Is Harvard's Government Department Really Weaker Today Because of the Absence of Analogues to Ned Banfield, James Wilson, Samuel Huntington, & Harvey Mansfield?
Steve Teles’s pleas for help in fighting “academic sectarianism” seem convincing to me in abstract, but unconvincing to me when we get down to empirical cases of really-existing conservatives past & present…
Steve Teles has nice a piece about the overliberalization of the American academy. But it seems to me that is all about the vibes. I want to believe that he is onto something—I certainly think that the American academy would be stronger, in the humanities and social sciences, if it had more diversity of intellectual style and approach.
But I find myself at the sticking point when I am told that what it needs is more conservatives. In large part because I am not at all sure what a conservative is these days. Is it a willingness to support and excuse the misdeeds of kleptocrats and plutocrats? Is it a willingness to be accomodating tho those who believe that the King James Bible is inerrant? It is is, it is not clear to me why more of them around would be especially valuable. I mean, it seems to me that plutocrats, kleptocrats, and believers that the King James Bible is inerrant already have more than their proper share of social power in America. Do we really need for them to have more?
And if that is not conservativism today, what is conservativism today?
Steve:
Steve Teles: Beyond Academic Sectarianism: ‘If conservatives’ disadvantaged position in academia is not mostly the result of direct discrimination, what explains their scarcity?… [The mere] perception of discrimination can have significant systemic effects…. Academic institutions… would be wise to send visible, credible signals that they are not discriminating…. The belief that the social sciences and humanities are profoundly discriminatory has become a feature of conservative identity…. There are real costs to encouraging young people to believe [that]…. Conservatives… find the culture of universities… forcing them to endure discomforts or even offenses… [and] have many alternative opportunities….
In my discipline, to take one example, conservative scholars James Q. Wilson, Edward Banfield, Harvey Mansfield, and Samuel Huntington were all part of Harvard’s government department in 1975…. Liberal institutionalists… believe… [in] subjecting society’s orthodoxies to empirical and theoretical scrutiny… commitment to merit… co-exist[ing] with pluralism…. Liberal-institutionalist faculty members should be explicit in arguing that moderates and conservatives would enrich their intellectual communities… <https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/beyond-academic-sectarianism>
One thing to grab onto here in an attempt to think about this is that here we have four names.
And that leads to an empirical question: To what extent were Wilson, Banfield, Mansfield, and Huntington assets to the Harvard University Government Department in 1975, really? What was their VAR—their value above replacement—back then, three years before I arrived in Cambridge as an eighteen-year-old undergraduate? How was Government Department thought better because they, rather than less-conservative alternatives, were in their seats?
I never ran into Wilson or Banfield in my years at Harvard.
So let me give the mic to the right-wing Glenn Loury, who did:
Glenn Loury (2012): ‘[There was] a particular moment in American history… [when] the postwar liberal belief in the possibility of a progressive resolution to the “urban problem” crash upon the rocky shoals of the riot-torn, welfare-fed, criminal, and black 1960s metropolis. While the left did not distinguish itself in those years, neither did… what the nascent neoconservative thinkers had to sa[, which] was pretty appalling. Banfield’s classic lament of the failures of 1960s urban policy, The Unheavenly City, looks an awful lot like reactionary drivel. (His argument that persistent poverty is due to the bad values and character of the poor—first set out in his book about Italy, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society—might have made sense for Sicily, but did not travel well to the South Bronx)… <https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/glenn-loury-much-to-answer-for/>
And:
Glenn Loury (2012): ‘[Wilson’s] 1975 book Thinking About Crime provides academic justification for a massive increase in imprisonment in the United States that began in the late 1970s and has yet fully to run its course…. I liked Jim Wilson, the man… urbane, witty, and generous… unfailingly open to hearing both sides…. [But] I slowly came to the view—which I continue to hold—that some of Wilson’s labors have done enormous damage to the quality of American democracy. His rationalizing and legitimating of over-reliance on incarceration in U.S. social policy have been particularly destructive. It frustrates me that even as mounting evidence over the past decade showed that crime control had become too punitive, Wilson stubbornly reiterated the views that he had developed four decades ago….
Call me unforgiving, but I can still remember sitting at Jim and Roberta Wilson’s dinner table in Malibu, California in January 1993 listening to [Charles] Murray explain, much to my consternation and with Jim’s silent acquiescence, that social inequality is inevitable because “dull” parents are simply less effective at child-rearing than “bright” ones. (I rejected then, and still do, Murray and Herrnstein’s claim that profound social disparities are due mainly to variation in innate individual traits that cannot be remedied via social policy.) Neither can Glenn Loury in 2012 ignore what he failed to see in 1983: that Wilson and Herrnstein’s Crime and Human Nature… is an enterprise of dubious scientific value. The behavioral theories of social control that Wilson spawned—see, for instance, his 1983 Atlantic Monthly piece, “Raising Kids” (not unlike training pets, as it happens)—and the pop–social psychology salesmanship of his and George Kelling’s so-called “theory” about broken windows is a long way from rocket science, or even good social science. This work looks more like narrative in the service of rationalizing and justifying hierarchy, subordination, coercion, and control. In short, it smacks of highbrow, reactionary journalism.
But, unlike most tabloid scribblers, Wilson’s writings had a massive effect…. I can’t help but think about the millions of folks being hassled even as we speak by coercive state agents who are acting on some Wilsonian theory recommending stop-and-frisk policing.
Neither can I overlook the reinforcement of subliminal racial stigmata associated with the institutions of confinement, surveillance, and patrol that Americans have embraced over the past two generations under the watchful and approving gaze of Professor Wilson.
I don’t think Jim Wilson had a racist bone in his body…. Was Jim Wilson fair-minded and decent? Yes. Did he run a good meeting? Was he an effective academic entrepreneur? Yes to both. Was he often a penetrating observer of and always a prolific writer on American politics? To be sure. Was he right about the direction that incarceration needed to go in 1970? Perhaps. Did liberals underestimate the fierce political backlash from the disgruntled ethnic working classes circa 1975, as Wilson strongly argued? Yes, they did. Wilson was not wrong about everything.
But is his 1997 book The Moral Sense—which cites human nature to make a case against moral relativism, and which Wilson thought his most important publication—a work for the ages? I doubt it seriously. Is Thinking About Crime up there in the pantheon of American social criticism along with Silent Spring, The Other America, The Feminine Mystique, or The Fire Next Time? Not hardly…. A cloistered moral sanctimony (“Tobacco shortens one’s life; cocaine debases it”) coupled with an enthusiasm for police work (“prison in America . . . helps explain why this country has a lower rate of burglary than Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, and the Netherlands”): that’s another way to think about the legacy of James Q. Wilson. Unkind to be sure, but not inaccurate…. For my money, he died with an awful lot to answer for… <https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/glenn-loury-much-to-answer-for/>
I really do not see the VAR here. Glenn Loury certainly doesn’t.
I did run into Samuel P. Huntington when I was an undergraduate, graduate student, assistant professor, and associate professor at Harvard.
I was not impressed.
But this time I am going to give the mic to him:
Samuel P. Huntington: The Hispanic Challenge: ‘“In Miami there is no pressure to be American”, one Cuban-born sociologist observed. “People can make a living perfectly well in an enclave that speaks Spanish”. By 1999, the heads of Miami’s largest bank, largest real estate development company, and largest law firm were all Cuban-born or of Cuban descent. The Cubans also established their dominance in politics. By 1999, the mayor of Miami and the mayor, police chief, and state attorney of Miami- Dade County, plus two thirds of Miami’s U.S. Congressional delegation and nearly one half of its state legislators, were of Cuban origin. In the wake of the Eliain Gonzalez affair in 2000, the non-Hispanic city manager and police chief in Miami City were replaced by Cubans.
The Cuban and Hispanic dominance of Miami left Anglos (as well as blacks) as outside minorities that could often be ignored. Unable to communicate with government bureaucrats and discriminated against by store clerks, the Anglos came to realize, as one of them put it, “My God, this is what it’s like to be the minority.” The Anglos had three choices. They could accept their subordinate and outsider position. They could attempt to adopt the manners, customs, and language of the Hispanics and assimilate into the Hispanic community-” acculturation in reverse,” as the scholars Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick labeled it. Or they could leave Miami, and between 1983 and 1993, about 140,000 did just that, their exodus reflected in a popular bumper sticker: “Will the last American to leave Miami, please bring the flag”….
There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English… <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/pdf/4147547>
The claim that the Cuban-Americans of Miami were not assimilating to America was always and is false. The claims that what they were unpatriotically— “Will the last American to leave Miami, please bring the flag”—destroying Anglo Miami, and that above all what they really needed to do was to stop speaking so much Spanish, stop naming their children José, and start eating potroast and Yorkshire pudding—those were always ridiculously blinkered.
I really do not see the VAR here either…
As for Harvey Mansfield, four things come to mind:
His remark to a visiting professor from one of the Maine liberal arts colleges—a guy who had the habit of leaving his door open in Harvard’s Government Department: “You should shut your door. If you do not, undergraduates might come in”, Harvey said.
Mansfield’s many-times repeated claims that grade inflation at Harvard was due to the admission of the Blacks: “Grade inflation coincided with the arrival of large numbers of black students on campus; many white professors were unwilling to give Cs to black students, so they also wouldn’t give Cs to white students. A C used to be the grade for an average performance. Nowadays, it’s a slap in the face…” He was often corrected by people pointing out that 32% of Harvard undergraduates graduated with honors in 1946, 41% in 1954, and 62% in 1964—when three were only 13 blacks in the then-1200 person graduating class. He was often corrected. He never stopped saying it.
His claim in 2007 that the American president is an extra-legal office: “a strong executive… not confined to executing the laws but has extra-legal powers such as commanding the military, making treaties (and carrying on foreign policy), and pardoning the convicted, not to mention a veto of legislation. To confirm the extra-legal character of the presidency, the Constitution [Art. I §1] has him take an oath not to execute the laws but to execute the office of president, which is larger. Thus it is wrong to accuse President Bush of acting illegally in the surveillance of possible enemies, as if that were a crime and legality is all that matters. This is simplistic, small-r republican thinking of the kind that our Constitution surpassed when it constructed a strong executive…. In the Constitution executive power represents necessity in the form of response to emergencies…”
And yet he stops his reading before he gets to Art. I §3: “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed…”
His argument is thus, basically, bullshit. And he does not even have the guts to quote the parts of the Constitution that undermine his claim that the Constitution provides authorization for presidents to break the law when they feel it is necessary to do so… <https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/harvey-mansfield-the-law-and-the-president-in-a-na>To my mind, (3) is a special case of Mansfield’s Straussian Bullshit—that one would read a text not by attempting to grok it in order to understand what the author was trying to say, but rather to slice it up into snippets and consider them one at a time in such a way as to pretend that the author is really saying what Mansfield wanted the author to say, which was always what previous-generation political philosopher Leo Strauss had wanted the author to say. I saw a number of political philosophy graduate students follow Mansfield’s siren song down this Straussian rabbit hole and never come out. To my mind this was worse than what was happening at the same time to Rhetoric students with Derrida. Strauss, you see, said explicitly that his principles were “fascist, authoritarian, imperial”, and I see no reason not to take him at his word—Strauss was one of the people for whom only the fact that they were Jewish kept them from being as full-throated an explicit Nazi as was Heidegger. Thus Mansfield seemed to me as bad for his graduate students as his Sociology Department peers who were, at the same time, pushing Althusser on their students.
Again, I really do not see the VAR there…
Judith Shklar had some observations on the Harvard Government Department of Mansfield and his ilk:
The effects of McCarthyism were less crude and immediate than subtle and latent…. Young scholars boasted of not being intellectuals. Among many no conversation was tolerated except sports and snobbish gossip. A kind of unappetizing dirty socks and locker room humor and false and ostentatious masculinity were vaunted…. So many people who should have known better, scorned the poor, the bookish, the unconventional, the brainy, the people who did not resemble the crass and outlandish model of a real American upper-crust he-man whom they had conjured up in their imagination. For any woman of any degree of refinement or intellectuality, this was unappealing company…. The place had too many closet Jews and closet gays and provincials who were obsessed with their inferiority to the “real thing,” which was some mythical Harvard aristocracy, invented to no good purpose whatever. What was so appalling was that all of this was so unnecessary, so out of keeping with America’s public philosophy.
It was also a bizarre refusal to think through the real meaning of the Second World War. In some ways I found Harvard conversations unreal… determined to immunize the young against fascism and its temptations so that “it” would never happen again. There was to be a reinforcement of The Western Tradition, and it was to be presented in such a way as to show up fascism as an aberration, never to be repeated. I would guess that in the pre-war Depression years some… may have been tempted by attitudes that eventually coalesced into fascism, and now recoiled at what they knew it had wrought. They wanted a different past, a “good” West, a “real” West, not the actual one that had marched into the First World War and onward. They wanted a past fit for a better denouement. I found most of this unconvincing….
What was it like to be woman at Harvard at the time I came there?… There were teachers and later publishers who went out of their way to help me… as a matter of fairness… often the sons of the old suffragettes and the remnants of the Progressive Era. I liked them and admired them, though they were a pretty battered and beaten lot…. Still they gave me a glimpse of American liberalism at its best…. Nevertheless, all was not well. I had hardly arrived when the wife of one of my teachers asked me bluntly why I wanted to go to graduate school, when I should be promoting my husband’s career and having babies…. I more or less drifted into a university career…. The crunch came predictably when the matter of tenure finally came up. My department could not bring itself to say either yes or no… this cat and mouse game…. That was more humiliation than I could bear, so I went to the dean and asked him if I could have a halftime appointment with effective tenure and lecturer’s title. It was not exactly what I wanted, but it was what I decided to arrange for myself…. Do I think my colleagues behaved well?… I will answer the question indirectly…. I have never thought of myself, then or now, as less competent than the other members of my department…. Do I think that matters have improved since then? In some ways I am sure that they have…. The atmosphere for women is, however, far from ideal… <https://www3.nd.edu/~pweithma/Shklar/Haskins%20Lecture.pdf>
So I have a question for Steve Teles: Would there be an advantage to having a Banfield, a Wilson, a Huntington, a Mansfield around today—other than the Millian one of providing a target dummy to use to practice our archery skills? Yes, intellectual diversity is excellent to have. Yes, groupthink is bad. But would having more modern-day analogues to Banfield, Wilson, Huntington, Mansfield around do anything other than wind up reinforcing today’s left-wing orthodoxy, given the very real weakness of the arguments they would make?
So I want a follow-up piece from Steve Teles. I will put to one side the fact that Glenn Loury’s (and my) judgments of these guys’ value as intellects as very low. Erasing the negative, what positive contributions did they make, and what positive contributions would their analogues in prominent positions make today?