PROFESSIONALS AND PURGES

By the mid-nineteenth century in western Europe and the United States, the growth in trade and industry brought a noticeable increase in university populations and a commensurate professionalization of intellectual pursuits. The self-trained patrician scholar was replaced by more formally schooled individuals explicitly certified to conduct the requisite scholarship. These newly minted professionals drew salary and rank from established institutions of higher learning, mostly in exchange for teaching duties. The gentleman amateur gave way to the gentleman academic (Hamerow 1987; Holt 1967).

A leading light of Germany's professionalized scholarship was the renowned Leopold von Ranke, whose unflinching devotion to absolutism won him the favor of German monarchs. In 1831, Professor Ranke agreed to edit a political journal sponsored by the Prussian crown, from which position he launched a series of attacks against parliamentary democracy (Ranke 1973, 102–3). For Ranke, the recording of political events was to be grounded on facts that were to be ascertained in documents produced mostly by the state. Hence, “objective” scholarship tended to be that which was heavily refracted through the official lenses of an autocratic state. In 1841, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV anointed Ranke official historiographer of the Prussian state. Ranke's other royal admirer, King Maximilian II of Bavaria, appointed him chair of the newly formed Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (Gilbert 1990, 11–45; Iggers and Moltke 1973, xxviii–xxix, xxx–xxxv).

Nota bene, the German monarchs of Ranke's day took academic scholarship seriously as an instrument of ideological propagation. They financed chairs, commissions, journals, and professional societies, taking care that these be staffed by men like Ranke who shared their own views about how past and present should be perceived. In 1885, undeterred by Ranke's pronouncedly antidemocratic sentiments, the newly formed American Historical Association elected him as its first honorary member, on which occasion George Bancroft dubbed him “the father of historical science” (Holt 1967, 20).

Within German universities of that day could be found some dedicated democrats, but they were not likely to be granted awards, editorships, or special funding. While heaping honors on Ranke, Friedrich Wilhelm IV launched a campaign to root out “the dragon-seed of Hegelianism,” including such dissidents as Bruno Bauer and Arnold Ruge. A close companion of both Bauer and Ruge was Karl Marx. Though endowed with a doctoral degree and exceptional capabilities, Marx never got his foot in the university door. In Britain, too, university scholars who strayed down iconoclastic paths usually saw their careers come to a sorry finish. There was the prominent case of Thorold Rogers, who brought forth a monumental study, the abridged version of which, entitled Six Centuries of Work and Wages, served as a political text for the British socialist movement well into the twentieth century. To shore up his professional acceptability Rogers repeatedly injected disparaging comments about socialism into his writings, just as many modern-day academics insert negative—and often inapposite—swipes against Marxism. But these precautionary disclaimers were not enough to prevent him from being run out of his professorship at Oxford (Samuel 1981, xxvi– xxvii).

As in monarchist Germany and aristocratic Britain, so in republican America, professionalization grew apace—but without ushering in any conspicuous change in political perspectives. Outspoken radicals had a markedly low survival rate. There was the notable case of Daniel DeLeon, who received the prized lectureship at the fledgling School of Political Science at Columbia College in 1882. DeLeon was a member of the Academy of Political Science, which was first established in 1880 as an adjunct of Columbia's law school and Columbia's newly created political science graduate school. When the Academy selected DeLeon as its president for 1884–1985, the young political scientist seemed launched on a promising career.

Then one day, while DeLeon sat with some of his colleagues, a crowd of workers trundled by in the street below. They were celebrating their victory after a hard-fought strike. DeLeon's colleagues expressed such utter contempt for the laborers as to infuriate him. In short time, he threw his support to Henry George, the radical single-tax advocate, whom the labor unions were backing for mayor of New York. DeLeon began campaigning publicly for George, identified as “Professor DeLeon of Columbia College.” Columbia's president, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, condemned DeLeon's radical views and his participation in the mayoralty election. Ever alert to the dangers of class leveling, Barnard condemned Henry George's rather modest electoral campaign as a “monstrous agitation” that threatened to “overthrow the entire structure of civilized society” (Seretan 1979, 13–15). Despite DeLeon's considerable talents as a scholar and teacher, his political activities prevented him from ever being offered a professorship on Columbia's political science teaching staff. In 1889 he left the faculty in disgust.

By the 1880s, wealthy and conservative business leaders came to dominate the governing boards of most universities and colleges, in what has proven to be an enduring reign. These trustees seldom hesitated to take action against faculty members with outspokenly heretical politico-economic opinions, including anyone who was known to have championed anti-monopoly causes, opposed U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, or defended the rights of labor leaders and socialists. Among those dismissed were such accomplished scholars as Edward Bemis, Thorstein Veblen, and E. A. Ross. The purging of faculty escalated around World War I. University officials such as Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, explicitly forbade faculty from criticizing the war. Butler maintained that such heresy was not tolerable in times of war. It was the patrician Butler who said that “an educated proletariat is a constant source of disturbance and danger to any nation” (Nearing 1972). The prominent scholar, Charles Beard, was grilled by Columbia's trustees, who suspected that his views might “inculcate disrespect for American institutions.” A furious Beard resigned his professorship, declaring that Butler and the trustees sought “to drive out or humiliate or terrorize every man who held progressive, liberal, or unconventional views on political matters” (Hofstadter and Smith 1961, 883–92).

Another celebrated academic who came under fire was the renowned economist Thorstein Veblen. Common lore has it that a stormy divorce and illicit liaisons with various women were the cause of his checkered career. Max Lerner, who edited an anthology of Veblen's work, sets the record straight; what really upset Veblen's academic employers “was less his unstable ménage than his dangerous thoughts. They got back at him in many ways. He was ‘not sound,’ they said; ‘not scholarly.’” They froze his meager salary and delayed his promotions. Despite his productivity and wide readership, his choice of teaching posts shrank, and he was never awarded a grant for any research project he submitted. In 1925, no longer able to ignore his scholarly contributions and his growing celebrity among a literate public, the American Economic Association tendered Veblen the nomination for its presidency. Even then the invitation was extended only after heated clashes within the AEA. In the end, Veblen refused the offer, remarking with some bitterness that it should have come years earlier when he needed it (Lerner 1948, 9–10, 19).

TWILIGHT OF THE ANGLO-PATRICIANS

As a formal academic discipline, political science seems to have branched off from history, law, and philosophy. By the late nineteenth century, political science departments had emerged as separate entities from history—though often partly stocked with recycled historians. Even into the 1980s one could still find stray historians lodged in one or another political science department, including rather prominent ones such as Howard Zinn at Boston University and Raul Hilberg at the University of Vermont. Sometimes the distinction between a historian and a political scientist was a blurry one. In the late 1950s the jest was: “If you're writing about events before the New Deal, you are a historian. If you're writing about events after the New Deal, you are a political scientist.” And the New Deal itself seemed to be fair game for both disciplines.

Into the early decades of the twentieth century, the political science and history departments of leading universities were populated largely by relatively well-off males of northern European descent and politically conventional opinion. Most of them entertained a solicitous view of the “captains of industry” and a rather negative opinion of labor unions and antiwar protestors. Many were tireless boosters of the established order. Samuel Flagg Bemis, for instance, so zealously trumpeted the virtues of U.S. foreign policy that his students dubbed him “American Flagg Bemis.” As befitting their lineage, American gentlemen scholars often were endowed with toney Anglo-patrician trinomina: James Truslow Adams, Worthington Chauncey Ford, Archer Butler Hurlbert, Wilson Porter Shortridge, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Harold Underwood Falkner, Henry Eldridge Bourne, Moses Coit Tyler, Wilbur Fisk Gordy—one could go on. As is said of the patricians, they own 80% of the wealth and 90% of the names.

After World War II, the G.I. Bill and other federal and state funding for higher education brought a commensurate growth in student enrollments, and with this a greater diversity in ethnicity and class background among students and scholars. The conservative Anglo-patrician grip on the political science and history professions was not broken but definitely loosened. People of more varied ethno-class background were making their way into what were once patrician graduate schools. The changes that took place did not go unnoticed by the patricians themselves. In 1957, at Yale, the chair of the Yale history department vented his concerns in a remarkable letter to the university's president, noting that although the English department “still draws to a degree from the cultivated, professional, and well-to-do classes, by contrast, the subject of history seems to appeal on the whole to a lower social stratum.” Far too few of the doctoral applicants in his department, he complained, “are sons of professional men; far too many list their parents' occupation as janitor, watchman, salesman, grocer, pocketbook cutter, bookkeeper, railroad clerk, pharmacist, clothing cutter, cable tester, mechanic, general clerk, butter-and-egg jobber, and the like” (Novick 1988, 366).

That same year, 1957, I myself—coming from a working-class family of the kind deplored by Yale's history chairman—was a stipend-supported graduate student in the Yale political science department. Typical of departments at other elite schools, the Yale political science faculty was all-male, all-white, and largely (but not exclusively) Euro-Protestant, featuring such notables as Robert Lane, Robert Dahl, Frederick Watkins, and Bradford Westerfield. To their credit, none of these faculty appeared troubled by the budding ethno-class diversity of the department's graduate student population. However, diversity did not extend into the political realm. As I recall, not one of us students or faculty were involved in what might be considered radical scholarship. Indeed, radical scholarship probably would have been considered an oxymoron in those days—as it still is in some quarters.

POLITICAL SCIENCE WITHOUT THE POLITICS

The 1930s, the New Deal, and the ensuing war against the fascist powers produced a generation of political and social scientists whose liberalism placed them well to the left of anything that would have been welcomed by Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard and his peers. But with the advent of the Cold War there came a heightened repression of campus heterodoxy. Instructors who trod a politically deviant path were hounded from their positions by administrators who often concerted with conservative faculty, trustees, and state legislators (Schrecker 1986).

In addition to ideological purges, the late 1950s saw the emergence of a depoliticizing methodological approach known as “behavioralism.” Up until then the predominant orientation in political science, and to a lesser extent other social science disciplines, might be described as nontheoretical and nonsystematic. Attention was directed to specific institutions rather than to the processes that cut across them. For this reason, practitioners of this approach were sometimes described as “institutionalists” and even “traditionalists.” Institutionalists focused on the ideographic rather than on the nomothetic. To be sure, some years earlier there had been political scientists like Arthur Bentley, Charles Merriam, and V. O. Key, and sociologists like W. I. Thomas who attempted to be systematically empirical in approach and somewhat theoretical in scope. But they were among the exceptions.

Although composing less than a majority of the profession, the behavioralists came to occupy the high ground in the discipline, with their outside funding and consequent control over many areas of graduate research. Now political phenomena were to be studied primarily for the purpose of extracting scientific hypotheses and theories. Cross-disciplinary approaches were encouraged. Political scientists learned to place greater emphasis on quantification and the rigorous testing of hypotheses. Suddenly it seemed that every political science department had to have a “quantifier.” Meanwhile, questions about the normative worth of the phenomena studied were to be left to the moral philosophers.

It would be wrong to assume that the swift ascension of behavioralism was achieved purely through intellectual discourse. Other factors having nothing to do with scholarly dialogue exercised an influence, most notably the enormous financial support given to the behavioral persuasion by foundations, government, and corporations. A vast array of centers and institutes mustered cross-disciplinary teams of behavioralists who honed elaborate studies on such subjects as social deviancy, urban riots, the lures of communism, consumer habits, military recruitment campaigns, and insurgency and counterinsurgency. The task of these social science teams—with political scientists among them—was not to change the world, but to assist authorities in getting a firmer grip on the existing social order. As the Advisory Committee on Government Programs in the Behavioral Sciences proudly reported in 1968: “The behavioral sciences are an important source of information, analysis and explanation about group and individual behavior, and thus an essential and increasingly relevant instrument of modern government.”

In the early 1980s, writing in PS, Joseph LaPalombara noted that political scientists could help overseas investors determine how political conditions in foreign lands might affect the safety and profitability of their investments. Within the burgeoning field of “political risk analysis,” political scientists could apply their theories to help “intelligent, harried bankers and corporate managers … keep the restless natives in line.” For such services the transnational corporations were willing “to spend hard cash.” “It is a heady challenge,” LaPalombara breathlessly announced (LaPalombara 1982). Corporations and banks were not the only ones interested in controlling “the restless natives.” In the January 1983 APSA Personnel Service Newsletter, the Central Intelligence Agency advertised for analysts to work in Third World areas. “They should have an interest in social change, revolutionary organizations and regime responsiveness and capabilities” (see also Diamond 1992).

THE POST-BEHAVIORAL CHALLENGE

During the ferment of the late 1960s, numbers of political scientists began complaining that important happenings were being ignored by the discipline. The critics were labeled (sympathetically) by then-APSA president David Easton as “post-behavioralists.” These post-behavioralists organized themselves into the Caucus for a New Political Science under the leadership of Christian Bay and Mark Roelofs. Among the political scientists of note who proffered a critical post-behavioral viewpoint were Charles McCoy, Peter Bachrach, James Petras, and Sheldon Wolin. Some, including myself, complained that most of the discipline's scholarship was removed from the imperatives of political life or inaccurate in its depiction of a benevolent democratic pluralism. Here is a summary of criticisms I first offered years ago (Parenti 1983):

1. In their search for the nomothetic, behavioralists tended to place undue emphasis on process and show a disregard for the content of events and systems. Process abstracted from its substance tends to be treated in an ahistorical reductionist fashion. Hence, it may be true that both Napoleon and his valet engaged in the decision-making process, one for the Empire and the other for the Emperor's household. Both organized staffs, set priorities, and allocated scarce resources. Perhaps one might come up with a model that could apply to the activities of both, but it would obscure differences in historical substance that were more important than the generalizable patterns of process. A theory of decision-making abstracted in this fashion would be a somewhat meaningless accomplishment. Indeed, we might wonder if the process itself were being properly understood when so utterly divorced from its context of interest and power.
2. As the behavioral methodologies became increasingly elaborate, the problems studied seemed to get increasingly insignificant. Quantifiable precision imposed limits on the kinds of subjects that could be addressed. So it seemed that the methodological mountain brought forth an intellectual mouse.
3. In pursuit of scientific neutrality, behavioralists often selected uncontroversial subjects to study. Hence, instead of neutralizing the investigator, they succeeded in neutralizing their subject matter. They seemed to overlook the difference between (a) injecting value judgments into the study of empirical phenomena and (b) studying value—charged political activities in an empirical way. The laudable desire to eschew (a) should not lead us to avoid (b).
4. Although the behavioralists claimed a value-free scientific posture, there were all sorts of value judgments hidden in their research. For instance, their eagerness to place their science at the service of government, military, and business rested on the unexamined value assumption that the overall politicoeconomic system was essentially a benign one.

In 1981, Evron Kirkpatrick, who served as director of the American Political Science Association for more than 25 years, said, “I have always believed that the knowledge we gain as scholars should provide a basis for others or for ourselves to play an active, effective and sound role in government and politics.”²

Not long after the Caucus for a New Political Science was formed, it became clear that the post-behavioral critique was really a radical one, directed less at a particular research mode than at the centrist or “mainstream” orthodoxy shared by many behavioralists and traditionalists alike (Lindblom 1982; McCoy and Playford 1967; Parenti 1983). In foreign policy analysis, the centrists never challenged the assumptions about the benevolent intent of U.S. interventions. In regard to domestic issues, it was assumed that “democratic capitalism” had an actual empirical referent and was not an ideological or propaganda term. But what really was the relationship of democracy to capitalism? And of economics to political power? That these kinds of questions were themselves ideologically inspired was irrelevant, I argued at the time, for they still could lead to empirical investigations that carried theoretical import. The centrists claimed to be nonpartisan, but the determination of what is nonpartisan is itself a highly partisan matter. They failed to acknowledge that husbanding the status quo was no less partisan than struggling to alter it.

AND TODAY?

The 1950s purges of academia were followed by the suppression of New Left radicalism in the late 1960s, a campaign that continued into the following decades and to some extend obtains to this day, targeting outspoken leftists and campus activists in political science and just about every other discipline. The political motive behind these purges usually have been denied. Most of the people who were refused a contract were declared to be deficient in scholarly performance. Sometimes budgetary exigencies were declared to be the deciding factor. No doubt such explanations must have been true in some cases. Still one had to marvel at how often the career path open to mainstream academics was so much less rocky than the one trod by equally qualified radicals. In some instances, the political motives behind the firings and nonhirings were openly pronounced, usually by conservative trustees and administrators, or right-wing legislators and other off-campus ideological gatekeepers (Meranto, Meranto, and Lippman 1985, 73–87; Parenti 1995, 175–96; Parenti 1996, 235–52).

Consider one of the better publicized cases. In 1978 Bertell Ollman was offered the chair of the political science department at the University of Maryland. After accepting the position, he came under fire in the media and from some trustees who explicitly opposed having a Marxist as chair. The administration could find nothing deficient in Ollman's academic credentials, yet it buckled under the pressure and withdrew the offer. As one security-minded corporation president put it to the university president, “We can't let a Marxist get hold of a department of government so close to the White House” (Ollman 2004, 34).

In contrast, one can point to those academic denizens whose writings are polemical and partisan, and who yet have done quite well: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Boorstin, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to name a few. Far from being politically neutral, such individuals have been explicit proponents of American military–industrial policies at home and abroad. Despite this—or because of it—they enjoyed meteoric academic careers and subsequently were selected to serve in prominent public posts. We might gather that outspoken advocacy is not a hindrance to one's calling as long as one advocates in the right direction.

Regarding the current state of political science, one senses that the discipline is stuck in a time warp. The behavioralists have evolved into “rational choice” specialists whose highly abstracted model-building seems to be something of an end in itself, valued for the elegance of its mathematical configuration. When critical questions about the political science discipline are posed, they seem to be the same ones that were put about in my salad days a half-century ago: What are the promises and limits of the scientific method as applied to political science? Does the more methodologically rigorous work have a commensurate payoff? Or does it come at too high a cost to understanding political reality? Is there an incremental gain in knowledge? Or do changing events, paradigmatic shifts, and other intellectual tides reduce past research to shambles? Have we developed any reliable middle-level theory regarding political life? (for example Hill 2004, and subsequent exchanges by Ozminkowski, Strakes, and Hill 2005).

There is an additional problem for those who teach political science. What is to be done about student skepticism in regard to the more indecipherable forms of research and scholarship? In a “Mr. Boffo” cartoon, appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle (March 7, 2005), and other newspapers around the country, a student sitting in the office of a course advisor is saying, “I want to specialize. I want to learn more and more about less and less, until I know absolutely all there is to know about nothing.” And the advisor responds, “Okay, that would be political science.” To see one's discipline treated as a bad joke in a syndicated newspaper cartoon is an unkind cut. People are trying to tell us something.

Today there are right-wing critics who would have us believe that institutions of higher learning are hotbeds of “politically correct” leftist orthodoxy, propagated by liberals, feminists, Black militants, Marxists, and gay/lesbian-rights promoters, a place where conservative opinion cannot find light of day. On the average college campus, it is said, a decent conservative who refuses to bow his head to the tyranny of campus liberals dare not hope for a career. In fact, no university is under leftist rule, and conservatives remain a regular fixture in many academic departments. The university's corporate-oriented board of trustees and extravagant monetary compensations for top administrators, its heavy exploitation of adjunct teachers, steep student financial indebtedness, increasing corporate arrogation of institutional functions, and overall growing dependence on private funding all militate against anything resembling a radical predominance (Soley 1997; White and Hauck 2000). If anything, in political science the spectrum has moved somewhat to the right since the 1970s, mirroring the climate of opinion in the wider society.

For years mainstream political scientists scorned antiwar radicals and Marxists of every stripe. Now, ironically, emboldened conservatives are accusing these same mainstreamers of being ideologically driven liberals. More recently, conservative students, often abetted by right-wing organizations and political bounty hunters like David Horowitz, have complained that exposure to liberal ideas, that is, ideas they disagree with, deprives them of their right to academic freedom and ideological diversity, and constitutes “possible indoctrination” (Horowitz 2006). What they really are protesting is not the lack of ideological diversity but their first encounter with it, an encounter with perspectives other than the one they regularly embrace.

Conservative students also grumble about being denied their First Amendment rights by being required to read leftists such as Howard Zinn. “Where are the readings by Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly?” complained one (Meranto 2005, 221). They do more than grumble. Under the guise of protecting academic freedom, conservative campus activists police the classrooms of faculty who teach things that the students disapprove of, “outing” and confronting teachers sometimes to the point of harassment, accusing them of conducting unbalanced and politically motivated classes. It should be noted that conservative professors are not subjected to such treatment. Even more intimidating, the conservative students register their complaints with college administrators, trustees, and outside conservative pressure groups; and disseminate their disclosures in right-wing publications and Web sites. Thus they act as self-appointed censors whereas themselves claiming to be victims of censorship.

To summarize the major points in this article: All scholarly work needs material support to achieve actualization. Such support must come either from personal fortune, patronage, or institutional and governmental sources. What we have seen through the ages is a link between research and professional formations, on the one hand, and the emergence of formal institutional and governmental power and resources, on the other. Specifically in our own time and profession, the interaction between scholarly proliferation and institutional and governmental funding is illustrated in one salient instance by the rise of behavioralism and in the subsequent eagerness of supposedly value-free scientists to serve the powers that be.

Overriding all these developments is the age-old control that institutional elites exercise over personnel selection, and the ideological conformity thereby propagated. Of course, ideological coercion is usually more implicit than overt. It becomes a painfully visible issue during times of crisis (World War I, the Cold War, the sixties, etc.). In less critical times, hegemony is maintained through a socialization process that is structured within the profession itself and is a component of the dominant ideological paradigm. Some might dismiss this whole matter, telling us there is no reason to act surprised that the discipline has been influenced by elite forces. But if it be such a commonplace idea why do so many continue to deny and dismiss it as a shopworn radical notion?

In the face of growing economic inequality, reactionary rollback, unaccountable political power, and potentially catastrophic environmental crises, the predominant intellectual product in political science remains bereft of any critical approach to society's compelling issues. Not everything written by mainstream political scientists serves the powers that be, but very little of their scholarly output challenges such powers. Let it be said that although orthodoxy no longer goes uncontested, it still rules. The repression of heterodoxy is more than just a passing phase. The use of institutional and material resources to effectuate ideological compliance within the ongoing politicoeconomic structure goes back well before Ranke and even beyond Cicero, an old story with an ever-changing cast of characters, from the patricians of yore to the plutocrats of today. Scholarly inquiry may strive to be neutral, but it is never confected in a neutral universe of discourse. It is always subjected to institutional and material constraints that shape the way it is produced, funded, distributed, and rewarded.

Still, even progressives would have to admit that there have been some real, albeit limited, advances within the narrow confines of the political science discipline. The Caucus for a New Political Science never managed to turn the profession in a genuinely radical direction, but it did produce a fairly decent journal of its own and offers a section of panels at the annual meetings. And even some of the discipline's more liberal mainstream members do occasionally create light and space where, in an earlier age, there had been almost none.