by Steven Yates by Steven Yates

Are university professors in some sense smarter or more intelligent than ordinary mortals, or just more likely to be locked into left-leaning political ideologies with all four claws? Perhaps we shouldn't ask one Robert Brandon, chair of the philosophy department at Duke University.

Brandon recently stepped into a hornets’ nest when expressing his opinion on a controversy created by a student group on the campus calling itself the Duke Conservative Union (DCU). The DCU had taken out an ad in a Duke student news publication, The Chronicle, documenting the relative absence of conservatives among Duke University faculty. The DCU conducted a survey of faculty voter registration and found that across the several Duke University academic departments there are eight registered Republicans as opposed to 142 registered Democrats. This isn't a whole lot of diversity of the political sort, and one suspects that were the numbers reversed, the howls of horror would be audible down here in Columbia. The group's methodology – relying on party affiliation – might strike some as suspect. Party affiliation isn't everything. After all, there are liberal Republicans, and I have met people describing themselves as Jeffersonian Democrats who are more conservative than I am. But I'll let this pass in order to get to the meat of this article.

Brandon's remarks – the product of a trained philosopher and chair of his department – are the sort that makes those of us associated with the subject cringe. Here is what Brandon initially said, in an interview published in The Chronicle: "We try to hire the best, smartest people available…. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican Party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this, too."

These remarks – immediately picked up and circulated around in the "bloggosphere" – prompted a storm of replies. A letter writer to The Chronicle accused Brandon of committing an illicit conversion in his John Stuart Mill reference. Illicit conversion is the formal fallacy of reasoning from a statement of the form "All p's are q's" to "All q's are p's." That the argument form is invalid is immediately seen by using what logicians call a substitution instance: reasoning from "All dogs are mammals" (true) to "All mammals are dogs" (false). Changing all to most or generally doesn't affect the invalidity of the inference.

Professor Brandon stated that "stupid people are generally conservative" when he either meant to say, "conservative people are generally stupid" or wanted us to infer this. On second thought, perhaps it isn't so clear whether he meant "generally all p's are q's" or "generally all q's are p's."

For there is at least one other way of analyzing Brandon's explanation of the lack of genuine diversity on his campus. Coming from the Fallacy Files blog for February 10 is the following:

  • All stupid people are conservatives.
  • No philosophy hires are stupid people.
  • Therefore no philosophy hires are conservatives.

This reconstructs Brandon's explanation in syllogistic form (a syllogism is an argument with exactly two premises and three terms). The argument is still fallacious; it distributes its major term (the predicate term of the conclusion) in the conclusion but not in the major premise. The technical term for this formal fallacy: illicit major. Readers: never mind if you're not an expert on logic and aren't quite sure what I'm up to with this talk of major terms, distribution, and so on. The point is: Brandon should have caught it. Presumably he's taught logic. The argument is invalid. Trust me.

The fallacy blog offered another possible syllogism, one that reflects the ambiguity between "generally all p's are q's" and "generally all q's are p's." Perhaps Brandon meant to imply:

  • All conservatives are stupid people.
  • No philosophy hires are stupid people.
  • Therefore no philosophy hires are conservatives.

This syllogism does not commit a formal fallacy. It is structurally valid. If you believe the premises you're rationally compelled to accept the conclusion. But validity, as logic teachers always point out, is a function of form or structure, not content. If one or more of the premises are false, the argument is still worthless in the "real world" where our arguments must not be merely valid but sound: possessing both valid structure and true premises. The major premise (the first one) in the second syllogism is almost certainly false (we'll see why in a minute). The minor premise (the second one) is also questionable (we'll see this below, too).

Brandon's use of John Stuart Mill as an authority also presents a problem of some magnitude. Mill wrote important works such as Utilitarianism and On Liberty. Both ought to be studied by anyone interested in grasping the full scope of modern political and moral philosophy. But should Mill, whose major works appeared some 150 years ago, be cited as an authority on conservatives today? After all, have not the meanings of the words liberal and conservative changed considerably during the intervening decades? In other words, when citing Mill's remark on conservatives, Brandon commits an additional fallacy, that of equivocation: using a term with multiple meanings in such a way as to ignore the fact, resulting in an ambiguity that misleads the reader. In fact, Mill's target was the 1860s British Conservative Party – which with its defense of workplace regulation and protectionism had more in common with today's liberals than today's conservatives. This suggests yet another fallacy in Brandon's remarks, what may be called misuse of authority. Misuse of authority, like most informal fallacies, has several variants. In this case it involves dropping the name of an out-of-date authority whose words can no longer speak to the issue because of major changes in the discussion (rather difficult to accommodate if the authority is dead).

As Eugene Volokh, professor in UCLA's school of law, observes dryly: "If some liberal professors (who are probably pretty far from 1860s Liberals) want to express their contempt for conservatives (who are probably pretty far from 1860s Conservatives), then it seems to me that they shouldn't call on John Stuart Mill to support their prejudices."

My source for Volokh's remarks notes further that another law professor, Jim Lindgren of Northwestern University, has done empirical research on conservatives and liberals in academia and in society. His research supports the thesis that, contrary to Brandon, conservative Republicans in the general public are actually, on average, better educated than liberal Democrats. Thus is refuted the major premise of the second syllogism above. (Volokh has some additional remarks that are a bit too technical for this article; anyone so inclined can read them here.)

Professor Brandon commits at least one more fallacy, that of false analogy. An analogy is a comparison. Arguing by analogy means arguing that because two items (or classes of items) are similar in a given set of known respects, they are also similar in some additional respect. Brandon's analogy compares the greater height of basketball players in the NBA to the greater intelligence of professors in academia: "There is a good reason for this," he says of each. Implication again: there are more liberals than conservatives in academia simply because liberals are generally smarter than conservatives, in a manner akin to there being more tall people than people of average height in professional basketball. As we've seen, however, this is probably just factually wrong.

What has gone wrong? Height, of course, is quantifiable. You can see it. You can't really see intelligence. You can only measure its effects, and then only imperfectly at best. A debate has raged for decades over whether intelligence is measurable or quantifiable at all. Surely it is not measurable and quantifiable in the same way as height and other qualities found in basketball stars. There are, moreover, many different things the word intelligence can mean, as Brandon must know. Some of them might make one a good professor; others not. Putting this another way, a professor may be exceedingly smart in some area of academic specialization. It doesn't follow that he understands politics, or economics, or any of the many other factors operating outside the walls of academia. Universities being fundamentally socialist institutions with policies such as tenure and shared governance that don't exist outside the walls of academia doesn't help matters any.

In a later guest editorial, Brandon tries to backpedal – following what he called "two days of venomous, hate-filled emails from self-described conservatives." Unfortunately, Brandon only digs himself in deeper.

Begin with that first sentence. Probably some of Brandon's email was nasty. A lot of conservatives, after all, are sick and tired of being dumped on by arrogant academics. But surely we've all noticed it: say something politically incorrect in a context where such academics are likely to run across it (it has happened to me with past LewRockwell.com articles), and you yourself receive emails accusing you of "hate speech" or "racism" or some such. I typically respond to such writers by asking them to point out the specific sentence or paragraph containing the "hate," or to produce for me their definition of racism. I almost never hear from them again.

Brandon contends that by quoting John Stuart Mill he was attempting to be "quite funny." He adds, "I now see that humor is not much appreciated in this context." I have to think of the now-countless cases of politically incorrect jokes or asides that were also attempts at humor but nearly ruined their authors' careers. Radical feminists in particular seem utterly devoid of anything remotely approaching a sense of humor. Apparently, academic leftists may use humor when ridiculing those they consider conservative; but not the reverse. Such double standards are astounding in their very brazenness.

Brandon maintains that in many courses, professors' political views are not relevant to course content. I'm sure this is true enough in some contexts. I doubt I would care if I took a computer science course and found out that the professor was a socialist – not that this is likely; most computer scientists have better sense than that. The problem, of course, is with what goes on in the classroom in subjects like philosophy. The best professors, I believe, will reward the best papers regardless of their agreement or disagreement with the students' conclusions. Brandon contends that this is the general rule. However, complaints by students contending that they have received a lower grade because they defended a conservative or libertarian point of view to a socialist professor in these cases are legion. I haven't tried to quantify or tabulate the number or prevalence of such cases for the purposes of this article, so I won't place a whole lot of weight on them here. Brandon's most striking assumption is that academics are fundamentally smarter than nonacademics, and that there is some kind of correlation – even a causal connection – between this greater intelligence and left-leaning points of view. Here is what he says: "The serious and interesting issue is how do we explain the surplus of liberals in academia…. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the only viable hypothesis … is something like the following: There is a statistical association between the qualities that make for good academics and those that lead to left-leaning political views. Said another way, a larger proportion of academics tend to be liberal, but certainly not all, and this may also vary by field and subfield because of the nature of knowledge, learning and the advancement of knowledge in that field. But, stated this way the hypothesis still remains incredibly vague. What qualities, what traits are we talking about? What causal relations underlie these statistical associations? These questions are worth exploring, but I think the hypothesis is right headed."

Did you get all that? I'm not altogether sure at this point what Professor Brandon means by "good academics." I'll concentrate on philosophy departments, since I know them best. I spent a few years (eight, to be exact, not counting graduate school), in and out of four different philosophy departments, and had sufficient contact with people in quite a few others to gain a good feel for what went on in them.

In the cases I knew about, one or at most two people carried the department. During the years I spent at Auburn University, for example, the two were Tibor R. Machan and the late Robert V. Andelson. Everyone reading this knows Professor Machan's voluminous writings on various aspects of libertarian political and moral philosophy. Professor Andelson, who sadly passed away last November, conducted extensive research keeping alive the ideas of the economist-philosopher Henry George, writing or editing books on Georgist thought. No one was more qualified to expound, develop or apply George's ideas than Professor Andelson, and I felt privileged to have sat in on his lectures and assisted on one occasion with the production of manuscript material for the just-published revised edition of his anthology Critics of Henry George.

I once attended a presentation by one of the other professors in that department, however. His topic was supposed to have been something in aesthetics (the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty – in art, music, architecture, sculpture, and so forth). What I heard was a stammering morass of confusion with no discernable thesis or direction. I felt sorry for the guy, who was clearly in over his head. So upon catching his use of the phrase metaphysics of feeling at one point it dawned on me: a philosopher named Quentin Smith had written a book entitled The Felt Meanings of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling, which one reviewer had described as "the most significant work of phenomenology ever written by an American." I seized on this and asked the professor if what he was saying tied in, in any way, with Quentin Smith's ideas.

He didn't know what ideas I was talking about, for he hadn't heard of either Quentin Smith or the book. So much for my attempt at charity.

These others were not necessarily better teachers than scholars. Another senior professor gave the exact same tests, semester after semester, and lectured from yellowed notes that had not been revised during a period as long as two decades.

In another department, I once sat and listened for close to two hours while a visiting speaker, a radical feminist, developed what was clearly (to me, at least) an application of Marxism to the theory of knowledge in science – "women's distinctive ways of knowing" rooted in all that oppression women have experienced under capitalism.

Were these cases atypical – the product of what you can expect down here in the Southern boonies? I don't know, but I've no evidence that philosophy professors in other parts of the country are exactly setting the world afire. Marxism remains very much alive in the American academy (where it constitutes the major intellectual influence in departments of "women's studies" and similar nests of political correctness). It is deader than a doornail everywhere else except places like Cuba and North Korea, brutal bastions of totalitarianism. Marxism has proven to be the most destructive worldview in history. We may never have an accurate body count. Scholars from David Gordon to N. Scott Arnold among others have devastatingly criticized various aspects of Marxist philosophy and economics. Since many philosophy departments continue to contain (and sometimes hire) Marxists, this throws cold water on that minor premise above that no philosophy hires are stupid.

Thus there is simply no reason to believe Professor Brandon's assumption that academics are smarter than ordinary nonacademic mortals, or that there is some correlation between smarts and left-leaning political views. Many nonacademics, through the kind of creative productive work that seems to me indicative of high intelligence, have contributed far more to American society. One need only think of Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft), Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle), Michael Dell (founder of Dell), among numerous other high-technology entrepreneurs. None of these three even have college or university degrees, much less university faculty appointments. What they did have were ideas that could be transformed into products that greatly improved people's lives and the efficiency of their work. All became billionaires as a result.

Academic Marxists, of course, see such men as part of the inherently unjust, exploitative, impoverishing capitalist system; how fair is it, they will ask, that Gates be worth billions while the average humanities professor must scrape by on (perhaps) $50,000 a year? Whenever a professional intellectual asks a question like this, he shows his ignorance of economics and further confounds the opinions of the Robert Brandons of the world that professors are more intelligent than ordinary mortals.

Be all this as it may, it has been a long time since a professional philosopher made a contribution to that field on a par with Gates's development of the Windows operating system and all that has come along with that, or Ellison's development of Oracle. I had never heard of Robert Brandon prior to the DCU flap at Duke. A Google search on his name brought up the two items in Duke's The Chronicle I used to research this article, the professor's home page, and a select handful of other items. In fairness to him, I learned that he has published a couple of books on philosophy and evolutionary biology with the names Adaptation and Environment and Concepts and Methods in Evolutionary Biology; he also has a few articles in academic journals such as Philosophy of Science. This places him a cut above the unnamed professors I discussed earlier. However, to the best of my knowledge neither of Brandon's books has had the wide-ranging and potential worldview-altering impact of a provocative work on the subject of evolution such as Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box. But again, in fairness, one may assume that upsetting the academic apple cart the way Behe has done is not part of Professor Brandon's personal agenda. Such things are not for everybody. In any event, I seriously doubt that the lapses of logic found in his explanation of the lack of intellectual diversity on the Duke University faculty occur in his serious work. But then the onus is on faculty members – especially those in positions of influence such as departmental chairs or who open their mouths and make themselves visible on their campuses – to apply the same standards of rigor to their political statements that they do to their intended contributions to their disciplines.

I cannot help but think that if they did, their commitment to various forms of left-leaning politics would waver and then collapse.

February 21, 2004