Academic Freedom And Partisanship Panel

March 1, 2004

Transcript of Commentary by Cathy Davidson:

I'm glad Mike raised the stakes so we could have some good arguments because I'm going to, too.

I came to Duke in 1989 to edit the Journal of American Literature. A few years after I began my job, our office was overflowing with paper and it was time to pack up the old back-files and bring them to the archives in Perkins Library. To my surprise, someone who had once been affiliated with the journal came to see me at that time and presented me with a file full of letters and readers' reports that had been culled from our office files. This person asked me to read the contents carefully and decide whether I thought they should be destroyed or preserved for posterity.

In this file was 40 year of editorial correspondence filled with venom and motivated by good old-fashioned prejudice: "Yes, this is an excellent essay, but isn't Rothstein a rather Hebraic-sounding name?" one letter said. Rothstein's essay was not published. Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Asian Americans, Italians, especially Poles, anyone deemed to be effeminate, and women of all races were rejected by the premiere journal in the field because of their authors' identity. That's called discrimination

It was easy for me to decide that this file should, in fact, be included in the journal's archives for the simple reason that most of my own scholarship and teaching is based on archival research and I believe in the lessons that history can provide.

No, I do not think political affiliation matters in the classroom because I believe intensely in the importance of original and critical thinking. My favorite assignment is to have students read a literary account of a historical event, to read a contemporary analysis of that same event, and then go back themselves to the archives and read diaries, letters, newspapers or magazines and report back to the class on what they find. Learning, I'm convinced, happens in the interstices between fact and fiction, present and past, event and interpretations. Students learn to think and read critically about literature, about history, about how events get turned into a story.

What I dislike most about the intellectual diversity movement is the story it tells. I think it underestimates the intelligence of its readers. And although certain of our panelists today have suggested otherwise, there's a taint in the intellectual diversity movement, not necessarily at Duke, but I'm seeing this in papers I've read for statutes in other states, especially presented to state legislatures. that no one will notice if it fudges its line between true discrimination on the one hand and lack of representation on the other. Either as a department member or a member of the APT committee, I've not encountered any Duke faculty member being harassed or discriminated against because he or she is conservative. Nor have I ever heard of students being so discriminated against or harassed. I've always assumed, in fact, that my Duke students are probably more Republican than Democratic, but I've never seen the numbers and I hope never to. We have both laws and institutional policies to protect individuals against harassment or discrimination. If Republicans aren't being hired or are being turned down for promotion for discriminatory reasons, we have mechanisms for remedying the situation and the situation should be rectified

Now lack of representation -- that's a trickier matter. But we also have mechanisms for increasing diversity. One of those is called Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action says that if candidates are equally qualified in other respects, it is preferable to select a candidate who helps make the institution more heterogeneous. More importantly, an institution makes value judgments about which of the multitudinous human qualities constitute the kind of heterogeneity that contributes to the collective good of its members. These subtle criteria are understood by every Duke student who has spent time in high school not just getting A's, but amassing an array of unique, unpredictable, interesting, yet admissions-friendly extracurricular activities.

Now, what if the pool of diverse applicants is too shallow? That problem is much more difficult to be remedied, but it can be done. And if the DCU wants to increase the number of Republicans in the classroom, here is where it should be focusing its attention. As several people have noted, low-paid helping professions tend to attract liberals. Is that a surprise? If part of being a Republican is belief in free market and capitalist values, why would you spend four year of colleges earning straight A's in order to go for six or seven years of graduate school in order to compete with 200-300 other applicants for the rare plum of a tenure-track job in the humanities with a starting salary of maybe, if you're lucky, $45,000 a year. In my years of teaching, I've had many students tell me they would love to be an English major but their parents insist that they go to medical school or law school or into business. I've never once, not once, have the reverse - tuition-paying parents bullying their child into quitting that job on Wall Street in order to go to grad school in English.

So if we truly want to increase the Republican professors at Duke, we need to look to the short- and long-term fixes provided by other diversity programs. Short-term: Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute can start lucrative graduate fellowship programs for young Republicans. Long-term: you've got to get them earlier. How about Head Start for Homer? Programs in affluent gated communities so baby Republicans can learn the joy of classics, not the joy of derivatives training. Or if we want to think really big, we should consider a full scale redistribution of wealth. If there were an enormous infusion of capital into education such that salaries for the nation's very, very best college teachers rival that of our nation's top lawyers or doctors or CEO's or stockbrokers, we may well might have more Republicans teaching French. There's only one problem with that. It may require socialism to achieve that end. In capitalist society, you get what you pay for. In higher education, that may just mean Democrats.