Are Academics Biased?

Of course they, just as pastors are biased, corporate leaders are biased, union organizers are biased and you, dear readers are biased. Any person or organization that is engaged in purposeful activity is biased, because purpose demands bias. It demands focusing on some things and ignoring or even putting aside other things.

A football player or a basketball player who is trying to win is biased against the views of sportswriters, fans in the stands, and possibly even his or her fellow teammates if they discourage him from staying focused on winning.

And what about the classroom? Well when I teach about cross-cultural communication in a MA seminar I’m biased against viewpoints that deny the existence of cultural difference or maintain naive views of language. A class focused on preparing leaders for complex cultural organizations isn’t going to waste its time on freshmen linguistics. Or, to use another example, a class on wastewater management engineering isn’t a likely place to raise the issue of privatization of government services. Water flow equations don’t mix with politics. 

But let’s go a little deeper, because the purpose of an institution isn’t limited to specific goals or subject matter. Virtually all institutions, but particularly colleges and universities, have the purpose of perpetuating certain core values. Let me repeat, perpetuating core values, not merely passing on information. No one ever founded a university or came to teach in one in order to fill students’ heads with knowledge. We’re here to impart the value of discovering the truth about reality and the value of using particular methods of discovering that truth. 

In every university or college both sets of values, the value of discovering the truth and the value of the particular methods for discovering the truth go hand in hand. And this is where the accusation of bias comes in. Because although everyone agrees, or pretends to, on the value of discovering the truth, there are serious disagreements concerning the methods for discovering the truth and thus the outcomes that we regard as “the truth.” 

In the West, or better the world of modernity created out of the North Atlantic world, a schism grew up from the time of the Enlightenment onward. It is relatively easy to characterize. Within the classical arts and sciences tradition revelation as a source of knowledge and faith as a means of knowing were gradually bracketed out as the search for truth, if not being outright rejected. Religion became an object of study rather than a means of discovering the truth. 

The initial pushback against this from American fundamentalists was a naive and ultimately futile effort to defend a Biblical understanding of a three tiered cosmos and a seven day creation of the earth. More moderate were efforts in the tradition of Schleiermacher and philosophical theology to support faith as a distinctive means of knowing reality, while bracketing out those aspects of reality better understood by science and critical studies.

Still, it is the pushback by the fundamentalists, played out in public from the Scopes trial onward that left a bitter combativeness against religion in the academy, and particularly religion deployed for political purposes among those seeking to break free from such nonsense. After all - it was precisely teachers that the fundamentalists were attacking.

That bitterness hasn’t disappeared even as science has triumphed in its creation of the world we live in and its methods for discovering the truth about it. The scientific method and critical inquiry in the liberal arts have been wildly successful in creating a better, more fruitful, more peaceful, and more prosperous world. To the extent that revelation and faith pit themselves against these accomplishments they remain for many academics an enemy of the core value of the university - free inquiry into the truth about reality. 

This bitterness has been exacerbated by the politicizing of religion against science and critical inquiry in the post-Moral Majority age. Given that the now dominant political party has become a staunch denier of the results of scientific inquiry and resister of scientific research, universities may justifiably fear that a combination of conservative Christian religion and pseudo-conservative politics are indeed an enemy to their core values.

The result is that the defense of the scientific method and critical inquiry has become one of the values perpetuated in the modern university. In the current political climate many academics believe that only by rejecting revelation and faith outright can the university defend its key methodology and thus pursue its goal of discovering the truth about reality. 

So yes, most academics are biased, but not because they are naturally political liberals. Nothing about the pursuit of scientific and critical truth favors political liberalism or political conservatism. The truth is non-partisan. But attacks on science and critical thinking have become partisan, lodged in the detritus of a Republican Party that has traded small government and fiscal responsibility for populist attacks on the perceived enemies of religion. And so long as self-identified political/religious conservatives attack both the results and methods of scientific and critical inquiry as “fake news” the university faculty will identify with political liberals who at least appear to protect their core values. 

And the future? I’ll offer this as a theologian in a church related university. We who believe in revelation as a source of knowledge and faith as a means grasping the truth could offer a great deal to the larger, and shared, value of pursing the truth. But if we seek short term gains in political power by attacking our peers in the academic world then we deserve to be rejected and our doom is as deserved as it is assured. 

Of course there is another side to this story - next post.