Interview: Paul Sniderman | Higher | EducationGuardian.co.uk

Interview: Paul Sniderman | Higher | EducationGuardian.co.uk
Paul Sniderman: Identity crisis
Paul Sniderman: Identity crisis

Multiculturalism may seem a liberal policy, but it reinforces prejudices, a visiting expert tells John Crace

Tuesday July 3, 2007
The Guardian

The best ideas often have the most unpromising beginnings. Towards the tail end of the 1990s, Paul Sniderman had just finished presenting his findings on immigrant minorities from eastern Europe and Africa to a conference in Italy, when a delegate stood up to ask him a question. “He was only about four sentences in, when I realised there was a huge gap in my research and that I didn’t have a clue what the answer was,” he says.

The question that left him speechless was this: if, as Sniderman claimed, people didn’t distinguish between minorities in their prejudices – those that were systematically hostile to one were likely to be systematically hostile to another – how did he reconcile this with the fact that there were clearly hierarchies of minorities?

Later that afternoon, at a different seminar, the same person asked him another question that was almost as tricky. Again, Sniderman, professor of public policy at Stanford University in California, had no hiding place. “I couldn’t escape the fact that I had clearly made a big mistake,” he says. Many academics might have adopted a policy of damage limitation, before sloping off to lick their wounds in private. Sniderman did something rather different. He invited his conference nemesis – a Dutchman called Louk Hagendoorn – to collaborate on a research project to find out the answers he didn’t have.

This turned out to be the best decision Sniderman ever made. He and Hagendoorn embarked on a study of Muslim minorities in the Netherlands. “We were very lucky,” he says, “because we began our research before anyone was aware there was a problem, before 9/11, and well before the murders of the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh and the gay rightwing politician Pim Fortuyn. This meant there was a purity to our work that wouldn’t have been there if we had been merely reacting to events. We were getting a snapshot of a society before it could be distorted by outside events.”

According to their research – just published in a book, When Ways of Life Collide – deep divisions between locals and Muslim immigrants existed much earlier than anyone had previously suspected in the tolerant, democratic Netherlands.

“There was this feeling,” Sniderman says, “that because the Dutch government was so openly committed to pursuing a policy of multiculturalism, and because there had been no trouble between Muslims and the Dutch, then that policy must be working.

“Yet we discovered something quite different. While any society will always have its fair share of bigots, we also found that governmental multiculturalism made the problem worse. By arguing that all groups in society should be allowed to live according to their own beliefs and customs, they were encouraging people to see themselves as different from one another. And not just a little bit different, but fundamentally different. So it fostered a them-and-us attitude to politics.”

Extreme attitudes

At one level, this is all very obvious. The more value you attach to questions of identity, the more reaction you are likely to get, with the result that people who don’t normally care very much about ideas of national identity can be provoked into extreme attitudes. But there are ironies and nuances at work. For one thing, Dutch policies of multiculturalism had their origins in racism rather than liberalism: the idea that minorities should maintain their traditions stemmed from the belief that their presence would be only temporary and that sooner or later they would be going “back home”. So the idea that multiculturalism might backfire shouldn’t be quite as shocking as it seems.

But what also emerges from this study is the thinness of the line between difference and prejudice. “We found that views typically held by otherwise tolerant Dutch people – that Muslims treated women badly and were too authoritarian with their children – were counterbalanced by Muslim attitudes towards the Dutch,” says Sniderman. “Muslims believed the Dutch were disrespectful towards women and failed to discipline their children properly. So this wasn’t about prejudices held by religious fanatics on both sides; it was a genuine conflict of values between two communities. It was the focus on these differences, through the pursuit of multiculturalism, that tipped the balance towards prejudice in some cases.”

Sniderman is too much the cautious political scientist to generalise from his data – at least on the record – but, when pushed, he will concede there are parallels that can reasonably be made between Britain and the Netherlands, particularly in regard to faith schools. “The Dutch always pursued a segregated education policy of different schools for Protestants and Catholics,” he points out, “and it seemed obvious for them to apply the same principles for Muslims.

Faith schools

“Yet the evidence proves this hasn’t worked. The biggest predictor of integration and social mobility in the Netherlands is the ability to speak Dutch, and kids at Muslim schools are not learning the language as well as students in other schools. The result is that second-generation Muslim immigrants are actually becoming worse off than their parents, a situation that can only cause more problems. And if the British government continues to promote faith schools, it could well find itself in a similar predicament.”

Neither does Sniderman reckon that trying to enforce a national British identity is the answer, as it also keeps the focus firmly on similarity and differences. So what is the solution? “Ah,” he says carefully, “I’m in the knowledge business, not the wisdom business. So I’m not really qualified in this.

“But it doesn’t mean that I haven’t thought about it, and what I have come up with is this: western governments should learn to chill out a little more. They should have more belief in the strength of liberal democracies. They’re a great deal less fragile than they imagine. They should legislate less for how they want people to feel, and more on the things that really matter, such as educational opportunity.”

Questions of identity haven’t just been the backbone of Sniderman’s academic career, they’re also an integral part of his life story. He and his brother, Alan, are identical twins. They were born 65 years ago in Hamilton, a small steel town 30 miles outside Toronto, and much of Sniderman’s childhood was spent trying to define his sense of self.

“My father had been a doctor,” he says, “and after he died, when we were still quite young, it was somehow always understood that Alan would be a doctor, too. I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do – other than not be the same as Alan – so I wound up studying philosophy at Toronto University.”

His keenness to differentiate himself from his brother had fortuitous consequences for both his professional and personal life. As a medical student, Alan looked the picture of respectability, even to the point of going to work in a suit. So, naturally, Paul made a point of going to bed at 3am, seldom shaving, and generally looking a bit of a wreck. It was a policy that paid off nicely. “One day this beautiful young medical student came up to me on the campus,” Sniderman says, “assuming that I was Alan, and that something dreadful had happened to him.”

Sniderman invited the woman on a date and he and Susie have been together ever since. Indeed, it was because of Susie that he wound up doing his postdoctoral research at the University of California in Berkeley.

“I knew that if I wanted to study political theory, then I either had to go to Cambridge in England or Berkeley on the west coast,” he says. “I didn’t know much about either of them, other than they were both about 3,000 miles away from Toronto, where Susie was. But I figured that one way was ocean and the other was land, and that it would be cheaper and easier to travel back and forth by bus, so I went to LA. When I got there, I discovered that Berkeley was actually just outside San Francisco.”

Rectifying errors has never been a major issue for Sniderman, so he quickly made his way 400 or so miles up the coast to the Bay Area and he’s never really left. Northern California suited both his personality – “everyone there is originally from somewhere else” – and his career ambitions. Although he started off planning to study political theory, he soon became more attracted to the number-crunching statistical work of Berkeley’s survey research facility.

Ordinary people

This was partly a reaction to the “intellectual barbarism of post-modernism” that was sweeping through all liberal arts subjects in the 60s and 70s. “The reason no one could understood the structuralist and post-structuralist theorists,” he laughs, “was because there was nothing really to understand.” But it was also because he had come to believe that, while politicians may come and go and bend the truth to suit their needs, there are still answers out there. “You just have to ask the right questions of the real people, the so-called ordinary people,” he insists.

It hasn’t always been the most glamorous of academic choices and Sniderman does have the odd regret. “I still think that my second book, A Question of Loyalty, that I wrote back in 1978, was my most important piece of work,” he says. “It was an investigation into how much confidence people had in government and it sank without trace because my conclusions were different to what most other political scientists believed at the time.

“There was a general feeling that after the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King and the disastrous war in Vietnam, the US must be doomed. Yet it was clear that while people may not have trusted the politicians, they still believed in the institutions.”

Sniderman doesn’t need to add that time has proved him right. He’s not that type of person. He’s happy enough without the recognition so long as he’s free to carry on doing what he wants to do. He may have moved across the Bay to Stanford in 1970, but he’s always remained a member of Berkeley’s survey research centre, and he’s continued to develop his work on the politics of identity and loyalty.

Along the way, there have been changes to his own identity. Fourteen years ago he and Susie decided it was time to become American citizens. How did he feel about swearing allegiance to the US flag?

“You know what?” he says. “It really wasn’t about that. What the judge actually told us was that we now had equal rights to anyone in the country who had lived there for 3,000 years, and I rather liked that idea.”

Even though he is now 65, Sniderman has no plans to retire and neither can he be forced to. “I told you I was a great fan of the US constitution,” he smiles. But he will be slowing down.

“I like to go up to our house in Napa at the weekends and not do very much,” he says. “And because I’m a political scientist, I have a lot of spare time on my hands so I get to babysit for my grandchildren. For the first time in my life, I’m actually doing something useful.”

Curriculum vitae

Age: 65

Job: Fairleigh S Dickinson Jnr professor of public policy, Stanford University

Books: A Question of Loyalty; The Scar of Race; When Ways of Life Collide

Likes: Reading, babysitting

Dislikes: Traffic, impatience

Married: with two children