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Conservatives attack my liberal, and they mean liberal, arts college
Romney backers attempt to discredit economist Kim Clausing because she teaches at Reed.
Conservatives attack my liberal, and they mean liberal, arts college
Ostensibly free-marketeers, Republicans are downright sore losers when they face defeat in the marketplace of ideas. Though very few conservatives pursue a career in reporting, many make their way to the punditocracy from where they work the refs, charging the mainstream media with “liberal bias” instead of rebutting them on the facts. Similarly, conservatives like Rick Santorum have for a long time derided universities as sites for left-wing “indoctrination.”
"It's no wonder President Obama wants every kid go to go college," Santorum said during the spring primary. "The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure there wasn't one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?”
The bated-breath hysterics aren't new. Amidst the nationalist fervor that swept this country after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as I reported nine years ago as an undergraduate, conservatives attacked any professor that “challenge[d] the traditional picture of America as a blemish-free beacon of freedom and progress,” creating websites like Campus Watch to denounce individual academics by name.
Conservatives are underrepresented in academia, or at least certain disciplines, for many reasons. Some smart conservatives prefer to make serious money, something that university employment, to be sure, rarely delivers. For other right-wing wunderkinds, academia's critical thinking and acceptance of science can be a stumbling block for a political ideology that pathologizes the poor, prefers simple triumphal narratives over complicated conflict, and rejects contemporary research on climate science and homosexuality.
But this week, Republicans crossed the rubicon of intellectual dishonesty when they disparaged economist Kim Clausing in part because she teaches at my alma mater, Reed College. In a recent article, Clausing argues that eliminating taxes on U.S. corporations foreign income “would eliminate constraints on shifting income abroad.” On Monday, Obama made use the study for a trenchant laugh-line.
"Today we found out, there's a new study out by [a] non-partisan economist that says Governor Romney's economic plan would in fact create 800,000 jobs. There's only one problem: The jobs wouldn't be in America.”
“The Oregonian,” writes the conservative Weekly Standard, “has called Reed College, where Clausing teaches, 'one of the most liberal and academically liberal colleges in the nation.'”
Actually, The Oregonian called Reed, which ranks fourth in the proportion of graduates that go on to earn doctorates, “one of the most liberal and academically rigorous colleges in the nation.”
It's a telling typo that when Weekly Standard writers see “academic rigor” they read “liberal.”
The Weekly Standard also took issue with Clausing being cited as a “non-partisan” economist, noting that she has made (small) donations to Obama and other Democratic Party candidates. Taking a cue from Romney's allegations that Obama practices “crony capitalism,” the Weekly Standard labeled his citation of Clausing's study “crony economics.”
“It is sort of silly to make a big deal out of relatively small personal contributions, particularly in today's campaign finance environment (where billionaires donate to superpacs, etc.),” Clausing writes in an e-mail. “Further, the critics clearly get the causality wrong. I donate (rather small amounts) to these candidates because I like their economic policies, especially relative to the alternative. Not the other way around.”
I'm sure, however, that Clausing's recognition of the fact that billionaires do make large donations to SuperPACs won't help her win any new friends in the conservative media.
Also lost in the newscycle's myopia is the fact that her Tax Notes articles speaks favorably of bipartisan legislation introduced by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Daniel Coats (R-IN). And the article, after all, was published in Tax Notes, which delivers “Federal tax law changes and policy shifts ― often months before they occur”--not exactly a partisan rag.
“Most articles in Tax Notes,” The Chronicle of Higher Education notes, “don’t get specifically mentioned by sitting United States presidents (another commentary in the issue, titled “The Case Against E-Filing,” while engaging, is unlikely to generate the same buzz).”
What's more, international taxation is a subject that Clausing has written about for years―from “A Burden-Neutral Shift From Foreign Tax Creditability to Deductibility?” in 2011 to “The Role of U.S. Tax Policy in Offshoring” (2006)―and it is absurd to frame her Tax Notes article, based on years of peer-reviewed research, as some sort of tactical partisan missive.
Republicans, to be sure, only work the refs because working the refs works. The New York Times, which reported the episode in a typical and lamentable he-said-she-said fashion, is a case in point. The article quoted an Obama spokeswoman defending Professor Clausing as a “well-respected economist.” The timid and self-flagellating mainstream media should report for accuracy instead of false balance: Kim Clausing, a Harvard PhD and two-time Fulbright scholar, is a well-respected economist.
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