Posted on 4/5/2005, 6:57:26 PM by RightOnTheLeftCoast
An Academic Question
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that?
Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new "academic freedom" laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story.
Claims that liberal bias keeps conservatives off college faculties almost always focus on the humanities and social sciences, where judgments about what constitutes good scholarship can seem subjective to an outsider. But studies that find registered Republicans in the minority at elite universities show that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences like physics and in engineering departments as in softer fields. Why?
One answer is self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.
But there's also, crucially, a values issue. In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the "party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the "party of theocracy."
Consider the statements of Dennis Baxley, a Florida legislator who has sponsored a bill that - like similar bills introduced in almost a dozen states - would give students who think that their conservative views aren't respected the right to sue their professors. Mr. Baxley says that he is taking on "leftists" struggling against "mainstream society," professors who act as "dictators" and turn the classroom into a "totalitarian niche." His prime example of academic totalitarianism? When professors say that evolution is a fact.
In its April Fools' Day issue, Scientific American published a spoof editorial in which it apologized for endorsing the theory of evolution just because it's "the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time," saying that "as editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence." And it conceded that it had succumbed "to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do."
The editorial was titled "O.K., We Give Up." But it could just as well have been called "Why So Few Scientists Are Republicans These Days." Thirty years ago, attacks on science came mostly from the left; these days, they come overwhelmingly from the right, and have the backing of leading Republicans.
Scientific American may think that evolution is supported by mountains of evidence, but President Bush declares that "the jury is still out." Senator James Inhofe dismisses the vast body of research supporting the scientific consensus on climate change as a "gigantic hoax." And conservative pundits like George Will write approvingly about Michael Crichton's anti-environmentalist fantasies.
Think of the message this sends: today's Republican Party - increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research - doesn't respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn't be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.
Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they're seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses' content.
And it wouldn't just be a matter of demanding that historians play down the role of slavery in early America, or that economists give the macroeconomic theories of Friedrich Hayek as much respect as those of John Maynard Keynes. Soon, biology professors who don't give creationism equal time with evolution and geology professors who dismiss the view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old might face lawsuits.
If it got that far, universities would probably find ways to cope - by, say, requiring that all entering students sign waivers. But political pressure will nonetheless have a chilling effect on scholarship. And that, of course, is its purpose.
From the blogosphere, http://eviscera.blogspot.com/ sums it up:
If we self select out of the universities why on the average do Republicans have higher educational achievments than the average DEMONICcrat.
From what I skimmed, it seems like they're beating on the religious again. Good. I'm sure all those red-staters and religious blacks and hispanics will show their appreciation (again) come election time.
What makes me laugh is the apparent praise of the "old" Republican Party before the "right-wing religious zealot takeover." Somehow I don't think Krugman supported any of the old Republicans, either.
Quoting Shays as a Republican is like quoting Zell Miller for the Democrats.
Crichton did his homework. Envornmental extremism isn't science - it's a pagan religion wrapped up in some scientific-sounding dogmas to fool the uneducated.
Which I guess includes the "noted economist" Krugman.
In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the "party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the "party of theocracy."
Party labels aside, Chris Shays is twice the liberal that Daniel Moynihan ever was.
Quoting one of the RINOs that sponsored McCain-Fiengold in the House, IIRC, Krugman is an absolute loon.
I do agree somewhat with the idea of self-selection. You find many more right-of-center CEOs than left-of-center. However, that doesn't mean that leftist professors do not act like scumbags.
Some Republicans go to church.
Therefore, all Republicans go to church.
People who go to church are stupid.
Therefore, all Republicans are stupid.
We don't want stupid people teaching college students
Therefore, it is a good thing that there are so few Republicans on college campuses.
Interesting how they want to close ranks and insist on orthodox authority of "science" and "court rulings".
I think it's as simple as the age-old saying, "Those who can, DO, those who can't, TEACH."
I don't think this applies to school teachers. Professors are a totally different breed. I have a colleague who left public accounting (my former field) to pursue a PHD. He returned to public accounting with about a year left in the program because he couldn't stand the politics involved with obtaining the degree and the self-importance of a bunch of people who have basically done nothing in their career but go to school and add meaningless degree after meaningless degree.
There are definitely good professors out there, and many of them contribute to society. However, the personality traits that are needed to succeed in the "real" business world are much different than those needed to succeed in academia. I think this may explain the disparity of liberals to conservatives on college campuses.
Republicans tend to study something useful in college, so they can get real jobs and earn a living. Liberals tend to study the Liberal Arts and hope some Universtity hires them to teach, so they don't have to work at McDonalds.
With a real education, conservatives enter the capitalist economy and try to get rich. Those Liberals with real educations tend to look for research or "public interest" jobs where they don't have to produce anything useful.
For the apolitical, immersion in hte real world teaches most to become conservatives, while immersion in academia teaches them that anything is 'theoretically' acceptable.
So9
Classic Krugman. Hayek's impact will be forever. Keynesian is a dirty word in most circles, unless you are nominated by the President.
I was on the faculty of a Long Island New York college for 12 years and I can tell this guy krugman is a jackass.
http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_04_03_corner-archive.asp#059974
Paul Krugman’s failed attempt to excuse the academy’s liberal bias is a very good sign. A spate of studies documenting campus bias, the Summers and Churchill fiascos, and the rebellion of students tired of one-sided education, have combined to put the academy under real pressure. Liberals now have to defend the indefensible, whereas before they could simply ignore the problem altogether. The fact that Krugman has to begin with an admission that professors are overwhelmingly liberal is progress.
Krugman argues that the political bias of professors is explained by self-selection. That’s a joke. As any aspiring conservative academic knows, the radical faculty carefully polices new hires for politics. Most conservatives have to hide their views to have any chance at all. Unfortunately, in today’s academy, the substance of academic work is so politicized that there’s no easy way to hide. Failing to be openly radical is often enough to do you in. Whole fields (and therefore many job searches) are actually defined by politics–post-colonial studies, for example. To see how academic bias really works, check out this great article from The Chronicle of Higher Education by Mark Bauerlein.
You can see the effect of politically biased hiring in the numbers. As Howard Kurtz reports, only 39 percent of professors in 1984 described themselves as liberal. The current figure is 72 percent. And, of course, by 1984, the march of the tenured radicals through the groves of academe was already well underway. The culture wars kicked off by William Bennett and Allan Bloom’s response to the new campus radicalism began around 1986. Krugman’s self-selection theory can’t explain this huge jump in the percentage of liberal professors over time. If liberals are more attracted to the academic life than conservatives, the effect over time should be constant. A study reported on by John Tierney in 2004 also showed a huge jump in campus liberalism over time. Democratic professors now outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences–a ratio more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades before. This shift is the result of deliberate political bias, not of some supposed affinity of liberals for the campus life.
Not only does Krugman ignore the shift over time, he downplays the differences between disciplines. The latest study showed that business, engineering, and economics faculties were 49, 51, and 55 percent liberal, respectively. English literature is 88 percent liberal. This disparity has nothing to do with liberal love of the academic life, and everything to do with politics. Yes, as Krugman points out, even many scientists are liberal. Krugman says that’s because scientists hate religious Republicans. I think it’s far more likely that we have here a politically based self-selection effect here. Imagine that you’re a conservative with an interest in science. You have a choice between doing research for a business, or living on a college campus. Which would you choose? Look what happened to Lawrence Summers. Any scientist or engineer with a conservative bent knows he’d be a fish out of water in a campus culture controlled by the radical left. That, if anywhere, is where self-selection is at work.
another dismantling of Krugman here
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200504051438.asp
**Note..
Just because you're crazy don't mean you are stupid.. and cannot put together some sophistry..
Charlie Manson comes to mind..
From the renowned psyco-analyist...
"This boy is about as sharp as a bowling ball"- Foghorn Leghorn..
University faculties, however, have search and hiring committees as well as tenure committees. Here the population is not selected by virtue of volunteerism, but by the existing population proliferating its own preferences. Like tends to hire like, both in terms of race, sex...and politics. The current distribution of politics on university campuses is, in a very real sense, the result of bigotry.
One sees this in the smirking response one often gets from partisan Democrats when this is pointed out - "university faculties consist of smart people, and Republicans aren't smart people." Try that statement replacing "Republicans" with "Blacks" or "Women" and the bigotry becomes obvious.
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