Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid :

1
Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the
Professional Pyramid

• Groupthink Mechanisms in Academia in the United
  States
• Link to paper as published in The Independent
  Review

2
Classical liberal professors are rare

• Professors in the humanities and social sciences
  (abbreviated h/ss) in the US are dominated by
  social democrats.
• They are generally highly supportive of
  status-quo interventions and welfare state
  policies.
• In h/ss, Democrats outnumber Republicans about 8
  to 1. (Democrats are almost never classical
  liberals.)

3
1 pro-intervention5 pro-laissez-faire
4
Economics an exception?
5

• Economics is not nearly as different as many
  think.
• Overall policy index 2.65
• D to R is about 2.9 to 1.
• Only about 10 of economists can be called
  serious free-market supporters.

6
Why so few classical liberals?

• Because academics are wise and enlightened, and
  classical liberalism is unwise and unenlightened.
• Because classical liberalism is wise and
  enlightened, and academics are unwise and
  unenlightened to the extent that they oppose
  classical liberalism.
• We proceed on the presupposition of 2.

7
Why are liberal professors so rare?

• A broader question Why are liberals in general
  rare?
• The question about professors is intertwined with
  the question about people in general.
• Here we focus on structural features of academia.
  We speculate on how bad thinking could become
  locked-in and self-perpetuating.

8
Groupthink

• -- the idea that a group can make bad decisions
  and hold bad beliefs because of bad practices and
  attitudes
• Excessive concurrence-seeking within the group.
  A lack of critical examination within the group.
• Too insulated from outside criticism. Outsiders
  are stereotyped.
• The group validates its own beliefs and
  decisions. Little independent testing, analysis,
  or evaluation.

9
Groupthink

• The idea has academic respectability.
• It approaches cases with a presupposition of
  defectiveness.
• Groupthink is an explanation for defective
  thinking.
• Groupthink is pejorative.
• The term is used with hindsight.

10
Groupthink settings

• The cases are generally narrow policy decisions
  taken by a small group.
• Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba
• Vietnam War escalation
• Watergate cover-up
• Space shuttle Challenger disaster
• Etc.
• They are afterwards recognized as fiascos, even
  by the perpetrators.

11
Groupthink literature

• Irving L. Janis, Groupthink, 2nd ed., Houghton
  Mifflin, 1982.
• Paul t Hart, Groupthink in Government A Study
  of Small Groups and Policy Failure, Johns
  Hopkins, 1990.

12
Groupthink literature

• Sociology, social psychology literatures
• group dynamics
• organizational theory and behavior
• Groupthink is also applied in
• political science
• international relations
• public administration
• management

13
Janis

• Groupthink refers to a deterioration of mental
  efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment
  that results from in-group pressures. (9)

14
Hart

• the focus of this study will be on flaws in the
  operation of small, high-level groups at the helm
  of major projects or policies that become
  fiascoes. (4)

15
Similarities between Janis-Hart and our
application

• The analysts presuppose that beliefs and actions
  are defective/unenlightened
• There is an in-group
• many parallel mechanisms

16
Differences between Janis-Hart and our application

• J-H groups are
• small
• chief-based
• concerned about security leaks
• often under great stress
• often making high-stakes or risky decisions
• dealing with immediate exigent issues.

17
Differences between Janis-Hart and our application

• J-H groups sustain groupthink beliefs that are
• specific to the decision at hand
• shallow, not about ones identity
• greater potential for eventual admission of
  defectiveness

18
Differences between Janis-Hart and our application

• Compared to J-H groups
• Academic groups are
• larger
• group boundaries are blurrier
• less chief-based
• less policy/action oriented
• less stressful, urgent, risky, secret.
• Academic beliefs are
• deeper, more complex, 25-to-grave
• more like moral, political, and aesthetic values

19
Adapting the theory to academia

• The differences make academia a less cohesive
  group, with less clear policy decisions.
• However, certain structural features have made
  each academic tribe more cohesive than meets
  the eye.

20
Groupthink in academia?

• How can entire disciplinary professionslike
  Political Science, History, Sociology, and so
  onbecome mired in unenlightened ideas?
• An explanation must relate micro decisions to
  macro norms and values.

21
What is the XYU History Department?

• You see XYU, with its campus and buildings.
• You think of XYU as a hierarchical organization,
  led by the Provost or President, the trustees,
  the Deans of the divisions or colleges.
• Beneath them, inside a building, on each floor is
  an academic department.

22
What is the XYU History Department?
23
Department

• Department sounds like a part.
• It sounds like a sub-unit within a larger agency.
• It sounds subordinate to agency chiefs.

24
An Agency Unto Itself

• Important departmental decisions
• Who to hire?
• Who to tenure and promote?
• What to teach?
• What to research? Whom to write for?
• Which students to promote?
• The provost, dean, etc. cannot meddle in History
  decisions. On questions of History, no one is
  above the department. The department is
  autonomous.

25
Departmental Procedure

• How are hiring decisions made?
• Answer Majority vote.
• What happens when 51 percent share an ideology
  and feel that to be a good colleague and
  professor one must share that ideology?
• They hire one like themselves.
• Making it 60 percent, then 70 percent, then 80
  percent . . .
• A tendency toward ideological uniformity within
  the department.
• The gradual elimination of minority points of
  view.

26
Departmental Ethos

• However, a major principle is consensus.
• It is possible for a vocal minority to sink a
  candidate.
• A tendency toward bland, OK-by-everyone
  candidates.

27
Diverse History Departments?

• The XYU History will tend to become ideologically
  uniform.
• Might we get diverse History departments at
  different universities?

28
On what basis does the department decide?

• Important decisions (again)
• Who to hire?
• Who to tenure and promote?
• What to teach?
• What to research? Whom to write for?
• Which students to promote?
• Answer The professional norms and standards of
  History, the profession.
• Partly, out of sincere faith in History
• Partly, out of practical need for focal points
  for consensus making

29
History The Profession

• Nationwide, each History dept functions within a
  mono-centric club called History
• The club hierarchy cuts laterally across the
  country
• The XYU History dept is more a creature of
  History than of XYU

30
The Professional Pyramid

• The ranking of
• Departments
• Journals
• Historians (leaders of the sub-field)
• Awards, kudos, grants

31
Again, the History Dept at XYU
32
Again, History cuts laterally in space
33
Again, the XYU History Department is more a
creature of History than of XYU
34
Professional Hierarchy

• People like to think that the discipline is
• filled with independent spirits and independent
  centers of scholarship
• polycentric
• contestable
• diverse
• But if you get out the microscope and think about
  how the profession functions, you realize it is
  very hierarchical.
• It is highly focused on the apex (including
  field apexes).

35
The only encompassing standard

• Without an encompassing standard, a discipline
  has no prospect of being a coherent enterprise.
• History is what historians do. Historians are
  those with History degrees and History
  appointments.

36
Heterodoxy is heterodox

• Despite heterodox protestations, the pyramid
  remains the gravitational well of group practice
  and individual ambition.
• Heterodoxies focus on criticizing the mainstream.
  People fight over influence and power within the
  pyramid.
• If parallel pyramids get erected, they generally
  are either ignored or are co-opted into the
  official pyramid.

37
How much real heterodoxy?

• There are almost no classical liberal historians,
  especially at the apex.
• What are the classical-liberal parallel pyramids
  in History?

38
Material Resources

• Jobs, pay and security
• Not having to teach
• Grant money
• Grad students
• research assistants
• teaching assistants
• an audience
• protégés

39
Encompassing public and private

• 70 percent of professors are government
  employees.
• But privates schools are enmeshed in the same
  History profession.
• New PhDs must be sold to the profession.
• Public or private doesnt matter much. XYU
  History dept is mainly a creature of History.

40
The market for History professors

• Is it like the market for waiters?
• Thought experiment
• What if waiters were like History professors?

41
If Waiters were like History profs

• Each waiter job is controlled by a collection of
  other waiters, a Waiter Department.
• Each Waiter Department spends money with slight
  regard for the preferences of restaurant
  customers.
• There are 200 Waiter Departments. Each Waiter
  Department gets whatever prestige and
  revenue-base it commands principally by adhering
  to the standards of the encompassing club.
• Each Waiter Department produces the new young
  waiters, whom it tries to place in the pyramid.

42
If Waiters were like History profs

• Non-waiters are deemed unqualified to criticize
  the standards of the Waiter club.
• Waiters at top departments set the tone.
• Waiters at the top departments rub shoulders with
  cultural elites.

43
If Waiters were like History profs

• Then there might be a groupthink problem among
  waiters.

44
The market for Historians

• History is not like a normal labor market.
• Supply and demand consist of historians!
• Historians producing historians.
• Historians buying historians.

45
A Professional Club

• History is like a genteel society drawing
  resources indirectly, much from tax-payers.
• Circularities
• Self-validating Historians validate each other
  and the pyramid
• They replicate themselves in PhD students

46
A scary thought

• What if a small number of departments
• held unenlightened ideas
• validated each other
• gained influence over the entire discipline
• manufactured most of the new PhDs
• who then filled most of the jobs at all schools?

47
The case of Economics

• Lets look at
• The percentage of economics faculty with Ph.D.
  from the worldwide top 35 economics departments .
  . .
• source D.B. Klein,The PhD Circle in Academic
  Economics, Econ Journal Watch, April 2005

48
The case of Economics
49
The case of Sociology in US

• Val Burris, The Academic Caste System Prestige
  Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks, American
  Sociological Review, 2004 . . .

50
The case of US Sociology in US

• Graduates from the top 5 departments account for
  roughly one-third of all faculty hired in all 94
  departments. The top 20 departments account for
  roughly 70 percent of the total. Boundaries to
  upward mobility are extremely rigid. Sociologists
  with degrees from non-top 20 departments are
  rarely hired at top 20 departments and almost
  never hired at top 5 departments.(247-249).

51
The case of Sociology in the US

• This information confirms the observation made
  by six references deleted here that mobility in
  academia is mainly horizontal and downward and
  seldom upward (249)

52
The case of Law in the US

• Brian Leiter of the University of Texas found
  that
• Among all new faculty who started in
  tenure-track law-school jobs between 1996 and
  2001, more than one-third earned their J.D. from
  just three law schools Yale, Harvard, and
  Stanford.

53
The scary thought . . .

• . . . is pretty much the way it is!

54
Intellectual culture beyond the academy?

• Suppose the History pyramid goes a certain way.
  Can it be challenged?
• Individuals and small circles of opinion can
  criticize. But little salience or eminence in
  the intellectual culture at large.
• The academic discipline is highly insulated. It
  has cultural power. Outsiders are ignored.
• The market for History isnt a free market.
  Enlightenment will not necessarily win.

55

• Majoritarian departmental politics and the
  professional pyramid
• The combination can explain why unenlightened
  views come to dominate entire disciplines, and
  why the views go unchallenged in the society at
  large.

56
Then and nowDemocrats per Republican
57
Narrow-tent Democrats

• How much diversity under the Democratic tent?
• 1 pro-intervention
• 5 pro-laissez-faire

58
Minimum wage laws
59
Workplace safety regulation (OSHA)
60
Pharmaceutical market regulation by the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA)
61
Air-quality and water-quality regulation by the
EPA
62
Laws making it illegal for private parties to
discriminate (on the basis of race, gender, age,
ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation)
against other private parties, in employment or
accommodations?
63
Laws restricting gun ownership
64
Redistribution policies (transfer and aid
programs and tax progressivity)
65
Government production of schooling (k through 12)
66
Government ownership of industrial enterprises
67
Repubs policy views
68
Dems policy views,more interventionist, less
diverse
69
The Democratic tent is narrower
70
Republicans sorted out

• Academic Not academic
• Dems 962 322
• Repubs 112 78
• 8.6 to 1 4.1 to 1
• 
  Significant at 1

71
Groupthink happens

• Janis, Groupthink, Figure 10-1 (244), verbatim
  bits of the figure
• Antecedent Conditions
• A Decision-Makers Constitute a Cohesive Group
• B-1 Structural Faults of the Organization
• 1. Insulation of the Group
• 4. Homogeneity of Members Social Background
  and Ideology
• B-2 Provocative Situational Context n.a.

72
Irving L. Janis

• C Symptoms of Groupthink
• Type I Overestimation of the Group
• Illusion of Invulnerability
• Belief in Inherent Morality of the Group
• Type II Closed-Mindedness
• Collective Rationalizations
• Stereotypes of Out-Groups
• Self-Censorship
• Illusion of Unanimity
• Direct Pressure on Dissenters
• Self-Appointed Mindguards

73
Irving L. Janis

• D Symptoms of Defective Decision-Making
• Incomplete Survey of Alternatives
• Incomplete Survey of Objectives
• Failure to Reappraise Initially Rejected
  Alternatives
• Poor Information Search
• Selective Bias in Processing Information at Hand

74
Groupthink happens

• Irving L. Janis, Groupthink (1982)
• One of the symptoms of groupthink is the
  members persistence in conveying to each other
  the cliché and oversimplified images of political
  enemies embodied in long-standing ideological
  stereotypes (37).
• When a group of people who respect each others
  opinions arrive at a unanimous view, each member
  is likely to feel that the belief must be true.
  This reliance on consensual validation tends to
  replace individual critical thinking and
  reality-testing . . . (37).

75
A Narrative

• In 1972 the h/ss faculty was preponderantly
  Democratic. Heightened uniformity made the group
  over-confident. Facing less testing and
  challenge, the habits of thought became more
  foolhardy and close-minded. Distant from real
  intellectual critics, the professors latch on to
  stereotypes. As the quality of belief
  deteriorated, the group became more sensitive to
  tension. This led to tighter vetting and
  expulsion, more uniformity, more intellectual
  deterioration.

76

• The result is a professoriate lacking
  intellectual tension. Taking behavioral cues
  from one another, each faculty member gets
  intellectually lazy and slips into bad
  intellectual habits. Their stereotypes,
  superstitions, and taboos are often
  institutionalized as academic standards, and
  permit them to evade real intellectual challenge.

77

• The tenure vote cannot be put on trial. They can
  lynch a vocal anti-leftist Assistant Professor
  and get away with it. Anti-leftists know this
  and respond accordingly.

78

• Outsiders often think that the anti-left
  professor only needs to get tenure. But graduate
  school and pre-tenure employment is about 11
  years. You find you are no longer yourself.
• Your 20s and early 30s are a crucial period of
  development and cannot be reversed.

79

• Even after tenure, you depend on department
  colleagues for pay raises, resources, teaching
  assignments, scheduling, promotions, recognition,
  and consideration.
• Standing up for your ideas usually brings
  acrimony.
• Thus, even tenured anti-leftists shrink from
  criticizing the dominant ways of thinking.

80

• The more uncongenial academia becomes, the more
  anti-leftists sort themselves out.
• Anyone contemplating an academic career knows the
  score.
• Graduate students never encounter classical
  liberals.

81
Sham diversity

• Tumbling to uniformity, the faculty touts
  diversity.
• Regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual
  preferences, everyone equally may share the
  social democratic creed.

82
Deep Groupthink

• Subversion of the liberal lexicon
• Freedom
• Liberty
• Liberalism
• Justice
• Rights
• Law
• Rule of law
• Equity
• Equality
• Contract

83
Imagine the following dissertations

• F.D.R. prolonged the Great Depression
• American labor law hurts the poor
• Most recycling programs are a waste
• The school system in this country is a socialist
  failure
• Social justice makes no sense
• Organizational integrity varies positively with
  the voluntary basis of participation and funding

84
Enlightened Ideas Frozen Out

• Such dissertations will tend to be frozen out of
  the top journals and jobs.
• Editors and referees can resort to any manner of
  excuse, including that freedom, voluntary,
  etc. are illusory concepts.
• If necessary, they will revert to dogmas that
  obscure the coercive nature of government and the
  collective foolishness of democracy.

85
Deep Groupthink in Economics

• Model-mindedness annihilates two key features of
  real-world economic processes
• Diverse interpretation of the situation
• The open-ended concept of freedom
• Model-mindedness annihilates the crucial
  arguments for freedom based on discovery and
  entrepreneurship. The entrepreneur has been
  eradicated from mainstream economics.

86
Deep Groupthink in Sociology

• Code-words for governmentalization society,
  social, solidarity, community,
  cooperation.
• Code-words for freedom the market,
  competition, neo-liberalism.

87
What is to be done?

• By whom?
• By the groupthinkers themselves
• Correct thyself
• Be more classical liberal.

88
Janis

• If the members agree that loyalty to their
  group and its goals requires rigorous support of
  the groups primary commitment to open-minded
  scrutiny of new evidence and willingness to admit
  errors (as in a group committed to the ideals of
  scientific research), the usual psychological
  tendency to recommit themselves to their past
  decisions after a setback can give way to a
  careful reappraisal of the wisdom of their past
  judgments. The group norm in such a case inclines
  them to compare their policy with alternative
  courses of action and may lead them to reverse
  their earlier decisions (113).

89

• Hire more classical liberals
• How?
• Institutional models
• Affirmative-action Check an ideology box?
• Property rights within depts (Stephen Balch)
• Create new departments
• Create campus institutes

90
What is to be done?

• By classical liberal scholars
• Challenge Aim your quill at royalty
• Justify skepticism, independent thought, doubt
• Army of Davidsthe Internet
• Believe in the long-run benefits of awareness of
  groupthink pitfalls and biases
• Bargain Shake hands with the establishment
• Be willing to be a domesticated dissenter
  (Janis 115-116, 257)

91
What is to be done?

• By public officials, citizens, voters
• Reduce tax-payer support of academia.
• De-governmentalize.
• Make it so that professors have to persuade
  private parties to support them.

92
Recap

• We presuppose that classical liberalism is
  enlightened.
• The lack of classical liberalism among h/ss
  faculty has been interpreted as groupthink

93

• Although groupthink has traditionally been
  applied to small groups of policy makers, many of
  the differences are mitigated by the major
  groupthink mechanisms in academia.

94

• Micro decisions
• Majoritarian departmental politics
• tends to make each department ideologically
  uniform.

95

• Macro norms and values
• The professional pyramid
• Once an ideological type gains control over the
  apex, it makes the entire pyramid that way.

96

• Social democrats gained control of the elite
  departments, sweeping social democrats into
  nearly every job throughout the discipline.

97

• Majoritarian departmental politics and the
  professional pyramid resemble and lead to some of
  the groupthink tendencies found in small
  policy-making groups.