But I still stand by my general assessment, only because it would be a big exception in US higher education if U-M wasn't more careful in its ideological controls than MSU. I wasn't arguing that MSU was somewhere on the Left--it wasn't. It's just that, in general, MSU is geared to reproducing a technical class, while U-M reproduces a professional-managerial class. Leftists (and, frankly, not a few eccentrics, drunks, etc.) could more easily slip into less-prestigious MSU because the ideological orientation of its "product" (graduates, research) is just less important.
Since they're both public universities, their funding is discussed publicly, and the solons of the Michigan legislature are often quite explicit about allocating funding along such "prestige" (class) lines.
Students figured this out, too. Personally, it was made clear to naive me during a hockey game in Ann Arbor some years back when, after MSU took a lead, the following chant rose up from the Blues:
That's all right! That's OK! You're gonna work for us some day!
(Harvard fans would chant this while *visiting* East Lansing. Cocky? Stupid? But I digress...)
Chomsky and Michael Albert have often noted this distinction between another technical/ideological pair, MIT and Harvard. Chomsky:
"By conventional measures, the Harvard faculty is much more liberal, in fact left-liberal. MIT faculty are very conservative often, even reactionary. I get along fine with MIT faculty, even when we disagree about everything (which is the usual case). If I show up at the Harvard faculty club, you can feel the chill settle; it's as if Satan entered the room." ("Disciplined Minds," Jeff Schmidt, Rowan and Littlefield, 2000, p. 14).
---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 11:47:15 -0700 (PDT)
>
>As a late 70s-early 80s vintage U-M red, I represent
>that remark. Nothing against East Lansing, mind you,
>we did a lot of work with comrades there. No
>invidious comparisons. But Ann Arbor in that era was a
>good time and place to be a commie, and there were a
>fair lot of us. Now, as to the faculty then: there was
>a pretty decent political economy program in the econ
>dept, since shut down (Tom Weisskopf), Dean Baker and
>Mark Weisbrot, whom people will know, as well as Hans
>Ehrbahr, were in grad school with me in that era. My
>main dept, philosophy, had Peter Railton (still does),
>at that time a Marxist (I know he's still a leftist);
>at the end of my time there the dept hired Elizabeth
>Anderson, one of the leading left philosophers today.
>English, there was and is my comrade Alan Wald;
>physics there's Dan Axelrod; Natural resources, Bunyan
>Bryant; sociology there was Tillt and Geoff Alexander
>and Howard Berman -- oh, U-M was red enough in them
>days.
>
>
>
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