We often hear that universities are teaching people to become leftists—that their professors are Marxists who will knock you down points if you don’t agree with their Marxist perspective. My experience in college (University of California, Irvine; 2016-2019) was particularly not like that.

Liberals and Leftists in the University

Almost all of my professors were classical liberal Democrats/Republicans interested in maintaining the procedural order and effectiveness of the liberal capitalism. Most weren’t very optimistic or open to wide-scale reforms (and certainly not revolutions). This was in part because the rigor required by their position mostly constrained their suggested reforms to their specific field of study, which they were able to dedicate years of study to and come to detailed, empirically informed conclusions. This, I think, is nice, that they come away with pet reforms from their research, but it often left them without a more interconnected, cross-disciplinary view of what social changes were justifiable.

Finally, there’s a lot of data that is lacking, or is too imprecise to study with normal levels of scientific rigor. The social sciences is presently stuck between the pressure on one side of wanting to draw good conclusions out of difficult-to-reproduce data, and another pressure of wanting to be able to claim to be as rigorous as other hard sciences like physics and chemistry. There are legitimate attempts to develop standards of rigor which allow people to be more confident in larger sociological claims made from ‘messy’ sociological data. But for the most part, university social scientists restrain themselves to small, somewhat top-level-superficial studies—as an attempt to prove to others through sheer force of overwhelming data that they are doing rigorous science. They want to show that Social Sciences is not simply Humanities-lite (an association which would be a danger to the continuation of the field, if you look at the way Humanities has been deprioritized).

Because social sciences lacks detailed, empirically-backed, ‘broad, overarching social theories’ which the hard sciences have, the establishment views fill in the gaps. People, particularly students, in these fields often uncritically develop and assume broader, unrigorous claims. These claims often simply reflect what is practical and useful for the continuation of establishment institutions, instead of anything particularly rigorous and empirically based. This seems to especially be the case in economics, where the unrigorous, a priori theoretical models essentially reflect something that: (1) works well-enough in terms of predictive capacity in our specific historical period; and (2) which can get people jobs as economic advisers in businesses, or jobs in government-advisory positions which favor capital (you wouldn’t want to trigger a capital strike, now, would you?). I wasn’t in enough classes to really tell, but something similar to this may have also been the case in International Relations sections of political sciences, influenced by the pressures of getting a job as an international political analyst.

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Few professors were noticeably leftist, and they often existed in positions lacking of institutional power, or in parts of the Humanities that you would have to put real work in to seek out. I had to sit in on a few classes, simply because I wasn’t in those areas of the Humanities. And then, they might lack the organizing experience and groundedness necessary to help people really develop into effective left organizers. (Nevertheless, exposure to general left theories and moral arguments can really help people kickstart their development into leftists, although it takes a lot of work outside of the university to actually develop those grounded sensibilities. That, at least, has been my experience.)

A Tale of Conservative Sociology

And obviously there will be some professors who were rather obviously conservative. One experience that stands out to me was the class I took called Sociology 141: Organizations. I took it because I was (and still am) interested in organizational institutional forms, and the variety of forms that are viable. I thought the class would give me a start at where I might look to learn more, give me a broad top-level understanding of what concepts and tendencies existed the field, and would provide me with useful concepts and language to understand and talk about institutional forms.

For many of these things, the class was good—this was my first real exposure to Weber (particularly his discussions of bureaucracy), Talyorism and Scientific Management, and the Hawthorne experiments and Humanistic Management. The class gave me a broad view of what existed in the field—sort-of, but we’ll get to that—and a top-level familiarity with the language of the field.

When I was taking the class and browsing the textbook (The Sociology of Organizations: Classic, Contemporary, and Critical Readings edited by Michael J. Handel), I noticed that the second-to-last section of the textbook was dedicated to ‘Democratic Alternatives to Capitalist Bureaucracies: Worker Ownership and Self-Management’. Exciting, right? It was essentially why I, a developing leftist, was interested in this class—I wanted to know the research around things like worker cooperatives and other forms of democratic organizing structures.

I waited patiently throughout the quarter to get to this penultimate section of the textbook. It made sense that this was at the end—in the history of empirical research into organizing structures, democratic organizing forms were relatively contemporary. We were going through the sociological research of organizations chronologically, so we could see how theories developed out of the failures and blind-spots of the preceding theories. It made sense to me that these research papers about democratic organizing would be at the end of the quarter. But when it eventually came to the end of the quarter, the professor had left no time to even talk about this section of the textbook. We took the final without even mentioning the potential for democratic alternatives to capitalist bureaucracies (except for the brief mentions in Weber—far from sufficient).

Throughout the quarter, the professor would say small things that tipped me off that he was some sort of right-libertarian. And eventually, he left us with research that he interpreted to mean that monopolies were good organizational forms, because they would self-regulate because they didn’t want to risk competitors replacing them. That conclusion was pretty obviously false to me, and I think would be pretty obviously false to anyone with more than a superficial understanding of economics. It also, I believe, was not even supported by the very research in the textbook which he was extrapolating from! He had taught up to the point where he had enough evidence to gesture at his political-economic belief that raw, capitalist monopolies were good—and then skipped teaching the part of the textbook which would necessarily challenge his views, and suggest the potential for a democratic alternative to the class.

Students in the class—if they weren’t actively looking for it like me—would leave the class without a hint of knowledge that democratic organizing structures were a potentially legitimate alternative forms of living and structuring our economic and social institutions.

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This sort of selective teaching is just one example—and a particularly intentional and salient example—of the broader way that society generally doesn’t expose people to possible new ways of living. The ideas we are structurally, selectively exposed to end up restricting people’s understanding of what is possible. And when people don’t think that liberatory forms of living are possible, they often end up justifying the existing social structures, and accommodating themselves to these less-desirable ways of living.

As for me, I was originally only renting that textbook for the quarter. But after I saw what the professor had done, I shelled out the extra money to buy the textbook, so I could study that section for myself. There were only two papers in the section on Democratic Alternatives to Capitalist Bureaucracy, but I’m glad I’ve read them.

Now that I’m writing this blog post and reviewing the textbook, I’m realizing the other areas which he skipped over—things that are also relevant and of interest to me, including a section on ‘Informal Organization as Shadow Structure’, which seems like it would be useful to have some background in when starting up an organizing group. Some of these things the professor skipped were potentially because he didn’t see how it would be that relevant to students, or because it wasn’t what interested him personally. But these sorts of blindspots very easily align with what just-so-happens to be the most useful topics for organizers and leftists. It’s not useful or helpful for establishment institutional actors to play around with concepts, or weigh the viability of alternate structures, which would challenge their bureaucratic positions of power. It’s not of interest for them to spend time researching, and it’s not in their interest to teach.