In the run up to the past US elections and during the immediate aftermath there was a lot of discussion about the narrow minded group-think of academics. Here are some recent additions to the growing body of commentary on the problem.

Timothy Burke:

Academics are not motivated to groupthink out of a loyalty to liberal causes, left-wing politics or registration in the Democratic Party, though in many disciplines at the moment, they may end up predominantly having those affiliations in a smug, uninterrogated manner. They’re motivated to groupthink by the institutional organization of academic life. The same forces that help academics to produce knowledge and scholarship are the forces which produce unwholesome close-mindedness and inbred self-satisfied attitudes. These forces would act on conservatives as well were we to magically remove the current professoriate and replace them with registered Republicans. They do act already on academics who operate in disciplines where certain kinds of political conservatism are more orthodox, or in institutional contexts, like religious universities, where conservative values are expressly connected to institutional missions.

Well, yes, but that's why the call is for diversity, it is assumed that lack of diversity breeds group think, cocooning, echo chambers and diminishes society.

Opinion Journal:

"My teacher came into class the day after the election proclaiming, 'That's it. This is the death of America.' The rest of the class was eager to agree, and twenty minutes of Bush-bashing ensued. At one point, one student asked our teacher whether she should be so vocal, lest any students be conservatives. She then asked us whether any of us were Republicans. Naturally, no one volunteered that information, whereupon our teacher turned to the inquisitive student and said, 'See? No one in here would be stupid enough to vote for Bush.' "

This was pretty universal on academic blogs but it's worrisome to hear that it goes on so blatantly in the classroom too. It's to be expected on blogs, understandable given the way academics whipped themselves into a bushating frenzy before the election, but it's deeply wrong, unprofessional, in the classroom.

The Economist:

“So what”, you might say, particularly if you happen to be an American liberal academic. Yet the current situation makes a mockery of the very legal opinion that underpins the diversity fad. In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell argued that diversity is vital to a university's educational mission, to promote the atmosphere of “speculation, experiment and creation” that is essential to their identities. The more diverse the body, the more robust the exchange of ideas. Why apply that argument so rigorously to, say, sexual orientation, where you have campus groups that proudly call themselves GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning), but ignore it when it comes to political beliefs?

This is profoundly unhealthy per se. Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies”. Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities' ability to influence the wider intellectual culture. In John Kennedy's day, there were so many profs in Washington that it was said the waters of the Charles flowed into the Potomac. These days, academia is marginalised in the capital—unless, of course, you count all the Straussian conservative intellectuals in think-tanks who left academia because they thought it was rigged against them.

In my view this is the real issue. By retreating to the tower and raising the drawbridge academics have cut themselves off from society. Their influence is limited to indoctrinating students, something that increasing numbers quietly reject though they stay in the closet until graduation, giving a new meaning to LUG: Liberal Until Graduation. Once they enter the real world they find that they are ill prepared, never learned critical thinking and have inaccurate views of social processes and norms. They're bright so they often adjust fairly quickly but they're immigrants from another society who have difficulty reading social cues like a native. Instead of preparing students to enrich society they damage students and depend on society to correct the problems.

Diversity isn't about the details of any particular orientation and can't usefully be advocated as a form of traditional interest group politics. It's about the health of society, something that academics ought to be keenly worried about, something that was once a core principle but has somehow been lost.