Matt Yglesias linked to this very interesting exit poll from the last Presidential election. Like Matt, I thought some of the voting breakdowns are striking. I knew Jewish voters tended Democratic, but I had no idea it was 79-18. I wasn’t as shocked to see that voters with no religion favoured Gore 61-28, with another 9% for Nader, but that’s still a noticable gap.
Do these results have anything to do with the ‘liberalism‘ (meaning, in this context, disposition to not vote Republican) of American academia? Perhaps. At a guess, I would say that atheists, agnostics and Jews are pretty well represented in the academy, and Protestants are not as well represented, at least relative to their size in the broader community. As noted the well represented groups tend much more Democratic (and even Green) than the under represented groups.
I doubt this can explain all of the data about the Democratic (and Green) preferences of university professors, but it explains a lot. It would be very interesting to see a breakdown of the professoriate by religion and politics, compared to a similar breakdown of the whole electorate, to see what the differences were. My guess is that within each religious (or non-religious) professors will be mildly more pro-Democratic than the electorate. The really dramatic differences will be in the religious makeup of the two groups. But because the religion and political disposition are correlated, the overall effect will be that the professors are much more pro-Democratic than the electorate, even without any religous group of professors being much more pro-Democratic than their non-academic counterparts.
There’s a bunch of things you might conclude from this.
First, you might think that you’d rather get your sociological speculations from someone who knows something about the empirical data than from someone’s a priori guesswork. That would probably be prudent, but just in case you’re feeling like taking some intellectual risks, let’s continue the thought experiment.
Second, you might think that even if the absence of conservatives can be explained by the absence of Christians, there’s still reason to promote conservatives because of diversity needs and the like. I don’t think this is an entirely absurd argument, but it is an argument for a very strong form of affirmative action. As an affirmative action supporter I don’t dismiss such arguments. Affirmative action for a group that is rather powerful politically is always a little dubious I think, but diversity is a good, so this would have to play itself out a bit before we could reach any firm conclusion.
Finally, you might think this shows that universities are biased against Christians. We’ve had this debate on CT before, and I don’t expect any easy consensus. There is certainly discrimination against one class of Christians, the class that takes the inference The Bible says p therefore p to be a decent argument without any extra reason to believe p. This is a content neutral form of discrimination. We also discriminate against people who take the argument Book X says p therefore p to be a decent argument without any extra reason to believe p for any given book X. (Well, unless the book in question is by Richard Montague or David Lewis.) And I think it’s an entirely justified form of discrimination in all cases. (Even when the book is by Montague or Lewis.) The interesting question is whether there are forms of discrimination against Christians that are not content neutral, and are not possible to defend by independently justifiable intellectual standards. And here I’ll stop making empirical speculations, because I simply do not know whether such pernicious discrimination exists. (See the comments thread to the earlier post for some strong anecdotal evidence that it does.)
Even if my (ill-informed) sociological speculations are correct, there’s still a lot of reason to be on the lookout for political discrimination in academia. The absence of systematic discrimination would not mean the absence of discrimination in any particular case. It’s perfectly possible for someone to have abhorrent or unintelligible views on the latest war or the latest economic reform and still be a great academic. (Chomsky keeps providing a shining example of this phenomenon.) If our colleagues are confusing political misguidedness for academic deficiencies, they should be ashamed and we should be taking action.
{ 31 comments }
Chun the Unavoidable 09.29.03 at 9:46 am
It’s a good time, I think, to say that someone opposed to the Bush tax cut (latest economic reform) or the Iraq war (ditto) is abhorrent or unintelligible, especially after noting the arugmentative problems with bare assertion.
It’s also possible that the variables turned off my irony-detection module.
Rob 09.29.03 at 2:36 pm
This all ignores the fact the United States has a huge Catholic university system including some rather large research insitutions in Nortre Dame, Boston College, and Georgetown. So right now they are good deal of priests teaching college courses in many of the humanities from the obvious theology and philosophy to history and political science.
Brian Leiter 09.29.03 at 2:57 pm
Hi Brian,
I’m relieved you didn’t denounce Chomsky as an “idiot.” But I confess to being disappointed still, as I had thought Crooked Timber was the “left’s best hope” in the rightwing blogosphere.
Cheers,
Brian
JP 09.29.03 at 2:59 pm
To be fair, the priests at BC and Georgetown tend to be extremely liberal, both on theology and politics. (I believe Notre Dame is conservative, however.)
Xhenxhefil 09.29.03 at 3:19 pm
How many professors at Catholic colleges are clerics? The only time my friends at Creighton (a Jesuit school) ever mention being taught by Father Somethingorother is in a theology class, or possibly history. They do make up most of the administration though.
brayden 09.29.03 at 3:32 pm
Affirmative action based on political ideology? This could be the last great hope for the Marxists.
Monarda B. Allen 09.29.03 at 3:51 pm
It is just an anectdotal impression, but it is my impression nonetheless, that in the struggle for tenure, joining and being active in a church are definite plusses. I have seen this in action, when a junior professor (educated in a Jesuit school) of my acquaintance, up for tenure in the romance language department, joined the local episcopal church and was indeed awarded tenure. Another good strategy, if you are a woman,is to wear a prominent gold cross. The reason is: that people want to be able to pigeonhole you, and having an instant religious identification on display is a good way to help them do it.
Another anecdote: a friend (and department chair) went to a conference of university women in administration, and they went around the room asking people what religion participants were (a question arguably, that should never be asked). When my friend said none, she felt she was virtually drummed out. Most of the women in this particular group identified as Catholic [She should have told the truth that she is a non-practicing Unitarian whose grandfather was a celebrated Unitarian minister, but I digress].
I am non-religious myself, but even I could easily fall for this way of identifying people. Everything being equal it is better to have a pre-packaged identity that people can instantly grasp (or think they can). This applies to academics as much as the rest of the world in the ratrace for success.
As to why most academics are liberal, liberals believe in boring things like fact checking and peer review that are the nuts and bolts of scholarly life. Conservatives, especially, the Potemkin Intellectuals in right-wing think tanks, think that they already know the answers, so why bother. Look at the staff of, say, Commentary Magazine, which has come out against Darwinian evolution. Do they care about evidence? Clearly not. Conservatives, furthermore, tend to feel persecuted when called upon to back up their claims with evidence, so they shout and scream, smear and call names. But the call for evidence is simply academic protocol, not liberal bias.
Rob 09.29.03 at 5:53 pm
Jesuits do tend to be economically liberal but socially conservative. You know, Catholic. (That was me realizing how obvious I was). But how one would classify them politically then is hard.
And I had Jesuits in Theology and Philosophy. There were also Jesuits, though I didn’t have such classes, in languages, history, and literature. It mostly the hard sciences were they weren’t found.
baa 09.29.03 at 6:42 pm
“[L]iberals believe in boring things like fact checking and peer review.”
I don’t think it is possible to come down hard enough on this kind of casual bigotry. To find these kinds of comments stated by intelligent people — and then picked up for extra-special commendation by bona fide academics like Brian Leiter — is depressing beyond measure. Look: no one ideology has a monopoly on intellectual or practical virtue. This should be obvious to any adult. Indeed, it’s a realization that I would ave thought foundational to intellectual life. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills…
Ophelia Benson 09.29.03 at 7:11 pm
“Look: no one ideology has a monopoly on intellectual or practical virtue. This should be obvious to any adult.”
But such things are also empirical questions. It is at least possible that as a matter of plain fact one party does tell more lies than another. It’s not self-evidently false that that’s not the case. It is in fact the sort of thing that can be checked.
Ophelia Benson 09.29.03 at 7:13 pm
“I knew Jewish voters tended Democratic, but I had no idea it was 79-18.”
I don’t think it is, most of the time. You may be forgetting Lieberman.
Brian Leiter 09.29.03 at 7:22 pm
I posted a link to the Allen comment primarily because of the example used, which makes the point rather well. I agree, of course, with Ms. Benson’s remarks in response to the anonymous “baa.”
Brian Weatherson 09.29.03 at 7:31 pm
Oops, I was forgetting Lieberman when I linked to that. I would have guessed the usual split would be between 60/40 and 66/33, and those are probably consistent with the split last time around being 79-18. (Is this kind of data readily available online? I thought all the info in those exit polls was fascinating, and it would be good to check it against other years to see what patterns are stable.) That point certainly reduces the explanatory power of my hypothesis about why academics usually vote Democratic.
Dirk Jenter 09.29.03 at 8:30 pm
“As to why most academics are liberal, liberals believe in boring things like fact checking and peer review that are the nuts and bolts of scholarly life.”
To both Monarda and Prof. Leiter – you seem to miss the empirical regularity that the hard left in academia is concentrated in the Humanities and to some extent in Law Schools. These are fields in which hard, verifiable facts are much harder to come by than in (say) Finance (my field), Economics, or the hard sciences. In these fields, in which intellectual rigour and quality of results are much more objective and verifiable, you will find more moderates and libertarians than lefties. Hence the suggestion that liberals are the better academics sounds rather self-serving.
Chun the Unavoidable 09.29.03 at 8:57 pm
Dirk,
The last thing in the world any economist (Artie Laffer, etc.) would be accused of is advancing a theory that corresponds only to material interest.
I find it endlessly fascinating that people try to use this obvious canard to explain why economists lean so rightward. There’s a predictable Keynes quotation used nine times out of ten.
The best explanation is that literature people don’t understand math and, consequently, don’t understand how mathematics proves economic science.
baa 09.29.03 at 8:59 pm
Yes, one party can lie more than another. It seems like an awfully difficult thing to prove, however, requiring a dissertation’s worth of tough intellectual work. In my experience, most people making claims like this have not done anything like this work, nor do they seem alive to the difficulties inherent in proving the point to anyone’s satisfaction. Perhaps Ms. Benson has done the anlysis that confirming her supposition would require. If so, I invite her to share it.
But let’s just stipulate for the sake of argument that George Bush and Dick Cheney are bat-winged, fork-tongued deceivers, unique in the history of American politics for their consistant mendacity. I fail to see how one would extrapolate from “Bush lied, soldiers died” to the frankly bogus claim that liberals believe in peer review and ‘source checking’ while conservatives do not. Again, this is just bigotry, and silly to boot.
Spare me, please, the invocation of intelligent design as the model case of conservative thought. Yes, the “conservative” big tent contains within it loony views. No doubt one could think of elements of the left which are similarly misguided.
I should add that in this case the example which Brian Leiter found so compelling appears to be false. It is not, as far as I can tell, the staff position of Commentary to deny Darwinism. The magazine has, as it happens, published articles skeptical of Intelligent Design. Although on the whole I have found articles published there more charitable towards ID than that idea warrants.
Of course, perhaps Allen meant only that some members of the staff of Commentary believe Darwinism false. I would wonder who these are (Berlinksi?), but even assuming that’s true, it would be a weak example. If a staff member of Commentary thinks this that would be too bad (it’s bad to believe false things). It also wouldn’t go far to invalidate the arguments made by other members of the magazine on other topics.
Matt Weiner 09.29.03 at 9:03 pm
In 1996 Jewish voters went 78-16-3 for Clinton-Dole-Perot. Of course Clinton’s margin of victory was greater than Gore’s, but these results are still pretty close to the 2000 results. So I don’t think Lieberman was such a huge factor, and your explanatory hypothesis has just as much power as it ever did.
(And it looks like http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/elections/natl.exit.poll is a good place to look for these data online.)
Brian Leiter 09.29.03 at 9:16 pm
I have no first-hand knowledge of Commentary’s position on intelligent design, and was relying on Allen’s representation of its content. I do have first-hand knowledge about what the National Review recently published on the subject, however, and it is as I described it.
Dirk Jenter must not know much about law schools if he thinks the “hard left” has a big presence!
Philosophy, which is at least as rigorous as economics (to put it mildly), has far more of the “hard left” than law schools. (Philosophy also has lots of libertarians, at lots of top departments.)
Dirk Jenter 09.29.03 at 9:49 pm
Prof. Leiter: I am certainly not interested in a “my-field-is-more-rigorous-than-yours” game, and economics is an extremely broad field and therefore difficult to assess. Let’s instead focus on the hard sciences, e.g. physics. Wouldn’t you agree that the median professor in a top 20 physics department is politically to the right of the median professor in a top 20 humanities department? Wouldn’t you also agree that the same physics professor has better analytical skills and analytical intelligence than the humanities professor, and knows more about fact checking and standards of verifiability?
Brian Leiter 09.29.03 at 9:53 pm
Fair enough, but I honestly don’t know the answer to your question. One can be misled, I fear, by generalizing from English Departments.
Chun the Unavoidable 09.29.03 at 9:58 pm
The fact that there are theories of remarkable predictive power in physics and not in literary theory could mean that physicists have better analytic skills than literary theorists. It might also, possibly, have something to do with the subject matter.
Furthermore, I’d say that physicists are more likely to be to the left of an average humanities professor.
Chun the Unavoidable 09.29.03 at 10:05 pm
Brian,
You’ll note that Dirk was talking about “humanities” departments, not English departments. Offensive generalizations about other departments remain, as always, welcome.
Barry@yahoo.com 09.30.03 at 12:18 am
(re: humanities, law schoolts) “These are fields in which hard, verifiable facts are much harder to come by than in (say) Finance (my field), Economics, or the hard sciences. In these fields, in which intellectual rigour and quality of results are much more objective and verifiable, …”
-Dirk Jenter
“I am certainly not interested in a “my-field-is-more-rigorous-than-yours†game, and economics is an extremely broad field and therefore difficult to assess. ”
-dirk jenter
Hmmmmmm………
Ophelia Benson 09.30.03 at 12:31 am
You all know Rebecca Goldstein’s hilarious bit about the inverse ratio between the certainty of one’s field of study and one’s concern with presentation of self? At one extreme, the English faculty, with zero certainty and total obsession with presentation of self. At the other extreme, mathematics, with rigorous proof and absolute indifference to self-presentation.
I might have the quotation at B&W, I’m not sure…
Dirk Jenter 09.30.03 at 12:37 am
Barry: I stated my opinion / assessment of various fields, Prof. Leiter stated his with regards to philosophy, and I proposed to leave it at this as opposed to turning it into a pointless back and forth. I presume you are trying to interpret some kind of inconsistency into my remarks which I would suggest is not there.
Ophelia Benson 09.30.03 at 12:42 am
Nope, sorry, you’ll just have to make do with the paraphrase.
Barry@yahoo.com 09.30.03 at 12:53 am
Dirk, it sure looked to me like you were boasting about your field, and dissing others. Then, when people started returning your serves, you explained that you were just doing your stretches on the tennis court, with your wife’s racket which you were bringing back home with you.
Dirk Jenter 09.30.03 at 1:01 am
Barry: I was indeed boasting and dissing, and so was Prof. Leiter. I should add that I stand by my assessments of the fields I mentioned, while at the same time recognizing that nothing I could do or say would change Prof. Leiters opinion.
Barry@yahoo.com 09.30.03 at 12:02 pm
O.K. That usually is the problem; it’s like trying to convert a fan of another team (with the added burden that each ‘fan’ has spent long, painful years becoming a full fan).
Robert Schwartz 09.30.03 at 4:16 pm
“No doubt one could think of elements of the left which are similarly misguided.”
Alan Sokal — Social Text.
“To find these kinds of comments stated by intelligent people — and then picked up for extra-special commendation by bona fide academics like Brian Leiter — is depressing beyond measure.”
Come on Bubba, put a smile on your kiss. The humor at this blog is both unintentional and wonderful.
Learn to appreciate it.
“I’m relieved you didn’t denounce Chomsky as an “idiot.—
He isn’t. He is a demonstration that mathematicians burn out young, and that lifetime tenure without manditory retirement is a bad idea.
Brian Weatherson 10.01.03 at 4:11 am
Well, except for the fact that mathematicians don’t burn out early and Chomsky kept doing field-defining work all the way through his career (important late work includes Lectures on GB 1981, Barriers 1986, Minimalist Program 1995, etc) most of what Robert said about Chomsky is corrrect.
This is not to say I believe a word of the late Chomsky theories. But a lot of smart people take it all very seriously, and many of them know a lot more about linguistics than I ever will.
Comments on this entry are closed.