Magical Left-Wing Professors

Wondering about those professors who are brainwashing your youth? Here’s a snapshot of one.

I had retired from a small state university on the East Coast, and was looking for adventures in corporate America. In order to get my first corporate university job, I had to take a personality test and a drug test. Unlike most true academics from the sixties, I passed the urine exam, even though I found myself strangely paranoid about taking it and uneasy about having to take it.

The personality test was fun. I’ve taken these all my adult life (to get jobs selling fruitcakes, to see if I could be a good military officer, etc.) find them fascinating, and had fun taking this one. In the last interview, the academic vice president asked me what I do when I don’t get my own way. I responded with “OK, so tell me how I did on the personality test.” The vice president responded that “it seems like you have a strong will.” I concurred with the findings.

When I asked if they did random drug tests, she looked at me funny.

I sat in my cube in a corporate environment, far from the ivy-covered walls of my imagination, far from the esoteric debates of a faculty senate wrestling over some grammatical issue relating to governance. My desk was clean; one coffee cup adorned it. And I drank decaf by myself. It was quiet, still, business-like. There was no ivy; there was no tradition; there were no students physically present, no hacky sack, no skateboards, no kids smoking —it was an online university.

The faculty members who taught the courses (“adjuncts”) were lesser mortals, just like those in the more traditional universities, who taught online courses filled with 30 to 40 students, for which they were not paid much, and certainly not what they were worth. I was their leader.

I smiled at memos, emailed from the president, urging me not to talk about recent downsizing decisions, indicating that it would not be consistent with good “organizational behavior” practices. I smiled at the president’s consternation with me when I challenged issues/decisions in meetings. I was the only one who did challenge. There were others who had in the past; they were no longer employees of the university.

Professors in traditional universities are required to teach, publish, and serve the university and larger communities in a variety of ways. A day in the life of a professor, as I experienced it for some 25 years, began around 8:00 A.M. Formal meetings of one sort or another—curriculum meetings, space committee meetings, committee on committees meetings, department meetings, senate meetings, etc.—took a piece of the day, sandwiched between courses (one to five courses with 30 to 300 students in each), and involved ritual coffee consumption. Lunch was an important time for meeting colleagues to discuss politics, the university, teaching, and research ideas. By 3:00 P.M. I generally went home, to return by 6:00 P.M. to teach a course or work on projects. By 9:30 P.M. I was home again, sometimes reading or working until the wee hours. There were some days when I spent most of my time at home working on courses or research or training projects, but most days I was at the university. Many days it was exhilarating. Every day was interesting.

Funny, we never discussed how to turn students into left-wing ideologues. I must have missed the memo instructing us to do so. Maybe we should have had a committee on this.

During an interview for my first corporate university professor/administrator job, I was told that I was entering a corporate environment in which I “would not be allowed to behave as a traditional academic”, and would be required to be in my cubicle by 8:00 A.M., take an hour for lunch, and leave the building by 5:00 P.M. The only exception to this rule was when management decided that I needed to work extra hours, for which I would not be paid, because I was in an exempt position. When I told the vice president in the interview that this would be a reduction in hours for me from my usual traditional academic leader role, she looked at me funny.

Are there differences between professorial life in traditional universities and life in corporate universities? Professors in traditional universities still like to believe we run the universities, but most don’t actually believe we do. Corporate universities intentionally communicate that faculty are employees-at-will with invisible time clocks to monitor our face time. Otherwise it’s more or less the same.

We never discussed turning students into lefties in this environment, either. We did discuss students as a part of our revenue-enhancing metrics, however. Free enterprise ruled.

I believe that most people choose to become professors, whether in traditional or corporate universities, because of dreams and ideals. We believe that exploring truths is important. We believe that stimulating other people to explore is also important. We believe that democracies demand that people be educated; i.e., willing and equipped to question conventional wisdom, to go beyond oneself to thinking about other folks in the past, present, and future, about God and evolution, about things seen and unseen, about important issues. We believe that colleges and universities provide people with a relatively safe haven in which to conduct important personal, spiritual, and interpersonal exploration. Universities were not designed, we believe, to ensure employment afterward, but to provide a climate of free expression and exploration the result of which is to ensure that people better contribute to the world, spiritually, politically, fiscally, and in terms of stewardship of the resources we use and manage.

These ideals, dreams, and values are hard to hold onto in the real world of academia, traditional or corporate, and I have watched their erosion in my colleagues and myself over the years. The U.S. has always seemed to be anti-intellectual, but in my lifetime I’ve witnessed a cynical acceleration of this attitude.

And with this cynicism comes the paranoia that results in the belief that somehow professors have the magical power to convert students into non-God-fearing leftist robots. I would laugh but I’m too tired.