Bastiat - a conservative?

A bit of background for this post. I work at a community college in a department (Social Sciences) that includes the disciplines of economics, political science, history, sociology, anthropology and geography.

The work of Klein and Stern (click here) describes the interventionist views of almost all of my colleagues, including my fellow economists. That is, on the scale used by Klein and Stern 1 to 5 with 1 a strong agreement with decentralized individual based decision making to 5 a strong agreement with government intervention I suspect if my colleagues completed the Klein survey they would range from 4.5 to 5.0. I believe Klein and Stern found in their sample that there was little diversity in higher education in these disciplines, with average overall ratings of 4.0 and above.

Klein is referenced in an Steve Horowitz article in the current Freeman - if you missed this it is work a click - a very disturbing, but not unexpected survey showing the attitude of professional economists to government and freedom.

That said, I was discussing Bastiat with a colleague yesterday in our work room and a junior faculty in political science remarked, "Oh, that conservative."

This comment speaks volumes - beginning with the danger of labels. I was not quick enough on the uptake to ask my colleague if his evaluation was based upon actual reading of Bastiat or impressions he had formed over time.

This junior faculty member teaches 6 sections of 30 students so the scope of his influence over time is not insignificant. What is equally troubling is the scale of his influence - to the extent that he misrepresents liberty and freedom and the the thinkers that advocate for individualism and liberty, he broadens the ongoing support by the masses for Leviathan.

So, to build upon the previous post dealing with mainstream v mainline thinking - it seems apparent that many (most?) in our profession have a tendency toward the mainstream and may well lack familiarity with mainline. To the extent that the next wave of faculty are more interventionist in their outlook than the current generation I suspect that the expanding scale and scope of government in our lives will expand.

Two sociologists attempt to explain the source of strong interventionism in higher education faculty in this paper which does reference the work of Klein and Stern.

An added variable that may well contribute to accelerating acceptance of the state in our society is the changing preparation of the students who are subjected to these interventionist faculty in college.

George Leaf describes the current college student as:

Ill-prepared and unmotivated as many applicants are, colleges are eager to have them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to stay afloat financially. Admitting throngs of weak students, however, leads to an array of problems for non-selective schools.

One of those problems is the need for remedial courses. Speaking from recent teaching experience, Toby observes that many students, even at a “flagship” state university like Rutgers, are terrible writers. They make mistakes on points that should have been learned in about third grade (such as the difference between the words “to,” “too,” and “two”) and cannot read college-level material because they have such limited vocabularies. That observation was also made by Professor Mark Bauerlein in his book The Dumbest Generation, reviewed here.

His analysis is well worth a read as it describes the above deterioration of college student preparation and motivation as a predictable outcome of incentives generated by state dominance of higher education.

Leaf aptly describes the situation at my institution:

Another unfortunate result of admitting a large cadre of weak students is that it means classrooms filled with an oil-and-water mixture: some eager and capable students and some lazy and incapable ones. How does a professor deal with that? Concentrate on the good students and let the weak ones fail if they can’t or won’t keep up? Or dumb down the course and inject plenty of entertainment so the poor students can keep up and get the “decent” grades they’re accustomed to? Since most colleges are frantic about student retention, they often pressure the faculty to adopt the latter course. Academic rigor thus erodes.

The final sentence is, I would argue, universal across the board, at least at community colleges. While I encounter more water and less oil in my classrooms, the "data driven" administration looks closely at metrics such as classroom capacity, completion rate, retention rate and withdrawal rate.