Machan's Musings - Myths of Neutrality, Governmental or Otherwise
by Tibor R. Machan
Driving to school yesterday, I listened to a talk program on KNX AM Radio, the Los Angeles all-news CBS affiliate. It was a consumer advice show, with the host taking calls about various beefs people have with their banks, barbers, department stores and the like. In this case the focus was on how easy it is to steal people’s credit and debit card numbers and what banks are doing about it. (It’s interesting that the perks banks offer seem almost like entitlements to customers now, probably because of their having gotten used to this from government.)
In the course of giving some advice to one of the callers the host of the program made a comment that brought me up short. "With this matter you probably be best off going to the State of California since they will be unbiased." Oh? Why should that be so? But no one asked that question of the host and the matter was simply dropped.
Now this idea that government is an unbiased, nonpartisan agency has wide currency in certain circles, including the academy. Whereas scholars who do research for some business corporation are immediately suspected of bias, those who get their work funded by the government never get so accused. There is a famous case in which the animal liberation activist philosopher, Peter Singer, now at Princeton but earlier at some Australian government university, refused to go to a conference sponsored by Shell Oil and made a big deal of announcing to the world that he will not take part in something funded by a profit-making company, since it is undoubtedly biased, and its agenda loaded. Yet he and thousands of other scholars go to hundreds of university-sponsored and government-funded conferences all around the globe without ever giving it a thought that these, too, have their biases.
What would such a bias be? Well, just as the KNX radio host assumed that, if you bring in the State of California, you will get impartial treatment and matters will be looked at objectively, so, too, many, many folks think that universities funded by governments are impartial forums of discussion and research. But they are not. For instance, very few people at universities, even private ones, ever challenge the idea that government ought to be involved in higher education—they are entirely blind to that notion and, of course, that is precisely where their bias lies. In government-funded or heavily-subsidized universities and, indeed, all schools, the idea that such subsidies are wrongheaded, even unjust, isn’t likely to be explored. Many other topics also tend not to be explored with care and openness at such institutions of learning—whether affirmative action policies are proper, whether special sensitivity seminars dealing with sexual harassment might not be themselves quite insensitive. (Why not other types of harassment or student exploitation, why focus only on sex?)
A great many professors in higher education are unabashed champions of extensive government involvement in, you guessed it, higher education and nearly every other aspect of society. I recall one minor star at Auburn University who even went about the state of Alabama urging politicians to increase funding of higher education, giving it no thought that this qualified as gross self-dealing, something professional ethics classes teach professionals to shun as a matter of their ethics!
Indeed, there is a great deal of nonsense going around about impartiality. A great many journalists actually believe that because they do not deliberately slant their stories, their values and those of their editors play no role in what is selected for coverage, what is ignored. It would be far more honest, in fact, if they did peddle some of their values so readers could tell immediately where they stand—because stand they do, someplace, no matter how much they protest ... and it’s going to have its influence on their work.
Still, my first concern here is to disabuse people of the myth that when they bring in government, they will get fairness and impartiality. That’s bunk. Government is now so vast, so much involved in promoting various projects for special interests groups, that to think of it as one thinks of an impartial judge or referee is quite naïve.
Discuss this Article (0 messages)
|
