claptrap the average “elite” UCLA student seems to believe.” 

            Bogus ideology of the free market?  Now that’s learning, UCLA style!