Wednesday, April 06, 2005

A Kibbutz Hooked up to an ATM

I should have my head examined for getting into this discussion, but I suppose New York Times columnists are supposed to be provocative. In his column yesterday, Paul Krugman discusses why "registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities."

I am a self-proclaimed conservative and I think Dartmouth qualifes under a description of "elite university," so I figure I should chime in here. I'll start by stating as clearly as I can why I chose this profession. First, I enjoy doing research. I have quite a lot of autonomy in what I work on. My work is evaluated by a profession of competent and thoughtful people. And I get to discover new things. Second, I love to teach. From the time I was tutoring my classmates in secondary school, I felt that I had a calling to be a teacher. (See this early post for more.) I presume that these two reasons, or similar ones, explain why most of my colleagues chose this profession, be they liberal or conservative. For the record, I made this decision when I was 18 years old.

I am friends with many liberal professors. At least in the economics department at Dartmouth, I have never in 11 years heard of a single instance where any professor made his or her political viewpoints central to the classroom experience. I've talked to many of my students, liberal and conservative, about the good and bad aspects of my time in Washington during office hours. That's not politics--that's just being a mentor. Before some classes, when there is a topical news story on campus or in the world, my students and I may exchange ideas about it. None of that matters for the class per se--once the group is assembled and ready to go, it's all about the economics. I would consider it a breach of my professional duties to put my own political views into the courses I am teaching. I presume the same is true of my colleagues in the economics department, be they liberal or conservative.

I have been involved in a decade's worth of hiring and promotion decisions. Never at any time has a person's politics come into play in any deliberations. My own experience suggests no evidence of a "left-wing bias" in the way my department is constituted.

I agree with the general terms that Krugman uses to frame his explanation:

The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.
But I do not buy into the remainder of his argument, which can be loosely paraphrased as not enough conservatives believe in the virtue of scholarship to get enough of them to be interested in the academy. Rather, I think the explanation for why liberals outnumber conservatives is that they actively like the way the academy is organized.

An elite university is like a kibbutz hooked up to an ATM. It is the closest thing we may ever find to a socialist enterprise that endures. The key element of the kibbutz--that the workers collectively decide on the activities of the entity--is hardwired into the university via faculty governance. (The departure from the ideal--that some workers are "more equal" than others--is also evident, in that it is faculty, not employee, governance.) The notion that this is a sensible way to organize one's professional life is bound to resonate more with people who have a soft spot for socialist, utopian ideals. In my opinion, that you find more liberals than conservatives in the modern elite university is largely (though not exclusively) a reflection of liberals rather than conservatives feeling at home in such an environment.

Under normal circumstances, we would expect such an enterprise to implode, because some members of the collective are more productive than others, and they eventually get tired of subsidizing the lifestyles of the less productive members of the collective. So what keeps the elite university alive?

It's the ATM--alumni generosity. With outside money, even those who cross-subsidize the rest can feel like they are being adequately rewarded. A place like Dartmouth survives because in good times and in bad, alumni and other benefactors provide it with external resources to make the numbers add up. The federal government provides an assist by making those contributions tax-deductible. At public universities, it is the generosity of the state taxpayers via the state legislature. Take away that ATM, and I wager that a lot of the perks that make the quasi-socialist utopian enterprise so interesting to those who are left-of-center would disappear. Universities would have to conduct their daily operations more overtly like a business, and we would find a more balanced mix of people trying to get jobs there.

I think that there has been too much emphasis in this debate on pernicious explanations. Krugman makes thinly veiled accusations from the left that conservatives have no respect for scholarship, and the David Horowitz crowd makes equally absurd accusations from the right of a left-wing conspiracy. Have I proven that both are wrong? No. I have just offered a much more benign explanation. I don't claim that it is the only explanation. I do believe it is an order of magnitude more relevant than these two extreme arguments.

So perhaps the last question to ask is: would universities be better off by operating more like a conventional business and less like the kibbutz hooked up to an ATM? I think the answer is "no" (or not really), precisely because the money flowing from the ATM is voluntary and not coerced. The benefactors of universities seem to believe in the mission, the personnel, and the institutions to continue to support them, despite their flaws. And there is a tremendous amount of goodwill on both sides of that relationship.

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8 comments:

Unknown said...

I’m not sure I completely understand why there are so many liberals in universities. I have hypotheses as well, but that is not the point of this comment.

I want to echo what is being said. Here’s a comment I posted regarding a disclaimer on my site:


…In my classes, as well as here, I do my best to be fair and respectful of all points of view. I also do my best to leave my politics outside the classroom, and to the extent that my politics are evident when I teach, I try and make the distinction between my opinion and positive economic analysis very clear so that my opinions carry no special weight.

Because I feel free to express my opinions here (in the blog), unlike in my formal and professional role at school and in other settings, I wanted to distinguish between the two roles and note that this site is a mixture of personal opinion, professional analysis, and other thoughts.

The disclaimer is mainly for any of my students who might view this site so that they realize this is both opinion and analysis and is different than the classroom, and to assure colleagues that I know the difference between positive and normative analysis….


Also, from a letter to the editor of mine way back in December on this topic:


…My department hires the best possible teachers and researchers. Politics plays no role whatsoever in our Ph.D. admission or hiring decisions. The vast majority of us are professionals who would never let personal politics interfere with our academic conclusions….


All we care about is scholarship. My department’s reputation is enhanced, and as an externality, so is mine, by having the best possible colleagues and graduate students. It also enhances my own productivity to have the best researchers available to consult. There’s no room for politics in scholarly research. I don’t care what the politics of the person are doing the research, only that it is the highest possible quality.

I don’t recall a single instance in the 18 years I’ve been involved in admissions and hiring, including five as Department Head, where politics ever came up. Not a single instance.

We are a small department and know each other fairly well. Of the approximately fifteen faculty (part-timers, etc. lead to fractions), I would not be sure how at least a third of them voted in the last election. You may have noticed I don’t shy away from politics, but I honestly don’t know how they voted and have never asked.

That's enough I guess. Apologies for taking more than my share of the comment space.

Fat Man said...

I don't know if your sociology is correct or not. I do know that the whole system is not delivering good value. But I would be willing to run an experiment. Pull the plug on the ATM. Repeal the tax exemptions. Stop the subsidies. See what happens. It couldn't be worse.

Chandra said...

The following para from the post seems to suggest that in academia pay
and other benefits are not correlated with productivity. Is this really
true? In most elite places, better known professors make more money and
get more perks like chaired positions etc. Also, in engineering and
sciences, people can make lot more money in industry and yet many stick
to academia for a variety of reasons. There is an implicit understanding
that research can be risky and people trade off the ability to take
those risks for lesser pay. Universities are far from perfect of course
but the following, seems to me, is not really a well reasoned statement
about the merits of one system over the other nor does it seem to be justified by clear evidence.

"Under normal circumstances, we would expect such an enterprise to implode, because some members of the collective are more productive than others, and they eventually get tired of subsidizing the lifestyles of the less productive members of the collective. So what keeps the elite university alive?"

Unknown said...

There are very clear differences in pay in my Department that depend on productivity. Ostensibly, the formula is 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service, but practically it is mostly research.

Pay increases come in two varieties, across the board COLA adjustments, and a merit pay component which often exceeds the COLA amount. Here, the quantity of merit pay allocated to departments is directly linked to the department's quality with good departments getting several percentage points more than poor departments (who quite often get a zero merit component) and, importantly, to the department's willingness to discriminate among faculty. If the merit component is allocated equally to all faculty, then department won't get merit pay the next time. The Dean’s office looks for justifiable tilt in the allocation.

I can't speak for other schools, e.g. the Cal State system where faculty are paid according to fixed steps that are the same across departments, but there is no doubt that pay is linked to productivity here. Faculty of equal rank can have very wide disparities in pay, wider than it is wise to make public if it can be avoided...

Andrew said...

The post does not suggest that pay is uncorrelated with performance. It suggests that the correlation is not as high as it should be--or would be in a more traditional market.

It's hard to know what "clear evidence" on this would be. The measurement of performance is a bit imprecise and in some cases subjective. This makes it hard to get a large sample to analyze. So much of the discussion about a topic like this would be in the form of anecdotes. I think it is evident to many of us in academia that plenty of people are free-riding. I welcome your perspective and would also be interested to hear other points of view.

Dr. Tufte said...

So ... do we think this means that leftishness is correlated with how much money the ATM has?

Digression: I'm a pretty typical for academic economist who got his Ph.D. in the last 20 years - libertarian on lot of social issues, conservative on a lot of fiscal ones, with a healthy dose of laissez-faire attitude towards much business behavior. About a 4 on the 1 to 10 conservativeness scale for economists, and about a 1.5 on the typical campus.

I've found two things. Personally, I fit in best on a campus which has a harder time raising money. Profesionally, the efficiency and level-headedness of academic decision making is better in those environments too.

When I think back to what I liked best about working at two flagship state universitiies and one major private university, it was the library and the bookstore. That doesn't say much about the people.

What I like best about working at a far less prestigious university is that both the faculty and the students have interesting things to say, but not as much of an obsession with being heard.

P.S. My blogger name links to the blog my students write. My personal blog is over at http://voluntaryxchange.typepad.com.

Unknown said...

I think there is some correlation between productivity and compensation across institutions, but it is lower than we would advocate as economists soley concerned with efficiency issues.

dr. tufte: Putting myself aside, if you ever come to our flagship state university, you will find great, interesting people who listen to and care about what others have to say.

JG said...

The ATM idea sounds reasonable to me -- but don't forget how much money the government feeds through the ATM, both directly and through tax breaks and subsidies for students, and note how much that has risen over time.

I'd bet that most institutions get more through the ATM from government than alumni.