Conservatives in the ivory tower

With university budgets being cut around the country, colleges will increasingly be looking to private philanthropy to make up the difference. So it is worth examining the Koch gift and its implications. (Full disclosure: I participated in a Koch summer fellowship 15 years ago.)

The primary reason that conservative and libertarian foundations give money to universities is to promote intellectual diversity on campus. In the last election, college professors donated eight times as much money to Barack Obama as to John McCain. But it’s not only politics. Whether it’s the view of religion by social scientists or the view of string theory by physicists, university departments do not usually tolerate disagreement. Numerous studies show that the structure of the university is one that promotes uniformity.

Researchers Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University found that university faculties have “tendencies… toward concurrence-seeking, self-validation, and exclusion of challenges to core beliefs.’’ The first factor, say Klein and Stern, is “departmental majoritarianism,’’ the notion that academic departments make most of the personnel decisions by vote and that only rarely does an outsider override them. This system is the natural result of the narrow specialties of most academics, whose merit can allegedly be judged only by others in their field. Academic department members tend to seek out and attract people who are most like them.

In order to break out of this cycle of cloning themselves, some outside input is necessary, but the tenure system rarely lets that happen. Faculty effectively run most universities and they view administrators, donors, and even parents with great suspicion.