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标题: 学术界的集体思维：多数派院系政治和专业金字塔 [打印本页]
作者: apple    时间: 2009-4-20 23:51     标题: 学术界的集体思维：多数派院系政治和专业金字塔

The Independent Review
Volume 13 Number 4
Spring 2009

Groupthink in Academia: Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid

By Daniel B. Klein

Charlotta Stern

Abstract: Although academia differs from the settings explored by group think theorists, it exhibits many of the same tendencies and failings. One result is the relative absence of classical-liberal and conservative viewpoints among humanities and social sciences professors, especially in the more elite departments.


In baseball, fans of different teams can agree on general issues concerning rules, umpiring, and performance evaluation because such matters are separable from support for a specific team. In academia, however, we find that rules and standards for performance are not separable from support for specific beliefs. Ideological sensibilities and commitments in academia tend to be bound up with notions of the whole academic enterprise. Thus, one’s positions on how performance should be umpired or evaluated and one’s support for a certain “team” are not separable.
We think that discussion of ideology in academia is itself bound to be ideological and that good scholarship calls on us to declare that our principal motivation for the present investigation is our belief that, by and large, professors in the humanities and social sciences are weak in certain sensibilities that we ourselves hold. In particular, classical liberalism has few adherents among academics. In policy terms, classical liberalism favors domestic reform generally in the direction of significantly decontrolling markets and personal choices, reducing the welfare state, and depoliticizing society. A further policy feature of classical liberalism, in our view,is a strong disposition against military entanglements abroad. The current label closest to classical liberal is libertarian, although classical-liberal beliefs are properly understood as somewhat looser and more pragmatic; we also prefer the label classical liberal because it reminds us of liberalism’s historical arc.
Ample evidence on the ideological profile of professors in the humanities and social sciences indicates that the dominant, though not monolithic, sensibilities combine social-democratic leanings and support for (or acquiescence to) most domestic government interventions. (We identify modern American “liberalism” as social democracy, a political outlook that readily treads on voluntarist ethics, views the polity as an organization, and therefore advocates the pursuit of collective endeavors, such as equalizing well-being and opportunity.)
Social-democratic views do not always run against the grain of classical liberalism. In our view, however, existing frictions indicate problems with the faculty’s ideological profile. Also, even absent friction, the neglect of important classical-liberal ideas itself often counts as a problem. Our analysis rests on the judgment that the relative absence of classical-liberal views among humanities and social sciences professors is unfortunate (but we make no argument for that judgmenthere).
Our analysis may be adapted by the adherents of other viewpoints who likewise see problems in the faculty’s ideological profile and find themselves systematically excluded and marginalized. In particular, conservatives, in a narrow sense that clearly separates them from classical liberals, may use a version of our analysis as a conservative diagnosis of the problem. Our classical-liberal viewpoint, then, is but one of two major viewpoints whose adherents may find the current account especially valuable.


Adapting Groupthink to the Academic Setting
We analyze academic ideology in terms of groupthink. Groupthink analysis examines decision making presupposed to be defective. In that sense, groupthink analysis is pejorative.
In the seminal work Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (1982),Irving L. Janis begins by examining a number of well-known fiascoes, including the Bay of Pigs, escalation in Vietnam, and Watergate—episodes that came to be judged fiascoes even by those responsible for them. Janis starts with defectiveness and seeks to explain the absence of correction. He defines groupthink as “members’ strivings for unanimity overriding their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.” He declares the term’s “invidious connotation”(9).
Paul ’t Hart, who developed the Janis tradition in Groupthink in Government: A Study of Small Groups and Policy Failure (1990), calls groupthink “excessive concurrence-seeking,” a behavior that explains “flaws in the operation of small, high-level groups at the helm of major projects or policies that become fiascoes,” such as the Iran-Contra affair (7, 4), and he reviews several applications of groupthink research (12h15). Diane Vaughan’s (1996) discussion of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which involves both bottom-up and top-down organizational errors, can be said to occupy an intermediate position between traditional Janis-Hart analysis and the analysis offered here.
The groupthink theorist wants to gain standing as a social theorist and therefore wants to avoid unnecessary controversy. Accordingly, groupthink theorists—at least those like Janis and Hart—have focused on episodes where, in hindsight, the judgment of failure (or error) is uncontroversial. The need for uncontroversial judgment is one reason why the scope of groupthink applications has been quite limited.
In this article, we apply groupthink theory to a setting where the presupposition of failure is anything but uncontroversial. Academe is quite different from the settings groupthink theorists have examined. We suggest, however, that given the presupposition of failure, central mechanisms in academe make it possible to adaptgroupthink theory to this setting. We try to make plausible the idea that if academic groups were caught up in defective thoughts, the defectiveness would be resistant to correction. We explain persistence, or the lack of correction. We do not consider “how the problem got started,” in part because of space limits and in part because there never was an Eden.
To be sure, we ought to be cautious about using groupthink to interpret academic ideology in the humanities and social sciences. The groupthink literature in the tradition of Janis and Hart examines mostly the belief processes of policymaking groups. The cases usually have the following features:
In all of these features, policymaking groups differ significantly from academic groups. The latter—whether colleagues in a university department or the leadership at a prestigious journal or association—are larger, less well defined, much less chief based, much less specific-action oriented, and much less subject to stress, urgency, risk, and danger. Their bad beliefs are much deeper, more complex, and more incorrigible—more in the nature of moral, political, and aesthetic values. These differences make academic groups more diffuse and variegated in purpose.
Despite these differences, we see basic similarities between Janis-Hart groups and academic groups. Both types of groups hold defective beliefs, and both tend toward concurrence seeking, self-validation, and exclusion of challenges to core beliefs. Finally, mechanisms in academe work to create an “in-group” that is insular, self-perpetuating, and self-reinforcing.


Departmental Majoritarianism
Let us imagine a university called XYU whose inner workings resemble those of other institutions—which is to say, they are hierarchical in purpose, structure, and authority. XYU is an organization led by a provost, deans, and so on. Beneath the administration come the academic departments.
Actors in an organization subdivide labor. In most nonacademic organizations, the bosses can scarcely tamper in detail with tasks assigned to subunits; rather, they look for results that advance the organizational mission. Academe has the same necessary subdivision and delegation, but a much fuzzier sense of organizational mission. Furthermore, oversight is more problematic in academe because scholarship is inherently specialized and embedded in the scholarly community. Even Adam Smith ([1776] 1981), who criticized academia, emphasized that any “extraneous jurisdiction” over substantive issues of teaching “is liable to be exercised both ignorantly and capriciously.”[url=#1][1][/url] The upshot is that administrators generally rubber-stamp departmental decisions. Although the department may appear to be structurally “under” the administration, in practice it is left to decide the important questions (about hiring, firing, promotion, teaching, research, graduate student training, and so on), nor is it guided in matters of an ideological nature.
The most important departmental decisions involve the hiring, firing, and promotion of tenure-track faculty. Such decisions come down to majority vote. Although the chair exercises certain powers, committees control agendas, and so on, the central and final procedure for rendering the most important decisions is democracy among the tenure-track professors—or departmental majoritarianism.
Most intellectuals develop ideological sensibilities by the age of twenty-five or thirty (Sears and Funk 1999), and afterward they rarely revise them substantially. Intellectual delight and existential comfort are taken not in reexamining prior decisions, but in refining and developing ideas along the lines already mastered (Ditto and Lopez 1992; Nickerson 1998). Professors are likely to respect scholars who pursue questions similar to their own and who master similar modes of thought. They are not likely to respect scholars who pursue questions predicated on beliefs at odds with their own. Indeed, if a scholar is engaged in a task that might threaten a colleague’s sense of self, he may give rise to personal distress and create acrimony between them. Professor A might lose standing and credibility with students if a colleague, Professor B, who is teaching those same students in a different course, exploded some of the premises of Professor A’s course materials, lectures, and writings.
In hiring a new member of the department, most existing members will tend to support candidates who share their fundamental beliefs, values, and commitments. Indeed, one of a scholar’s prime responsibilities is to navigate through the big issues, make judgments and commitments, and move on. These judgments are not separate from science or scholarship, and scholars rightly may say: “If Candidate A has judged differently on fundamentals, then he has exhibited bad scholarly or scientific judgment.” This judgment cannot be disposed of. No one has a way to step outside of it. Discriminating on the basis of differences in fundamentals, therefore, cannot be condemned in the abstract as irresponsible scholarship. We all discriminate on the basis of ideology, and—again in the abstract—doing so is perfectly justifiable.
As noted previously, the academic setting differs in certain regards from the settings groupthink theorists have studied. Yet some of these differences may compensate for each other. In academia, the focus of belief and action is not a crucial policy decision, such as invading Cuba. Therefore, there is no corresponding secrecy and necessary separation from regular channels of discourse. Another difference, however, has to do with the depth or personal significance of the beliefs in question. In academia, the beliefs are deep seated and connected to selfhood and identity. For that reason, protecting and preserving them have high personal stakes. The existential significance of ideological beliefs in some respects compensates for the fact that personnel and other decisions in academia are otherwise mundane and socially inconsequential.
In context, people know they must judge and act on deep sensibilities, and they know, if only tacitly, that no real scandal attends their doing so. Theories of group formation and social dynamics tell us that social groups tend to seek and attract newcomers like themselves (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001), screen out and repel misfits (Allport 1954; Brewer 1999), and mold the unformed in their own image (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955, 62–63; Moscovici 1985).[url=#2][2][/url] These tendencies are rooted in human nature.
Suppose a department must hire a new member, and 51 percent of the current members share a broadly similar ideology—say, social-democratic progressivism or conservatism or classical liberalism/libertarianism. Moreover, they believe that one must broadly conform to that ideology to be a good colleague and a good professor. What happens? The department members hire someone like them. The 51 percent becomes 55 percent, then 60 percent, then 65 percent, then 70 percent, and so on. As Stephen Balch (2003) and others have noted, majoritarianism tends to produce ideological uniformity in a department.
The syndrome does not depend on the ideology’s identity. The George Mason University Department of Economics is led by and dominated by classical liberals. Some would identify themselves as conservative. Only a few would identify themselves as liberal (in the current U.S. sense). A case of ideological discrimination? The classical liberals and conservatives think that being an interventionist in the manner of, say, Kenneth Arrow, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, or Dani Rodrik reveals failings in economic judgment. Many George Mason economists regard undue confidence in government and politics as bad science, and they consider arcane work a scientific failure to deal with the most important things.[url=#3][3][/url]
We speak of tendency, not of lockstep uniformity. Some degree of variation will be normal and acceptable—for example, ongoing internal tensions prevail between the more radical Left and the establishment Left. In any case, the tendency toward uniformity is not the whole story. An ideological oddball might be well liked and considered unthreatening, perhaps because he is meek or does research in an arcane mode that renders him effectively irrelevant to fundamental issues. Moreover, departments usually have an ethic of consensus. Colleagues are human beings, and they are stuck with each other. They usually seek to avoid acrimony and aggravation. The majority does not steamroll the minority’s interests. The consensus factor works toward blandness in personnel matters; the majority advances job candidates who belong to their camp, but not in a strident or outspoken way. The consensus factor moderates the majority’s actions, but it does not undo the tendency toward uniformity. Its main effect is probably to pull that uniform character toward blandness—that is, merely toward a presumption in favor of the conventional policies and opinions of whatever major party the majority favors.
Outsiders often think that the classical-liberal or conservative professor needs only to get tenure in order to ensure his professional success and psychic well-being. But imagine building a career through graduate school and pretenure employment (about eleven years) before feeling able to be yourself. You then find you are no longer yourself—not that your ideological views have changed much, but that any ideological motivation has likely receded. You “go native,” as they say. Your twenties and early thirties are a crucial period of development, and these developments cannot be reversed. Moreover, even after being granted tenure, you depend on department colleagues for pay raises, resources, teaching assignments, scheduling, promotions, recognition, and consideration. Tenure alone is clearly not a refuge for the departmental miscreant.
Because of departmental majoritarianism, each department tends toward ideological uniformity, perhaps watered down. Some XYU students lament that the history department lacks classical liberals or conservatives. Citizens at large, however, may hope that the public conversation among prestigious academic historians includes such viewpoints, so that perhaps one can shop for a university that has a history department with a more appealing ideology.


The Professional Pyramid
Imagine a college freshman named Sarah who comes from a family that admires thinkers such as Adam Smith, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman. She goes off to XYU. After her first year, she informs her parents that the humanities and social science departments seem to be dominated by social democrats. Her parents grumble, but what’s done is done. However, they have another child looking toward college who wants to study history. This time, they shop more carefully and investigate the history departments at different schools. Everywhere they see signs of a social-democratic bent, and they wonder why it prevails so widely.
The principal explanation of the uniformity across campuses lies in understanding what the individual history department is at an existential level. The XYU history department, for example, is not so much a subunit of XYU as it is a village of the larger tribe, history as a profession. History the profession has a settlement at XYU, the XYU history department. As professional researchers, members of that department find much of their meaning and validation in belonging to and serving the history profession. They may share a roof with philosophers, linguists, and so on, but they almost never engage in scholarly discourse with them. Rather, their scholarly life takes place within the tribe of history, which resides in settlements situated laterally across geography and physical institutions (see figure 1). History is the “invisible college” to which most historians principally belong. The department is more a creature of history as a profession than of XYU.

Again, the XYU history department has to make decisions about hiring and other matters. They are microdecisions. In making and justifying these decisions, department members draw on the tribe’s macronorms and values. The micro and macro are intimately and thickly interconnected.
In structure, the tribe is pyramidal, with the elite at the apex and widening echelons at each lower step (see figure 2). Position within the pyramid depends on focal, conventional rankings of key institutions, notably academic journals, departments, publishers, citations, grants, awards, and other markers of merit. Individual scholars, aside from playing specific roles (as teacher, writer, journal editor, and so forth), help to organize the tribe by performing activities that determine or affirm rank, such as writing letters, praising work, and citing research, and they too are subject to ranking. All the usual metrics are intertwined and mutually reinforcing.

Research is highly specialized, and the tribe is broken down into subfields. U.S. history, for example, might be broken down by period, by aspect (social, cultural, economic, gender, political, legal), by mode of research, by theme or character. Prestige and eminence are determined within the subfield, a kind of club within the tribe. The clubs constitute the tribe, just as agencies and branches constitute the government. Each club sorts people with overt reference to pedigree, publication, citations, and letters of reference. The club controls these filters and then applies them to itself. It controls the graduate programs and journals. By spawning and hiring new recipients of Ph.D. degrees, the club reproduces itself.
The academic job market is unlike the market for waiters or cab drivers. In all but the literal sense, one history department “sells” its newly minted Ph.D. holders to other history departments. The consumers (history departments), the producers (other history departments), and the products (newly minted history Ph.D. holders) are all historians. Waiters and cab drivers are accountable to their employers, who are accountable to consumers. Historians are accountable for the most part only to other historians. Meanwhile, they are spending funds drawn from taxpayers, tuition payers, foundations, and charitable donors.
The pyramid of club and tribe is self-validating. Who else can possibly provide the validation? The pyramidal structure is to a great extent in the nature of the beast. A department’s microdecisions are decisions about friends, colleagues, enemies, friends of friends, students of mentors, and so on. If it wants to look beyond itself to make and justify its decision, it looks to the higher echelons of the profession, as an individual may look to heritage.
This allegiance reflects in part a sincere faith in the tribe—after all, we would agree that the official rankings express genuine quality in someimportant dimensions of scholarship. But in part it reflects a practical need to establish commonly understood standards and practices. The tribe’s standards are focal points around which expectations are mutually coordinated and consensus is tolerably achieved (Whitley 1984). Without an encompassing standard, a discipline has no prospect of conducting itself as a coherent enterprise. The precept “history is what historians do, and historians are those with history degrees and appointments” may not be intellectually satisfying, but at least it keeps the wheels turning fairly smoothly.
Reliance on the tribe’s standards to decide on jobs, pay, security, teaching loads, grants, research assistants, and so forth is so entrenched and ingrained that the players come to value the standards for their own sake. Having an article accepted at a top journal brings concrete gains and prestige, regardless of the article’s or journal’s intrinsic value. Functionality depends on internalizing the discipline’s norms.
Now, suppose that the departments and journals at the pyramid’s apex adhere to ideology j. In that case, no internal conflict occurs, and any dissent from below is safely ignored. Indeed, inferiors will be inclined to refrain from criticism because they depend on their superiors’ acceptance and endorsement. Microdecisions throughout the pyramid will tend to follow those at the apex. In addition to such concurrence mechanisms, there is propagation: the apex produces Ph.D. holders and places them well.
Consider a conventional ranking of two hundred economics departments worldwide, where the top thirty-five are treated as the apex (Klein 2005, 143). In these top thirty-five departments, more than 90 percent of faculty received their Ph.D. degree from the same thirty-five departments; the top is almost entirely self-regenerating. According to the regression line, the department ranked one hundredth would have about 65 percent of its faculty from the top thirty-five. Departments farther down the pyramid are generally much smaller, so the top thirty-five departments train and mentor the people who populate most of the top two hundred departments. The profession, especially at the higher echelons, consists for the most part of people directly indebted to and personally loyal to those at the apex.
Yet these results do not fully capture the domination by the top departments, which also have vastly disproportionate influence in regard to journals, grants, second-generation degrees, and so on (Klein 2005, 144–45). In sociology, for instance, Val Burris documents the extraordinary power that the leading U.S. departments exercise:
Graduates from the top 5 departments account for roughly one-third of all faculty hired in all 94 departments. The top 20 departments account for roughly 70 percent of the total. Boundaries to upward mobility are extremely rigid. Sociologists with degrees from non–top 20 departments are rarely hired at top 20 departments and almost never hired at top 5 departments. . . .
The hiring of senior faculty by prestigious departments is even more incestuous than the hiring of new PhDs. . . . Of the 430 full-time faculty employed by the top 20 sociology departments . . . only 7 (less than 2 percent) received their PhD from a non–top 20 department, worked for three or more years in a non–top 20 department, and, after building their scholarly reputations, advanced to a faculty position in one of the top 20 departments. (2004, 247–49, 251)
In the field of law, Richard Redding finds: “A third of all new teachers [hired in law schools between 1996 and 2000] graduated from either Harvard (18%) or Yale (15%); another third graduated from other top-12 schools, and 20 percent graduated from other top-25 law schools” (2003, 599).
Because of the mechanisms that operate within disciplines—propagation, “follow the apex,” and “freeze-out”—if the apex embraces ideology j, it will tend to sweep that ideology into positions in every department all the way down the pyramid. We are oversimplifying, but perhaps not much. Some dissent will occur, but heterodoxy focuses on criticizing the mainstream pyramid because the pyramid remains the gravity well of group practice and individual ambition. As for any central power, people fight over its exercise and distribution. If parallel pyramids are erected, they generally are either ignored or co-opted into the fringes of the official pyramid, altering its character somewhat. The professional pyramid and departmental majoritarianism function together effectively to exclude scholars opposed to ideology j, especially from the highest-ranked departments. This process may explain why in most fields of the humanities and social sciences, no predominantly classical-liberal institution has a significant professional standing.

[ 本帖最后由 apple 于 2009-4-20 23:55 编辑 ]
作者: apple    时间: 2009-4-20 23:52

Academic Groupthink

Although academia differs from the settings explored by groupthink theorists, it exhibits many of the same tendencies and failings. Irving Janis provides a summary table of antecedent conditions and symptoms of groupthink (1982, 244). We list them here verbatim (in boldface), omitting a few items that do not fit the academic application (such as “Provocative Situation Context”). We add (in regular type) our suggestions of how these conditions and symptoms operate in academia. We sketch a narrative of increasing social-democratic groupthink from about 1972, when the ratio of Democrat to Republican in the humanities and social sciences (excluding two-year colleges) was around four to one, to the present, when it is around eight to one (Klein and Stern 2005, 264).

ANTECEDENT CONDITIONS

      Decision Makers Constitute a Cohesive Group. The professional pyramid and departmental autonomy tend toward group cohesiveness.

      Structural Faults of the Organization

      Insulation of the Group. No one outside the pyramid is qualified to judge the group. Insiders safely ignore outside opinion.

      Homogeneity of Members’ Social Background and Ideology. Sorting and molding mechanisms produce ideological homogeneity, both throughout the pyramid and within the individual department. In 1972, the social science and humanities faculty was preponderantly Democratic. Once the skew became too great, it tumbled into a self-reinforcing process. Among professors, the Democratic tent is significantly narrower in policy views than the Republican tent (Klein and Stern 2005, 272).


OBSERVABLE CONSEQUENCES

      Symptoms of Groupthink

      Type I: Overestimation of the Group

            Illusion of Invulnerability. Academics feel that those outside the pyramid lack knowledge and credibility, and that those inside the pyramid would not dare to become renegades.

            Belief in Inherent Morality of the Group. Individuals choose to join an academic profession. Many say they do so to serve scholarship, learning, science, truth, society, and so forth. Belonging is infused with dedication and purpose. It is part of one’s identity. Heightened uniformity makes the group overconfident. Members take their ideas to greater extremes. Facing less testing and challenge, the habits of thought become more foolhardy and close-minded.

      Type II: Closed-Mindedness

            Collective Rationalizations. Academic professions develop elaborate scholastic dogmas to justify the omission of challenging or intractable ideas. Discussions that depart the forty-yard line and explore substantially different arrangements are dismissed as “normative,” “ideological,” or “advocacy.” Classical-liberal formulations of voluntary versus coercive action would be dismissed as illusory and ideological. In economics, where mathematical model building dominates the theoretical literature, important facets of knowledge and discovery, including the virtues of free markets, have little chance to be noticed or studied. As Janis writes, “When a group of people who respect each other’s opinions arrive at a unanimous view, each member is likely to feel that the belief must be true. This reliance on consensual validation tends to replace individual critical thinking and reality-testing” (1982, 37).

            Stereotypes of Out-Groups. Janis writes: “One of the symptoms of groupthink is the members’ persistence in conveying to each other the cliché and oversimplified images of political enemies embodied in long-standing ideological stereotypes” (1982, 37). It is not uncommon for social-democratic academics to lump their critics together as “conservatives” or “the Right,” and, as Mark Bauerlein (2004) notes, to assume that these critics are represented by the likes of George W. Bush, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity. Few social-democratic academics engage the classical-liberal alternative offered by Adam Smith, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, or Richard Epstein.

            Self-Censorship. The pyramid functions much like a genteel society in which criticism is muted. Particularly because of norms of consensus, it is impolitic to alienate colleagues. Going along to get along, dissidents and miscreants tend to suppress their disagreements with the dominant view, leading to what Timur Kuran (1995) calls “preference falsification.”[4]

            Direct Pressure on Dissenters. In Janis’s work, an insider who dissents is pressed to toe the line. In academia, the dissenter is more likely to be frozen out. As the group’s beliefs become more defective, the group becomes more sensitive to tension, more intolerant of would-be challengers and miscreants. This development leads to tighter vetting and expulsion, more uniformity, more intellectual deterioration, and more intolerance. Stanley Rothman, Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte (2005) provide evidence that conservative scholars hold less academically prestigious positions than their peers, controlling for research accomplishment, and we show elsewhere (Klein and Stern 2005, 275) that Republican-voting scholars who are members of major academic associations are more likely than their peers to have landed outside of academia (especially in sociology, history, and philosophy).

      Symptoms of Defective Decision Making

            Incomplete Survey of Alternatives

            Incomplete Survey of Objectives

            Failure to Reappraise Initially Rejected Alternatives

            Poor Information Search, Selective Bias in Processing Information at Hand

All of the foregoing items from Janis’s table can be applied to social-democratic and forty-yard-line blinders and precepts. Classical-liberal and conservative ideas are often ignored, dismissed by way of elaborate dogmas, or treated only in false caricature.

Some Examples

Perhaps the clearest way to illustrate how we see the problem of social-democratic groupthink in the humanities and social sciences is to perform a thought experiment. Imagine a doctoral student who unabashedly holds classical-liberal ideas. Ask yourself whether such a student would be able to find warm support in the elite departments of political science, sociology, history, and so forth. Ask yourself whether the student, no matter how solid his research, would be likely to win grants, have his articles published by the most respected journals, and succeed on the academic job market.

Consider some specific claims that such a student’s research might explore:

    * FDR and the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression.

    * American labor laws, such as union privileges, have never been justified and have hurt the poor.

    * The K–12 school system in the United States can be fruitfully analyzed as a socialist industry, and it exhibits most of the characteristic failings of socialism.

    * Most mandated recycling programs are a waste.

In our view, such claims are more than merely plausible, and it would be easy to multiply the examples. Research of this type is not completely unheard of within the tribe of economics,[5] but especially in other disciplines a new Ph.D. holder who develops such claims and substantiates them thoroughly would fail on the job market and in the “good” journals. The lack of tribe credentials and seals of approval would justify microdecisions to freeze out such a scholar.

Consider some broader theses in philosophy, politics, sociology, anthropology, and history, many of which can be pursued empirically:

    * “Social justice” makes no sense (as argued by Hayek).

    * “Social justice” is an atavism (as argued by Hayek).

    * Government intervention, such as the minimum-wage law, is coercive; the social-democratic state is a society of wholesale coercions.

    * Leading features of democratic processes include ignorance, superficiality, and systematic biases.

    * Democracy often treads on liberty, decency, and prosperity.

    * The rise of social democracy since the late nineteenth century may be fruitfully regarded as a subversion of liberalism, specifically in that it promotes a view of the polity as a kind of organization.

    * Since 1880, intellectuals have altered the meaning of many key terms of the liberal lexicon—freedom, liberty, liberalism, justice, rights, property, rule of law, equity, and equality—so as to undermine their power in opposition to a social-democratic worldview.

    * Organizational integrity varies positively with the voluntary basis of participation and funding—that is, government organizations tend to lack organizational integrity because they do not face the threat of loss of support based on voluntary participation.

    * The distinction between voluntary and coercive action (or laissez-faire versus interventionism) provides a better framework for analyzing political views and public opinion than a distinction between liberal and conservative.

These ideas are anathema to the tribes of such disciplines.[6] Groupthink keeps them out of the prestigious journals and course curricula. Some of these fields have alternative centers and associations that might pursue such ideas, but these centers and associations generally remain peripheral to the professional pyramid. Classical-liberal and conservative scholars know the score, and if they nonetheless try to get on in academia, they find themselves watering down their ideas and cloaking or misrepresenting who they really are.

References

Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Balch, Stephen H. 2004. Toward a Reconstitution of Academic Governance. Academic Questions 17, no. 1 (winter): 67–72.

Bauerlein, Mark. 2004. Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-intellectual. Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12.

Brewer, Marilynn B. 1999. The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love or Outgroup Hate? Journal of Social Issues 55: 429–44.

Burris, Val. 2004. The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks. American Sociological Review 69 (April): 239–64.

Davis, William L. 2004. Preference Falsification in the Economics Profession. Econ Journal Watch 1, no. 2: 359–68.

Ditto, Peter H., and David F. Lopez. 1992. Motivated Skepticism: Use of Differential Decision Criteria for Preferred and Non-preferred Conclusions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63: 568–84.

Hart, Paul ’t. [1990] 1994. Groupthink in Government: A Study of Small Groups and Policy Failure. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Janis, Irving L. 1982. Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Katz, Elihu, and Paul Felix Lazarsfeld. 1955. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. New York: Free Press.

Klein, Daniel B. [1994] 1998. If Government Is So Villainous, How Come Government Officials Don’t Seem Like Villains? In 3 Libertarian Essays, by Daniel B. Klein. Irvington, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education.

———. 2005. The Ph.D. Circle in Academic Economics. Econ Journal Watch 2, no. 1 (April): 133–48.

Klein, Daniel B., and Charlotta Stern. 2005. Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists. Critical Review 17, nos. 3–4: 257–303.

———. 2006. Sociology and Classical Liberalism. The Independent Review 11, no. 1 (summer): 37–52.

———. 2007. Is There a Free-Market Economist in the House? The Policy Views of American Economics Association Members. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 66, no. 2 (April): 309–34.

Kuran, Timur. 1995. Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook. 2001. Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual Review of Sociology 27: 415–44.

Moscovici, Serge. 1985. Social Influence and Conformity. In The Handbook of Social Psychology, 3rd ed., edited by Gardner Lindzey and Elliott Aronson, 2:347–412. New York: Random House.

Myrdal, Gunnar. [1969] 1983. Objectivity in Social Research. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

Nickerson, R. S. 1998. Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises. Review of General Psychology 2: 175–220.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1843. The Rationale of Verse. Reprinted in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. A. Harrison, vol. 14: Essays and Miscellanies, 209–65. New York: Crowell.

Redding, Richard E. 2003.Where Did You Go to Law School? Gatekeeping by the Professoriate and Its Implications for Legal Education. Journal of Legal Education 53: 594–614.

Rothman, Stanley, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte. 2005. Politics and Professional Advancement among College Faculty. The Forum 3, no. 1.

Sears, David O., and Carolyn L. Funk. 1999. Evidence of the Long-Term Persistence of Adults’ Political Predispositions. Journal of Politics 61, no. 1 (February): 1–28.

Smith, Adam. [1776] 1981. The Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund.

Vaughan, Diane. 1996. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Whitley, Richard. 1984. The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

Wisniewski, Richard. 2000. The Averted Gaze. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 31, no. 5: 5–23.

Acknowledgments: We thank Richard Redding, Robert Maranto, and Anne Himmelfarb for detailed feedback that significantly improved this article. In another form, the article appears in Reforming the Politically Correct University, edited by F. Hess, R. Maranto, and R. Redding (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 2009). The authors and Independent Review gratefully acknowledge the American Enterprise Institute’s permission to use the material here.

Footnotes

   1. In treating the matter of extraneous jurisdiction, as by bishop, governor, or minister, Smith continues: “In its nature it is arbitrary and discretionary, and the persons who exercise it, neither attending upon the lectures of the teacher themselves, nor perhaps understanding the sciences which it is his business to teach, are seldom capable of exercising it with judgment” ([1776] 1981, 761).

   2. Klein [1994] 1998 treats self-sorting, screening, and belief plasticity in the tendency toward uniformity in government agencies’ organizational culture.

   3. In this respect, the George Mason department is an aberration among economics departments at and above its professional echelon (Klein and Stern 2007).

   4. On preference falsification in the economics profession, see Davis 2004.

   5. It is conceivable that in economics a scholar would succeed in placing such an article, loaded with math, in a reputable journal, but it is nevertheless likely that he would have no prospects at the leading economics departments.

   6. For an examination of the sociology profession, see Klein and Stern 2006.

Daniel B. Klein is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, and Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and a contributing author to the book, The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society. Charlotta Stern is a research fellow at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University.
作者: apple    时间: 2009-4-20 23:56

学术界的集体思维：多数派院系政治和专业金字塔

丹尼尔·克莱恩 夏洛特·斯特恩 著  吴万伟 译

光明网-光明观察 刊发时间：2009-04-14 14:40:59　



　　摘要：虽然学术界和群体思维理论家探索的背景不同，但它还是表现出了许多相同的趋势和失败。其中一个结果是人文科学和社会科学教授中相对缺乏古典自由主义和保守派观点，尤其是在一些名牌大学的院系。

　　“我们注意到任何具体机构和政治背景下的科学家，一般来说，都是成群移动的，避免涉及有争议的话题以及可能对他们共有的基本偏见体系产生质疑的独创性。”

　　——纲纳·缪达尔Gunnar Myrdal,“社会研究中的客观性”

　　“我们避免研究体制内的生活或许是因为这样的工作得不到同事的尊重。毕竟，学术界是个俱乐部，期待成员们谨慎和沉默。就像任何排外的俱乐部一样，学术界担心公众审查的目光。学术研究是在公共领域的，圈外人可能使用研究揭露出来的内容破坏学术界。”

　　——理查德·维尼斯基（Richard Wisniewski）“转移的凝视”

　　“一千个杰出的学者可能失败了，首先，因为他们是学者，其次，因为他们杰出，第三，因为他们有一千人。

　　——埃德加·爱伦·坡（Edgar Allan Poe）“诗歌的合理性”

　　在棒球比赛中，不同球队的球迷在规则、裁判和表现评价等一般性议题上观点一致，因为这些问题和具体支持哪个球队是分开的。但是在学术界，我们发现规则和表现的标准与支持具体的信仰无法分开。学术界的意识形态敏感性和承诺倾向于把整个学术界的观点捆绑在一起。因此，一个人对于如何裁判和评价某个表现的观点和他对“某个球队”的支持是分不开的。

　　我们认为学术界关于意识形态的讨论本身就属于意识形态，良好的学术品格要求我们宣称我们进行这次调查的主要动机是出于我们的信仰，即人文科学和社会科学界的教授们在我们坚持的某些敏感性方面非常薄弱。大学教授中经典自由主义的支持者尤其稀少。用政策术语来说，经典自由主义倾向于支持大幅度取消市场控制和扩大个人选择、减少福利国家项目、社会的去政治化等国内改革。在我们看来，古典自由主义的政策特征是强烈反对海外军事干预的倾向。当前最接近古典自由主义者的标签是自由意志论者，虽然古典自由主义者信仰被适当地理解为更加松散和更加实用一些。我们也更喜欢古典自由主义者的标签，因为它提醒我们自由主义的历史渊源。

　　人文科学和社会科学教授意识形态倾向的充足证据说明支持社会民主党的倾向和支持(或者默许)政府的大部分内政干预措施占主导地位，虽然不一定是完全一致的敏感性。(我们把现代美国“自由主义”看作社会民主党主张，很乐意地踩在自愿主义伦理学基础上的政治观，把政治群体看作一个组织，因此鼓吹追求集体的事业如美好生活和机会平等)。

　　社会民主党观点不一定和古典自由主义的观点冲突。但是，在我们看来，存在的摩擦表明教授们意识形态倾向上的问题。而且，即使没有摩擦，忽略重要的古典自由主义观点本身常常就是问题。我们的分析建立在这个判断基础上，即人文科学和社会科学教授缺乏古典自由主义观点是不幸的（但这里我们不对此展开论述）。

　　我们的分析或许被其他观点的支持者所修改，他们可能看到教授意识形态倾向存在的问题，发现自己被系统地排斥在外或者被边缘化了。尤其是在狭隘的意义上明显区别于古典自由主义的保守派。他们或许使用我们分析的版本作为对这个问题的保守派诊断。我们的古典自由主义观点不过是两个主要观点中的一个，这些观点的支持者或许发现当前的状况特别有价值。

　　修改集体思维以适用学术界的情况

　　我们用集体思维的术语来分析学术界意识形态。用集体思维式分析来考察决策过程必然是有缺陷的。在这个意义上，集体思维式分析是糟糕的。

　　欧文·詹尼斯（Irving L. Janis）在开创性的著作《集体思维：政策决策及失败的心理学研究》(1982)中考察了一些著名的失败案例，如猪湾事件、越南战争恶化、水门事件等，甚至那些负责这些事情的人都认为它们是失败的。詹尼斯以缺陷性开始，试图解释为什么没有改正。他把集体思维定义为“成员对于全体一致性的追求战胜了他们现实地评价其他替代行动方案的动机”。他指出了这个术语“招致不满的含义”(9)。

　　把詹尼斯的集体思维传统用在政府管理上的保罗·哈特（Paul ’t Hart）写了《政府管理中的集体思维：小团体和政策失败研究》(1990)，把集体思维称作“过分地追求全体一致”，一个能解释“拥有重大项目或者政策决定权的高层小团体运作中的错误”的行为（这些项目后来都失败了），比如伊朗-抗它拉事件(7, 4)。他评述了集体思维研究的几个具体运用(12h15)。 迪亚娜·沃恩（Diane Vaughan）(1996)有关挑战者号航天飞机灾难的讨论涉及自下而上、自上而下的组织错误，可以说占据了詹尼斯-哈特传统分析模式和这里提供的分析模式两个极端的中间位置。

　　集体思维理论家想获得作为社会理论家的地位，因而避免不必要的争议。在至少像詹尼斯和哈特这样的集体思维理论家集中讨论的事件上，他们认为失败的判断不会引起多大争议。正因为需要不引起争议的判断，所以集体思维运用的范围一直非常有限。

　　在本文中，我们把集体思维理论用在学术界这个背景下，但是预先假设它的失败肯定是要引起巨大争议的。学术界和集体思维理论家们考察的背景非常不同，不过我们建议考虑到失败的假设，学术界的中央控制机制使得把集体思维理论用在这个背景下是可能的。我们试图讨论这个观点，即学术群体是否陷入有缺陷的思想不能自拔，是否抗拒纠正这些缺陷。我们要解释顽固不化或者为什么缺乏纠正。我们不考虑“问题是如何出现的”，部分因为篇幅不够，部分因为世上从来就没有伊甸园。

　　当然，在使用集体思维来解释人文科学和社会科学里的学术意识形态的时候，我们应该谨慎。詹尼斯-哈特传统的集体思维文献考察的多是政策制订小组的信念过程。这些案例通常有如下的特征：

　　小组很小。

　　小组相当清晰地确定下来，一群“圈内人”。

　　小组以组长为基础，有高度集中的决策模式。

　　小组关心的安全漏洞或者其他限制导致它高度评价秘密进行。

　　小组在巨大的压力下行动。

　　小组做出具有极大风险的决策，涉及巨大的利害关系和可能危险。

　　小组在处理非常迫切和紧迫的议题。

　　小组的糟糕信念和手头要决策的内容有具体关系。

　　糟糕信念很肤浅，它们不是关于身份认同问题的。

　　最终承认缺陷的潜力往往存在。

　　在所有这些特征中，决策小组和学术团体有明显的不同。后者---不管是大学院系的同事或者著名刊物或者协会的领导都更大，成分更复杂，较少以信念为基础，较少以具体行动为中心，较少受到压力、紧迫性、风险或者危险的制约。他们的糟糕信念更深刻、更复杂、更根深蒂固—更多是道德、政治、审美价值的本质问题。这些差别让学术界群体在目的上更分散和混杂。

　　尽管有这些差别，我们看到詹尼斯-哈特小组和学术界小组之间的基本相似性。两种小组里都拥有糟糕信念。两者都企图向寻求一致性、自我合理性排除对于核心价值观的挑战。最后，学术界的工作机制是要创造一个绝缘的、自我渗透的、自我强化的“小圈子”。
作者: apple    时间: 2009-4-20 23:57

　　院系多数派主义

　　让我们想象一个名叫XYU的大学，它的内部工作机制和其他大学相似，也就是说，它们是在目的、结构和权威上是有等级差别的。XY大学是一个由教务长、系主任等等领导下的组织。在管理部门下面是学术院系。

　　
组织里的员工再进行劳动分工。在多数非学术组织中，老板很少详细篡改分配给属下单位的任务，相反，他们寻找能够推动组织使命的结果。学术界具有同样的必要的从属单位和代表部门，但是组织使命的意识就模糊多了。而且，在学术界未来关照往往是有问题的，因为学术研究天生的专业性和镶嵌于学术共同体的特性。甚至批评学术界的亚当·斯密（Adam Smith ([1776] 1981)也强调任何对于教学实质性问题的“外来管辖权”“都可能是无知和恶劣地实施地”[1] 结果是管理者往往对于院系的决定盖上橡皮图章而已。尽管院系可能在结构上属于管理部门领导，但是实际上所有重大决策（比如招聘、辞退、提拔、教学、科研、研究生培养等等）都是院系说了算，在意识形态性质的问题上也不受管理层的领导。

　　院系最重要的决定涉及招聘、辞退和提拔进入终身教职系列的人员。这样的决定一般都是按投票由多数来决定。虽然系主任拥有一定的权力，但教授委员会控制议题等。关于最重要的决策的中心的和最后的程序是终身教职的教授们的民主过程或者院系多数主义。

　　多数知识分子到了25岁或者30岁的时候已经养成了意识形态情感(Sears and Funk 1999),此后他们很少实质性地修正它们。智慧快乐和存在快乐不是从重新审查从前的决策中获得的，而是在沿着已经掌握的路线重新细化和发展已经掌握的观点(Ditto and Lopez 1992; Nickerson 1998).教授们很可能尊重那些探索和自己的问题类似的学者，或者掌握了类似思想模式的学者。他们不大可能尊重那些肯定和自己的信念矛盾的问题的学者。实际上，如果一个学者在从事一个可能威胁到同事的自我认识的研究项目时，他可能造成个人精神紧张和两者的言辞激烈。甲教授可能失去地位或者在学生中失去可信性，如果他的同事乙教授在给同一批学生讲授另一门课时暴露出甲教授课程材料、讲座和著作的前提存在缺陷的话。

　　院系招收新成员时，大部分现有成员倾向于支持那些拥有和他们基本价值观、信念和承诺相同的候选人。实际上，一个学者的首要责任之一就是探索大问题，做出判断和承诺后前进。这些判断和科学或学术是分不开的，学者们可能说“如果候选人甲在根本问题上判断不同，那么他表现出了糟糕的学术或者科学判断能力”，这是正确的。这个判断是不能被扔掉的，没有人能有办法绕开这点。因此，根据根本观点不同而形成的歧视不能被抽象地当作不负责任的学术问题来谴责。我们都在意识形态基础上区别对待，在抽象意义上，这样做完全是有道理的。

　　正如上文注意到的，学术界在某些方面和集体思维理论家们研究的背景是不一样的。但是这些差别中的部分内容可能是互补性的。在学术界，信念和行动的焦点不是关键的政策决定，比如攻占古巴。因此，没有对应的秘密性或者必要的区分文本的正常渠道，但是，另一个区别与所谈的信念的深度和个人意义相关。在学术界，信念是根深蒂固的，与自我认识和身份认同密不可分，正因为如此，保护和捍卫这些信念对个人来说就有更大的利害关系。意识形态信念的现有意义在某些方面弥补了这样一个事实。学术界的人事或者其他决策是平凡琐碎的，对于社会没有多大影响的。

　　在上下文里，人们知道他们必须根据深层的情感来判断和行动，他们知道，如果只是沉默的，没有真正的丑闻让他们这样做。集体形成的理论和社会动力学的理论告诉我们社会群体倾向于寻求和吸收像他们自己一样的新成员(McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001), 过滤掉或者排斥异教徒(Allport 1954; Brewer 1999), 按自己的形象塑造那些还没有形成固定思想的人(Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955, 62–63; Moscovici 1985).[2] 这些倾向扎根于人性的本质中。

　　假设一个系必须要招聘一个新成员，现有成员的51%拥有大致相似的意识形态，比如社会民主党的进步主义思想，或者保守主义或者古典自由主义/自由意志论等。而且，他们相信一个人必须笼统地吻合于那个意识形态才能成为好的同事或者好的教授。那么，会发生什么事呢？教授们招聘一个像他们一样的人。51%就变成了55%，然后60%，65%，然后70%等。正如斯蒂文·巴尔奇（Stephen Balch）(2003) 等人已经注意到的，多数派主义倾向于产生院系里的意识形态同一性。

　　这个综合症不依赖意识形态分子的身份认同。乔治梅森大学经济系由古典自由派主要由古典自由派率领。有些人可能自认为是保守派。只有少数人自认为是自由派（当今美国人的意义上）。这是意识形态歧视的案例吗？古典自由派和保守派认为作为干预主义者，比如在肯尼思·约瑟夫·阿罗（Kenneth Arrow）、约瑟夫·史蒂格雷茨（Joseph Stiglitz）保罗·克鲁格曼（Paul Krugman）或者丹尼·罗德瑞克（Dani Rodrik）方式上的，暴露出经济学判断上的失败。乔治梅森大学的许多经济学家认为对于政府和政治学的过分信心是糟糕的科学，他们认为晦涩难懂的著作是处理最重要的事情的科学失败。[3]

　　我们谈论的是倾向，不是步调完全一致的同一性，某种程度的变化是正常的和可以接受的。比如，现在更加激进的左派和更加传统的左派之间的内部紧张关系，不管怎样，朝向同一性的趋势不是故事的全部。意识形态上的异类或许有人喜欢，被看作没有威胁性，或许因为他胆怯或者进行的神秘研究领域让他成为和根本问题没有多大关系的人，而且，院系通常有达成共识的道德。同事是人，他们相互纠缠在一起，他们通常寻求避免恶语相向和关系紧张，多数派不会侵害少数派的利益。共识因素在人事问题上比较温和的，多数派支持属于他们阵营的求职者，但并不是以刺耳的、耀眼的、或公开说出来的方式。共识因素让多数派行动变得温和，但是它不能扭转朝向同一性的趋势。它的主要影响可能把共同特征拉向温和—也就是说，只不过朝向多数党喜欢的观点或者传统政策的假设而已。

　　圈外人常常认为古典自由派或者保守派教授只需要获得终身教职就可以确保专业上的成功和心理上的幸福。但是想象一下通过研究生院学习和获得终身教职前的见习期（大概11年）才能感觉到做真正的自己的职业拼搏道路，不是说你的意识形态观点变化了多少，而是说任何意识形态动机都可能退去。正如他们说的，你“回归自然”。你20多岁和30岁出头是发展的关键期，这些发展是不能被扭转的。而且，即使在获得终身教职后，你还是需要系里同事的支持，如果你要得到工资提升、资源、课程任务、课程表安排、提升、承认和关照等等。单单终身教职显然不是得罪院系的异端行为的避难所。

　　因为院系多数派主义，每个系都倾向于朝向意识形态同一性，或许稀释减弱。XY大学的有些学生哀叹历史系缺少古典自由主义和保守派。但是广大市民或许希望著名大学里的历史学家的公共讨论包括这样的观点，这样一来，人们可以寻找一个大学，其中有个更吸引人的意识形态的历史系。
作者: apple    时间: 2009-4-20 23:57

　　专业金字塔

　　想象一个名叫萨拉（Sarah）的大学新生来自崇拜亚当·斯密、哈耶克、米尔顿·弗里德曼等思想家的家庭，所以来到XY大学求学。在上了第一年课后，她告诉父母说这里的人文科学和社会科学系似乎被社会民主党人士所霸占。她
的父母抱怨几声，但事已至此，已经没有办法。但是，他们还有另外一个孩子渴望上大学，想学习历史。这次他们更加认真地挑选，比较了不同大学里的历史系。但是在任何地方他们看到的历史系都有倾向社会民主党的迹象，他们纳闷为什么它的影响能这么大呢？

　　不同校园里出现的同一性的主要原因是了解个别历史系在存在层次上意味着什么。比如XY大学历史系并不像更大部落里的一个小村庄一样是XY大学的附属机构，历史是一门专业研究领域，历史专业确实存在定居在XY大学即XY大学历史系，但是作为专业研究者，系的老师发现他们的意义的价值/可靠性在于属于历史专业领域。他们或许和哲学家、语言学家等共在一个屋檐下，但是几乎从来没有和他们之间有学术上的对话。相反，他们的学术生活发生在历史专业领域内，这个部落的位置可能在地理上或者实际机构上的不同地方。(参见表1).历史领域是个“看不见的学院”，大部分历史学家都属于这个学院。这个系与其说属于XY大学倒不如说属于历史专业。

　　再次，XY大学历史系需要做出招聘等事务的决定。他们是微观决定，在做出这些决定和为这些决定辩护时，系的成员要依赖部落的宏观模式和价值观。微观和宏观亲密地浓厚地相互交织在一起，无法分开。

　　在结构上，部落是个金字塔，精英在顶点，下面是更宽大的梯队(参阅表2)在金字塔内的地位取决于著名大学的专业排行榜或者传统的排行榜、知名学术刊物、院系、出版社、引用率、拨款、奖励或者表示水平的其他标志。个别的学者，除了担任具体的角色外（比如老师、作者、刊物编辑等）帮助组织起部落，通过参加确定或者证明这些排行的活动，写推荐信，写书评，引用研究成果，他们自己也成为排行的对象。所有这些通常的度量衡都是相互交织在一起并且不断相互增强的。

　　研究是高度专业化的，部落被分成众多附属领域。比如美国历史可以被按阶段分，按领域分（社会、文化、经济、性别、政治、法律等）按研究模式分，按主题或者人物分等等。名望和地位是在附属领域来决定的，相当于部落内的俱乐部。这些俱乐部构成了部落，正如各部门和机构组成政府一样。每个俱乐部挑选人都公开地使用谱系、出版物、引用率、推荐信等控制这些过滤网，并把它们用在自己身上。它控制研究生项目和刊物，通过大量生产和招聘新的博士学位获得者，俱乐部繁殖自己。

　　学术界的人才市场和招聘服务员或者卡车司机的市场不同。除了字面意思外，一个历史系实际上是在把自己新培养出来的博士“卖”给其他历史系。消费者（历史系）、生产者（其他历史系）、产品（新科博士）都是历史学家。服务员和司机要对雇主负责，雇主要对消费者负责。历史学家基本上只对其他历史学家负责。与此同时，他们花的钱是从纳税人、支付学费者、基金会、或者慈善捐款者那里得来的。

　　俱乐部和部落的金字塔是自我证明合理性。其他还有什么人能够提供合理性呢?金字塔结构在很大程度上是怪兽的本质。一个系的微观决定是关于朋友、同事、敌人、朋友的朋友、导师的学生等等。如果它想超越自身做出决定或者为其决定辩护，它就求助于本领域的更高一级梯队，正如一个人向祖先求助一样。

　　这种忠诚部分反映了对于部落的真诚的忠实，毕竟，我们将同意官方排行榜在某些重要的方面确实反映了学术的真正质量状况。但在部分上，也反映了建立一个普遍理解的标准和做法的实际需要。部落的标准是关键点，围绕它们协商出共同的期待和达成的宽容的共识(Whitley 1984)没有了环绕一切的标准，一个学科就没有作为连贯的事业来进行的前景。“历史就是历史学家做的事情，历史学家就是获得历史学学位的人和在历史系工作的人”或许在思想上是不令人满意的，但是至少它让车轮相对顺畅地转动起来。

　　依靠部落的标准来决定工作、工资、安全保障、工作量、拨款、研究助手等变得根深蒂固和强大，以至于参与者逐渐从这些东西本身的价值来看待这些标准。在顶尖杂志上发表一篇文章能带来实实在在的利益和名望，根本不考虑文章或者杂志的内在价值。功能取决于学科规范的内在化。

　　现在，假设位于金字塔顶点的院系或者杂志坚持一种意识形态j。那样的话，没有内部的冲突出现，下面的任何一个异议者被安全地忽略。实际上，下面的人倾向于克制自己不批评，因为他们依靠上面的人的接受和认可。整个金字塔里面的微观决策倾向于跟随顶端的微观决策。除了这样的赞同机制外，还存在繁殖机制：顶点出产博士并把他们安置在很好地地方。

　　在世界范围的200个经济系的传统排名中，前面的35名被看作顶点 (Klein 2005, 143).在这35个顶尖经济系中，90%以上的教授是从这同样的35个院系中获得博士学位的。顶端几乎完全是自我繁殖的。根据回归线，排名100名的经济系的教授中有65%的人是从这35个院系中获得博士学位的。沿着这个金字塔再往下走的院系的比例更小，所以顶尖的35个院系培养和照顾前面200个院系的大部分教授。这个领域，尤其是更高梯队的领域包括了大部分人，他们直接受益于或者个人忠诚于顶端的人。

　　但是，这些结果并不能充分地抓住顶尖院系的支配地位，它们还有庞大的不成比例的影响力，涉及到期刊、拨款、第二代学位等(Klein 2005, 144–45).比如，在社会学，瓦尔·伯瑞斯（Val Burris）描述了顶尖美国院系发挥的超级影响力：

　　从五个顶尖院系毕业的学生占据了所有94个院系所有教授的三分之一。前20名院系占据了全部教授大约70%的比例。向上流动的界限非常地严格。那些从非20名院系中获得学位的社会学家很少能被前20名院系聘用，几乎从来没有被前5名院系聘用过。

　　名牌院系招聘高级教授比招聘新博士更加小团体化。在前20名社会学系的430名全职教授中，只有7%（不足2%）是从非20名院系获得博士学位的，在非20名院系中工作三年或者以上时间，在奠定了学术地位后，跳槽到前20名院系中(2004, 247–49, 251)

　　在法学领域，理查德·雷丁（Richard Redding）发现“所有新老师的三分之一[1996年-2000年招聘进入法学院]要么毕业于哈佛(18%)要么毕业于耶鲁(15%);另外三分之一毕业于其他12所顶尖法学院，其他20%毕业与其他前25所法学院。(2003, 599).

　　因为院系内的纪律—繁殖、“跟从顶点”和“淘汰”—如果顶点拥抱意识形态j, 它将倾向于把这个意识形态沿着金字塔一路向下横扫每个院系。我们可能过于简单化了，但是或许并没有这么严重，可能出现某些异议者，但是异端见解集中在批评主流金字塔，因为金字塔仍然是群体实践和个人野心的地球引力。至于任何的中央权力，人们为它的施行和分配争吵不休。如果平行的金字塔建立起来，他们一般是要么忽略它，要么招安纳入到官方金字塔的范围内，在某种程度上改变它的性质。专业金字塔和院系多数派政治非常有效地共同作用，排除反对意识形态 j的学者，尤其是把他剔除顶尖院系。这个过程或许解释了为什么在人文科学和社会科学的众多领域，没有哪个古典自由主义占主导地位的学校有相当的专业地位。
作者: apple    时间: 2009-4-20 23:57

　　学术界的集体思维

　　虽然学术界和集体思维理论家探索的背景不同，它也表现出了很多共同的趋势和失败。欧文·詹尼斯提供了群体思维症状和先行条件的总结表格(1982, 244)。我们这里列举出逐字逐句(用黑体),省略了个别不适合学术界的
项目（比如挑衅性情形的背景”)我们添加了（正常字体)这些条件或者症状在学术界是如何运作的建议。我们勾画了从1972年开始不断增加的社会民主党集体思维的描述，当时在人文科学和社会科学（两年制学院除外）里民主党和共和党的比例大概是4：1，现在这个比例是8：1。(Klein and Stern 2005, 264).

　　先行条件

　　决策者构成一个衔接的小群体。专业金字塔和院系自主权倾向于朝向群体衔接性。

　　组织的结构错误

　　群体的绝缘性。金字塔外的人没有资格评价这个小组，内部人安全地忽略外面的意见。

　　成员的社会背景和意识形态单一性。选拔和塑造机制产生了意识形态同一性，不仅通过专业金字塔而且通过个别的院系。1972年，社会科学和人文科学教授大部分是民主党人，一旦这个扭曲过于强大，它就遭遇自我强化的过程。在教授中间，民主党帐篷在政策观点上明显比共和党帐篷狭隘得多。(Klein and Stern 2005, 272).

　　可以观察到的后果

　　集体思维的症状

　　第1种：群体的过高估计

　　强大无比的幻觉。教授们觉得金字塔外面的人缺乏知识和可靠性，金字塔内的人不敢成为叛逆者。

　　相信群体道德的延续性。个人选择加入一个学术领域。许多人说他们这样做是为了学术，学习、科学、真理、社会等等。归属感和献身和目的混淆起来了，它成为个人身份认同的一部分。高度的同一性让群体过于自信。成员把他们的观点推向极端。因为面对很少的检验和挑战，思维习惯变得更加顽固和封闭。

　　第2种：思想封闭

　　集体合理化。学术专业领域发展出详细的学术教条来为自己省略挑战性的或难对付的观点辩护。一旦离开40码线（棒球术语）和探索相当不同安排的讨论被看作“规范性的”“意识形态的”或者“规范性的”或者“鼓吹者”而不屑一顾。自愿性的与强制性的行为的古典自由模式被看作虚幻的和意识形态的内容而不屑一顾。在经济学领域，那里建立数学模型主宰理论文献，知识和发现的重要方面，包括自由市场的美德，很少有机会被注意或者研究。正如詹尼斯写的“当一群相互尊重对方观点的人达成了共同的观点后，每个成员可能都觉得这个观点肯定是真实的。这种依赖共识可靠性的倾向于取代个人的批评性思考和现实检验。” (1982, 37).

　　群体外的俗套观念。詹尼斯写到“群体思维的一个症状是成员坚持相互传播关于政治敌人的陈词滥调和过分简单化的形象，体现在长期存在的意识形态俗套观念里的 (1982, 37).社会民主党教授把他们的批评家归拢为“保守派”或者“右派”是不稀罕的，正如马克·博伊尔莱因（Mark Bauerlein）(2004)注意的，假设这些批评家被乔治·布什、安·库特（Ann Coulter）、拉什·林堡（Rush Limbaugh）、比尔·欧雷利（Bill O’Reilly）、肖恩·哈尼蒂（Sean Hannity）之类人所代表。很少社会民主党学者从事.亚当·斯密、哈耶克、米尔顿·弗里德曼或者理查德·爱波斯坦（Richard Epstein）等人提供的古典自由主义替代性观点的研究。.

　　自我审查。金字塔功能很像一个上流社会，其中批评被禁声。尤其是因为共识的规范，疏远同事是缺少政治敏感性的行为。随大溜，异议者和异端分子倾向于压制自己和主流观点不同的意见，导致出现第默尔·库兰（Timur Kuran）(1995)所说的“偏好伪装”[4]

　　对于异议者的直接压制。在詹尼斯的著作中，一个持不同观点的圈内人被迫修正自己的观点。在学术界，异议者更可能被冷冻起来。随着群体的观念变得更加有缺陷，群体对于紧张关系更加敏感，对于可能的挑战者和异端者更加不能容忍。这种发展导致更加严格的审查和驱逐、更多的一致性、更多的思想堕落、更多的不宽容。斯坦利·罗斯曼（Stanley Rothman）罗伯特·里奇尔（Robert Lichter）、尼尔·内维特（Neil Nevitte）(2005)提供了证据说明保守派学者比同行拥有的学术上更加优越的地位明显稀少，控制的研究成果，我们在别处(Klein and Stern 2005, 275)显示在主要学术协会中投票支持共和党的学者比同事更可能退出学术界之外（尤其是在社会学、历史和哲学）。

　　有缺陷的决策的症状

　　对于替代方案的不完整调查

　　对于目标的不完整调查

　　不能重新评价最初被拒绝的替代方案

　　蹩脚的信息搜索，对于手头信息处理时的选择性偏见

　　来自詹尼斯的表格中所有这些提到的项目都可以应用在社会民主党和40码线的出色表现和戒律。古典自由派和保守观点常常被忽略，被看作死板的教条而不屑一顾或者只是用虚假的模仿来对待。

　　一些例子

　　或许最清楚地显示我们如何看待人文科学和社会科学中社会民主党集体思维的问题的方法是做一个思想实验。想象一个博士生不加掩饰地拥有古典自由主义观点。自问一下这样的学生能否在名牌大学的政治系、社会学系、历史系等得到热情的支持。自问一下不管这个学生的研究多么可靠，他能否获得拨款，在最受尊重的杂志上发表文章，或者在学术界的人才市场上成功找到工作呢？

　　想象以下这个学生的研究可能探讨的一些具体内容：

　　富兰克林罗斯福和新政使得大萧条的时间延长了。

　　美国劳工法，比如工会特权，从来没有得到合理性证明，损害了穷人利益。

　　美国的K–12 学校体制可以被作为社会主义工业来有成效地分析，它表现出社会主义失败的众多特征。

　　大部分强制性回收项目纯粹是浪费。

　　在我们看来，这样的观点不仅仅听起来有道理，而且很容易提出更多的例子。这种研究在经济学部落里不是绝对没有听说过[5] 但是尤其是在其他学科里，一个新博士如果持有这样的观点彻底证明他们在就业市场上可能失败，也不可能在‘好’的刊物上发表文章。缺乏部落的证明书和和认可的公章将理所当然地为把这样的学者冷冻起来的微观决策提供合理性。

　　再考虑许多通过经验来研究的学科如哲学、政治学、社会学、人类学、历史学等的一些更广泛的主题：

　　“社会正义”没有意义/说不通（如哈耶克指出的）

　　“社会正义”是返祖现象(如哈耶克指出的).

　　政府干预，比如最低工资法是强制性的；社会民主党国家是批发强制性的社会。

　　民主过程的主要特征包括无知、肤浅和系统性的偏见。

　　民主常常践踏自由、体面和繁荣。

　　自19世纪末期社会民主的兴起可能被有成效地看作对自由主义的颠覆，尤其是它推广了把政府作为组织的观点。

　　自1880年以来，知识分子已经改变了自由词汇的许多关键术语的意义，比如积极自由、消极自由、自由主义、正义、权利、财产、法治、公平、平等—为了削弱它们反对社会民主党世界观的力量。

　　组织的整体性和参与以及资金支持的自愿性基础成正比—也就是说，政府组织倾向于缺少组织整体性，因为它们不用面对建立在自愿参加基础上的支持丧失的威胁。

　　自愿性和强制性行为的区别（或者自由放任和干预主义）提供了比自由派和保守派这个区分能提供的更好的框架来分析政治观点和公共主张。

　　这些观点在这些学科部落看来是十分可憎的。[6] 集体思维让他们被排斥在名牌杂志和课程之外。这些领域中有些有替代性中心和协会能够探索这样的观点，但是这些中心和协会一般来说位于专业金字塔的边缘。古典自由主义和保守派学者知道这个比例，如果他们仍然试图进军学术界，他们就会发现不得不减弱、修改、伪装或者扭曲自己真正的想法。
作者: apple    时间: 2009-4-20 23:58

　　参考文献：

　　Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

　　Balch, Stephen H. 2004. Toward a Reconstitution of Academic  
Governance. Academic Questions 17, no. 1 (winter): 67–72.

　　Bauerlein, Mark. 2004. Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-intellectual. Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12.

　　Brewer, Marilynn B. 1999. The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love or Outgroup Hate? Journal of Social Issues 55: 429–44.

　　Burris, Val. 2004. The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks. American Sociological Review 69 (April): 239–64.

　　Davis, William L. 2004. Preference Falsification in the Economics Profession. Econ Journal Watch 1, no. 2: 359–68.

　　Ditto, Peter H., and David F. Lopez. 1992. Motivated Skepticism: Use of Differential Decision Criteria for Preferred and Non-preferred Conclusions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63: 568–84.

　　Hart, Paul ’t. [1990] 1994. Groupthink in Government: A Study of Small Groups and Policy Failure. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

　　Janis, Irving L. 1982. Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

　　Katz, Elihu, and Paul Felix Lazarsfeld. 1955. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. New York: Free Press.

　　Klein, Daniel B. [1994] 1998. If Government Is So Villainous, How Come Government Officials Don’t Seem Like Villains? In 3 Libertarian Essays, by Daniel B. Klein. Irvington, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education.

　　———. 2005. The Ph.D. Circle in Academic Economics. Econ Journal Watch 2, no. 1 (April): 133–48.

　　Klein, Daniel B., and Charlotta Stern. 2005. Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists. Critical Review 17, nos. 3–4: 257–303.

　　———. 2006. Sociology and Classical Liberalism. The Independent Review 11, no. 1 (summer): 37–52.

　　———. 2007. Is There a Free-Market Economist in the House? The Policy Views of American Economics Association Members. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 66, no. 2 (April): 309–34.

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　　McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook. 2001. Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual Review of Sociology 27: 415–44.

　　Moscovici, Serge. 1985. Social Influence and Conformity. In The Handbook of Social Psychology, 3rd ed., edited by Gardner Lindzey and Elliott Aronson, 2:347–412. New York: Random House.

　　Myrdal, Gunnar. [1969] 1983. Objectivity in Social Research. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

　　Nickerson, R. S. 1998. Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises. Review of General Psychology 2: 175–220.

　　Poe, Edgar Allan. 1843. The Rationale of Verse. Reprinted in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. A. Harrison, vol. 14: Essays and Miscellanies, 209–65. New York: Crowell.

　　Redding, Richard E. 2003.Where Did You Go to Law School? Gatekeeping by the Professoriate and Its Implications for Legal Education. Journal of Legal Education 53: 594–614.

　　Rothman, Stanley, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte. 2005. Politics and Professional Advancement among College Faculty. The Forum 3, no. 1.

　　Sears, David O., and Carolyn L. Funk. 1999. Evidence of the Long-Term Persistence of Adults’ Political Predispositions. Journal of Politics 61, no. 1 (February): 1–28.

　　Smith, Adam. [1776] 1981. The Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund.

　　Vaughan, Diane. 1996. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

　　Whitley, Richard. 1984. The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

　　Wisniewski, Richard. 2000. The Averted Gaze. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 31, no. 5: 5–23.

　　致谢：

　　我们感谢理查德·雷丁（Richard Redding）、罗伯特·马兰特（Robert Maranto）和安·希默尔法布（Anne Himmelfarb）提供的详细反馈意见，大大改善了本文的质量。本文曾以另外的方式发表在《改革政治正确的大学》赫斯（F. Hess）、马兰特（R. Maranto）和雷丁（R. Redding）编著(Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 2009).作者和《独立评论》非常感谢美国企业研究所允许在这里使用这些材料。

　　注释：

　　1．在对待外部管辖权的问题上，比如主教、总督、部长等，斯密继续说“在本质上它是随意性的和随意支配的，实施这个的人，既不参加老师上的课，也不明白讲述的科学内容，很少能提供有判断力的管理。([1776] 1981, 761).

　　2．Klein [1994] 1998 政府机构的组织文化对待自我归类、过滤、信仰可塑性在朝向同一性的倾向。

　　3．在这方面，乔治梅森院经济系是个畸形，位于经济系梯队的上层。(Klein and Stern 2007).

　　4．关于经济学专业的偏爱伪装，请参阅Davis 2004.

　　5．可以想象到，在经济学界，学者将成功地在名牌刊物上发表这样的文章，里面充斥数学公式，但是很可能他没有机会到名牌经济系任教。

　　6．关于社会学领域的考试，请参阅 Klein and Stern 2006.

　　作者简介：

　　丹尼尔·克莱恩（Daniel B. Klein）是独立学院研究员，乔治梅森大学经济学教授，著有《志愿的城市：选择、社区和市民社会》The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society.

　　夏洛特·斯特恩（Charlotta Stern）是斯德哥尔摩大学瑞典社会研究院研究员。

　　译自：“Groupthink in Academia: Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid”By Daniel B. Klein Charlotta Stern

　　http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=731



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