While the campus grievance mongers cry for Justice! and continue their drive for power and safe spaces, I note an extraordinary story in the latest issue of Stanford, the bimonthly magazine of the Stanford Alumni Association. Take this in very slowly:
By extrapolation, it would seem that Stanford has slightly more than 200 political science majors, out of an undergraduate student body of a bit more than 7,000—or 2.9 percent. There are 46 faculty listed on the political science department’s web page, which means there is a faculty-to-major ratio of about 1-to-4. This is incredible, as it indicates a discipline at one of our leading universities that attracts almost no students. The fact that political science majors are declining (this is happening at a lot of universities—not just Stanford) at a time when general interest in politics is rising suggests a crisis in the discipline.
I hasten to add that the Stanford political science department has some excellent scholars (Morris Fiorina, David Brady, and Barry Weingast, to name three), some of them even conservative or at least sympathetic to conservative perspectives on modern politics. So this is not a case of a department self-marginalizing through ideology.
One explanation might be Stanford’s decision willy-nilly to become Caltech by the Bay. Computer science and its related fields are by far the leading majors at Stanford. But that can’t be the whole story, and Stanford has the resources to have leading humanities and social science departments. Indeed, the New York Times reported recently that Stanford is aiming to have the number-one-ranked economics department and is spending freely to attract the biggest names in the field. And Stanford’s history department has always boasted some of the best scholars in the field.
A more complete explanation requires a digression for a moment back to the college protesters who are demanding an expansion of the politicized and deeply ideological courses about oppression, “social justice,” and so forth. Why are they demanding more of this? Why wouldn’t students interested in “justice” be flocking to political science, which, in the abstract, ought to be one of the most vibrant and lively departments on any campus, engaging the issues of justice more directly than other social sciences? Leaving aside for the moment the simple will to power among the protesting left (a decisive motive in the end), one reason is that the fundamental questions of justice have either gone missing from most political science curricula, or more often are only anemically discussed. This is the plague of the social sciences, where issues of justice are reduced to the category of “normative” questions, which, being subjective, are not treated seriously. They are not even much discussed in many classes. It might be more accurate to call them the “anti-social sciences.”
Allan Bloom put his finger on the problem in his famous book from the late 1980s:
Nothing much has changed since then. The typical social science journal article is largely a mathematical exercise today, often revealing something counterintuitive that is useful and interesting, but invariably noting that “more research” is necessary, and that the narrow findings “raise normative questions,” before abruptly ending. In other words, just as things are getting interesting, political science often goes mute. Richard Weaver noted the defect in this approach in his 1948 classic Ideas Have Consequences:
Next to this desiccated approach to political life, it is not surprising that many students flock to radical courses where professors purport to battle against clear injustice and on the side of justice. At least here there is clarity and purpose, even if badly degraded and poisonously politicized. Meanwhile, too many political science departments—Stanford’s likely among them—have become narrowly specialized (“knowing more and more about less and less,” as Leo Strauss once put it), conforming to the dictates of modern academia, which has sacrificed the liveliness and engagement with the real world of politics that attracts interested and public-spirited students. I’ve stopped keeping track of students who, while full of interest in and opinions about politics and current affairs, say to me: “But political science is so boring!” Memo to universities: If your political science classes are boring large numbers of students, you’re doing it wrong.
My understanding is that the number of students choosing to major in sociology is plummeting even faster at most universities. The irony here is that if you were a student leftist in the 1960s, sociology was the field you took for a major, and it was the hotbed for cutting-edge radical thought then. But having settled in to the usual academic conventions of journal-publishing obscurantism, it was rendered obsolete by the burgeoning “-studies” departments.
Contrast Stanford with Bowdoin College, an elite institution, where government and legal studies is the largest major on campus, or Claremont Mc-Kenna College, which, at less than half the size of Stanford, has about the same number of government majors. The government departments are thriving at several other universities I can name, and they typically have one thing in common: They teach the subject the old-fashioned way, and understand politics as more an art than a science, usually combined with a serious historical perspective. Actually, you can tell by the way the subject is named at different colleges and universities. Instead of “political science,” places where the study of political life is thriving usually have a “government” or “politics” department, without any scientific or technical pretense.
Stanford has responded by attempting to make political science more “relevant” to student interests, but it appears they may be doing so by embracing the politically correct ideology of the “studies” departments. A little further in the alumni magazine article is this account:
If the new “law and justice” track just borrows from the current conventions about “social justice,” I doubt it will halt the slide at Stanford.
Steven F. Hayward is the Ronald Reagan distinguished visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Public Policy.
