BY AARON R. HANLON
Aaron R. Hanlon is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College
The public is right to care about what kinds of values our institutions of higher education are (and are not) imparting to students. People are likely to disagree over which particular values they think colleges and universities ought to emphasize—in both curricular and co-curricular programming—but any such debate that proceeds without some grounding in facts will likely go astray. This has been the case with the most widespread media narrative about the imposition of values in the academy: that higher education today is overrun by “social justice warriors” who are indoctrinating students with malicious values and attributes, such as emotional fragility, disdain for free speech, and strident disregard for reason and facts. [It’s barely worth citing examples here, given the ubiquity of this moral panic over “social justice,” but I include a few for anyone who hasn’t encountered this narrative.]
As an occasional defender of “social justice” and the various academic disciplines rightly or wrongly associated with it, I hold reason and facts in high esteem. So let’s consider a few facts, and reason from them. In particular I’m interested in why disciplines associated with “social justice” have faced such scrutiny and accusations of malicious “indoctrination” while business, marketing, entrepreneurship, and associated disciplines—which offer the most popular suite of college majors—face so little scrutiny for their capacity to impart harmful values, like disregard for honesty and integrity, or an instrumentalist outlook that prevents learning, intellectual humility, and curiosity.
As detailed in the most recent National Center for Education Statistics report, the total number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2015-16 in the collection of fields known as “Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies”—those routinely, if often sloppily associated with “social justice” values and “indoctrination”—was 7,840, down from its peak in 2011-12, which was 9,228. For comparison, according to the same data set, the total number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in business was 371,694, the highest total on record, up slightly from 363,741 the year before.
To put these figures in perspective, 47 business degrees were conferred in 2015-16 for every one “Area” and other “studies” degree. One could of course argue that “social justice” teaching crops up in other disciplinary contexts as well, but then one could make the same argument about business teaching outside of business courses. In other words, for every “social justice” corner of English, anthropology, history, philosophy, sociology, and so on, there’s a business, marketing, or entrepreneurship corner of economics, engineering, computer science, and biomedical and health sciences. And the latter disciplines almost always account for a greater share of majors and enrollments at the national scale. Likewise one could make the structural argument that “social justice” ideas permeate administrations, and therefore hold greater influence than coursework alone could account for. But once again the same could be said for the influence of corporate donors, financiers, trustees, hedge-fund managers, and others working with and within colleges and universities.
Here are some more facts: Research has shown that business and marketing majors are more likely than other majors to cheat; that the cognitive moral development of business majors is lesser than non-business majors (particularly than that of liberal arts majors); and that business majors learn less in college than other majors. In other words, we have evidence of correlation between taking business degrees and exhibiting some of the negative values and attributes that critics of business education—many business educators among them—have voiced.
But when we turn to the set of disciplines associated with negative aspects of “social justice” values, we find no comparable evidence that, for example, taking a course or a major in gender studies makes one emotionally fragile, anti-reason, or anti-free speech. We don’t have data (that I’m aware of) that sorts attitudes toward free expression by college major, for example. My point here is not that it’s impossible that teaching in “social justice”-associated disciplines has an impact on student views on free speech or the reliability of reason or other such concerns, but rather that the link between business curriculums and the negative attributes above is stronger and more explicit than the link between “social justice” and assumed outcomes.
Even if we zoom out and examine the accusation that higher education indoctrinates students into becoming more left-leaning, and perhaps therefore more prone to “social justice” values, we find no evidence that could possibly help those arguing that left-wing “social justice” thinking is caused by the likes of gender studies faculty. Students in general are increasingly left-leaning when they enter college, but after one year of college students tend to view the political “other side” more favorably than they did before college. Further research shows that contact with faculty actually makes students more politically moderate, and that college graduates tend to have the same political views as their siblings who did not attend college. When it comes to faculty and free speech in the classroom, for example, an American Enterprise Institute round-up of survey data finds that over 90 percent of faculty in English, history, political science, arts, and humanities support the idea that “faculty members should be free to present in class any idea they consider relevant,” while 70 percent of business and education faculty support this statement. Research also finds that faculty in “liberal” departments grade students more fairly than those in “conservative” departments.
When we put together the fact that students on the whole are far more likely to get classroom exposure to business curriculums than to curriculums generally associated with “social justice,” and the fact that business students exhibit greater tendencies to cheat and lesser tendencies to develop moral sensibility, we find probable cause to ask of business programs the kinds of questions we’ve been asking of programs affiliated with “social justice.” When we add to this that both faculty hiring and resources in “social justice” disciplines have always been marginal, while those in business and related disciplines are much greater and only increasing, we have yet further cause to be skeptical of anyone behind the national interrogation of “social justice” fields who isn’t also interrogating business fields with the same vigor.
I suspect that a large part of the reason we’re vigilant, sometimes panicked, over “social justice” values but not business values has to do with the fact that the former are typically portrayed as “ideology,” while the latter are routinely and naively accepted as neutral facts of life, particularly in the United States. But the policy choice, for example, to allocate insulin by markets rather than by need is no less “ideological” than the choice to support paid maternity leave as a social good. In other words, to whatever extent there are tacit or even overt values being prioritized in women’s studies courses, the same is true in corporate finance courses, management courses, and marketing courses. It’s reasonable, even preferable to have metaethical and policy discussions about which kinds of values we ought to value as part of a postsecondary education; but those important discussions can’t happen when we deny the very possibility that our most popular majors might push some values over others—including some values we wouldn’t want our students to adopt—while at the same time piling on a select few disciplines who have become scapegoats for the academy’s public-relations challenges.
To be very clear, I don’t oppose business programs, nor do I buy the idea that “social justice” values are primarily bad. My interest is not in pitting disciplines against one another, nor simply to supplant one scapegoat (“social justice”) with another (business). Instead, I’d like to see a more intellectually honest and equitable approach to discussions about values and higher education, one that doesn’t need a scapegoat in the first place.
This is a well-written essay and the writer had my buy-in until he (apparently) slipped into thought and expression suggesting ideological bias, but especially, a per se misunderstanding of what business schools and business training, including economics, actually consist of. He states: ‘I’m interested in why disciplines associated with “social justice” have faced such scrutiny and accusations of malicious “indoctrination” while business, marketing, entrepreneurship, and associated disciplines—which offer the most popular suite of college majors—face so little scrutiny for their capacity to impart harmful values, like disregard for honesty and integrity, or an instrumentalist outlook that prevents learning, intellectual humility, and curiosity.’
A fair point. I don’t believe Colby ranks in business school leagues and of course is a college, not a university, so it is not clear what set of institutions inform the writer’s opinion. Is it N=1? If he were to conduct even a summary assessment of US graduate (and tier 1 undergraduate) business schools such as UChicago, Stanford, Texas or Illinois, among many others including Harvard, Yale, Duke, Georgia, Miami, Berkeley, UCLA, Hartford, Tennessee, Northwestern, Toronto, or in the UK the LSE and Oxbridge, he would find the very heart of those social concerns otherwise topically (versus structurally in business) addressed in the Humanities. The MBA, for example, is to social science what engineering is to physical science.
Allow me to provide below some extracts from a 2018 memorandum I wrote for the senior administration of University of Chicago, that may be further explanatory, and helpful (some program bias acknowledged):
“The MBA is one of the most comprehensive, useful and actually “liberal” of educational programs that has ever been invented. Unlike an academic masters degree, such as the traditional MA, the more modern MSc, or even the venerable European MPhil, the MBA can contemplate the same complex mix of humanistic, social and even physical science problems, but combines them with applied tools of analysis, quantification and judgement that pure academic degrees rarely touch. And it contains a curriculum of advanced, complex subjects ranging from economics, statistics, accounting, finance, operations and psychology, to advanced mathematics and expository writing that puts it in an intellectual league of its own (it even challenges the PhD, as an investment-grade business plan can rival a dissertation on several dimensions including originality, conceptual complexity and sophistication of primary data, forecasting and application). Moreover, the MBA, unlike its academic counterparts, demands significant work experience so that its concepts, methods and applications can be understood and deliberated from a base of actual hands-on experiences and references. That alone makes it unlike any other graduate training program (even law or medicine). Nothing comes closer in synthesizing and applying advanced verbal, quantitative, and integrated reasoning skill.”
“A business curriculum, interestingly, and perhaps instructively for those faculty in opposition to it, also has its counterparts in the Humanities however. Academic philosophy is an example. The long if not ancient tradition of philosophical inquiry, in fact, really laid the foundation for modern science (from natural philosophy) and the humanities (from moral philosophy). But it did so, as Karl Popper argues in Conjectures and Refutations (and to some extent by Wittgenstein), not by seeking method, theory or even application, but by working on the solution to a problem removed from academic philosophy proper. As Popper puts it succinctly, “Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted in urgent problems outside philosophy, and they die if these roots decay.” Indeed, even in the long pedigree of ancient, medieval, continental and analytic practice, it was extra-philosophical problems that inspired, directed and preoccupied those efforts. It is exactly analogous in economics and business: it has no other purpose, nor can find any intellectual bearing, except in actual problems outside what has become economic social science and theory.”
“Academy bias against business is, strangely, not directed with the same animosity toward other professional schools or programs, such as law, medicine or public policy. Why? They are by design, training students for “lucrative careers” as a law partner, litigator, surgeon, hospital executive, government cabinet member or professor. Indeed, even the PhD, by its very nature, exists to train new researchers and teachers for careers, the ones who will go out and write grant requests, raise donor funds, publish books, act as consultants or government advisors, agency directors, labor leaders, school administrators, federal reserve bankers, presidential election managers and a host of lucrative, if not “crony capitalism” roles. Yet “business” training is somehow seen as strictly about money, profit and commercialism. It indeed can be. But it is also, if not more, about management. Management of resources, time, people, technology and especially, opportunity. The very heart of liberal concerns—health care, human rights, environmental stewardship and effective government, among numerous other challenges—all come down to competent management. And nowhere else is the art of management and leadership so thoroughly pursued as it is in business school. It is the Liberal’s best friend in the pursuit of equality and opportunity because those pillars of a democratic society rest on competent management, leadership and vision. The Philosopher-King may be wise, but the executive leader is capable. We need both—or better still, the elements of both in one person.”
Thank you and with Regards.