Groupthink in Academia: majoritarian departmental politics and the professional pyramid.

• Author: Klein, Daniel B.

Generally speaking, we can observe that the scientists in any particular institutional and political setting move as a flock, reserving their controversies and particular originalities for matters that do not call into question the fundamental system of biases they share.

--Gunnar Myrdal, Objectivity in Social Research

Perhaps we avoid studying our institutional lives because such work is not valued by our colleagues. The academy is, after all, a club, and members are expected to be discreet. Like any exclusive club, the academic world fears public scrutiny. Research is in the public domain. Outsiders might use what the research reveals against the academy.

--Richard Wisniewski, "The Averted Gaze"

The "thousand profound scholars" may have failed, first, because they were scholars, secondly, because they were profound, and thirdly, because they were a thousand.

--Edgar Allan Poe, "The Rationale of Verse"

In baseball, fans of different teams can agree on general issues concerning rules, umpiring, and performance evaluation because such matters are separable from support for a specific team. In academia, however, we find that rules and standards for performance are not separable from support for specific beliefs. Ideological sensibilities and commitments in academia tend to be bound up with notions of the whole academic enterprise. Thus, one's positions on how performance should be umpired or evaluated and one's support for a certain "team" are not separable.

We think that discussion of ideology in academia is itself bound to be ideological and that good scholarship calls on us to declare that our principal motivation for the present investigation is our belief that, by and large, professors in the humanities and social sciences are weak in certain sensibilities that we ourselves hold. In particular, classical liberalism has few adherents among academics. In policy terms, classical liberalism favors domestic reform generally in the direction of significantly decontrolling markets and personal choices, reducing the welfare state, and depoliticizing society. A further policy feature of classical liberalism, in our view, is a strong disposition against military entanglements abroad. The current label closest to classical liberal is libertarian, although classical-liberal beliefs are properly understood as somewhat looser and more pragmatic; we also prefer the label classical liberal because it reminds us of liberalism's historical arc.

Ample evidence on the ideological profile of professors in the humanities and social sciences indicates that the dominant, though not monolithic, sensibilities combine social-democratic leanings and support for (or acquiescence to) most domestic government interventions. (We identify modern American "liberalism" as social democracy, a political outlook that readily treads on voluntarist ethics, views the polity as an organization, and therefore advocates the pursuit of collective endeavors, such as equalizing well-being and opportunity.)

Social-democratic views do not always run against the grain of classical liberalism. In our view, however, existing frictions indicate problems with the faculty's ideological profile. Also, even absent friction, the neglect of important classical-liberal ideas itself often counts as a problem. Our analysis rests on the judgment that the relative absence of classical-liberal views among humanities and social sciences professors is unfortunate (but we make no argument for that judgment here).

Our analysis may be adapted by the adherents of other viewpoints who likewise see problems in the faculty's ideological profile and find themselves systematically excluded and marginalized. In particular, conservatives, in a narrow sense that clearly separates them from classical liberals, may use a version of our analysis as a conservative diagnosis of the problem. Our classical-liberal viewpoint, then, is but one of two major viewpoints whose adherents may find the current account especially valuable.

Adapting Groupthink to the Academic Setting

We analyze academic ideology in terms of groupthink. Groupthink analysis examines decision making presupposed to be defective. In that sense, groupthink analysis is pejorative.

In the seminal work Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (1982), Irving L. Janis begins by examining a number of well-known fiascoes, including the Bay of Pigs, escalation in Vietnam, and Watergate--episodes that came to be judged fiascoes even by those responsible for them. Janis starts with defectiveness and seeks to explain the absence of correction. He defines groupthink as "members' strivings for unanimity overriding their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." He declares the term's "invidious connotation" (9).

Paul 't Hart, who developed the Janis tradition in Groupthink in Government: A Study of Small Groups and Policy Failure (1990), calls groupthink "excessive concurrence-seeking," a behavior that explains "flaws in the operation of small, high-level groups at the helm of major projects or policies that become fiascoes," such as the Iran-Contra affair (7, 4), and he reviews several applications of groupthink research (12-15). Diane Vaughan's (1996) discussion of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which involves both bottom-up and top-down organizational errors, can be said to occupy an intermediate position between traditional Janis-Hart analysis and the analysis offered here.

The groupthink theorist wants to gain standing as a social theorist and therefore wants to avoid unnecessary controversy. Accordingly, groupthink theorists--at least those like Janis and Hart--have focused on episodes where, in hindsight, the judgment of failure (or error) is uncontroversial. The need for uncontroversial judgment is one reason why the scope of groupthink applications has been quite limited.

In this article, we apply groupthink theory to a setting where the presupposition of failure is anything but uncontroversial. Academe is quite different from the settings groupthink theorists have examined. We suggest, however, that given the presupposition of failure, central mechanisms in academe make it possible to adapt groupthink theory to this setting. We try to make plausible the idea that if academic groups were caught up in defective thoughts, the defectiveness would be resistant to correction. We explain persistence, or the lack of correction. We do not consider "how the problem got started," in part because of space limits and in part because there never was an Eden.

To be sure, we ought to be cautious about using groupthink to interpret academic ideology in the humanities and social sciences. The groupthink literature in the tradition of Janis and Hart examines mostly the belief processes of policymaking groups. The cases usually have the following features:

1. The group is small.

2. The group is fairly neatly defined--a group of "insiders."

3. The group is chief based, with highly centralized decision making.

4. The group is concerned about security leaks or other constraints that lead it to put a premium on secrecy.

5. The group acts under great stress.

6. The group makes decisions that run great risks and involve huge possible dangers.

7. The group is dealing with an issue of great immediacy and exigency.

8. The group's bad beliefs are specific to the decision at hand.

9. The bad beliefs are shallow; they are not about issues of identity.

10. The potential for eventually admitting defectiveness usually exists.

In all of these features, policymaking groups differ significantly from academic groups. The latter--whether colleagues in a university department or the leadership at a prestigious journal or association--are larger, less well defined, much less chief based, much less specific-action oriented, and much less subject to stress, urgency, risk, and danger. Their bad beliefs are much deeper, more complex, and more incorrigible--more in the nature of moral, political, and aesthetic values. These differences make academic groups more diffuse and variegated in purpose.

Despite these differences, we see basic similarities between Janis-Hart groups and academic groups. Both types of groups hold defective beliefs, and both tend toward concurrence seeking, self-validation, and exclusion of challenges to core beliefs. Finally, mechanisms in academe work to create an "in-group" that is insular, self-perpetuating, and self-reinforcing.

Departmental Majoritarianism

Let us imagine a university called XYU whose inner workings resemble those of other institutions--which is to say, they are hierarchical in purpose, structure, and authority. XYU is an organization led by a provost, deans, and so on. Beneath the administration come the academic departments.

Actors in an organization subdivide labor. In most nonacademic organizations, the bosses can scarcely tamper...