posted
I thought that this article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune mades some very good arguments.
quote:The relative scarcity of Republican professors is widely asserted as proof of willful prejudice.
Of course, there are other possible explanations. Perhaps fewer conservatives than liberals are willing to endure the many years of poverty-stricken graduate study necessary to qualify for a faculty position. Perhaps conservatives are smarter than liberals, and recognize that graduate school is a poor investment, given the scant job opportunities that await newly minted PhDs. Or perhaps studious conservatives are more attracted to the greater financial rewards of industry and commerce.
Beyond the ivy walls, many professions are dominated by Republicans. You'll find few Democrats (and still fewer outright liberals) among the ranks of high-level corporate executives, military officers or football coaches. Yet no one complains about these imbalances, and conservatives will no doubt explain that the seeming disparities are merely the result of market forces.
And they are probably right.
It is entirely rational for conservatives to flock to jobs that reward competition, aggression and victory at the expense of others. So it should not be surprising that liberals gravitate to professions -- such as academics, journalism, social work, and the arts -- that emphasize inquiry, objectivity and the free exchange of ideas.
So what do you think? Is it any more reasonable to assume that conservative professors and journalists are rare because of unfair prejudice than it is to assume that liberal CEO's are rare because of prejudice?
[ December 02, 2004, 05:49 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:It is entirely rational for conservatives to flock to jobs that reward competition, aggression and victory at the expense of others.
I think this sentence right here establishes both the bias and the inaccuracy of the article.
On a larger scale, I've seen the hostility first hand to non-liberal professors and met ones who have moved to private industry because of the pressure from liberal academic establishments.
I'd also be interested to see the statistics on liberal or democratic CEOs.
Finally, there's a significant difference between the two situations when it is the ideas themselves and those who propogate them being supressed within academia. Especially with all the pious talk of academic freedom and the supposed "threat" to it posed by young over-zealous student activists.
posted
I think there might be something in the "natural inclinations" theory. I think you can see it even in academia, if you look at the different disciplines. Engineering professors are notoriously conservative for example.
quote:It is entirely rational for conservatives to flock to jobs that reward competition, aggression and victory at the expense of others. So it should not be surprising that liberals gravitate to professions -- such as academics, journalism, social work, and the arts -- that emphasize inquiry, objectivity and the free exchange of ideas.
Oh yeah. That's a marvelously unbiased passage.
I have a friend who is a conservative history professor outside of Utah, and the environment is distinctly hostile to his thinking. His field is African history, and two years ago, the department head publicly stated that she would like to remove from department everyone of non-African descent. He is often accused of being unsympathetic to current situation of blacks in America, and that really hurts. Believing in other methods of solving the problems is NOT the same thing as being unsympathetic.
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posted
Note I was not saying that the excerpt was unbiasedly written. But I think there may be something in the more idealistic vs. more practical mindsets mentioned.
posted
I love English, and I went into college with the purpose of getting a PhD in English lit. I left, literally, because there's only so much I could take of the prevelant religion in that English department. I wanted to study what made great writing great and how the history of English literature shaped writing today.
What I got, after the survey classes, was class after class of identifying unknown authors whose major value now what that no one had heard of them before, and identifying how they were oppressed and still managed to express themselves.
Go through the lit class catalog for half a dozen universities sometime. I went to visit SMU and interviewed with the head there when I first moved to Dallas. One of my questions was just how Methodist was Southern Methodist University, and he just laughed and said there was no common religion at all (Good.), except for maybe Freud (Not Good.). I didn't do it because I didn't want to change everything about my thinking, and I didn't want every day to be a fight.
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quote:It is entirely rational for conservatives to flock to jobs that reward competition, aggression and victory at the expense of others.
Aside from the tipping their hand just a bit in their personal prejudices, the author fails to realize that the data does not support his assertion. In Jim Collins' Good to Great, the research shows that the men and women who led companies from being merely Good to record-breaking Great do *not* seek victory at the expense of others and are generally fairly humble people with a singleminded vision for their corporation: to be the best in the world at what they do. That requires the ability to work with a team that will all pull in the same direction with you. That means they have to be people who can get along with others. The data also showed that the success of one company did not mean that they had to drive their competition out of business. Instead, they focused on being the best themselves and let their competition with less vision sink themselves.
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quote:Engineering professors are notoriously conservative for example.
"notoriously conservative" compared to whom? My observation as an engineering professor is that engineering professors are on the average considerably more liberal than engineers in industry and considerably less liberal than philosophy professors.
On the campuses where I have worked and studied, and among my many collegues from around the US and the world, there have been more democratic engineering professors than republican engineering professors by at least 2/1. This is despite the fact that I have never seen an accusation that there is any type of political screening in highering engineering professors. I have served on numerous hiring commitees and have never seen any evidence of any political bias in highering science or engineering professors or in recruiting graduate students for science and engineering programs.
My observation is that at the undergraduate level, engineers tend to be more conservative than the general university population but no more conservative than the general population. Among graduate students, conservatives are rare. Most of the conservative students go straight to industry rather than working on a graduate degree. If conservative students do seek a graduate degree they are more likely to go into an MBA program than an MS program.
At the PhD level, I know very few right wing Engineers. I know some who are republicans, but even they are on the extreme left of the republican party.
I think that this authors hypothesis has merit. Choosing an academic career means choosing a career which is very demanding and yet does not have the rewards of either money or fame available in many other career paths. People go into academia out of a love for knowledge and teaching -- traits which are more common among bleeding heart liberals than right wing reactionaries.
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posted
as a conservative in academia, I can assure you that I have seen prejudice against conservatism in academia. Some of it is just the little things such as comments about 'warmongering republicans' directed at you, or purposely scheduling activities when you have stated that you can't make it because you have church...but in certain professors, their overall interactional tone is negative towards you if you are known to be a conservative.
quote: People go into academia out of a love for knowledge and teaching -- traits which are more common among bleeding heart liberals than right wing reactionaries.
Where the hell do you get that from?
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posted
"The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth it prevents you from achieving."
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quote:Yes. In fact, neoconservatism is exactly that viewpoint which places all of the bad guys to be on the other side by defining bad as "someone who thinks differently than I do".
Wow! We've reached new depths in this thread, haven't we?
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posted
This is precisely why I've come to the conclusion that neo-cons are the equivalent of the boogey man.
For now on, Democrats who don't like affirmative action will blame affirmative action on neo-cons, those who don't like high spending will again blame neo-cons, and so on and so on, until neo-con comes to represent liberal concepts that some liberals don't like and therefore are more easily blamed on people who are members of the Republican party.
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When was the last time you heard Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh wax poetic on the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake or donate their time to an inner city school? In my 12 years as a college professor I have known many right wing engineering students. I have yet to hear one of them say they loved learning for its own sake, yet I have heard many liberal students make such comments. I have known only one outspoken right wing student who went on to get a PhD. The rest have all been anxious to get the big salaries in industry as soon as possible and start moving up the corporate ladder.
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The ONLY information you have about this department head is that she is reported as being extremely liberal, she was very racist, and she was in a position of authority.
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quote:the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake or donate their time to an inner city school?
I work for the Boy Scouts, a wildly conservative organization. My boss's wife works in an inner city school. The computer programmer on my team tutors kids after school. My boss's boss run a teenager's troup. And there's me.
There's no one in that group (except for maybe me) that could be remotely described as liberal.
You are too much in your narrow world, Rabbit.
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posted
Katie, I never said no conservatives did such things, I said that spokesman for the right wing revolution (Hannity and Limbaugh) don't talk about such things.
I know plenty of conservatives who volunteer their time for all sorts of good causes, including tutoring children in inner city school. I never said they didn't.
My point was my idea that liberals were more likely to be passionate about knowledge and teaching is based on what the prominant right wing personalities and liberal personalities say publically.
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posted
I have to agree with the article in a sense. I think that more academics are liberal because a person who goes through that sort of lifestyle sees that as the philosophy/way that best fits him/herself.
People who end up doing well in the business world may well see the conservative way as more of their own because of the way they came up in the world and what they have seen of the world.
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posted
You cut the article off a little too early. The author admits his bias. He also admits that a little diversification of university campuses certainly couldn't hurt:
quote: After all, teachers at all levels -- from nursery school to graduate school -- tend to be Democrats. Surely there cannot be a conspiracy to deny conservatives employment on kindergarten playgrounds.
Alas, there have in fact been instances of political discrimination in academic hiring and promotion. And yes, conservatives, both faculty and students, have been snubbed or mistreated on overwhelmingly liberal campuses. More seriously, certain professors, and in some cases entire departments, have crossed the line from legitimate scholarship to overtly politicized advocacy, most frequently coming from the left. These situations should be vigorously addressed as individual cases, and remedied where necessary. But none of this is proof of systematic intimidation or blacklisting, as alleged by Horowitz and others.
The reality is that universities, by their nature, tend to be liberal institutions (not only in the United States, but in many countries around the world).
Conservatives may bemoan the social forces behind this phenomenon, but there is nothing sinister about it. Nonetheless, liberals (like me) should admit that faculties face a resulting risk of intellectual conformity, which can be stultifying and confining even when it is unintentional.
Most major universities would likely benefit from the presence of more conservative scholars, who would sharpen the dialogue and challenge many assumptions. I might even be persuaded to support some form of recruiting outreach or affirmative action for Republicans -- but surely my conservative colleagues would never stand for it.
posted
You asked me where I got the idea -- I told you. Why do you have a problem with my answer? Are you suggesting that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh aren't influential right wingers? That people love what they have to say, but don't actually agree with it?
The fact of the matter is that even in Utah, where most of the teachers are educated at the conservative strong hold of BYU, teachers are more likely to be democrats than the population at large.
You will note that the author of the article admits that there are problems with some programs on college campus that have lost their objectivity. He agrees that colleges need more diversity of political opinion. He simply maintains that liberal bias on college campuses is the result of the fact that most professors are liberal and not the cause.
Do you have any evidence to support the opposite? And since you object to my using anecdotal evidence, I won't accept your annecdotes as evidence.
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posted
Michael Moore has great influence and following. Do you support him as a fair representative of the average liberal?
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posted
I like watching Rush or Sean, for the exact reason that I don't believe what they're saying. Some people yell at the TV during football games. I don't like football, so I yell at the TV while watching Fox News.
I think Al Franken is probably a better candidate for the liberal flagbearer. A lot of liberals I know don't like Moore because he's so flaky. A lot of people in Vermont like Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders or Pat Leahy. They're more obscure, though.
quote:You asked me where I got the idea -- I told you. Why do you have a problem with my answer? Are you suggesting that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh aren't influential right wingers? That people love what they have to say, but don't actually agree with it?
Because it's unsupported and ill-conceived. Who, exactly, are the popular media liberals who support knowledge for knowledge's sake? You've already ignored the Michael Moore counterexample.
quote:Do you have any evidence to support the opposite?
Does this mean you're basically just making s*&^ up and challenging others to disprove it? Your comments have shown repeated misunderstanding of conservative philosophy and what it takes to be successful in business. You're casual, sweeping, inaccurate generalizations are something I've seen far too often from liberal professors.
No, I don't have any evidence. You'll note I also haven't made an unsupported claims.
I think it's unwise to conflate liberal in the sense of liberal humanism with liberal in the sense of Democratic policies and agendas.
Where English departments -- and other departments in the humanities and those in the social sciences -- have lost their way is in mistaking one for the other and being intolerant of those who refuse to accept both agendas.
And while the discrimination may not be overt, there's no doubt that *what* you choose to study in the humanities and social sciences has a huge impact on your career prospects and has the effect of weeding out those with, shall we say, certain affections and tendencies -- any glance at the conference program for the MLA or the list of the hottest hires in the field proves that.
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posted
I agree with Dagonee. There are gross and very, very unfair generalizations contained here within. If that kind of sheer ignorance is the result of an all-academic career, is there any wonder why it's held in less high esteem?
The Ivory Tower is a pejorative term because of the self-imposed and willful ignorance it entails.
----
Personal rant: My favorite examples of Ivory Tower ignorance are the business professors. I think no one should be allowed to get a doctorate in business until they have proven their ability to either start or run a successful company for five years.
I had the horrible misfortune to be partnered with a business doctorate candidate in my internship my senior year of college, and he couldn't make a profit as the only seller of ice in Tahiti. He'd also banged around various universities for fifteen years and had collected a list of degrees.
Part of our project was to create an e-commerce site (this was in 2000), and we came to conflict almost immediately because he wanted to create the entire thing in Flash. With animations on every page, and every product would have a theme song. When you were on that page, the midi file would play. He was the business half of the project, and I was the design half, but he was very sure that being distinctive was the way to go. It was the most laughably-egregious example of principles gone wrong I've ever seen.
A 2000 e-commerce site in Flash! With theme songs!!
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posted
If you agree then why would you use it in a way that makes it seem like you're trying to make someone who is most likely a Democrat into someone who is "conservative," unless you are trying to be sarcastic which considering the use of the term by many liberals is hard to tell.
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quote: Among graduate students, conservatives are rare. Most of the conservative students go straight to industry rather than working on a graduate degree. If conservative students do seek a graduate degree they are more likely to go into an MBA program than an MS program.
At the PhD level, I know very few right wing Engineers. I know some who are republicans, but even they are on the extreme left of the republican party.
You are making assumptions about WHY they don't want to join the programs...or WHY they leave after getting a masters rather than getting a PhD. I can't speak for all conservatives of course...but being in an environment that is hostile can wear you down after a while.
Also, some of the people that you "know" are liberals, might not be as liberal as you think. There is at least one graduate student in my department that many think is liberal, but is really a conservative who is "in the closet" so to speak. It is anecdotal of course...I am not sure if hiding your political offiliation is common, but I know it does happen.
I don't think it is what people would think of as a "black list" but it also is not an example of conservatives being money grubbing jerks who don't want to go into academia. It is simply natural for people to want to avoid environments that are openly hostile to them.
I remember in one class reading an article for class that was "proof" that liberals were better people that conservatives. It went through talking about how liberals gave more money to charity, and conservatives gave almost nothing away. They also amusingly made the claim that it shown how the religious right was hypocritical since they talked about being compasionate, but didn't give money to charity. Of course they waited until the end of the article to put in fine print that the study did not include money that was given to churches, or any religion based charity.
It just seems funny that the author goes through bashing conservatives and talking about how we prefer to make money at the "expense of others" and is surprised that these same people that he ridicules don't want to join him as colleagues
posted
I was a chemistry major. I didn't go into academia because I wanted to teach -- and heaven knows many academics don't DO that! (If you don't believe me, let me tell you about some of the professors I had at UCLA -- one of the best schools in the country!)
Anyway, as a science-type person, I think it's fairly simple. The current majority of academics are liberals. And like dissolves like.
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posted
You know Rabbit, when I said "conservative" I was thinking of something entirely different than "republican" OSC is conservative for example.
When I meant engineers were conservative. I meant (and probably should have clarified) that I was talking more about personal choices and lifestyle than political affilliation. Conservative doesn't automatically mean close minded. But I'd say you certianly find a high percentages of stable marriages where one partner is an engineer. Engineers also tend to like large margins of safety if they are in the public trust, though for doing an experiment they'll live more on the edge and only put in a 2x margin of safety rather than a 3x.
posted
Guys, I know you don't like the answer, and Kat, I thought the quote was stupid the first time you paraded it out last year and I still think it's stupid, but the author is on to something. If you are having a hard time looking for college english departments who study great white authors, I just don't think you are looking too hard because I'm pretty sure that you can trip and fall and hit thirty on the way to the ground 30 in Massechusetts alone.
Do you think it's a coincidence that the Bay Area, California is both notoriously liberal and notoriously well-read?
quote: as a science-type person, I think it's fairly simple. The current majority of academics are liberals. And like dissolves like.
Do you really think it's that simple. I think it's like saying that ecologists happen to be bike riders, when compared to the average American.
I submit that if all liberal professors and conservative business awoke with switched positions, a generation later, liberals would still find their way into academia and conservatives, business, that is, of course, once the economy and educational structure collapsed from the sudden swap.
Personally, I don't think that there is a conservative bias on behalf of the businessmen. I just think that ones vocation speaks to their priorities and commitments. I'd only make a marginal mid-level executive because 1) I don't get a rush out of money 2) I don't get a rush out of making people want things that they don't need 3) I think that most people have what they need if they stopped to look at what they have-- and anything else, I'd feel immoral selling at a profit-maximizing price 4) I think that private corporations, for the most part, distract from attention to the biggest problems of our age.
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge vs. knowledge for the sake of commodity.
Do you think that it's a coincidence that most good American writers lean to the left? By the way, and I know this is going to get some flack, I don't think that it's a coincidence that most 21st century Christian fiction is dreck, or that the guy who just made a name for himself banning books in Alabama is a republican. Or that even the most considered and eloquent writers on the board, and yeah, I think they are Sara and TomD, would sooner hang themselves than vote for Bush and Cheney.
posted
Actually, yes, I do. It's also part of why the proportion of female tenured professors -- a good 30+ years after my mom was among the first female graduate math students at Princeton -- is so low.
Change is slow. Change in academia is glacial. So much for not being conservative. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
How do you account for the arts? I'm sure we could take a look back through the pulitzers and the nobel literature prizes and I'd be surprised to find out if it were even close to 2 to 1, liberal to conservatives.
There is something for the questioning, the concerning, the considering, the thoughtful attention to people, especially in institutions bereft of pure faith, that's going to draw liberals. I bet you that there is a 2 to 1 advantage in funny comics, also.
posted
*Donns the Kevlar/Mylar fireproof suit and sunglasses* *breaks the box labeld "in case of fire..."* *from it, I remove marshmellows and a long stick*
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posted
"I think Al Franken is probably a better candidate for the liberal flagbearer"
Mind if I nominate John Stewart instead? In my experience, he speaks for more of the self-declared liberals I know than Franken does.
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*laughs with Anna* Oh, I know. I keep telling people that I'm a moderate, and they never believe me. It's because I'm an agnostic who powerfully dislikes and distrusts the Republican Party more than the Democratic Party; somehow, they confuse this with my positions on social and economic policy.
That said, I think conservatives here are offended by the generalizations that knowledge for its own sake, particularly coupled with self-sacrifice for the good of the community, stands as a primarily "liberal" value. And to some extent they're right to be offended by this; I know many caring, giving, intellectually curious conservatives. But in the same way that it's not entirely unfair to say that liberals are a bunch of godless communists, even if it's a gross distortion that's not backed up by data, it's not entirely unfair to say that the typical conservative is less likely to be interested in a life of service and pure research, particularly in the soft sciences and/or humanities.
Now, it's not necessarily constructive to make this generalization, any more than it is to indulge any other stereotype. But if you are, as this author is, attempting to rebut a similar generalization -- that educational facilities are little liberal factories, or that the media is some monolithically liberal conspiracy -- by pointing out that the careers in question are likely to attract people who are drawn to traditionally (and stereotypically) liberal values, I think there's some reason to make the argument.
Unfortunately, what the author here misses is that the conservatives making the complaint about the Ivory Tower or the Liberal Media in the first place don't really care why either organization is the way it is; to indulge in stereotype again for a moment, that kind of examination of a root cause is a classically liberal value, and not one that most pundits really want to indulge. What they want, when making these points, is to successfully marginalize both the media and the "educated elite" in popular discourse; if people are taught to distrust the educated, to distrust the primary sources of information, it's possible to do a complete end-run around that system.
But the problem is that it's not just the pundits making this kind of scummy power play; there's legitimate room for complaint. Because liberal thought too often calcifies into a kind of neo-inclusionary, victim-oriented orthodoxy, and conservatives are marginalized or driven underground in some of these institutions in exactly the same way pundits seek to drive "intellectuals" underground in popular consciousness. As the author points out, this is regrettable -- but I think the author doesn't place enough emphasis on the depth of this problem, as it's my opinion that this kind of oppression, however meaningless it is outside the halls of academia, winds up simmering within those incestuous, semi-Beltline institutions until it produces people like Ann Coulter and David Brock and others who've admitted that their own primary motivation in penning polemics is to tear down the orthodoxy that they felt smothered them during their formative college years.
quote:The funny thing is that lifestyle-wise Tom D is far more conservative than I am.
I don't know about Tom, but I don't drink or smoke and I never have, and I'm betting that The Rabbit isn't a hellcat, either. Being liberal doesn't mean that you partake in all of the things that you see in movies or read in books, it may mean that you just don't want those books censored.
posted
I'm trying to figure out what I'm arguing here. I think my thesis is that while I mostly agree that conservative and liberal inclinations do have an outcome as to whether a person ends up in academia (and or traditionally liberal or conseravative fields)it has a lot more to do with personal lifestyle choices and personal conservative vs. liberal lifestyles, rather than political affiliations whatsoever.
For example Of COURSE an engineer that is a university professor is going to have a more personally liberal lifestyle choice than one who goes into industry. For one thing they are going to be a heck of a lot poorer for a lot longer. The personally conservative approach is to ensure financial security and stability among other things
However, when you take that same engineering professor and compare them to a liberal arts department in university setting you will probably find them to have vastly more conservative lifestyles than the liberal arts types. Even including even your gay computer science prof whou will be living a generally staid life compared to the Gay liberal arts prof.
quote:1) I don't get a rush out of money 2) I don't get a rush out of making people want things that they don't need 3) I think that most people have what they need if they stopped to look at what they have-- and anything else, I'd feel immoral selling at a profit-maximizing price 4) I think that private corporations, for the most part, distract from attention to the biggest problems of our age.
Well, as someone who was a high level executive, I can tell you that the first two are detriments to being a good businessman, the third is not a necessity, and private corporations provide most of the services people in this country depend on every single day of their lives.
quote:Being liberal doesn't mean that you partake in all of the things that you see in movies or read in books, it may mean that you just don't want those books censored.
I've encountered in my life at least as much liberal-advocated censorship as I have conservative. And I grew up in Virginia Beach, home of Pat Robertson.
quote:private corporations provide most of the services people in this country depend on every single day of their lives.
Yeah, then the problem I have is with advertising. I like the private sector, and it's not just that I suffer the private sector, I actually like that we have a vibrant private sector.
I just wish that more good businesses, like In and Out, got the recognition they deserved.
posted
Yep, In and Out Burgers put John 3:16 on their cups and treat their workers like princes and princesses. We wouldn't even need minimum wages laws if companies behaved with their sense of duty.
posted
Here's part of the problem, Irami: by law, a publicly-held company's only actual duty is to maximize profits for its shareholders.
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