Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Dog Bites Man

Partisan Politics

The Washington Post reports on a study that finds that the vast majority of college professors are liberal.  While this should come as no surprise to anyone who ever went to college, the degree to which the professoriat is liberal is worrying.

Among the findings:

Among all universities, professors are:
72% liberal and 15% conservative
50% identify themselves as Democrats, and 11% as Republicans

At elite universities (the top 1/3), the gap is wider still:
87% of faculty are liberal and only 13% conservative

“In contrast with the finding that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are liberal, a Harris Poll of the general public last year found that 33 percent describe themselves as conservative and 18 percent as liberal.

The liberal label that a majority of the faculty members attached to themselves is reflected on a variety of issues. The professors and instructors surveyed are, strongly or somewhat, in favor of abortion rights (84 percent); believe homosexuality is acceptable (67 percent); and want more environmental protection “even if it raises prices or costs jobs” (88 percent). What’s more, the study found, 65 percent want the government to ensure full employment, a stance to the left of the Democratic Party.”

“The most liberal faculties are those devoted to the humanities (81 percent) and social sciences (75 percent), according to the study. But liberals outnumbered conservatives even among engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent).

The most left-leaning departments are English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative, the study says.”

Liberal professors tend to hire more liberal professors.  Anecdotal evidence of discrimination against conservatives in academia abounds, although this study says that evidence of discrimination is “preliminary.” For all their talk of diversity, universities seem to be almost entirely lacking in the one sort of diversity that actually matters - diversity of ideas.

[wik]Johno comments that

Yeah, okay. But what happens when a bunch of adults start hectoring students about right-thinking this and socialist that?

That’s right- the smart and attentive ones do what endless generations of kids have done: grow up, drift the opposite way, and end up as professors with center-right to conservative opinions.

Seriously… if the problem were as bad as for example David Horowitz would have us believe, the Yoots of Today would be hoisting the star and sickle and marching to the “Internationale” on their way to cut their penises off in recompense for man’s injustice to (wo)ma(or y!)n. And yet, heavens! that ain’t happening.

But that ain’t happening, and this will fix “itself” in a few years.

(Trust me on this. The one entrenched big-school liberal arts faculty I know well is changing its face with each new hire, abandoning the orthodox insurgent marxism of the 60s and 70s for a softer kind of wimpy leftism (as described above) with no backbone to it whatsoever. The Marxists staged a “revolution” in the 70s in the academy, and they are now moribund at best and laughingstocks at worst. In twenty years, all the Assistants and Associates will be trending right, I promise.)

Johno gets the Calvin Coolidge award for recommending effective non-action.  My original intent when I read the article was not to write a “sky is falling” post.  Things generally swing back and forth, but this swing has been bigger than others, and - this is the important thing - accompanied by constant claims that the swing never happened, and that all those Chairman Mao quoting postmodernists were really just middle of the road moderates.  That someone had to commission a no-doubt costly study to demonstrate what any booze-drenched college freshman could blearily see in seconds is the real story.  Which is what I was thinking when I saw the article, but lost track of as I wrote the post. 


Posted by Buckethead on 03/30/05 at 11:21 AM
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