BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE

Right-wing attacks on academia allege that modern secular universities are hotbeds of liberal orthodoxy and must be reformed to expand the range of views on offer to students. This past year, North Carolina Republican legislators and their appointed university trustees used this rhetoric to justify bypassing the faculty and creating a new School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC–Chapel Hill.

It’s true that there are reigning orthodoxies in academia. But the narrowness of intellectual vision that so incenses conservatives doesn’t exist where they think it does and is rampant in places where they never think to look.

One place it doesn’t exist is in the social sciences and humanities. In these fields, where I spent my forty-year academic career, professors love to expose students to competing theories and bodies of evidence. This occurs within courses, between courses, and across disciplines. Doing this sort of thing—giving students different ways to look at the world—is our bread and butter, and a big part of what makes these fields exciting for both faculty and students.

Part of what bothers many conservatives is that not every view gets equal time. Stuff that is logically incoherent or backed by no credible evidence is understandably ignored or given short shrift. Stuff like, say, phrenology, 9/11 trutherism, or trickle-down economics. But that’s not narrowness; it’s just culling ideas that are demonstrably wrongheaded.

Faculty in the physical and biological sciences do likewise when they forego teaching flat-earth theories, creationism, or racist eugenics. We should all be glad, inside and outside academia, that this kind of sifting and winnowing occurs, because it’s how knowledge grows. It’s what makes universities different from YouTube.

So where do we find a troubling narrowness of views in the university? Right in front of us, often on prominent display: in business schools, where the reigning orthodoxy, pretty much everywhere all at once, is capitalism.

I know this observation is likely to elicit a shrug. “Yes, of course, capitalism is assumed in business schools,” the response might be. “What else would you expect in a capitalist society?” This is the proverbial fish-in-water mindset. If your whole world is water, being wet doesn’t seem like a problem; it’s just how things are.

But our economy isn’t so simple. According to the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, there are about one thousand worker co-ops in the United States. These enterprises are not essentially capitalist; they operate on principles of democratic control and distribute company earnings to employees, not managers and distant shareholders.

Here in North Carolina, according to the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center, there are 18 worker co-ops and 117 companies with employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). The latter group of companies includes 649,045 active members.

So, if you were a young person and wanted to study business at UNC–Chapel Hill to learn how to run a democratic work organization—a cooperative or employee-owned enterprise of some kind—could you do that? It would be hard.

You’d be discouraged by looking at UNC’s course catalog. Of the 170 courses listed under “business administration,” exactly zero focus on workplace democracy or employee ownership. That’s as good an illustration of a dominant orthodoxy as one is likely to find.

Although there are a handful of courses on workplace democracy taught at US universities, these are rarely part of regular business school curricula. CUNY offers a graduate certificate in workplace democracy and community ownership through its School of Labor and Urban Studies. Courses on cooperative management are taught through UW–Madison’s Center for Cooperatives. Rutgers is a partial exception. There, the School of Management and Labor Relations offers a certificate in participatory management.

But searching the online catalogs of the top five business schools in the United States—Booth at Chicago, Kellogg at Northwestern, Wharton at Penn, Sloan at MIT, and Harvard—for courses on workplace democracy, worker ownership, employee ownership, and worker cooperatives turned up nothing. It’s possible that workplace democracy is addressed in special topics courses at these places, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Faculty and administrators in the business school at UNC–Chapel Hill and other universities might say there is no demand for alternative programs or courses, that undergrads and MBA students want only to learn how to win at capitalism. But that’s doubtful. In addition to the people already involved in worker-owned enterprises, many more might show up at the classroom door if their interests were addressed.

A study recently published in the American Political Science Review bolsters this point. Researchers Soumyajit Mazumder and Alan Yan found that Americans are increasingly resistant to dictatorial work arrangements and want more democratic workplaces. So, there is at least suggestive evidence of a wider, untapped interest.

Here, then, is a chance for conservatives genuinely concerned with opposing orthodoxy to speak up and suggest “expanding the range of viewpoints” on offer in the university, with the specific goal of promoting democracy.

Alas, I’m not hopeful. Conservative beachheads in academia, like the James Madison Program at Princeton and the new School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC–Chapel Hill, are not really about viewpoint diversity or democracy. Strip away the public relations rhetoric and it becomes clear that these outfits are really meant to combat critical views of capitalist society and keep democracy from getting out of hand. The point is to ensure that the fish can conceive of no world but water.

Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.