Imbalance in academia
Thoughts on the current plight of the academy in Australia
It has been a while since I have posted on this blog. I have been consumed by my submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. I have said that the Commission may make my submission public, in due course. There’s probably something in it with which every reader can agree, and something in it with which every reader will disagree. None of the views expressed in it will be a surprise to anyone who reads this blog.
Among other things, I submit to the Commissioner at paragraph 106(1) of my main Submission that universities must develop:
[a] commitment to ideological diversity among faculty members, and to modelling respectful, scholarly disagreement. The right to freedom of speech is not protected if the loudest and most aggressive group on campus can speak, but everyone else is too afraid to disagree or even to ask questions. Respectful disagreement and consideration of other points of view are the foundations of scholarly innovation and learning.
However, I concede in this post that fostering ideological diversity may not be simple, because the current atmosphere in universities is a result of the incentives which have been entrenched by both the right and left of politics across the West over the last sixty years, particularly in the Anglosphere. At the moment, the academy is not a conducive environment for those who have a conservative outlook on life. It’s even difficult for a moderate person like me to survive, at least if I want to be able to speak my mind.
A little while ago, I had an argument on a social media platform about this very point. When I expressed concern about the lack of ideological diversity in academia, an interlocutor responded that progressive people tended to be drawn to academia, because the mission of academia was inherently progressive, and hence there was a self-selection bias. I asked him what he meant by “progressive”, and he expressed a view that progressives cared less about making money, more about helping humanity, whereas conservatives only cared about making money and self-interest.
This exchange got me thinking. I consider that my interlocutor was right in a way, and wrong in another. He was right, I think, that the academy incentivises progressive approaches, and that there is a self-selection bias. I will expand on that below.
However, my interlocutor seemed to define conservatism as “self-interest and making money” and progressivism as “other-interested and helping people.” I disagree with that characterisation. I suspect that my interlocutor has no close conservative friends or colleagues, nor has he spoken with any conservative people, which, for an academic, is the norm. I do have conservative friends, and I would not paint them in the way he did. My friends, at least, possess an immense sense of duty and honour, and a sense of obligation towards society.
We must consider the true roots of the words: to conserve and to progress. What does it mean to conserve and to progress, in the production of knowledge and the teaching of others?
In what follows, I take “conservatism” to mean “honouring the wisdom of the past, conserving tradition, and preserving past hierarchies” and “progressivism” to mean “questioning the wisdom of the past, developing new ways of thinking about the world, and undermining past hierarchies.”
The mission of the modern university is profoundly progressive in the sense I use above. It’s untrue to say that progressive people are not motivated by money—the desire for government grants is a significant motivator for progressive stances in academia, the arts and media—but academics are also hugely motivated by a desire for moral status and standing within the academic community, which requires adopting the incentivised approaches.
As I have also said in my Royal Commission submission at paragraph 73, status games are baked in to academia, because “support from one’s colleagues is necessary for citation, publication, promotion, and award of government grants.” Therefore, there are significant incentives to conform and to keep quiet about any views one might hold which are not the norm among academics. Norms of academic freedom may not help much on their own, in the face of these incentives, particularly in fields where there is not much viewpoint diversity. If expressing a view which is unpopular in academia means that you don’t get funding for your work, no one cites you, you don’t get promoted, and you are ostracised by your peers, then you’ve chosen a difficult path.
I think of the slogan attributed to Ezra Pound—“make it new”—as the animating slogan of modern creative arts and academia. One is incentivised to question the wisdom of the past, to develop new ways of thinking about the world, and to undermine past hierarchies.
However, to teach students effectively (at least in my field) it is necessary to describe what we know about a topic as it currently stands, accept certain hierarchies as true (at least for the purpose of teaching foundational subjects) and to follow the works of scholars and judges who have gone before. For foundational subjects, it is necessary to possess a certain level of conservatism, in the sense that one discusses knowledge and tradition from the past, presenting it in a structured way to students. Teaching existing knowledge has come to be regarded as a chore which distracts from the “real” business of academia: publishing and developing new theories.
Personally, I have given up on grants. It struck me, after I had a discussion with two scientist friends about the difficulty of getting grants in my area, that fundamentally, lawyers and scientists do different things with our research. The scientists were of the opinion that I could get more grants if I advanced hypotheses and set out things in the way they suggested, but I realised during our discussion that this is neither what I actually do, nor what I want to do. It distorts my research to force it into this shape.
In fact, common law reasoning likely looks despicable to a scientist, because it tends to proceed casuistically (namely, from case to case) not syllogistically (namely, by ascertaining whether something does or does not fit within the general rule). However, prior to the scientific revolution, casuistic reasoning was the main method we had of ascertaining truth. It can, of course, produce error, which is why one must take care with it, and why it got a bad name in science.
Let me explain what I mean by casuistic reasoning with a practical example. Presume that a judge has a case before her, about a fox biting a man. Also presume there’s no statute which expresses a clear rule about foxes biting people (which might require us to reason syllogistically). In the absence of a clear statutory rule, in our legal system, the judge will have to look at the previous common law cases and work out what her decision will be from the earlier decisions of judges. I sometimes think of the common law as a sea of fluid law, with solid islands of statutes enacted by Parliament floating upon it.
Presume now that the judge looks at the previous decisions of the court, and does not find any cases about a fox biting a man. She finds several other cases: many cases of a dog biting a person and a case of a monkey biting a woman.1 She must look at these cases, work out the reasoning of each judge, decide which case the fox case resembles most, and apply the principles in that case. Perhaps she will think that vulpine and canine species should be treated as equivalent. Or perhaps she will think that generally, wild animals such as monkeys and foxes should be treated as equivalent. Perhaps there are some variations which distinguish this case from all previous cases, and she will have to develop a separate principle. Incidentally, this is why it takes years of learning and practice to become a common lawyer, to get a sense of what the best answer may be. And even then, the decision of the judge may be overruled by an appeal court, who may come up with a different analysis.
As I often tell my students, one of the complexities in the common law is that for some contested areas of law there can be a range of answers. As a lecturer, what I look for in the work of my students is sound and carefully explained reasoning and reference to relevant cases and statutes, but a student need not necessarily come to the same answer as I have, as long as it is well-reasoned and correctly identifies the relevant facts and context. After all, the judges of the highest courts of the land often disagree. Decisions are not always unanimous, in the common law.
In some senses, I am progressive: I really enjoy questioning the status quo, and developing new ways of thinking about things. In psychological tests, I display extreme openness to new experience.
But in other senses, I am conservative, as I am always aware of the dangers of taking away “Chesterton’s Fence”, derived from a parable by the author, G.K. Chesterton:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.[emphasis added]
As a common lawyer, I frequently have to look to the past to discover what the law is and where it came from, and why it arose. The common law is not perfect. It has problems at times, and once an error has been built in, it is difficult to remove. Sometimes a principle needs to be critiqued or reformed, or the reasons which underlie it no longer exist. But sometimes, a principle can be repurposed, or upon a careful analysis, it can ascertained that it existed for a certain reason which still carries importance in the modern world.
A lot of my research does not provide something that is entirely new and revolutionary, because this is not usually how the law develops. Rather, I think of much of my research as providing a possible map through the maze that is the common law, along with explanations for why that first fence is there, why this second fence should be removed, and why this third fence must be replaced with a different one. It is, therefore, both progressive and conservative, all in one. There’s a reason I started this post with my yin and yang fish painting. In my mind there is a balance in my research between conservation and progress, and this flows through into my research.
However, I fear that the balance has gone awry. We have made the academy only look to progress, which means that many academics simply critique and tear down what has gone before. Make it new, make it new.
Consequently, this is the sense in which my interlocutor was right to question why a conservative would wish to become an academic. What conservatives are inclined to do—honour the wisdom of the past, conserve tradition, and preserve past hierarchies—is inimical to many of the current academic projects. In the arts and social sciences, we are into deconstruction, not conservation, at least in relation to Western knowledge and sources. Many arts and social science academics regard Western knowledge as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in their path, and which should be smashed or deconstructed as much as possible. However, such an approach lacks nuance.
I spoke before of Ezra Pound’s maxim to “make it new”. In fact, the history of that phrase is much more complex, in ways that are revealing. Gregory Wolfe explains:
Pound’s fascination with Confucianism led him to read deeply in the ancient chronicles. There he came across a story of Ch’eng T’ang, the first king of the Shang dynasty (1766−1753 BCE). This monarch is said to have had his washbasin inscribed with the phrase, a daily reminder. But the best translations stress that the meaning of the phrase is closer to “renovation” and meant in the sense of personal moral and spiritual renewal, rather than as a call to artistic creation.
Pound’s own translation of the Chinese original—first published in 1928, well after the initial heyday of modernism—used “renovate,” and only alters that to “make it new” in a footnote. It wasn’t until the mid-1930s that he would use these words as the title of an essay collection and not until the 1950s that it would be picked up by literary critics as a catchphrase of the modernist project.2
I interpolate here that Confucianism is a highly conservative ideology, requiring a person to respect one’s elders, teachers, leaders and the proper order of things. Of course, because I am teaching myself Mandarin, I decided to find out exactly what the phrase inscribed on the bathtub was. According to the Book of Learning in the Book of Rites, it was, 茍日新，日日新，又日新, which was translated in the linked version I found as, “If you can one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation.”
“Renovate” carries an entirely different sense to “making anew”. “Making anew” suggests knocking something down, clearing the ground, building a new thing. “Renovate” suggests maintaining respect for what went before, leaving the necessary bones of the past intact, but updating and changing where necessary. Perhaps my common law training makes me think in this way, because I have to look both backward to ascertain the law, and forwards to apply the law, but it seems to me that the mission of the academy should be to renovate. We need to restore the balance between conservation and progressivism, so that useful things are not destroyed. We need to change the incentives.
Me being me, of course I have a specific case for the latter situation in mind: in May v Burdett (1846) 9 QB 101, a bite from a “tamed” monkey caused Mrs May to be “lame, sick and disordered.“
Gregory Wolfe, ‘Making it New’ (Issue 81, Summer 2014) Image Journal. He derives this tale from Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (2013, University of Chicago Press).
One of the most successful rhetorical tricks in modern politics is the appropriation of the word progressive. It is an impressive piece of political branding. To call oneself progressive is not merely to indicate a policy preference. It is to claim alignment with history itself. The label suggests not just that one favours change, but that one favours the right change — the change that carries society forward, while opponents merely obstruct the march of progress.
That way of thinking did not begin with today’s self-described progressives, and it did not even begin with Marx. But Marx gave it one of its most powerful modern expressions.
Marx did not invent the broader notion that history moves in a meaningful direction. That idea was already present in Enlightenment thought, with its confidence in reason, science, liberty, and human advancement. But Marx transformed that general optimism into something far more muscular: a theory of history as a structured process, driven by material forces and class conflict, moving through intelligible stages toward a final social resolution. Feudalism gave way to capitalism; capitalism would give way to socialism; socialism would culminate in communism. History, in this view, was not simply unfolding. It was progressing according to an inner logic.
That matters, because Marx helped entrench a habit of mind that still survives even where Marxism itself does not: the habit of treating one’s own political preferences as the next stage of history.
To be clear, that does not mean today’s progressives are Marxists. Many are not. Some would reject Marxism emphatically. The point is subtler, and in some ways more important. It is that modern political rhetoric often borrows from the same deeper assumption: that history has a moral direction, that society is moving toward a more enlightened state, and that those who oppose the latest approved causes are therefore not merely wrong, but backward.
This is the real force of the word progressive. It does not merely describe a viewpoint. It flatters it. It wraps ordinary political preferences in the aura of historical necessity.
I am coming to the conclusion that many progressives -- and many populists -- have the goal of doing away with the rule of law altogether, and live in a realm of pure power. It seems that law's impartiality is now considered, not a feature, but a problem. If a white supremacist or an Islamist shoots up a synagogue, then whether that act is condemned or valorised depends on the political power of the perpetrator, according to his or her social identity. The act, and indeed the victim is an afterthought.
I think we need 'The Rule of Law -- What it is, its History and Why it is a Good Thing' as a required subject for several years for elementary school students. It will be instructive to watch who comes out _against_ such classes.