Conservatives in Academia

I think it is because there is not a lot of money to be made in academia (or in grade school teaching for that matter, another occupation apparently dominated by “liberals”).

I’m a conservative, and would not deny that there are institutionalized inequities. Just as conservative, I tend to accept that and move on. Anyways, your argument is flawed after all, conservatives intellectuals would rather do other things like work in the business world. But that’s not bad, just different.

I would agree that market forces may drive the “conservatives” elsewhere. Why linger on campus when one can venture out into the world and earn a living? It’s difficult enough to repay student loans in the private sector or in business; I can’t imagine how it challenging it would be to do so meaningfully in academia.

Another question might be: Why do liberals feel compelled to remain on campus for so long? Is it because universities attempt to foster “communities” which are insulated from this and that? Is it because as university profs or administrators they find it easier to engage in social engineering? Or is it simply an idealism which the more practical “conservative” either never had or left behind?

Another possibility is that while academics are indeed smarter on average than non-academics, they also have other qualities in greater abundance, again on average, than non-academics, and it is these other qualities, not above-average intelligence, that lead to the dominance of liberals in academia. Examples of such qualities might include: willingness to engage in petty office politics for years on end, the desire to dominate those less credentialed, the ability to comfortably hold contradictory viewpoints (or to compartmentalize abstract views when they conflict with one’s self-interest), etc.

Naturally this is the least charitable possible spin on the reason for this inequality (from a liberal perspective), just as “liberals are smart and conservatives are dumb” is the most charitable from a liberal perspective. (And, I suspect, the “liberals are smarter” spin is closer to the truth, although both are pretty far off.)

Wouldn’t will-to-power explain a preference among humanities scholars for iconoclasm? Let’s assume you have the natural ability to tease meaning out of elusive texts that the best literary critics have. Isn’t it likely that you would gravitate towards unacknowledged-legislator status, rather than merely being the tutor of princes?

“The demands of prospective employees may be a factor, too. Academia (at the tenured level, anyway) is one of the few remaining professions in which one can get more-or-less ironclad job security by giving up the chance at a really high salary. It would make sense for that package to attract people who would like to see high-end rewards in general reduced in order to provide economic security guarantees.”

Posted by Nicholas Weininger ·

IMHO, for the past thirty years (in the US), the actual situation has been that the academic system offered a piss-poor chance at lifetime job security, *and* carried reduced salaries.

To get tenure, one first had to get a Ph.D., which was a 50-50 shot (at best). Then one had to land a tenure track position, which probably less than a 50% chance, for graduates of top universities (over at IA, a study was mentioned, which gave the chances at 20% overall, for history Ph.D.’s). If your university was merely #30 in your field, forget it. Then one had (again) perhaps a 50% shot at tenure.

All in all, starting with a BS/BA in hand, it was a 1 in 8 chance, at best, *if* one were admitted to a top Ph.D. program.

Of course, if conservatives in general would rather be in business, why are they complaining that there aren’t many in academia? Or is it only the conservatives in academia that are complaining, in which case, who are they directing their complaints at? I have to presume it is the conservatives who didn’t stick around who are at fault, and not inequality in hiring practices.

On the other hand, if it’s the go-getting business world conservatives who are concerned about this, precisely which of their fellows do they expect to eschew the benefits of private employment in favour of the obviously unpalatable life of the academic?

The whole thing seems, well, unconservative to me.

If one expanded the ranks of professors to include those in the hard sciences and business schools, would it really seem that conservatives are a distinct minority in academia?

Further, in recent years conservatives have managed to define anyone to the left of the hardcore of the republican party to be part of “the left.” This tends to include in “the left” many who in previous decades would have been considered to be “in the center.”

Hey — I know plenty of conservatives in academis who are really smart — as in, some of the smartest people I know. And they are in the Humanities. One of them even has a blog link on the CT site! Of course I also know a couple of real boneheaded conservatives, but I think this philosophy guy is perhaps living proof that being a bonehead is not limited to conservatives.

The argument that “the most parsimonious explanation” for the relative lack of success of conservatives in academia today is that “conservatives are just not as clever as liberals and so don’t get hired” seems to depend on the assumption that there is such a thing as “cleverness” and that this “cleverness” is measurable, or at least evaluable, independent of the prejudices of the evaluator.

How many people on the modern academic left are prepared seriously to defend such an assumption?

In my experience, there are few surer ways to provoke leftist outrage than to suggest that “general intelligence” exists and can be measured. Is “cleverness” somehow different? Does it have a better conceptual and empirical pedigree? Can academic hiring committees assess this quality without the mediation of their political biasses?

How far do you really want to push this line of thought?

One more thing. If stupid people tend to be conservative, but conservative people do not tend to be stupid, then doesn’t Kieran’s (and by extension, Robert Brandon’s) argument fall apart? As Brandon says, “Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average.” In which case, it doesn’t really matter what stupid people believe in terms of politics; all that matters is what smart people believe, because only smart people are selected to be academics.

Isn’t this guy the chair of the philosophy department at Duke? Unless I’m missing something elementary, it seems that stupid people can in fact be chairs of philosophy departments.

“I’ve never found the argument that conservatives are discriminated against in academia terribly compelling.”

This is fascinating in the terms of your post. You believe that disparity in numbers actually hired (in terms of race) is excellent evidence of racial discrimination even in areas where race has no bearing on performance (which is to say practically everywhere) yet you do not believe the same of ideological leaning in an arena where ideology can be quite important? How does that work? Do you find it uncompelling because you are prejudiced against conservatives? Do you have a deep seated fear of conservatives? If I made the same statement about race I would be immediately subjected to such ‘concerns’.

I also believe that you misrepresent the conservative position. Racial disparity may indicate unfair hiring in many cases. But quotas are a remedy which cause great harm and perpetuate myths about racial inability to perform. Quotas would be a poor remedy for conservatives in the academic sphere as well, so the contradiction you worry about simlpy does not exist.
I know very few conservatives that deny the perpetuation of certain inequalities, we deny that racist counter-policies are a good idea but I think that is quite a different thing. I would be perfectly happy with an academy that did not actively discriminate against conservatives, much as I like it when a company does not actively discriminate against black people. If the conservative population doesn’t grow AFTER you remove the overt discrimination, we can talk again about ‘durable inequalities’. We aren’t even at that stage yet.

I have heard that there is a correlation between highest level of education achieved and liberalism; but I’ve also seen this disputed. A quick Google attempt at a search didn’t clear this up. If true, I think it would have relevance.

I think that, on average, academics are more critical thinkers. There’s lots of disparate things that make up conservatism and liberalism; but a strong component of conservatism (by definition) is traditionalism. And traditionalism is anti-critical. Whereas progressivism is aggressively critical.

In practice this is far less true than it is in theory.

My actual experience of both conservatives and liberals, and of academics, is that they are not that hugely more critical thinkers than is the population at large. The difference isn’t that huge. The difference isn’t that great between academics and non-academics, or conservatives and liberals. Still—though small—it exists.

Academic populations tend toward the radical in contrast to the general culture because of this inherent skepticism. In communist or oppressive countries the academic communities tend towards a “radicalism” that would be politically “conservative” in the context of Europe or the US.

Aside from explicitly religious conservative schools, even traditionally conservative universities tend to be more liberal than their surrounding communities. Why?

Ack, that should read “melanin levels” not “melatonin levels.” I need sleep.

Jon Winston thinks that most [conservatives, I assume?] “don’t want fairness, they want to win”. I don’t think he means to conclude that, since they want to win, they should be denied fairness.

I do think that academia is different from other fileds as far as political views go. To take a well known example, critics have charged that Middle East Studies has been corrupted by the necessity to follow a certain line to obtain jobs. This seems plausible to me, for a number of reasons. This matters far more than, for example, a disproportionate number of plumbers being Republican.

I am still interested in knowing what Kieran thinks would be a “compelling argument”. As I mentioned, the case of Lynch is instructive. I assume that Kieran and Jon are familiar with it and would be interested in knowing why they think it doesn’t matter.

Does anyone have any solid data on the political views of the professors in engineering and hard sciences? In the science departments of the best universities, what percentage of professors have conservative political views?

You might think that the conservatives who complain about bias in academia would be happy to produce this number to prove their case. If the split in hard sciences is close to 50-50 or even better for conservatives, the argument “liberals are simply smarter” goes immediately out of the window.

Were I a conservative think tank, I would be conducting such a study ASAP. But perhaps they have already done such a study and did not like the results, which is why such a study has never been published. If the liberal hegemony is as total in hard sciences as it is in the humanities departments, the conservatives have a lot of explaining to do.

We can get a hint of this percentage from The National Academy of Sciences, which has polled the religiosity of its members, and found out that only about four percent believe in God. Since at least in the red states of the USA, the belief in the Judeo-Christian God and creationism are prerequisites of being a political conservative (if you don’t believe in God, how can you not be a nihilistic and relativistic America-hater?), this sets a hard upper bound to the percentage of conservatives, at least among the best scientists.

One also should not forget that the American conservatives do have their own parallel science and humanities academia that they do dominate, namely the small religious universities and their intellectual power. These institutions get to hire all the talented conservative PhD’s that the liberal universities unfairly discriminate against. If the conservatives really are as good in doing science as liberals or even better, this edge should dramatically change the rankings of American universities within maybe a decade or so. Move over, MIT and Harvard! Let us therefore wait and see.

Ikka, my experience is that atheist and agnostic science and engineering profs tend to be what Americans like to call “fiscally conservative” if they are conservative at all. They’re usually closer to the Democrats on social issues. They also tend to support government spending, especially on scientific and engineering research. Go figure. Anyway, they tend not to be reliably conservative, and I think the majority of them would fall into the “centre-left” part of the spectrum. I suspect that business departments are the place to go if you want to find real conservatives.

Ironically, the small religious colleges in America aren’t that conservative. Some of them are – I’m not talking about Bob Jones U. – but I went to a very small, very religious Midwestern college that was flamingly leftist.

I agree with KH that there’s a tension for conservatives in the argument under attack here. But why can’t we left-liberals make it? I’m on the left, yet it bothers me quite a bit that conservatives are so underrepresented in humanities departments. It’s not a good thing for us, among others, since it encourages sloppy thinking and a really insidious political presumptuousness.

These vices are already in evidence in the thought that only conservatives worry about their underrepresentation. We on the left would never assume that only a women would worry about the underrepresentation of women, only an African-Amercian worry about the underrepresentation of African-Americans, etc. So why the presumption in the present case? (I’m aware that the classifications are of different types. Still the issue doesn’t seem to depend on that difference.)

Sorry, it’s we ourselves who are being inconsistent here.

That’s not my experience, madhatter. (And I’m not sure I would include business as one of the more intellectually rigorous disciplines.) Scott Martens’s point is much closer to the truth, I think.

I really don’t think that you can talk about this very clearly without making the distinction between cultural and economic conservatives. People in the hard sciences, engineering, and business are probably on average somewhat more culturally conservative than humanities folk; but in the context of American culture, they’re still quite to the left of center. And while it may be the case that this group may be, as Scott says, more to the right economically—possibly somewhat right of center—they’re still not at all representative of what’s considered conservative thought.

I already mentioned this, but even conservative universities are often more liberal than their communities. Texas A&M is a very conservative school, but it’s not as conservative as College Station and the rest of East Texas.

This has been discussed in depth in other posts by CT bloggers, but I really think that you can’t really understand the American right without distinguishing cultural and economic conservatism. An awful lot of cultural liberals have made common cause with conservatives because, to them, the economic issue is primary. This is a deep fault line among Republicans.

I’d just like to (potentially) upset everyone on both sides by claiming that the entire argument is silly. It’s linked so I don’t appear to be a troll. Here

Chipping in with my own personnal experience of getting a PhD at a large, state university (UNC). I worked with profs in Chemistry, Physics, and Dentistry, and I found that their politics were pretty much across the board, with no particualr bias either way. Of course, this also blows apart the idea that liberals are somehow smarter (at least in my experience). It really does bother me when Horowitz and his crew cherry-pick the humanities and social sciences to make a case for bias. I would LOVE to see somebody (anybody) repeat the Duke study, but this time include all of the faculty. OTOH, they do seem to have at least a small point when it comes to humanities and social sciences. Those disparities are quite striking.

Leo: if Harvard hired a brilliant young conservative, this would probably lead to Harvard’s esteem actually going DOWN in the eyes of its peers compared to Harvard hiring a mediocre liberal, so Harvard has the “market” incentive to hire the liberal, which suits its own faculty’s preferences as well.

Kieran: Sorry, but this is just laughable.

Leo: If you think this is just laughable, you obviously have absolutely no idea of the discrimination faced by conservatives in academia. A very prominent, moderate philosophy professor once mentioned offhandedly in a seminar I took that Loren Lomasky is severely underplaced, because no school will hire a libertarian (forget conservative) philosopher. A student asked why not. He replied, “I don’t know; they all seem to want to have at least one Marxist in each philosohy department, but even someone as good as Lomasky can’t get a job as the sole libertarian.” I also heard a respected, moderate law professor state that “no one takes Richard Epstein [in legal academia]seriously.” Granted, Epstein has a job at U. Chicago. But if Epstein, the most prolific and one of the most brilliant scholars of his generation can’t get his views taken seriously in law schools, where things are “conservative” compared to most humanities fields, what chance does a young conservative or libertarian scholar without his track record have?

So conservatives aren’t as smart as liberals? Then why are the hard sciences dominated by conservatives? Higher math takes intelligence and dedication and requires results.

Umm, Mike, how many mathematicians have you actually spoken to? Mathematicians tend to be pretty apolitical across the board, but of the ones who do express opinions, they tend to skew to the left. Math isn’t a science, but scientists in general tend to look askance at the kinds of people whose thought processes lead to advocating the teaching of creationism in schools.

Mr Healy: you say that it doesn’t matter whether or not people on the left believe “that there is such a thing as ‘cleverness’ and that this ‘cleverness’ is measurable, or at least evaluable, independent of the prejudices of the evaluator,” since “the argument in question — that the distribution of rewards in the labor market is explained by individual differences in smarts, skills and drive — is not one made by the left, it’s made by conservatives.”

Conservatives like Robert Brandon?

Micha Ghertner makes the crucial point about your argument, at which I merely hinted: “If it is inconsistent for conservatives to believe in institutionalized inequality of ideology but not of race or sex, than it is also inconsistent for left-liberals to believe in institutionalized inequality of race or sex but not of ideology.”

If conservatives are being inconsistent or hypocritical here, than leftists are being equally and oppositely hypocritical.

To be perfectly consistent here, the left should be pushing affirmative action for conservatives in academia, while the right should insist that such measures wait on proof that the lack of conservatives in the humanities is a product of unfair discrimination.

To conservatives’ credit, few if any are seriously demanding preferential treatment for themselves. To leftists’ discredit, absolutely none of them are demanding such treatment for conservatives. Who is being most inconsistent here?

This question seems to me similar to asking “why are there so many frat-boy types in fraternities?” For the most part, academia is allowed to pick its owm members, so it does not seem unusual that they predominantly choose to associate with like minded individuals. This is human nature to form groups and societies in which the members feel more comfortable. As, as far as associations of private groups are concerned, this is not a problem. The concern I have, though, is when this sort of selectivity is applied in public venues, or specifically in public universities. Just as it would be wrong to expect minority citizens to fund public institutions that are hostile or exclusive against them, many conservatives feel it is wrong to use their tax monies to support an academia that is hostile or exclusive to their way of thinking. Many liberals seem to want to excuse this hostility and exclusivity based upon the premise that liberal political thoughts are correct or moral and conservative political thoughts are wrong or immoral, but that seems to be arguing a position based upon assuming it is true (I’m not well versed in logic, but I know there is a specific name for this sort of false proof).

The bottom line is that neither the liberal not conservative political views have been conclusively proved and neither is empirically wrong or right. As such, to systemically exclude either from a publically funded institution is wrong. As other have addressed, the real question is how to ensure these institutions fairly represent the people they serve while not joepardizing the quality of that service provided.

Shorter argument: Conservative students listen to liberal Professors, decide to go do something else.

—

I think one could make the case that there is not so much a bias against conservatives, as there is a bias against conservative ideas. There are good examples of conservative persons doing very well in academia (Condi Rice, for one) but always these widespread allegations of liberal bias. But is it a bias against people and their ideas, or just a bias against the ideas? And is there an important difference?

I think there is an important difference, and I think it’s something you’ve touched on. Conservatives might find University life unattractive because of the philosophy of many possible colleagues, thereby choosing some other position. To conservative students, however, this would appear to be a institutionalized bias — something unfair. This could be a reason that you see students make the accusations of liberal bias more than any other group: to us, it appears as though the University is attempting to indoctrinate a particular ideology.

Case in point – though it is only anecdotal evidence. I fully believe that there are very intelligent conservatives out there, who could be teaching me in my international relations and economics classes. It just so happens that I’ve gotten two liberal professors, who very often react negatively to conservative ideas. Just so we understand, I take conservative ideas to mean things like realism and (as you duly noted) unhindered market self-correction or Classical Economics. Having to go through my university has made me very unlikely to ever want to teach at it.

Another question might be: Why do liberals feel compelled to remain on campus for so long?…Is it because as university profs or administrators they find it easier to engage in social engineering? Or is it simply an idealism which the more practical “conservative” either never had or left behind?Posted by Dedman · February 11, 2004 03:13 AM

An alternative question might be: why would conservatives leave the academy for the cutthroat, brownnosing-required capitalist market? Clearly beause they couldn’t hack it in academia.

Random guy makes a highly salient point. Here we have someone who meets meets the liberal litmus test on all the major issues yet is called a Nazi for his failure to toe the party line on deconstructionism, the canon, Afrocentric history and feminist “herstory.” I’m appalled at both the treatment of Random and at his laisser-faire (irony fully intended) response: “Intellectual conservatives (like himself) can actually manage in Academia if they have the stomach for it.” This is symptomatic of a lack of intellectual diversity _on the left_, let alone the political spectrum as a whole. When someone is labelled a fascist/racist/misogynist/other for using phallocentric/imperialist tools such as logical arguments and evidence in support of even politically liberal positions, it bodes ill for liberalism, in both academia and the world at large. The failure to challenge this radical worldview has led to liberals’ estrangement from the masses they claim to be struggling for. (There is also the matter that many of the groups that liberals claim to struggle for, e.g. African-Americans, Hispanics, the Third World, are quite conservative on matters such as homosexuality and would find the radical worldview as alien and hostile as most Westerners suffering from “false consciousness.” If I had my druthers, I would rewind liberalism back to the early ’60’s before the radical fringe began dragging liberals into the abyss. The left as a whole and the academic left in particular needs to have a Sister Souljah moment if it wants to remain relevant.

The left as a whole, but especially the academic left, must have a Sister Souljah moment if we

I don’t see why it’s inconsistent for conservatives to believe that conservatives are underrepresented for institutional reasons and that minorities aren’t.

The inconsistency is in the form of the typical conservative argument against the existence of institutional discrimination against minorities. As I have seen the argument, it generally takes the form of: “Mere statistical differences in result are evidence of nothing whatsoever — to make any kind of a case, you must have evidence of particular actions that have a specifically discriminatory intent or effect.” On the other hand, when we start talking about conservatives in academia, the conservative postition shifts to something more like: “So what if we have no evidence of actual conservatives who were denied jobs or advancement that can be attributed to their political views? Conservatives are grossly underrepresented in academia — it must be the result of discrimination!” To the extent that any conservative holds both of these (obviously oversimplified for conciseness) positions, that conservative is laughably inconsistent.

Kieran —

Apart from the usefulness of these qualities [the alternatives to intelligence I listed that might explain liberals’ dominance in academia] in employed life in general, I don’t see how they are relevant unless you can show that conservatives are less likely to have them than liberals.

And yet somehow the “parsimonious explanation” that conservatives are dumber than liberals has been independently, rigorously and empirically demonstrated (or perhaps its relevance is just self-evident).

You will find that many conservatives believe they, in fact, have actual evidence of institutionalized discrimination against conservatives and conservative ideology on campuses. Proof of discrimination in hireling practices might be a stretch. Assuming discrimination in hireling practices based on discrimination against ideology is not much of a stretch.

“We can get a hint of this percentage from The National Academy of Sciences, which has polled the religiosity of its members, and found out that only about four percent believe in God. Since at least in the red states of the USA, the belief in the Judeo-Christian God and creationism are prerequisites of being a political conservative (if you don’t believe in God, how can you not be a nihilistic and relativistic America-hater?), this sets a hard upper bound to the percentage of conservatives, at least among the best scientists.”

All I can really say about this is, WOW! I haven’t seen such prejudice masquerading as discussion in quite some time. You have views about the intersection of religion and American conservatism which in my experience as an actual conservative in the actual USA are quite divorced from the reality. The idea that you could even think that your statistic provides a close enough proxy to conservatism to be useful in this discussion is astonishing.

“It really does bother me when Horowitz and his crew cherry-pick the humanities and social sciences to make a case for bias.”

Is it possible that bias might exist in some departments and not in others? Clearly yes. So the idea that you are cherry picking when you look at the nearly autonomous department level seems kind of odd to me.

“Mere statistical differences in result are evidence of nothing whatsoever — to make any kind of a case, you must have evidence of particular actions that have a specifically discriminatory intent or effect.”

Just so, and having seen and heard with my own eyes and ears specifically discriminatory intent on the University of California-San Diego campus I personally don’t have a problem saying that it exists and suggesting that it shouldn’t. I also note that San Diego is generally considered one of the more conservative of the UC campuses. Heaven help the conservative at Berkley or UCLA or Santa Cruz.

I specifically AM NOT asking for affirmative action for conservatives.

Anecdotal evidence to follow of the year-long ‘Dimensions of Culture’ indoctrination class.

Kieran,
“Open market?” Did the Duke Philosphy Dept incorporate as a for-profit business while I wasn’t looking? You can’t explain the inequities and inefficiences of a non-profit bureaucracy as the result of a dastardly free market in action. Thomas Sowell has written (title slips my mind) about the fact that governments can be much more racist than businesses or individuals because they foist the costs of bigotry onto other people.

Kieran — I was commenting on the idiocy of the Duke Professor — not on your argument, which I think is basically sound.

As for the nonsense that math and science are in some way more intellectually rigorous than say, history or philosophy or classics, I can only say that that’s the silliest thing I’ve heard in a long time. I can only speak from a medievalist perspective, ut our training usualy includes at least three foreign languages, reading different handwriting styles and abbreviations, negotiating our way around archives in other countries, and then the basic stuff — learning what happened, how we know it, who argues that what we know is not entirely correct and why … so, I guess not that rigorous.

I think the point about different kinds of liberal and conservative bears repeating. I also can think of departments and even colleges where political agenda (in this case the agenda of the 1970s left) is important to hiring — to the point that people with the right agenda are hired to teach outside their fields of expertise.

That’s a far cry, though, from claiming discrimination against conservatives in general. There are plenty of conservatives teaching, and most places hire the people they think will fit in best. I’ve never been directly or indirectly asked about my politics in an interview, and don’t know anyone who has. Here’s something else to think about — perhaps academics are often accused of being liberal because what they teach isn’t as readily available via the media as the generally more conservative agenda is. I’ve been accused of liberal bias in my modern survey because I talk about the institution of the Shah, the assassination of Lumumba, and the ‘suicide’ of Allende, as well as Watergate and Iran-Contra. I also talk about the Bay of Pigs and the fact that Kennedy and Johnson were in office during a good part of VietNam, and that detente was mostly a Nixon-Kissinger thing. But since most of the students haven’t heard of many of these things, and because we live in a world where discussing actual events that don’t reflect well on the presidency is at present considered unpatriotic and, well, liberal, there are people who think I’m pushing a liberal agenda. Maybe I am at that — is encouraging students to know their roots and behave as informed, responsible citizens a liberal thing?

I’ll start by seconding Tom T’s post at 1:13 PM, Mike Fisher’s at 2:21 PM and Eric E. Coe’s at 2:46 PM.

I think Tom’s characterization of academic employment as an inefficient market strongly constrained by externalities is demonstrated by a situation that also speaks to the results vs. peer approval paradigm stated by Mike.

When we speak of academic “leftism” I believe most would fairly take this as a synonym for “Marxism” or “partaking, in whole or large part, of a Marxian analytical framework” – classes, oppression, class struggle, all that sort of thing.

In, say, 1890 I think that Marxian notions of History and Economics might reasonably have been held to define the parameters of a plausible social order – no large-scale experiments having yet been attempted.

In the realm of Physics, in that same year, the classical Newtonian description of the universe still appeared to be the best available.

By the 1930’s, no serious physicist still thought of the universe as working by essentially Newtonian principles. The intervening 40 – 50 years had seen two major revolutions in the description of reality; Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Both were radical and controversial in infancy, but thoroughly tested and accepted in remarkably short order. Reality was the gauge and theory had to follow.

On the Humanities side of the ledger, however, Marxism was still wildly popular, despite what any fair-minded person would have to acknowledge were very disquieting things going on in the Ukraine and Spain. Granted, the Hitler-Stalin Pact caused quite a few formerly fervent Marxist theoreticians to lose their religion, but there was no shortage of volunteers to take their places.

By 1990, physicists, while still relying on Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, were in their sixth or seventh decade of attempting to find an overarching descriptive concept that would marry these notions without conflict. That search continues to the present day.

By 1990, no one with sense could still plausibly argue that Marxism constituted any kind of basis for real-world social orders to which real people would voluntarily consent. Dozens of experiments had, by then, been conducted. The results were, at best, dismal. At worst, they were crimes against humanity. The correlation between Marxism and mass killings by the state is in the high 0.8’s or the low 0.9’s.

So we come to our present day in which the Physical Sciences remain exquisitely attuned to reality while the Humanities are, to an extreme degree, detached from it.

I submit that, from a pedagogic point of view, one should regard professors of Humanities who teach from an essentially Marxian perspective as having the same intellectual respectability as Astrologers and Ptolemaic cosmologists, Alchemists and Phlogiston chemists, Flat-Earthers, Velikovskians, Phrenologists, practitioners of Palmistry and promoters of Perpetual Motion machines or Creation Science. In all the named cases, experiment has proven the ideas in question to be incontrovertibly wrong.

Despite this, the first-named of these obsolete fantasies is still adhered to and taught by present-day academics. How else is one to explain this if not as the degenerate result of a system that shields its occupants from market forces and most other forms of engagement with reality?

This fits well with the fact that whites aren’t as criminal as blacks and that’s why there are more black arrests than whites.

Those bell curves really screw up theories, don’t they?

I believe there is a huge distinction between cultural liberalism and political liberalism, and cultural conservativism and political conservativism.

If by “political liberalism” you mean voting patterns, then this is becoming less and less true in the U.S.
The political divide is crystalizing along cultural lines. Just as working class, socially conservative whites began voting Republican in the 80s, culturaly liberal, but fairly wealthy white proffesionals have become prime constituents for the Democrats. The truth is that in today’s political climate, cultural views are the primary determinant of political affilliation.
So if one concedes that academics of all stripes are culturaly liberal, one is essentialy conceding that academics of all stripes tend to be politicaly liberal as well.

Maybe conservatives are underrepresented in “less intellectually rigorous fields” like ethnic or gender studies, social sciences, and humanities because they tend to think those fields are “not intellectually rigorous”.

(I can readily admit that liberals are probably underrepresented in b-school faculties for comparable reasons.)

Also–do people understand that there is a hell of a lot of evidence for discrimination against minorities and women that goes beyond “minorities and women are less wealthy (or do worse on the outcome measure of your choice) than whites and males? Didn’t Kieran once write a post about a study showing white men with prison records have better employment records than black men without prison records? Then there was the one about sending out resumes with “black names” and “white names” and seeing the economic results. Racial profiling in law enforcement is very well documented. etc. etc. That’s just evidence of current discrimination–then you have more evidence about the link between parents’ wealth and children’s education and wealth, which is certainly relevant when Jim Crow has been out of existence for only 40-odd years.

There is an easier answer: Academics value intellectual honesty; conservatives value sophistry. Many of the people who work for right wing think tanks (Lott comes to mind) have been so intellectually dishonest that they would have been fired at any university. Tenure doesn’t protect a liar.

elspi – You will be hard pressed to find true intellectual honesty among any high ranking politician. If you wish to use that as a basis, President Clinton was a Rhode Scholar and apparently did not know the meaning of the word “is”. Using a politician that as proof of an ideologies commitment to truth, honesty, or integrity is a fallacy at best.

The old joke: How do you know a politician is lying? He says something.

Academics do not always value intellectual honesty. Sometimes its more important to tow the party line so to speak.

james, I believe it is more correct to say, “tow the party hawser”. HTH.

Dr Jim Miller appears to be making a mistake common amongst conservatives, they think that if they complain about being a persecuted minority long enough the rest of us will start agreeing with them and stop thinking they are full of it.

In the old days the attraction of being a conservative was avoiding the tedious ideological shiboleths of the right. There are still a few Marxist sad-cases like McKinnon floating arround but only Rush Limbaugh believes they are representative of the left.

It is now the conservatives who have swallowed ideological twaddle hook line and sinker. To become a Conservative today you must believe passionately that tax cuts deter rogue regimes from acquiring nuclear weapons, pre-emptive wars promote the sanctity of mariage and gay marriages are a threat to growth.

There are not many people who are too stupid to surrender their intellect to an ideology of any type who can hold down a tenured academic position these days. In the 1960s when academia was expanding it was different.

“conservatives, by and large, tend to believe that people get what they deserve in life and that labor markets — whether for food service workers, corporate consultants, assistant professors or any other occupation — shake out fairly”

Maybe the old-style conservative believes that, but I think many conservatives nowadays would say just that people don’t have a right to more than they get and that the government has no responsibility to provide more for most people than already is provided (and even that is often far more than the government is morally required to do).

“When confronted with evidence of systematic racial or gender inequality, for example, they’ll go to considerable effort to argue that it’s differences in natural talent, acquired skills or personal preferences that are driving the outcome.”

That’s also just not true anymore. Arguments against affirmative action are increasingly about whether the practice harms minorities who are supposed to be helped by it. Conservative explanations of racial disparity rely partly on institutionalized attitudes of victimology, anti-intellectualism, and separatism rather than laziness or lack of ability.

Williestyle – certainly, in the general population, most conservatives are religious. So are most liberals, because in the general American society, most people are religious.

It’s likely true that more atheists are liberals or socialists than are conservatives or libertarians, but there exists, particularly among the intelligentsia, a large number of libertarian (and a few conservative) atheists.

My personal (limited) experience is that professors in fields where their skills could get them a well-paid job in private industry (engineering, the natural sciences, economics, business, and law) tend to have a fairly broad spectrum of political opinion, but few under 50 are outright Communists, or very close. Professors who next-best career option would be government or teaching at other levels range in political opinion from Bill Clinton to Kim Il-Sung, with an occasional token libertarian Republican in the lot.

“Further interest attaches to the way in which this distinction is made, since the anti-rational-authoritarian is shown to possess many of the attributes, both as regards social position and personality characteristics, which were supposed by Adorno et al. to characterise the pro-irrational-authoritarian.”

In other words: this study found both fascist an leftists to be less intelligent and less socially successful than centerists.

http://jonjayray.tripod.com/rudin.html

James, here is the Clinton quote in context:

It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ means. If ‘is’ means is, and never has been, that’s one thing. If it means, there is none, that was a completely true statement.

I don’t have time to go into all the details, but I will relate 3 incidents all relating to the year long Dimensions of Culture class.

Background: UCSD had at the time 5 colleges. Each had a different basic writing course. All students were to take the writing course to gain a minimum proficiency in writing. My college had ‘Dimensions of Culture’ or DOC. We spent a year learning about how culture effects reality and writing about it.

Quarter 1: We spent weeks learning about how all of culture and morality is socially constructed. Emphasis was placed on the fact that no one culture was better than another, and the fact that no culture could be independently judged on anything because all cultures formed their own values. Typical po-mo crap. Toward the end of the quarter we talked about how South Africa constructed its society to opress black people. I raised my hand and asked how one could reconcile the idea that societies should be free to form their own cultural norms with the idea that the cultural norms expressed through aparthied were ‘objectively’ wrong? I suggested that Western treatment of South Africa implied either that there were actually norms independent of culture (which we wanted to enforce), or that we were attempting to impose merely Western norms on South Africa. The teacher responded by suggesting that only racists would defend South Africa, and that I clearly had no understanding of the underlying issues. The discussion in class included two students who called me a racist in the class with one suggesting I was a NAZI, with no comment from the teacher, and no reply allowed.

Quarter 2: This quarter was more specifically about US law and culture. We were instructed to write an essay intended to persuade the reader to agree with our point of view on a controversial topic dealing with American law or culture. It was a 5 page paper. I spent the first 2 pages discussing why we thought of child abuse as an especially horrible crime. I mentioned that we place emphasis on the vulnerability of the child and of the abuse of power between a parent and child. I wrote at length about how child abuse can cripple the ability of the child to function as an adult later. I spoke about how parents sometimes treat their children as existing for their own convenience. On page 3 I drew parallels with abortion and continued from there. The grade I received was a D. The only notes on the paper were one circled mis-spelling and a circle around my transition to abortion with the comment “This is the thesis. The thesis belongs at the beginning of an essay.”

I had never received anything less than a B+ on a college essay, and never received less after that paper. I was an English Literature major, so I wrote quite a few essays. I asked the teaching assistant about it. She said that the thesis must be exposited at the beginning of an essay. I was not exhibiting clear thinking by waiting until the third page to write the thesis. I protested that an essay on abortion was so contentious that it was far better to present your arguments before mentioning the word ‘abortion’ since once the word was in the air, thinking on both sides tended to cease. She disagreed. I went to the professor and he said that I could re-write the essay with the thesis first for a regrade with a maximum of a C. I did so and received a C.

Not long after that we formally discussed abortion in class. We spent 2 days discussing the horrors of the pre-Roe era. Outside of class we were required to attend an on-campus lecture with either the San Diego head of the National Organization for Women or the National Abortion Rights Leauge, I don’t remember which. I was asked by the TA not to ask ‘provacative’ questions. The speaker spent 20 minutes on a slide show about ‘scary’ anti-abortion protestors. She focused special attention (5 or so slides) on a Catholic nun with a big cross praying on the sidewalk. I was not called on, but a Catholic girl asked what was so scary about a nun praying on the street. We were assured that the nun was threatening, just not in the pictures. All in all she was an effective speaker, responding well to the mood of the crowd, etc.

For ‘balance’ we were shown the cheesy 1970s movie “The Silent Scream”. The movie has weird sound effects and is pretty lame. I asked if we could have a pro-life speaker. I was told that it wouldn’t be ‘appropriate’ to invite such a speaker. I pointed out that we had just had a pro-abortion speaker. The professor was unimpressed and said suggested that the 20 year old film was adequate rebuttal to a live, crowd-interactive, presentation.

By quarter 3, I saw that DOC was becoming a substantial drag on my GPA, so I shut up.

Conservatives are probably rare in academia because they leave owing to the “hostile atmosphere,” as it were.

I received my PhD at Berkeley (God help me) before spending 15 years as a professor in the Ivy League and later a premier foreign university (widely characterized as a bulwark of socialism in that country), by which time I’d had it up to the eyeballs, gave up my tenured position, and left for industry. A number of conservative friends in academia have either left also, are thinking about it, or are resigned to suffering in silence to minimize the otherwise inevitable flak.

The incessant left-wing yammering just became tiresome (as did the risible paychecks, the stifling bureaucracy, and the lack of opportunity). It is stressful and unpleasant to be entirely out of step with most of your colleagues, to be a lightning rod for vociferously expressed left-wing disapproval of any conservative policy (one’s support for which was generally imputed), to be lumped in with particularly distasteful figures on the right-wing, to be patronized as not having yet seen the light, and generally singled out for opprobrium. Imagine being an American in France right now, and you have the picture.

That social pressure is probably the primary mechanism for keeping academia left-wing. Academia most likely became left-wing in the first place because homogeneous population distributions tend to be metastable in the presence of a disruptive force. An simple analogy would be a tray of water that, unless lifted in a perfectly level fashion, will tilt and slosh water to the low side, thereby generating a torque that aggravates the original tilt. Steven den Beste has written a superb essay (“Formation of residues”)

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/08/Formationofresidues.shtml

on how this phenomenon leads to inhomogeneous population distributions.

Academia has concentrated those of a left-wing viewpoint because such opinions historically would make those holding them unpopular elsewhere, or at least on the fringe. Tenure insulates academics holding unpopular views from retribution directed toward their employment, while the pressure to produce creative independent thought too often degenerates into garden-variety contrariness (“the prevailing orthodoxy is capitalist, so …I guess I’m a socialist”) in a misguided (and somewhat pathetic) attempt to establish intellectual bona fides. Add a jigger of late adolescent rebellion to appeal to the student body, and voila! A left-wing faculty member is born (in the US; in Eastern Europe it worked the opposite way). Repeat the process a few times, the trend accelerates, and academia becomes a left-wing bastion, as new entrants try to distinguish themselves from the pack by staking out still more extreme positions (much like Janet Jackson, on a topical note, and the Jacobins in the French Revolution, on a historical one).

Nothing to do with intelligence, necessarily, much as those in academia would like to believe in that self-serving explanation.

whoa, are we talking about what conservatives do or what they say? I mean, it’s no wonder they think academia is full of “liberals,” since “liberal” in actual conservative use means “anyone even remotely to the left of me,” leading to some really odd accusations (Tacitus as a liberal site, for instance).

But, since conservative’s supposed principles are nowhere evident in their actual policies, shouldn’t we be asking about the liberal bias in conservative policy-making? Why won’t the liberal media talk about this?

And just how would someone espousing cold-fusion economics and an ethical system based on cringing fear of a giant Charleton Heston in the sky think they could get a job in academia? What they must think of us!

“If the essay was on child abuse and you mentioned abortion as a form, then I would expect that to appear in the first paragraph.”

Considering your reading comprehension on my post, perhaps it is unsurprising that an A student might get lower grades from you. If you would re-read my framing of the essay you will see that your concerns have already been addressed.

Let us make it easy for you: “We were instructed to write an essay intended to persuade the reader to agree with our point of view on a controversial topic dealing with American law or culture.”

The sarcasm was honed after college. ;)

Most conservatives I know do not agree with the educational system itself. Many find the idea of working for a government institution to be itself a conflict of ideals. Not all colleges are government supported or controlled, but by and large there is a massive inclusion of government in the operations of acedemia. A majority of the conservative professors and teachers I have seen have been either in private schools or are in areas that tend to be most helpful in spreading conservatism, i.e. business and economics.

The idea of one group being smarter or more willing to put up with the environment of school I think is difficult to back up. I know plenty of smart people and plenty of stupid people. They are on all sides of the political, social and economic spectrum.

I personally find that people tend to operate in an environment that works with their belief system. Conservatism works well in business, but it works poorly in a government institution. Liberalism works well in academia, and is insulated to some extent from the business world, meaning that it can adhere to its ideals without obvious contradictions being thrown at it. Ideals on either side have to have a certain insulation from reality to remain viable. Academia as the system currently stands is a poor environment for conservative ideals.

Natural scientists are more conservative as a group than their social science and humanities colleagues, just they are more religious.

About 40% of US natural scientists in a 1996 survey reported belief in a personal God (E. J. Larson & L. Witham, Nature 386, 435 – 436 (1997)); rougly the same percentage as on the first such survey back in 1916.
As I recall, the percentage for humanists and social scientists in only around 20%.

Now it is true that if we look at elite natural scientists there has been substantial change since 1916. But still, a puzzle, why should humanists and social scientists overall be more atheistic (and more liberal, and more democratic) than their natural science counterparts?

Occam’s razor (thank to that Duke prof. for reminding this thick conservative of it) suggests that the explanation just might be the same as the explanation for why we see so small a percentage of US citizens in Ph.D. prgrams in Computer Science and so many in law school taking courses on Internet Law.

Can you say: differential opportunity costs? I knew you could.