Claremont Professors Find Lack of Ideological Diversity in University Syllabi

Higher education through one-sided narratives has created "closed classrooms."

Credit: Wikipedia

Professors Jon Shields (CMC), Yuval Avnur (Scripps), and Stephanie Muravchik (CMC) have recently released a working paper analyzing diversity of thought in American college syllabi. The research team examined how three controversial issues—bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion—were taught in classrooms, with an eye to whether these issues were presented as scholarly debates between good-faith opponents.  

With op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Monthly, alongside coverage from Ross Douthat in The New York Times and Emma Pettit in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the researchers have garnered attention for their study’s bleak results: education through one-sided narratives has created “closed classrooms.”

Methodology

Through the “Open Syllabus Project” (OSP) database, the researchers had access to 27 million syllabi scraped from university websites dating back to 2008. “The surprising thing about the database is how little it’s been used,” Professor Shields noted in an interview with The Forum. With features tracking how often specific texts are assigned and paired with those expressing opposing views, the team could use this tool in an innovative way—to examine if syllabi fairly assigned both canonical texts and their criticisms.    

The three focus topics were selected for their disciplinary breadth—criminal justice draws on  sociology and law, Israel-Palestine on political science and history, and abortion on philosophy. These issues have also been omnipresent during the research team’s teaching tenure. Criminal justice and the Israel-Palestine conflict have been the two most polarizing campus issues for the past decade, Shields observed, whereas abortion is the most enduring issue in the broader American culture wars. 

The next step was determining the canonical texts of each debate, with decisions made based on citation counts and the researchers’ own familiarity with the scholarship. The researchers chose Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (19,000 citations) on criminal justice, Edward Said’s Orientalism (90,000 citations) on Israel-Palestine, and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” (3,000 citations) on abortion.

All of these authors have provoked pushback, with their critics raising subtle complications and, other times, offering full-throated rejections. The question remains whether these critics are being taught and, if so, at what frequency. 

Findings

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow—assigned 4,309 times in classrooms since 2012—argues that though formal racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Movement, the carceral system has replaced the old Jim Crow. Critics like James Forman Jr., John Pfaff, and Michael Fortner argue that Alexander fails to consider favorable Black attitudes to incarceration and overemphasizes the role of drug convictions in prison growth.     

Of all the opposing texts co-assigned with The New Jim Crow, Forman’s essay “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration” was the most common. However, Forman was assigned only 149 times in the 4,309 syllabi that include Alexander. Simply put, only three percent of students reading The New Jim Crow have also read its top critic. Instead, they read texts that reaffirm Alexander’s thesis; the texts most frequently co-assigned with The New Jim Crow are Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.  

Syllabi that include Orientalism indicate a similar trend. Orientalism—cited 90,000 times and assigned in 16,000 courses—is more popular in classrooms than any “great book” of the Western canon. Author Edward Said, in discussing the ways Western experts (“Orientalists”) misrepresent the East, argues that Israel’s sovereignty can only be justified by embracing a xenophobic Western ideology. 

Said’s foremost critic is Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations (cited 50,000 times and assigned in 9,000 courses). Huntington argues that Islam presents a dangerous threat to Western ideology. Said has called Huntington’s argument “a gimmick.” 

Yet students are not made familiar with the heated debate between the two scholars. Huntington is only assigned in 758 of the courses that assign Said—less than five percent of the time. Orientalism’s more commonly co-assigned texts are other works of critical theory, such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. 

In a surprising turn, and to the credit of professors assigning Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion,” the most commonly co-assigned text is Don Marquis’s essay, “Why Abortion is Immoral.” In fact, works expressing pro-life positions are assigned with Thomson more than a third of the time. 

The researchers note that the department primarily responsible for teaching Thomas—philosophy, which accounts for 90 percent of the occurrences of Thomson’s work across syllabi—may play a role in fostering this openness. Philosophy is a “discipline whose pedagogical aims explicitly include exposing students to competing arguments,” the researchers state. 

However, during our interview, Professor Shields was cautious to read too much into disciplinary differences. Though philosophy professors assigned Thomson with her critics more often than their non-philosophy colleagues assigned critics for their materials, such professors were in the minority. The “norm was not to assign her with her critics,” Shields observes, remaining uncertain whether other questions in philosophy would be presented any fairer. 

Interestingly, when critics are assigned in syllabi regarding all three topics, the most commonly co-assigned materials are the mainstream canon. For instance, professors who assigned Forman assigned The New Jim Crow 82 percent of the time. And even if Alexander was not taught with her critics, the research team found that similar—sometimes even more radical voices—were often assigned in place of The New Jim Crow. 

Reflections 

Since the paper’s release, critics have questioned whether “closed classrooms” are the norm. Shields says that many higher-education courses are uncontroversial in their subject matters, and often taught without issue. But the measure of a liberal institution is not how it teaches inoffensive issues, but how it prepares its students to grapple with the deeply polarizing ones.  

By no means should academics avoid teaching certain fashionable thinkers, Shields added. “The academy has always been…faddish and taken with certain intellectuals.” The concern lies in whether they are presented in conversation with critics or presented as infallible. 

There are also pragmatic benefits to liberalizing these classrooms—even if such “controversial” courses are in the minority. Increasing the rigor of debates in the humanities and social sciences might curb the drift towards STEM. Doing so might also help universities avoid future federal attacks. By presenting more well-rounded syllabi, academics can change the perception that “we’re trying to push a particular political project onto the public,” Shield says.

On a final note, when asked how he’d motivate professors to open their classrooms, Shields replied: “it’s more fun.” Presenting these debates certainly makes the world more “complicated and tragic” for these students, but also gives them the sense that something is at stake. They gain the confidence needed to become thoughtful citizens, recognizing the import of these weighty questions. 

“We must invite students into the drama of truth-seeking.”