Academia, Stuck To the Left

Washington Post ^ | 11/28/04 | George F. Will

[Pokey78]

Republicans Outnumbered

In Academia, Studies Find

-- The New York Times, Nov. 18

Oh, well, if studies say so. The great secret is out: Liberals dominate campuses. Coming soon: "Moon Implicated in Tides, Studies Find."

One study of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That imbalance, more than double what it was three decades ago, is intensifying because younger professors are more uniformly liberal than the older cohort that is retiring.

Another study, of voter registration records, including those of professors in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine Democrats for every Republican at Berkeley and Stanford. Among younger professors, there were 183 Democrats, six Republicans.

But we essentially knew this even before the American Enterprise magazine reported in 2002 on examinations of voting records in various college communities. Some findings about professors registered with the two major parties or with liberal or conservative minor parties:

Cornell: 166 liberals, 6 conservatives.

Stanford: 151 liberals, 17 conservatives.

Colorado: 116 liberals, 5 conservatives.

UCLA: 141 liberals, 9 conservatives.

[buffyt]

No wonder so many people are turning to Home Schooling, Church run schools, and private schools~

[EagleUSA]

Now even the most naive will understand what has happened to the output of academia...the high schools turn out dolts, some of which can barely read and write well and the colleges turn out indoctrinated leftists who can hardly find their own vents.....

Welcome to liberalism...isn't it beautiful ????

[cornelis]

This gives rise to what Bauerlein calls the "false consensus effect," which occurs when, because of institutional provincialism, "people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population."

A terrible "side effect" here (apart from statistics of party membership) is creating what I call a subtle, destructive habit in the classroom where students only recognize or understand what has been repeated. Whatever is heard for the first time is forgotten. Learning is no longer a discovery, but a confirmation of indoctrination. Students only recognize something as knowledge if it has been drilled into them. Even if it is critizised, they will not understand the criticism but only only parrot the original theme.

[goldstategop]

Its always been this way and in some respects its worse. Stepping on a campus is like stepping into an alternate universe America. Our institutions of higher education are as intolerant of heretics and non-conformists as the medieval Church was.

[goldstategop]

No one wants to get on their professors' bad side. The brighter students quickly know what they're expected to do to get good grades and if they have opinions that are not welcome in the classroom or on campus, they keep it to themselves.

[Dark Wing]

FYI

[dalereed]

I would place the few conservatives in the dedicated class and the liberals in the "those that can DO, those that can't teach".

[LS]

The problem, so far, is that there are VERY few alternatives to the leftist universities. The handful of conservative schools---even if you include religious (which are not necessarily conservative, because I teach at a leftist Catholic school)---can't begin to compete with the vast number of state and private left-wing schools.

There are some new internet universities appearing; but it will be a generation before these even have any impact at all.

[Luigi Vasellini]

The never ending cycle, liberal PhD thesis good, conservative PhD thesis bad.

[dfwright]

I suppose the only surprising thing here is that are ANY conservatives at all...

[cornelis]

That is also true: the only thing the professor understands from papers is their own mantra.

Here's an interesting passage which illustrates the problem of only recognizing repetition:

The absence of a rational foundation or discourse about the truth to ground moral certitude has consequences on the form of the message as well as on the tone used to convey it. Today's moral message is not explanatory, as it was for example in the case of Las Casas in the sixteenth century, who defended the dignity of the American Indians, or of Thomas More, who was indignant about human misery. Our message, on the contrary is loud and repetitive. It is proclaimed vehemently and always carries a threat against its adversaries. It creeps in through all the cracks of social life because to be convincing it must be constantly repeated. It compensates for its lack of justification by its ubigquity and omnipotence. Its "human rights"-ism is incantatory to the point of inducing nausea. It disguises the lack of a crucial backdrop by hogging the stage, leaving space for no rival. What it is unable to obtain through persuasion or debate, it obtains through the stifling of adverse ways of thought, which are vilified as soon as they dare to show their faces. Evil is not rejected by reason, but hated out of indignation and denounced through invective. At the same time, discourse about the good is set to the tones of panegyric and the smell of incense. p. 77 Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen.

[Cicero]

I know from personal experience at NYU over the years that it's NOT because graduate students who are entering the professoriat are more liberal. It's because hiring committees are more liberal.

Conservative hiring committees usually hire the best candidates, regardless of politics. Liberal hiring committees always hire clones of themselves, and wouldn't touch the best candidate with a ten foot pole if he was a conservative.

The result is that almost all the chairmen and hiring committees are now liberal, and their departments keep moving further and further to the left. Not only that, but many departments have been wrecked because no one is interested in doing anything but politics or gender studies.

[blackdog]

There is a feature article in this month's Chemical & Engineering News which covers the disasterous, toxic, and volitile EPA chemical handling rules not being adhered to by colleges and universities. We are talking major stuff too! The response from a consortium of University heads is that it's unfair to hold university laboratories to a standard set of rules intended for industry. They complained that if they adhere to EPA rules that they will have no funds left to do research. They also claimed that while many violations were dangerous, most of the citations issued for simple non compliance on paperwork and that such records were a waste of resources.........

Most the EPA ordered laboratory cleanups were carried out by local bomb squads because so much of the material was so dangerously crystalized. They detonated much of the chemicals on site while students were on holiday breaks to avoid the hazards.

Simply astounding that universities can complain that compliance to EPA rules are too burdensome and expensive, but that is an acceptable situation for industry!

I guess that's what nine of ten grant gifted professors hold true.

[Ptarmigan]

Not surprising. We have our fair share at UT, like Robert Jensen and Dana Cloud, who both teach Journalism.

[stylin_geek]

I'm not quite sure how to react to this.

David Horowitz and Ann Coulter have been on this issue for quite a while. So, does this mean that George Will is finally on board, or does it mean he has finally decided to lend the weight of his name to this issue?

[cornelis]

There are many who agree with Horowitz and Coulter, but few who are willing to point out that their temptation: the morality of incantation.

[kdot]

... proving once again, that diversity for liberals is purely racial. Idological diversity is not desired or embraced.

[LiteKeeper]

INTREP

[VOA]

They complained that if they adhere to EPA rules that they will have no funds left to do research.

A lot of the mess is because an established academic retires and the department
doesn't say "clean up your mess before you go!".
Or a faculty member might also die...thus the mess is "left".

That article is surely correct in many ways...the academics are finding that the
beaucratic rules that they love to see imposed on "The Evil Corportions of America"
also apply to them as well!