The historian KC Johnson has an interesting, link-filled article on ideological and intellectual diversity at Inside Higher Ed:
Inside Higher Ed recently reported on four University of Pittsburgh professors critiquing the latest survey suggesting ideological one-sidedness in the academy. According to the Pitt quartet, self-selection accounts for findings that the faculty of elite disproportionately tilts to the Left. “Many conservatives,” the Pitt professors mused, “may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientific method.”
Imagine the appropriate outrage that would have occurred had the above critique referred to feminists, minorities, or Socialists. Yet the Pitt quartet’s line of reasoning — that faculty ideological imbalance reflects the academy functioning as it should — has appeared with regularity, and has been, unintentionally, most revealing. Indeed, the very defense offered by the academic Establishment, rather than the statistical surveys themselves, has gone a long way toward proving the case of critics who say that the academy lacks sufficient intellectual diversity.
Johnson then critiques three excuses for ideological homogeneity:
1. The cultural left is, simply, more intelligent than anyone else. As SUNY-Albany’s Ron McClamrock reasoned, “Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we’re just f-ing smarter.” The first recent survey came in early 2004, when the Duke Conservative Union disclosed that Duke’s humanities departments contained 142 registered Democrats and 8 registered Republicans. Philosophy Department chairman Robert Brandon considered the results unsurprising: “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.” . . .
2. A left-leaning tilt in the faculty is a pedagogical necessity, because professors must expose gender, racial, and class bias while promoting peace, “diversity” and “cultural competence.” According to Montclair State’s Grover Furr, “colleges and universities do not need a single additional ‘conservative’ .... What they do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists — all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few ‘conservatives.’” . . .
3. A left-leaning professoriate is a structural necessity, because the liberal arts faculty must balance business school faculty and/or the general conservative political culture.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Political Diversity on Law School Faculties.--
- KC Johnson on Intellectual Diversity in Universities.--
Also, doesn't the recent ID contreversy lend credance to the scientific method critique?
So why all the carping about university professors? What do you want affirmative action for conservatives?
If, and I do not concede, there is a liberal bias in academia, self-selection may indeed play a role. But other than for the "intelligent design" acolytes, the reason can't possibly be objection to the scientific method. Rather it's that liberals may be more drawn to teaching as an expression of their social concern than conservatives, who may be more philosophically inclined to private practice, or business.
But what I really want to see is a well-executed and broad survey tackling the question: "Did you find, overall, that your college professor's explicit or implicit political biases affected the nature and quality of your education? Did you feel that their teaching was tainted by this personal bias?" With a good professor, I honestly don't think it ought to matter. I was taught by a number of excellent professors in college, and I knew almost none of their political leanings, and when I did they didn't come up in the classroom. Actually, if anything in class was troubling to me at the University of Chicago, it was due to (some of) the students; there was an occasional instance of knee-jerk Bush/Republican/conservative bashing that was (almost) always met with a combination of agreement and silence. The classroom didn't feel like a safe space to drop similarly unthinking conservative rhetoric without engaging the ire of most other students. But that had nothing to do with the teachers.
I have a couple of questions for anyone who genuinely believes these disparities are evidence of discrimination in faculty hiring.
1) Is it unreasonable to suspect that bright young conservative college students tend to value financial success and go to B-school and the banks, but bright young liberal college students tend to value academics and go to grad school?
2) Is it unreasonable to suppose that the conservative mindset, in general, tends to disvalue the reflective temperament necessary for academic pursuits? Think whether you could imagine George W. Bush or Al Gore as a university professor (and they had roughly the same grades and SAT scores, remember). Indeed, I can only think of one or two recent Republican presidential candidates fit the temperamental bill of university faculty, Forbes and Gramm. Yet on the Democratic side, Kerry, Gore, Kucinich, etc.---only Edwards and maybe Dean seem unsuited to academic work.
And it's not surprising---Republican voters found something deeply unsettling about John Kerry's stress on "nuance" during the last election, preferring Bush's moral clarity. Nuance is where academics live. If Republican voters don't think it's an attractive trait in candidates, why is it not unreasonable to suspect they'd be turned off from pursuing career choices that demand they personally develop that trait?
3) If discrimination is the reason for these disparities, why does the disparity appear even in the physics and math departments? Is there a Democratic way to do physics?
Overall, I find the empirical argument seriously undeveloped. And as a meta-commentary, I find the willingness of many conservatives to believe the theory of discrimination---reflexively, in spite of all its holes, as an "of course" matter---to be yet another example of intellectual unsuitability for tenured faculty positions.
While many VC readers continued to educate themselves after school and began to drift rightward, too many of our classmates did not and stayed both undereducated and leftist. No, no, I'm not saying that leftist=dumb. I'm just saying that, based on the incomplete education provided at most universities, most people (including future conservatives/Republicans/libertarians) leave their Universities voting Democrat. Only after continued exposure to information and ideas, without the blinders imposed by our 'intellectually superior' professors, did many of us begin our drift rightwards. And even then it is with a touch of guilt and confusion. ("We all learned that Communism is a superior economic system. So why am I beginning to think it's not? Is there something wrong with me?")
Too many of my college friends retained their leftist beliefs after school as they lapsed into a life of sitcom re-runs. They never cared to continue learning, and since they only heard one side of the story in college, Mission Accomplished! - they're life long Democrats. If they stayed intellectually active, some of them would still be liberal. Some of them would not. When colleges crank out a steady stream of left-leaning graduates, they're betting that students will never learn more. The question is not how many VC readers survived their schooling with their political beliefs in tact (or converted later in life). The question is how many more VC readers would there be if college students were given a more honest education.
If the goal is the latter, then you have an enormous problem, because the program then has the explicit aim to indoctrinate students, not foster critical thinking and advance human knowledge. If you have a faculty who is so partisan as to be unable to ecumenically and broadly discuss issues, the students are at a tremendous disadvantage. I think the first comment brings up an interesting point, that there is some confusion as to what, exactly, "conservatism" is and what it means. I think many people, and perhaps these few sad professors quoted here, have fundamentally confused "conservative" (in the adjective sense) and Conservative, in the sense of the range of philosophy generally referred to by that term. The conflation of this philosophy with a socially conservative philosophy (by which I mean proscription of trangressions based on a religious dogma) may be why some people are so distressed by the idea of conservatives in the academy, but it also highlights their basic ignorance of the difference between indoctrination and education. You can be a liberal/leftist and still be an outstanding and ecumenical educator. But that is not what we're discussing, nor what is, in many cases, happening in so many colleges and universities.
Personally, I tend to agree that self-selection due to philosophical views about income and business is largely responsible for the disparity.
Nick
I expect this plays a role, but I think we shouldn't forget the parents.
Of course children of conservatives are more likely to be conservatives; similarly for liberals.
Many conservative parents want their kids to go into business or accounting or in any case do something practical; liberal parents may place less emphasis on their kids' financial success, and may actually be happy that they're considering a financially worthless liberal arts PhD.
I never did buy the "more education makes you more left-wing [for a given income level]" argument.
So: are liberal and conservative parents unequally supportive of academic careers? Could this be a reason why so many of the over-educated are liberal?
1. I would be competing with hundreds of other PhDs in history for each position that would pay about 40% of what I make now. Once I have retired, and no longer need an income, then I could afford to teach. More importantly, once I no longer need to work for a living, I can at least afford to invest the time and money in pursuing a doctorate so that I can compete with hundreds of other PhDs for a position.
2. I'm sure that most academics would not intentionally discriminate against conservatives--but they would just be "more comfortable" with people whom they think of as intelligent. The more that someone else's beliefs match yours, the more intelligent they must be, right?
3. It is true that most academics are not such doctrinaire haters that they would intentionally prevent qualified conservatives from being hired--but it doesn't take too many of the PC bunch making hiring decisions or sitting on tenure committees to effectively block all conservatives from becoming employed--especially when the attitudes KC Johnson quotes are considered acceptable.
I don't have much confidence that the academy plays it very straight. Some years back, I was applying to grad schools to work on my master's in history. I had just completed my BA in History, cum laude, and the department granted "with distinction" as well--perhaps because I already had two history books published before I received my BA. I had As in every class in my major.
My GPA for all classes was about 3.8--dragged down by having taken upper division classes in computer science, as well as other classes that history majors don't usually take, such as two semesters of calculus, and the serious sequences of chemistry and physics.
When I took the History GRE, I scored 91 percentile on the world history section, and 99 percentile on the American history section.
With those qualifications, you might think that getting into grad school to work on a master's would have been a piece of cake, right? Nope. The only grad school that would accept me was Sonoma State University, where I had earned my BA. Washington State University at Pullman and University of Idaho sent me rejection letters indicating that I wasn't qualified for their programs. When I asked them to explain in what way I was not qualified, I could get no answer out of them.
It makes you wonder, doesn't it?
--Winston Churchill
This is a non-sequitur. If discrimnation exists, then it doesn't matter what subject matter you are teaching. Discrimination means you are hiring on qualities other than those that are related to the job at hand.
It's not that there is a Democratic way to do physics, but that the professor of physics happens to be a Democrat, and so, is hired in part because of his political leanings and not just his demonstrated mastery of the subject.
Hmm...I suppose that argument is just fine...
But then, why is/was there such a outcry for {women | gays | blacks | hispanics}in the {congress | policitcs | military | police |fire departments | business boardrooms | law school | college atheltics}?
Universities are now places where increasingly onerous taboos are foisted on a largely unsuspecting populace. Sure, some of the more heretical youngsters are goaded into fighting back, but does anyone think that the presentation of only one side of a debate is the role of a university?
And how would a conservative apply for a job in a women's studies, gender studies or Black studies program, when the sole purpose of those programs is to perpetuate historical leftist grievances?
But I think a not insubstantial part of it is that much of what a vast section of academia deals with today simply isn't that interesting to anything other than a very small group of self-selected people to begin with. How many people do you know actively follow gender studies? Somewhere along the line sociology moved from dealing with general questions such as "what causes high rates of teen pregnancy" to oddball analyses of why we need five or more "genders." I consider myself a fairly well read person, but it wasn't until I ran into an English professor that I knew Captain Ahab was merely neo-Marxist prefiguring of the Jack Albertson role on "Chico and the Man." Or whatever. It's become such hopeless babble that it seems unmoored from even the subjects these people are purportedly dealing with - are they surprised that the vast amount of people IN GENERAL, and not merely conservatives, have no interest in it? A substantial section of academia is in areas that essentially have no connection to the day to day lives of about 99% of the population. Anthropology I'm sure has interesting insights on the nature and structure of American society. But you wouldn't know that from talking with them. Philosophy moved from "How do I live?" to a mishmash of semiotics. Academia is becoming more and more of an echo chamber, and the liberal political dimension is only one aspect of that.
With corporate and political America completely dominated by the Right, preserving a liberal bastion in academia -- particularly in the social sciences -- seems unlikely. Just as corporate America has been hollowed out by the creation of a class of greedy, ignorant, irresponsible corporate executives, I think academia can be hollowed out by replacing liberal, rational faculty with conservative, rational faculty, whose critical capacity is focused exclusively on approved topics.
The plutocracy wants a conservative academia, which will serve the interests of the ruling class. They will get what they want. Let's accept the inevitable with as much dignity as possible.
Science department professors are probably middle-of-the road liberals, with many conservatives thrown in. This has partly to do with their more positive view of the role of the government as funders of research, partly to suspicions about religious conservatives and their historical role in interfering with science. But most physics and chemistry professors are comfortable with Clinton-like triangulated liberalism -- hardly the lefties that everyone is worried about.
Engineering professors are between b-school profs and science profs. Even though they know science, they don't do science, they apply science. As a group, they have less historical memory of religious conservative interfering with their work. A good percentage of them are middle of the road republicans. Engineering schools in the US are heavily funded by DoD, and they are less knee-jerkily suspicious about US DoD. But they are still liberal enough to want a strong government role in funding research.
Most people in the above departments don't even know the political leanings of their colleagues. When people are interviewed, their technical work is the only one discussed, and maybe their personalities. There may also be politics, but the politics has more to do with ideas in their disciplines, e.g., a prof might not have much respect for a certain technical approach, and he or she might veto a newcomer pushing that approach. But this is not left vs right politics.
People in history and philosophy departments are probably on the average left-of-center liberals, not "lefties" in the sense of raging Marxists or whatever. But there are exceptions. The way anti-conservatism might come in here in a philosophy department is through relatively less respect for areas like metaphysics, which are often the areas that religiously inclined philosophers study. It is also true that philosophers are by trade more likely to be critical and questioning, and religious conservatism is less likely to flourish in such departments.
It is the English, culture studies, etc. departments that seem to have real "loony" leftists, at least people whom most of this site's readers would regard as loony leftists. I don't have a simple explanation for it.
BTW, there were studies a decade or two ago that plotted liberalism vs conservatism (as measured by voting Democratic or Republican, admittedly a proxy measure) against education. At that time, labor was still a relatively dominant force. People with the lowest education voted Democratic and as educational level went up, the percentage voting Republican increased nicely. At the Ph D level, the correlation started going down, with a larger percentage voting Democratic again. When it came to Nobel laureates (mostly scientists), an overwhelmingly large percentage voted Democratic. Make of it what you will.
They do? I've read quite a bit by economists that isn't terribly conservative. Perhaps what you mean is that these parts of the academy aren't completely dominated by the left. I would be overjoyed if the humanities and social sciences were as politically diverse as econ departments and business schools.
We would be overjoyed if there were some conservative opinions in academia. Diversity is a wonderful thing, according to the left, with respect to race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. Diversity is so important that it actually takes precedence over excellence. So why is diversity in political orientation less important?
First, the presence of a bias to the left is simply fact. Those who try to deny it are deluding themselves. Other than me, I don't know of anybody in the department right of moderate Democrat, and I certainly know many for whom the Democratic Party is much too right-wing.
Second, in my experience, there is little overt discrimination when it comes to hiring. Sure, the structure of some fields definitely presents a strong impetus towards a left-ward bias, but the more salient point is that there are simply far fewer Ph.D.s being produced in the humanities who are right of center. I judge this based on my graduate school colleagues who were on the whole well to the left of my faculty colleagues. To understand where this is all coming from, I think we need more insight into why people choose whether to enter academic fields in the first place. We can sit around and speculate on message boards like this all we wish, but it will never be much more than speculation--and the type of speculation that leads those of certain ideological shades to assume a particular etiology of the problem. Some real facts would be nice.
Third, I'm not so confident about the lack of bias that I spend a lot of time proclaiming my conservative bona fides. Still untenured, I continue to fear the possibility of bias, though I have seen no direct evidence of its impact.
Fourth, the unrepentent far left folks like Grover Furr are truly the exception. You should see his Stalin apologetics on the H-Russia list. Disturbing, but unusual in a field of history that despite popular understandings is actually on the whole farther to the right than most fields of history. Far more faculty spend far more time concerned not to bring their political biases into the classroom than many of you would like to believe. One of the posters on Johnson's Inside Higher Ed article made the correct point that it is this great majority that is never covered in the media, because the careful teacher who really does seek to promote critical thinking is a lot less interesting to the press than the ideologue seeking to indoctrinate.
Finally, based on my own obviously ridiculous sample size of one, I simply cannot accept the notion that conservatives are less curious, less committed to education, or otherwise less fit in general outlook for academia.
#1 is George Soros who gave more than $23 million ($2.5 million alone to MoveOn).
#2 is Peter Lewis of the aptly named Progressive Insurance, who gave just under $23 million (another $2.5 million to MoveOn).
#3 is Steven Bing who gave almost $14 million (almost a million to MoveOn).
#4 is Herb &Marion Sandler, who gave $13 million (more than $2.5 million to MoveOn).
At #5 we finally get to a "plutocrat" contributing to conservative 527s (Swift Boat Veterans for Truth).
#6, #7, and #8 are all hard left contributors.
#9 is T. Boone Pickens who, to my surprise, backed conservative causes.
#10 is again a left contributor.
What is this about the plutocracy wanting conservative academia? The plutocracy is disproportionately left.
You applied to three schools, got into one (a 33% conversion ratio isn't that bad, really), and are extrapolating from this that the academy hates conservatives? That seems a bit of an overreaction; many history Ph.D.s apply to tens of programs even with Ivy League undergraduate credentials and only get into a couple of the top programs. Some get into some top programs and not others (i.e., into the top program in their field and not the second-tier). Some have to get a master's degree first because their undergraduate school is less well-known.
I mean, maybe a 3.8 from Sonoma State isn't perceived as that valuable? Maybe (as often happens) there's not a faculty member with a specialty in the field you want (e.g., if you want to study Chinese history, and there's no one in the department researching it, you might get rejected.) It's kind of hard to blame your conservatism; I don't remember the part of my grad school application process where they asked me my political views, religious beliefs, or party affiliation.
The idea that Ph.D. students are all the sons and daughters of millionaires so they have no need to go and make money is almost as laughably absurd as the idea that all conservatives are the sons and daughters of small business owners who work hard so they must go to Wall Street.
The idea that conservatives aren't as bright is just stupid. There may be something to the idea, illustrated in the Churchill quote above, that people tend to be more liberal when they're younger and grow more conservative as they age. My students often joke that once they're i-bankers, they'll discard their liberal views due to self-interest. If someone never leaves the academy, they're unlikely (broadly generalizing) to be the sort to chomp down on conservative policies that don't benefit them much.
My guess is that it's somewhat self-selective, and now, self-perpetuating as fears about the liberal academy convince people that they shouldn't consider graduate school. That's unfortunate; we'd be better off with more balanced opinions.
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, administrate.
I have always argued that self-selection plays a big part in political disparities in law faculty hiring. Yet one of the reasons for looking at the extent of the political disparity in faculty hiring is that it is much too large to be plausibly due entirely to self-selection. Further, there is enough open, admitted political bias against hiring conservatives that it is reasonable to speculate that there is unadmitted bias in hiring.
One must remember (as John McGinnis's forthcoming study reveals), there are very few top law schools with any significant faculty political diversity. Among the top 15 schools, my impression is that only Virginia, Northwestern, and Chicago have more than 20% conservative or Republican leaners--and (the last time I counted) Republicans are outnumbered at least 2-1 at Northwestern and Chicago. It is my impression that Texas and Yale are among the other top schools with more than token representation of faculty leaning Republican.
I have run faculty hiring for at least a total of 6 years at three different law schools. As to the success of my fellow Volokh conspirators in legal education, I can't tell you how many times (at least a dozen) I have heard a faculty member at a top school say that they would have trouble getting one or more of my fellow VC members through their hiring committees or faculties in part because of their (libertarian) politics. If you don't think that VC members' politics are discussed when they are doing a look-see visit at a top 5 law school, then you really don't understand legal education.
Have you ever wondered why so many VC members (most of whom are libertarians or have libertarian leanings) have ties to George Mason, which is the law school most open to hiring smart conservatives and libertarians? One left-leaning friend of mine who places as many people in law school teaching as any law professor in the country said of a candidate he/she was advising a few years ago: "Given his politics, the only schools that are likely to give him a serious look are Chicago, Northwestern, Virginia, and George Mason." He/She then proceeded to say why two of the four schools really had no needs in his area, leaving only George Mason and one other. That prediction proved to be exactly right: the candidate went to Mason after getting close to an offer at one other of these four schools relatively open to libertarians and conservatives. I can't say for certain that he got no other offers, but I don't think he did.
I am not arguing that no conservatives or libertarians are hired at other top schools, just that it is far from an unimportant obstacle at many of them. Certainly, Stanford and Georgetown have been among the least politically diverse schools, though Georgetown is making a genuine effort in the last year. Nor am I arguing that there is no discrimination in faculty hiring against people on the extreme left.
The title of my second book, For the Defense of Themselves and the State: The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep And Bear Arms might have been something of a tipoff about my politics. (It was eventually cited in one federal court decision and a Rhode Island Supreme Court dissent.) Do you suppose if the title had been, Sexuality &Constitutional Law: A Post-Modernist Critique of Sexual Orientation Discrimination in Amerikkka the results of my applications might have been different?
Sigh. Yes, liberals are all multimillionaires.
It makes you wonder, doesn't it?
You'll forgive me if---given the rest of what you wrote---it doesn't make me wonder that much.
Taimyoboi---
This is a non-sequitur. If discrimnation exists, then it doesn't matter what subject matter you are teaching. Discrimination means you are hiring on qualities other than those that are related to the job at hand.
I think that's certainly a valid point, and I left unspoken part of my problem. What I meant to suggest is that, whereas it makes some amount of sense that English lit profs would find conservative approaches to the discipline distasteful and evaluate them unfairly, but still think they were being objective, there's no analogous way for that to sneak into faculty decisions in physics. Which leaves only blatant discrimination, which I don't think is plausible. It appears you do:
It's not that there is a Democratic way to do physics, but that the professor of physics happens to be a Democrat, and so, is hired in part because of his political leanings and not just his demonstrated mastery of the subject.
But to repeat, I simply don't find that plausible. Do you really think there are math department hiring committees saying "Well, XXX is a Republican, so we'll go with YYY, even though his expertise is questionable"? Because that really seems highly unlikely to me.
First, schools hire from a pool that forms a small subset of the non-stupid, i.e., the very smart. Since Mill's remark about the stupid has no bearing on the conservative propensities or otherwise of the very smart, it can tell us nothing about why conservatives are under-represented in academia. Secondly, Mill's remark can't in any case all alone explain why non-conservatives so outnumber conservatives in academia. For Mill's remark is compatible with its being true that all non-conservatives are utterly unreliable, and hence unhireable, in which case academia would have no non-conservatives at all.
why is/was there such a outcry for {women | gays | blacks | hispanics}
Because disadvantaged minorities were historically denied the economic opportunities to go to school, achieve political power, etc.? I'm just guessing.
There's no contemporary movement to ensure economic access for, say, Jews, nor should there be, because Jews have been able to succeed on their own for quite a while. Likewise, why should conservatives need a help up? They're already up. (The existence of many on this thread who have convinced themselves that they're down notwithstanding.)
As I said, I think self-selection plays a big part.
As for other reasons, I would speculate that lifestyle issues are present. Michael Barone's Hard America/Soft America places academics as part of soft America, with reduced market forces. Then I think that there is socialization with fellow faculty and with faculty in other fields in college. The culture that gives rise to elite educations disproportionately reflects New England educated culture, which is pretty liberal even outside the university.
Frank, you are as smart as anyone I know, and you've taught at Texas, Northwestern, and probably other places. Why do you think it is?
I just looked at the Ladd Lipset book. In 1948, professors favored Democrats by 9% more than the general population. In 1969, the social sciences favored Humphrey over Nixon in 1968 75/20, the humanities 72/23, law 65/35, physical sciences 57/39, biological sciences 56/41, business 40 (Humphrey)/55 (Nixon), engineering 37/60. Even then, the relative odds of favoring Humphrey for social over physical sciences is 2.6 to 1. Might one treat the physical sciences as a baseline and then try to model the rest of the disparity?
Do you have more recent data on the physical sciences or math or physics?
I also wonder whether the slant to the left will continue. Young law professors tend, I think, to be more conservative than the middle-aged folk who grew up in the 60s; the same may well be seen in other fields.
But to repeat, I simply don't find that plausible. Do you really think there are math department hiring committees saying "Well, XXX is a Republican, so we'll go with YYY, even though his expertise is questionable"?
I don't think that anyone serious is asserting the bolded part. However, keeping in mind the number of Ph.D. holders compared to tenure track positions (even in the sciences), the bolded part need never come into play- there's plenty of capable people for the spot.
Going down the rest of the list shows that the hard left is better represented than conservatives.
My impression is that among historians, those who grew up after Watergate tend to be, if not more conservative, at least least less doctrinaire leftists. A few that I have talked to are very careful what they write or say, because they know that tenure will be difficult if they are perceived as not following the Party line.
I'm deeply suspicious of your math. If it is true that the Federal government taxes 20% of the average paycheck, does it seem likely that the states and local governments spend one-and-a-half as much again?
It seems you're referring to the Americans for Tax Reform figure, here (.pdf), but it's important to note that 50% estimate takes into account (as nearly a third!) of the total tax burden the cost of complying with regulations. First, I doubt that's an easy figure to calculate, and probably includes a hefty normative judgment that regulation is bad. Second, it doesn't jibe with your claim that taxes alone eat up 50% of the average paycheck, even those of only property-owners. So even accepting the ATR's figures, 33-35% seems more likely.
Furthermore, 50% doesn't seem plausible. I'm just recalling from my own faulty memory, but the national GDP is about $11 or $12 trillion. The federal budget is about $2 trillion, plus a $300 million or so deficit. So $2.3 / $11.5 = 0.20; federal government spending equalling 20% of the national income seems pretty plausible. Accepting the ATR figures as roughly reflecting reality, it appears state and local spending in aggregate is half as large as federal, so we could estimate that total government spending is 30% of the national income. Now, spending would equal taxes plus deficits, so total government taxation, we'd predict, should be even less than 30%. And that jibes with reality; I'm a lawyer (comparatively high-paid) in New York (certainly high-taxed); I don't pay nearly half of my income to government. And there just aren't enough people in the 2% or so above me to make up for those below me if, as I suspect, those who make less money than me pay a smaller percentage in their taxes (I have no dependents and only trivial deductions, so it stands to reason).
My point is that it's all too easy to assume that those who disagree with us are simply in the delusions of ideology. That's possible, of course. But it's equally possible that it's we ourselves who are mistaken. (In the example you provided, I suspect it's a little of each.) It's therefore a mistake to infer from that mere observation of disagreement that there's some institutional bias against a group of people.
Ah. You've got it right. But I think if you replace "not qualified" with "not as qualified as the distasteful Republican" it should work.
Yup. Hence the term "ivory tower" as an expression of contempt for someone isolated from how real people live, work, and play.
Ah. You've got it right. But I think if you replace "not qualified" with "not as qualified as the distasteful Republican" it should work.
But I don't think it's that even- I'm pretty sure that, given the realities of supply and demand, a conservative has to be markedly better than a liberal to be employed.
Perhaps people come out of college fairly leftty, but those who go into business become more conservative due to their experiences there, while those who spend their entire lives in academia never shed their youthful, lefty beliefs. That doesn't make one right and the other wrong, BTW, just that different experiences will naturally produce different results.
That accounts for the Democratic physics profs. And, as someone with an MS in physics, I can't say the "hostile work environment" theory makes any sense to me. I was WAY to the right of most (though not all) of the grad students, but that did not somehow make my life there miserable.
I made absolutely no claims in one direction or another. I took issue with your attempting to generalize about discrimination in general based on the unlikelihood that such would occur in the sciences. Your original statement being:
"If discrimination is the reason for these disparities, why does the disparity appear even in the physics and math departments?"
If you prefer to limit the discussion to the sciences, then no, I don't think there is systemic hiring discrimination against conservative physicists or mathematicians. But I wouldn't rule it out so casually as you have done.
"Which leaves only blatant discrimination, which I don't think is plausible."
Does that mean you also believe its implausible that hiring discrimination exists against minorities in the business world?
I'll put my hours of work up against yours any time. The lack of knowledge of the academic world is clear when people think we work "only six months a year." Believe it or not, most of my work comes outside of teaching, so I am not "off" when classes are not in session.
Aren't we all forgetting that in Mill's day, "conservative" had quite a different meaning? Many of today's conservatives and libertarians are much more closely aligned with Mill's classic liberalism than your average modern democrat.
Doesn't anyone else find it alarming that a Philosophy Dept Chair has somehow missed this major and obvious distinction?
Maybe because they don't see anything hypocritical in thinking that a lack of conservatives on campus is a bad thing but a lack of women, minorities, etc. is not.
I think we agree, then, on the terms of the debate: Whether science faculty hiring committees really would take a marginally less qualified liberal over a marginally more qualified conservative, for the reason that they'd rather hire a liberal. Or am I still missing your point?
If I'm not, I think our disagreement has been identified: I don't think any committee actually would make such a conscious decision.
Perhaps I made an inteperate and hasty comment. There are, in every group, exceptions. However, I know my fair share of graduate level academics, of which I am not admittedly a part, who lament in July that they have to go back to work in September. Maybe those I know are the exception.
I should know better than to generalize from specific examples on this blog.
Hmmm... First, sorry to rush to judgment.
Second, let me restate, because I'm a little confused here. A large majority of French lit and gender theory profs vote Democratic. But a large majority of physics profs do, too. The inference I draw from that is, if the differential in the former is due to discrimination, then the differential in the latter presumably would be due to the same thing. But if the latter differential is not due to discrimination, then it seems likely there's a partial non-discriminatory basis for the former, as well.
Now, I don't think there is a discriminatory basis for the differential in physics faculties. I don't think I'm ruling it out; I'm just making my best guess given the weight of the evidence in a situation of uncertainty. And so long as one remains open to revisit the issue if circumstances change, I don't think it's terribly hasty to infer good faith where there's no evidence to the contrary.
(Analogous: Is it fair to say, "No, I don't think that person is a racist, an anti-Semite, and a Dave Matthews Fan. But I wouldn't rule it out so casually as you have done." Obviously not the same thing. But still.)
Here's where you lose me:
Does that mean you also believe its implausible that hiring discrimination exists against minorities in the business world?
I didn't mean to suggest that blatant discrimination, in every circumstance, is implausible; I meant only to say that outward discrimination against conservatives doesn't seem to me terribly likely.
But I think race is a good example to discuss part of my argument. Even someone who thinks he's not racist can subconsciously use an African American's race as a proxy for all sort of undesirable traits, and therefore discriminate on race without knowing he's doing so. Indeed, that seems to me the stronger argument against university liberalism; that liberal arts faculties use conservative arguments as a proxy for weak-mindedness or academic unseriousness. In history departments, I can imagine it happening. But in chemistry, it makes a lot less sense to me, and I still think that the only plausible discriminationwill be outward and blatant, rather than subliminal. But I don't think that outward, blatant discrimination is very likely; therefore, in the sciences at least, I don't think any discrimination is very plausible.
Fair enough. But of course that argument goes both ways. I can't recall who put it this way, but try answering the following questions:
As for the ludicrous suggestion that liberals are smarter than conservatives the fact that conservatives do quite well in Engineering, economics and business should dispel that. Ask any undergraduate about the difficulty of those major respective to poli sci, philosophy, history etc. (I'm poli sci and the rest of my family are engineers) The relative GPAs between those majors may be informative as well.
If I remember my sociology from undergrad right there are some interesting works suggesting that a certain percentage of a minority are needed for success of that particular minorty. While I'm not necessarily endorsing the research it does seem to provide an interesting possible explanation.
On the other side of the equation: some of these activities are so much fun that it is hard to distinguish work from play. I enjoy time spent digging through archives, reading, and trying to unravel historical mysteries. Even teaching can be somewhat enjoyable, when you have students (at least some students) who are interested in learning, and have made some effort to prepare for class. I would expect that most historians who work full-time also enjoy this quite a bit.
For the most part, those of us in the private sector get paid better partly because we work 50 weeks a year, and partly because our work is less fun. If I had any influence on this society (which, being a conservative, I do not), I would prefer state governments pay professors better--perhaps in exchange for a bit more consistent teaching in their assigned fields, and a bit less political agitation masquerading as teaching. My experience as a student was that perhaps 80% of professors were doing their jobs (and just their jobs), while another 20% thought that "political activist" was one of their responsibilities in the classroom.
First, Conservatives cover a large body of attitudes. A huge percentage of conservatives are traditionalists (paleocons) or very Christian. The academy today rewards a skeptical rationalism. Anybody who thinks that tradition or revelation trumps rationality is not going to make it. Hence, the devotion to rationality precludes a big chunk of conservatives. Now, I am not saying that traditionalists or Christians are irrational people, just that it is not their lodestar, like it is at the university.
Libertarians of course, are pretty devoted to rational analysis. And while Conservatives as a group are underrepresented, I think that libertarians are, if anything, overrepresented. I see much more libertarian feeling among faculty than other groups of society with which I am familiar.
I think that there may be some bias against the religious, because of the academic methodology, which is to question everything and rationalize answers.
There is pretty general agreement among conservatives that people should be judged on their individual merits. Not because they are black, or white, or male, or female. This is the conservative critique of affirmative action--that individuals are not being admitted to schools or hired based on their own merits, but because they fill a quota.
Remember that affirmative action first surfaced when it did not because there were conscious discriminatory efforts that affirmative action was trying to fix, but because there were a lot of often unconscious assumptions that were getting in the way.
There were genuinely intentional racists out there. Back when I was an employment agent, I provided assistance to a Human Resources manager working at a government contractor in finding a new job, so that she could safely send in the attack dogs from EEOC after the Engineering Manager. Choice quotes from the Engineering Manager: "Don't send me any more Hispanics or blacks." "There's only two things women are good for: filing and f--king."
For the most part, the problem was that an overwhelmingly white and male hiring population tended to hire people that sounded and looked like them. Affirmative action was originally an attempt to get managers to consciously examine assumptions that were causing minority applicants to be dropped from consideration because, "He doesn't seem very serious about the job." This may be the sort of affirmative action required at universities--a conscious examination of whether the hiring committee's political assumptions are denigrating the value of an applicant's scholarly work.
No big thing. It was a note of frustration--likely born of too much time away from the kids as I try to make it to tenure. People always think we have it easy in academia, and some who don't take it seriously probably do, especially if they have more teaching experience than I. I just finished my first full-time teaching year and averaged probably 6 hours prep for each hour in class and after that I did the things that will actually get me tenure some day, because it won't be the teaching that counts. For me, the summer is much needed time to catch up on all those things I did not finish during the regular academic year.
Anyway, this is really off topic here, so I'll stop.
1) The reason there are so few conservatives in university faculties is: ideological discrimination, affirmative action for women and minorities, and different job preferences, though I certainly don't rule out other possibilities. I don't buy the "conservatives are too dumb" hypothesis. More plausible is that conservatives on average prefer the world outside academia, but I don't think that that can account for such a huge discrepancy. Since women and minorities with PhDs are more likely to be liberal than their counterparts, affirmative action for them means relatively more liberals. Btw, I'd concede that colleges (or departments) with conservative reputations tend to be biased too, though given there are so few of them one might argue that it's therefore justifiable.
2) The reason there are so few women in science faculties is: how about Larry Summers's threefold thesis (in decreasing order of importance), namely, (1) high-powered job (the mommy-track isn't especially conducive to an academic science job, and I'd add that the mommy-track coincides with a person's younger years, which I suspect is the most prolific time for scientists, unlike, say, historians), (2) possible differences in aptitude (this would tend to lead to women being relatively less represented in the hard sciences but relatively more represented in the humanities and social sciences), and (3) sex discrimination.
I agree entirely. (Well, I can't agree with you as to the very last point, because I'm cheating on my state and local taxes. (Shhh.)) And I'm somewhat intrigued and somewhat terrified by these "mosquito districts" of which you speak. The moment I run into a mosquito big enough to hire a tax assayer, I'm moving to Siberia.
I suspect you didn't understand the rhetorical point of the questions.
It seems he had a friend (OK, it was Saul Bellow, as verifed by Irving himself when I once met him) back at CCNY (my alma mater, incidentally, although somewhat later) who belonged to a Marxist group, which of course was the fashion of the times. Young Saul brought his comrades back to his family's Brooklyn apartment every Friday night whereupon they engaged in passionate discussion and controversy of the most minute points of Marxist theory and doctrine. While this discourse was taking place, his mom, an immigrant short in formal education, would keep the young intellectuals plied with coffee, tea, other beverages, cookies, sandwiches and fruit.
One night after they left she turned to her son to remark "Your friends, what brilliant young people! Smart! Smart!" and then with a downward dismissive swipe of her hand, "Stupid!!"
True enough in the short term. What I'd really like to know is how many kids Brandon and McClamrock have. As was noted after the 2004 election in endless discussions of Red State Fertility, the bluest states have the fewest kids. Ron, even if you all are "f-ing smarter" than us, if you don't pass your intellectually superior genes on to a next generation and don't convert the children of people who do, your ideas will soon disappear--and that can't happen too soon for me!
Well, the two main reasons are (a) because left-wing students don't get the benefit of having their ideas challenged and (b) because it encourages people, with good reason, to define the word "academic" as meaning "political ideologue" rather than "informed expert".
The second problem is really the biggest one. Heck, even the liberal students at my university used to crack jokes about the courses they were taking -- "White-Men-Are-Evil Studies", "America is a Fascist State 101", etc. It wasn't that the professors leaned slightly to the left; it was that it was easier to find a professor willing to sing the praises of Fidel Castro than it was to find a professor willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, Ronald Reagan had been right about one or two things.
It isn't the bias, it is the cartoonish nature of the bias. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where you could ask the question "Hm, what do the biology professors think about this latest environmental issue" without knowing the answer is "Probably whatever the latest Greenpeace newsletter tells them to think"?
So I ask you a pair of questions (Why so few women / conservatives on faculties?) designed to underscore the easy leap to judgment by many conservatives that "of course universities are discriminating against us!", even though they're reluctant and you answer:
1) Why so few conservatives? Discrimination first! Then reverse discrimination! Then 'cause they don't want it very much. (You wouldn't want it either, if you had to deal with all that discrimination!)
2) Why so few women? Discrimination last! If at all! Only after 'cause they're dumber! And most of all because girls don't like hard work!
I'm caricaturing, obviously. But you didn't do a very good job of showing that you got the point. Nor showing that you're not a hypocrite. Not that I believe you are one, but if that's the charge you're worried about it's an ineffective rebuttal that conservative bias, unlike liberal bias, might be justified.
In any case, I wanted to make the broader point that just because a professor identifies as a Democrat doesn't mean that her teaching itself is biased; 'Democrat' doesn't mean 'leftist' any more than 'Republican' means 'fascist'. It's possible to teach a philosophy class, for example, that teaches the foundations of introductory ethics that doesn't consist in holding up conservatives as unethical, nor on downgrading students for having different beliefs than the prof. Critical thinking will always be involved; but that really shouldn't worry anyone, because conservatives use critical thinking too.
There are limits, of course. You probably won't get too far as an IDer in a genetics course if you refuse to learn about genetics; you probably won't do well in a course on Marx if your essay consists of screeds against Marx and doesn't demonstrate that you read the material. But surely those students are rare; probably about as rare as profs that laugh Christians out of the classroom.
It's certain more interesting leading a class discussion where the students are free to express their own beliefs and challenge each other's beliefs than it is to hear boring pabalum regurgitated.
(1) A Milwaukee biology teacher who is outspokenly contemptuous of conservatives, while displaying a comically cartoonish view of what conservatives are.
(2) A Chicago-area astronomer who is loudly hostile and even inserts nasty comments into discussions of astronomy.
(3) Someone in the humanities so comfortable with her hostility to Christianity that she dismissed Christians as evil ignoramuses in the presence of the invited Jesuit scientist.
(4) Humanities professors who are perfectly comfortable with and respectful towards Marxists, Maoists, and Castroites but make no secret of despising Reagan and all he stood for (making it obvious what they would think of me once my opinions became known.)
I soon decided to avoid this hostile environment.
I dont care much for the liberal or conservative bias of College Professors WRT what they do in the voting booth or wherever. But as the father of two kids who will be going to college in the next few years, i have a real problem with paying that kind of money for an essentially illiberal education.
To me the 4 years they spend at the university is supposed to be an opportunity for them to get exposed to a variety of opinions in a unbiased manner.
The Larry summers witch hunt to me was deeply disturbing, not just in the eventual outcome but the ultimately fascist manner it was conducted in. deeply disenchanting.
I am rapidly coming to the opinion that the 200K per kid i wil probably spending on college eduaction will giv e them nothing other than an external albeit superficial and meanigless Stamp of approval so that they can get meaningfully employed.
a sad reflection indeed on the essentially parasitic charcter of academia.
But, on my end at least, the argument isn't based on statistical discrepancies, but on observed behaviors. Its not at all uncommon to hear professors openly referring to conservatives or Republicans using language that would make a dockworker blush. What is rare is to hear any condemnation of of their rants. If a professor were to speak about women, African Americans, or gay people in the manner that they quite often speak about conservatives, they'd rightly be shown the door and the college would quite likely be exposed to a very large legal bill.
Ever since Galileo, it has been fashionable to prefer "skeptical rationalism", by which the speaker always means "You should be more open to changing your mind. Since I'm right, I don't have to." In the current academy, this always means "skepticism of Christianity", "skepticism of traditional American ideals", "skepticism of the American government when it is being run by Republicans", "skepticism of history that makes the West look good", "skepticism of anything that can't be reduced to physics". It never seems to include "skepticism of physicalism", "skepticism of the intentions of America's enemies", "skepticism of political correctness", or "skepticism of the idea that global warming is caused by human activity".
People who believe in tradition or revelation are not less concerned with rationality. Often it is quite the opposite in fact. People who are willing to openly express the source of their premises are more dedicated to rationality than people who pretend that rationality itself can provide premises. It can't. And a true respect for rationality requires one to carefully explicate the boundaries of rationality.
Conservatives and libertarians don't disagree for rational reasons. They disagree because they have different pre-rational premises.
Obviously there are exceptions, but generally the selection committees for graduate students are looking for applicants that 1) will make the department stronger, 2) match up to the fields and specialties of the faculty and 3) display a curious mind.
We never really cared about the politics of the applicant (although I suppose at the fringes that could come into play). In fact, there were quite a few students that one of our more liberal members jokingly refered to as "misguided, but not misinformed."
Someone else pointed out the difference between conservatives and social conservatives-- it's true. an environment which excludes people on irrelevant criteria like sexual orientation, gender, and religious belief will naturally suffer retarded academic growth. Religious Christians, as long as they are tolerant of other people's lifestyles and beliefs, are welcome in a liberal environment; gays, Jews and people who are actively culturally black are unwelcome in a wonderful place like Bob Jones.
Assuming you're a reasonable man, and not the sort that thinks requiring biology students to learn evolution is symptomatic of liberal bias, you really have very little to worry about. Profs who fail kids for having different opinions are well known; and learning differing points of view is part of what university is about, as is whether to agree with those points of view and how to argue against them.
In all seriousness, if you are that worried, send them to a school that agrees with your conservative values (it won't be as high of an educational standard, but maybe that's a sacrifice you're willing to make). But practically, your conservative child is far more likely to be corrupted by classmates, meeting people who have different backgrounds, alcohol, and being outside of parental control for the first time instead of by some liberal English prof asking him to read the naughty bits in Catcher in the Rye.
That's true only if his kids are interested in the physical sciences, mathematics, or engineering. If they're interested in the social sciences or humanities they're basically going to have to resign themselves to four years of reguritating what some twit tells them, and rely on self-education to learn what's what.
Of course, the concept of military history is not quite what is presented on the history channel. Look at the substance of what the "traditional" military history is: battle tactics, troop deployments and comparative weaponry virtually devoid of context. Compared with social history, the standard of analysis for this military history is quite thin—most of this information can be drawn verbatim from generals' letters and field commands, with the rest being the rote regurgitation of facts. That really isn't what most historians consider to be a historian's job. The point is to take sources and DO something with them, not just transpose them into a monograph.
That's no longer the point of military history (thankfully I feel) and it's going in a new direction. Try looking at Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men
I felt this book much more valuable to my understanding of Nazism and WWII than any map of battle fronts ever could be.
And to all the commenters who decry the American university system as a Marxist echo chamber, you must realize what a ludicrous accusation this is. I've actually been in a seminar where we discussed the fetishization of Communism by Western intellectuals and how misguided it has been.
Just because FIRE says so, don't automatically believe it's true. I'll have a little more faith in that organization when it starts defending the constitutional rights of Bob Jones University students to watch Disney movies and listen to boybands.
It seems to me it's really too bad that the debate has to be about giving liberals and conservatives equal time to try to convince the undergrads that they are right. It's sad that the academie has become so enmeshed with politics. Why can't we just try to hire people who are thoughtful and serious? I have a bias because I go to St. John's college where this really isn't a problem. We have liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and many others that don't fit into these neat little categories. What keeps everyone together is a commitment to honest inquiry and discussion.
It seems to me the reason why political bent has become such a big issue is because so much of what academics do now is not thoughtful questioning and research but intellectual lobbying. So the liberal faculties aren't really interested in keeping out conservatives per se but anyone who is going to seriously question thier work. It's alot easier to influence society and political instiutions if you can speak with a unified voice.
And speaking of the discipline of political science, I do know that while women and minorities are "underrepresented" among those seeking political science faculty positions when compared to the general population (women 36%, blacks 4%, Hispanics 4%), their chances of landing a permanent job are comparable (and significantly better in the case of Hispanics) to their white male counterparts (men 81%, women 79%; whites 44%, blacks 41%, Hispanics 58%--all stats are for year 2001-2). (How the numbers would look without affirmative action is an interesting question). I wish that someone would compile job placement statistics for political views or party affiliation. Inquiring minds would like to know whether conservatives are just whining.
I've always found it interesting that the same conservatives who point to disparities in the percentage of conservatives on the faculty as prima facie evidence of discrimination go to great lengths to discount those same statistical disparities when it comes to women and minorities.
Again, as has been stated many times, political views or party affiliation is going to be a really crappy way to tell how a professor runs a classroom. (Just as the % of women profs doesn't mean that someone is actively screening out the applications for women, but might reflect a host of other issues that may or may not be problematic.)
Should we next demand equal hiring of liberals on Wall Street? Surely our business ethical practices would benefit from a different point of view. This is just silly.