Ideology and Faculty Selection

Abstract

The purposes for which our society establishes such institutions are, as the declaration said, threefold: the advancement of knowledge, the provision of higher education for students generally, and the training of specialists in the various professions. Such institutions therefore play a crucial, central role in the nation's cultural and economic life, for it is in them that the nation's future is born. To the extent to which they do not welcome new ideas, their threefold purposes cannot be well accomplished, and the future that grows out of them is stunted. As the AAUP's later 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure put the point, in brief: "Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good [,which] depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition." 3 But on some views, institutions of higher education are failing to serve as intellectual experiment stations: they are charged with behaving like homes of orthodoxy, reaction, and conventionality. Feminists complain that institutions of higher education are dominated by male-inspired conceptions of what constitutes good scholarly work, and that the content of teaching makes women's lives and women's work at best invisible. Feminists are joined by scholars in Afro-American Studies in complaining that the literary canon these institutions place before their students is at best arbitrarily restricted to the products of white males-I say "at best arbitrarily," since on some views the canon is a product merely of white male bigotry. Some people complain that the philosophical canon these institutions place before their students is improperly restricted to the products of Western philosophy, totally ignoring