One of the benefits of earning a degree from the University of
Michigan, aside from being able to root for a good team on football
Saturdays, is a usually interesting alumni quarterly newspaper
called Michigan Today. The Summer 2003 issue, however,
included a somewhat bizarre article by one Ian Robinson,
co-director of the Labor and Global Change Program in the Institute
for Labor and Industrial Relations. I call it bizarre because Dr.
Robinson (Ph.D. in political science from Yale, with a BA and MA,
also in political science from other institutions) took on the task
of explaining why Mexico’s economy couldn’t produce enough jobs for
its population.
As a political scientist and sociology lecturer, one would think
that Mexico’s troubled political system would be the main thrust of
Dr. Robinson’s commentary. But he didn’t mention that at all. He
even didn’t focus much on the political and sociological issues
associated with dislocations in formerly protected industries
exposed to free-market reforms. (I am not naïve enough to
expect many political science professors to write about the
positive aspects of free-market reforms.) Instead, he played the
role of economist, making judgments on what has caused Mexico’s
economic problems, blasting things from U.S. Federal Reserve policy
in the 1970s to IMF mandated market-based economic reforms in the
1980s to NAFTA. I felt duty-bound to write in to point out that,
not only were many of Dr. Robinson’s pronouncements wrong, they
also excluded the biggest problem of all — Mexico’s corrupt
political system and its still state-dominated economy. For good
measure, I mentioned that countries with state-dominated economies,
let alone those as corrupt as Mexico’s, have pretty bad economic
track records.
The editors of Michigan Today printed my letter in the
Fall edition, along with a response from Dr. Robinson that
demonstrates it is not just the admissions policy for
undergraduates that Michigan needs to reexamine. Dr. Robinson’s
response to my letter was to rant against “neoliberal” (free-market
capitalist) economic “ideology.” The esteemed Dr. Robinson says
that “unfortunately for Mexico’s workers” for the past 20 years
Mexico’s economy has been operated under “neoliberal auspices.”
That is, indeed, the considered opinion of the Leftist political
parties in Mexico. But the fact is, the “economic reforms”
instituted in Mexico over the past twenty years, with the exception
of NAFTA and re-privatizing the banking system, have been modest,
at best. And the new reforms promised by Vicente Fox after his
election in 2000 (which, for the first time, would touch Mexico’s
enormous, and notoriously corrupt, state-run energy industry) have
been bottled up in the Mexican Congress. No progress has been made
on dealing with political corruption and its influence on economic
progress. The basic system in Mexico of corruption, cronyism, and
government control has remained virtually unchanged.
But Dr. Robinson goes on to argue that, not only does Mexico’s
experience disprove the ideology of free-market economics, but that
we can look to communist China as the “coup de grace”
discrediting “neoliberal dogma”! Robinson notes that China has had
great economic growth over the past 20 years doing lots of things
“anathema for neoliberals.” As Dr. Robinson keenly notes, the
communist government of China retains many “interventionist”
policies. But I guess it takes a Ph.D. in political science to
believe that China’s economic growth has less to do with the rather
dramatic free-market reforms started under Deng Xiaoping in the
1980s and entering the world economy than it has to do with the
Chinese government maintaining capital controls.
Rebutting the particulars of Dr. Robinson’s ideas (which I am
hoping is not needed for the readers of this article) is not my
goal in this piece. Rather, I am interested in the growing trend
(or so it seems to me) of political scientists, sociologists, and
other practitioners of the “social sciences” to masquerade as
economists or otherwise to enhance their “expertise” using as cover
some university-sponsored “institute.”
IT IS INTERESTING TO ME, FOR example, that instead of having the
Labor and Global Change Program in the Institute for Labor and
Industrial Relations populated by at least by some people schooled
in economics, Michigan seems to think that being part of the Labor
and Global Change Program gives a political scientist and
sociologist the credentials to speak as an economist. Indeed, the
Labor and Global Change Program is the recent creation of Dr.
Robinson, and he seems to have created it in his own image. Aside
from Dr. Robinson (who, oddly, is listed as the Program’s sole
“co-director”) the Program’s website lists only two other members
— both visiting professors, one of whom, a sociologist from South
Korea, lists “participating actively in the Solidarity for
Alternatives to Neoliberalism and working closely with the
democratic labor unions in South Korea” among his extracurricular
activities.
In fairness to Michigan, the Institute for Labor and Industrial
Relations (of which the Labor and Global Change Program is a part)
is not a completely ideological left-wing think tank. It does
contain some “diversity” — even including some not necessarily
anti-capitalist or anti-business perspectives regarding industrial
labor relations, courtesy of inclusion of one faculty member from
the Michigan Business School. This is in contrast to the University
of California, Berkeley.
Berkeley’s Institute of Industrial Relations is nothing more
than a capitalist-phobic (if I may coin a term) front organization
for organized labor and socialist and Marxist activists. And the
vanguard in its efforts is the UC Berkeley Labor Center, which
lists among its goals “raising voices in economic development and
social policy,” “workers’ rights,” and “living wages.” Its
“Community Scholars Program” run, not surprisingly, as a joint
effort with the Department of Sociology and financially supported
by Big Labor, strives to “foster collaboration between academia and
labor” in order to “carry out research projects that advance social
justice campaigns.” Remember, this is an “academic” institute run
by a public university (with taxpayer funding).
Two years ago I published an article detailing some of the
outrageous anti-American responses to the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks coming out of American universities. One of the
examples I found was an extraordinary article in the alumni
magazine of Ithaca College in New York. This embarrassingly idiotic
piece by professor Asma Barlas argued that we should not be asking
the question “why do the terrorists hate us?” but, rather, “why do
we hate and oppress them?” The United States, according to the good
professor, has had as its goal since the end of World War II,
“control over the entire world by any means necessary,” and now, as
evidenced by September 11, “people everywhere are sick and tired”
of our “political economy based on their systematic abuse,
exploitation, and degradation.” At the time Professor Barlas wrote
this masterpiece she was interim director of something called “the
Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity” at Ithaca
College. Published as it was in an alumni publication with a
relatively mainstream readership, her piece came in for a lot of
criticism (in addition to mine). The president of Ithaca College
predictably defended Barlas on the basis of “academic freedom.”
Unfortunately, many university administrations now see the
protection of “academic freedom” (at least for left-wing or
anti-American professors) as more important than the protection of
academic integrity.
Like many similar institutions, the Center for the Study of
Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College was established
recently (1999). Its stated aim is to help students succeed in an
increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic world by promoting
understanding of different cultures and investigated sources of
ethnic and racial conflict. To quote professor Barlas, this is
greatly needed at Ithaca College and elsewhere because “[e]ven
where the academy has opened up parts of its curriculum to
diversity initiatives, it has done so piecemeal and without
abandoning the secular fundamentalist myth of US invincibility
abroad and white racial supremacy at home.”
Certainly, we should not expect the various institutes that have
cropped up at university campuses in recent years to be immune from
the biases that we see in campus faculties at large. But what
purpose do they serve? Do they promote true meaningful scholarship,
or do they promote politically based “research” and “teaching”? Is
their aim to advance our understanding of complex issues or to
enhance the ability of faculty to get published and of universities
to get research grants?
I don’t know how many “institutes” and “centers” have been
created in the halls of academe over the past 20 or 30 years, or
what percentage of them serve a truly academic purpose, rather than
exist to promote political agendas or to enhance the “credibility”
of their members (and the universities that sponsor them). But I
think finding that out would be a good research project for
somebody in academe.
