The Methodological Connection to the Campus Climate (Part 2)

Changing methodological conventions are common to every academic field, with many disciplines becoming wholly different from what they were just two generations ago. This process is what philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn in The Structures of Scientific Revolutions called “the disciplinary matrix.” His book famously illuminated how science changes less through steady or step-by-step progression than through crises and anomalies that generate whole new dominant “paradigms.”

• Premier MBA programs today, for example, heavily emphasize finance-focused quantitative analysis and entrepreneurship, in contrast to the dominant case-study method that Harvard Business School borrowed from legal education when it started a century ago.
• The physical sciences are beset by theoretical and methodological conflicts just as bitter as those found in the social sciences and humanities. Physicist Lee Smolin in The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next and mathematician Peter Woit in Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law both describe the long impasse over several competing theories of advanced physics alongside a growing resistance to heterodox views in physics departments, affecting not only faculty hiring but research and conference agendas.

The academic controversies in the physical sciences attract little general attention for the simple fact that, aside from the complexity of the subject matter that is beyond most laypeople, there is little political or social import involved.

The scene changes when considering the social sciences. The social sciences deal with matters over which political opinion divides sharply and passionately, because, at the root, they are concerned with basic questions of justice.

This fact is often obscured by the senescence of the “fact-value” debate that arose while scholars were attempting to make social sciences more fully “scientific” and empirical. This effort, which began during the 17^th and 18^th century Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, culminated in the 20^th century with the “positive” social science of thinkers like Max Weber. Moral claims (“values”) today are dryly described as “normative” issues and considered unscientific because they cannot be empirically grounded.

For much of the 20^th century, conservatives were usually found on the “value” side of the fact-value debate, though many liberal and even radical left thinkers also resist narrow empiricism: Sheldon Wolin, Hilary Putnam, and Ian Shapiro, show that the fact-value debate remains alive, even if it is largely dormant or hibernating in most college curricula.  (For more on these periodic controversies in political science, see David M. Ricci, and Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed., Perestroika: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science.)

One reason that there tend to be more conservatives found in political science, especially political philosophy, is the diversity of methodologies and subfields and vigorous intradisciplinary debate in the field. Ironically, this is also why political science, as a discipline, tends to be relatively less politicized than other social sciences. Traditionally, every political science department included political philosophy, with scholars concerned with what the positive social scientists isolate as “normative” questions.

However, today, some leading political science departments have considered discontinuing political philosophy as a subfield, suggesting it should be the province of philosophy departments instead. This is an entirely wrongheaded idea. Empirical political scientists do not grasp that today’s academic philosophy, rightly understood, is a foreign enterprise wholly incompatible with political philosophy.

But it also has the effect of deterring conservatives, who were disproportionately represented among political philosophy faculty, from entering academe at all. Allan Bloom may have put his finger on the heart of the matter in his Closing of the American Mind:

“Political Science is the only discipline in the university (with the possible exception of the philosophy department) that has a philosophical branch. . . Political philosophy . . . provides at least a reminiscence of those old questions about good and evil and the resources for examining the hidden presuppositions of modern Political Science and political life.”

Other subfields in political science that have attracted conservatives over the years are slowly dwindling. Public law, once a thriving subfield featuring many conservative professors, has been in decline for two decades or more. Increasingly, public law is being ceded over to law schools, even though law professors do not approach the subject in the same manner as political scientists, which means useful perspectives are lost. Political history has almost completely disappeared as a specialty in political science; in fact, the new editorial leadership of the American Political Science Review does not contain anyone from political philosophy or political history.

Up Next…

I’ll analyze why disciplinary methodology is converging much more so today than a generation ago, why this matters, why this has resulted in the questions of justice or “values” increasingly orphaned and politicized in unhealthy ways, and how this has unintentionally contributed to the excesses of campus “political correctness.”