Some can't hide contempt for colleagues on the right

Rocky Mountain N ews ^ | 7/30/05 | Seebach

[pabianice]

For certain enlightened liberals on university faculties, the lesser intellectual stature of Christians and conservatives is so much taken for granted that they do not hesitate to write about them in terms dripping with condescension and contempt.

An example I encountered this week is especially odious, and I am happy to bring it to the attention of a wider, non-academic audience. The authors are four political scientists at the University of Pittsburgh - Barry Ames, David Barker, Chris Bonneau and Christopher Carman. Their paper is a critique of a study, published earlier this year, examining the statistical evidence that not only Christians and conservatives but also women in higher education tend to teach at less prestigious institutions than their scholarly qualifications would suggest.

The original paper, "Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty," was by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte; it appeared in Vol. 3, No. 1 of an online journal called The Forum, published by the Berkeley Electronic Press. The critique, plus a response by the original authors, is in Vol. 3, No. 2. They're all at www.bepress.com/forum- tiresome but free registration required.

The critique authors, who titled their paper, "Hide the Republicans, the Christians, and the Women," refer to the first study by its authors' initials, RLN, and RLN return the favor by referring to the critique as ABBC. This is not a courtesy, but it is a convenience...

[IncPen]

... sound like anyone you know ping ...

[dirtboy]

With their third point, they take aim at religion: "many conservatives may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientific method."

What a bunch of arrogant pr**ks. Members of the scientific community can be just as dogmatic as fundamentalist Christians, especially when it comes to the religion of global warming. Many scientists disregard basic tenets of the scientific method in order to preach adherence to Kyoto, while abandoning natural, cyclical theories as to why the climate has gotten slightly warmer recently - even though there have been several climatic cycles in recent geological history that were obviously not caused by human industrial activities.

But the liberals don't see their dogma as deviating from the scientific method, because their cause is just.

[randog]

With their third point, they take aim at religion: "many conservatives may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientific method."

Wow.

[Fido969]

Is it just be, or *in general* but aren't most of the low character attacks coming from the left? I mean, except for people like Coulter, aren't the 'pubs, in general, acting like gentlemen?

[Nita Nupress]

mark

[Nita Nupress]

Is there some sort of academia ping list?

[Noachian]

...I am happy to bring it to the attention of a wider, non-academic audience.

This is the type of material that should be published on the web as soon as it's found, and I'm happy that Seebach did just that.

What academic liberals put in print too often stays only in academic circles. Putting liberal papers outside the purview of academia alone opens those papers to review and criticism, by the general public. That's something that liberal academia has too often been cloistered from.

A student may be punished with a failing grade for criticism of a professor, but the general public is immune and should take advantage of what liberals write.

[trebb]

With their third point, they take aim at religion: "many conservatives may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientifichubris method."

That's more like it...

[mewzilla]

Oh, this has got to be passed around.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

...published by the Berkeley Electronic Press...

That's pretty much all you need to know ...

[popdonnelly]

Hey, I have contempt for leftist professors. They earn it.

[Fido969]

One think that I think intellectuals on the right take for granted nowadays, and kind of mention in passing, is the obvious intellectual bankruptcy of modern liberalism - even while the left hangs onto it's ancient (and obsolete) claim to true intellectualism.

They've taken over the universities all right - and are graduating students who can't write, barely read and are incapable of independent thought.

Sad, in a way, to watch it.

[Crawdad]

I'd like to do some background on these 4 gentlemen. I'll do the first one, Professor Ames. Anyone want any of the other three?

[squarebarb]

Very nasty statements.

The people who wrote the study are profoundly, deeply ignorant of any social scene outside of their own little group in academia.

They take our money and sneer at us.

[Crawdad]

FACULTY

Barry Ames, PhD
Stanford University, 1972
Chair
Andrew W. Mellon Professor
of Comparative Politics

E-mail: barrya@pitt.edu

Curriculum Vitae


COURSES/SYLLABI

PS 1321 Latin American Politics
PS 2321 Graduate Field Seminar in Latin American Politics
PS 2381 Quantitative and Formal Analysis in Latin American Political Science
AREAS OF EXPERTISE

Comparative politics, Latin America, legislative behavior, electoral systems, political economy
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

“Approaches to the Study of Institutions in Latin America” Latin American Research Review (Winter 1999) 34:1.

“The Politics of Environmental Policy Making in Brazil” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs (1997-1998) 39:4 (Co-authored with Margaret Keck).

“Electoral Strategy Under Open-List Proportional Representation” American Journal of Political Science (May 1995).

“Electoral Rules, Constituency Pressures, and Pork Barrel: Bases of Voting in the Brazilian Congress” Journal of Politics (May 1995) 57:2.

“The Reverse Coattails Effect: Local Party Organization in the 1989 Brazilian Presidential Election” American Political Science Review (March 1994).

Political Survival: Politicians and Public Policy in Latin America. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1987.
OTHER FACULTY AND PROFESSIONAL POSITIONS

Core faculty member of the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) of the University Center for International Studies (UCIS).

Chair, Section on Political Institutions, Latin American Studies Association.

Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh

Latin American Politics at the University of Pittsburgh

[topher]

Reminds of a very famous story in France circa 1880.

An old man and a young man are on a train. The old man is praying (Catholic with rosary). The young man starts to deride the old man saying:

"Such foolish superstitions you have! Science is the way of the future! Why do you engage in such nonsense as your foolish religion -- embrace Science!"

The wise old man did not respond, but handed the young hand man his business card, which read:

Louis Pasteur
Pasteur Institute
Paris France

At the time, Louis Pasteur was world reknown for his breakthroughs in Science. It was sort of like demeaning Einstein in a similar way (because of the fame Louis Pasteur had at the time)...

[Crawdad]

Professor Ames

[JustaCowgirl]

Rushed to Judgment
Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior

David Barker

"Rushed to Judgement is a landmark study of political talk radio. David Barker takes talk radio research to a new level of theoretical and empirical sophistication. This comprehensive work gives thorough coverage to existing research, and provides much new evidence about the audience, content, and influence of political talk. His findings and insights will stimulate readers to think anew about the implications of talk radio for democratic politics."
—Diana Owen

"[A] welcome addition to the growing shelf of scholarly works on radio broadcasting . . . well documented . . . offers useful research paths for others to follow."
—Christopher H. Sterling, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator

"[An] important and quite ground-breaking study of American conservative call-in talk radio."
—Bridget Griffin-Foley, Australasian Journal of American Studies

"the volume is useful not only for those who study media effects, but also for those who work in the area of political persuasion."
—David C. Barker, Public Opinion Quarterly

"David Barker's theoretically grounded, empirically based analysis explains how persuasion works for all the new, unabashedly biased media that are flourishing today. Methodologically, the experimental research that grounds the figures is imaginatively designed and beautifully executed. It provides a model for sophisticated modern political communication research."
—Doris A. Graber, University of Illinois, Chicago

Convenient, entertaining, and provocative, talk radio today is unapologetically ideological. Focusing on Rush Limbaugh—the medium's most influential talk show—Rushed to Judgment systematically examines the politics of persuasion at play on our nation's radio airwaves and asks a series of important questions. Does listening to talk radio change the way people think about politics, or are listeners' attitudes a function of the self-selecting nature of the audience? Does talk radio enhance understanding of public issues or serve as a breeding ground for misunderstanding? Can talk radio serve as an agent of deliberative democracy, spurring Americans to open, public debate? Or will talk radio only aggravate the divisive partisanship many Americans decry in poll after poll? The time is ripe to evaluate the effects of a medium whose influence has yet to be fully reckoned with.

Contents

1. Introduction : Political Persuasion, Propaganda, and Media Effects
2. Political Talk Radio and Its Most Prominent Practitioner
3. Toward a Value Heresthetic Model of Political Persuasion
4. Talk Radio, Public Opinion, and Vote Choice: The "Limbaugh Effect," 1994-96
5. Talk Radio, Opinion Leadership, and Presidential Nominations: Evidence from the 2 Republican Primary Battles
6. The Talk Radio Community: Nontraditional Social Networks and Political Participation
7. Information, Misinformation, and Political Talk Radio
8. Conclusion
Appendix A. The Limbaugh Message
Appendix B. Excerpts from the Rhetoric Stimulus
Appendix C. Excerpts from the Value Heresthetic Stimulus

About the Author

David Barker is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Prof. Barker has published several articles on talk radio in the Journal of Politics, Social Science Quarterly, and Political Communication.

[t2buckeye]

It's more likely that they know that "top-tier research universities" would hold them in the contempt shown by this article...and that they wouldn't be hired anyway

[billnaz]

I spent some time in an academic environment. There were many differences between my liberal colleagues and me. The main difference was that I could function outside academia, and they couldn't. If the local supermarket had ever closed they would have starved to death.

[Neoliberalnot]

Good post. Here in central Missouri as I was reading the paper yesterday and noticed the weather stats were thus: record high for JULY 29 was 108 set in 1930, while the record low was 56, set in 2004. I realize this is only a small sample but if you check weather records of the U.S., 3 of the 5 hottest summers were all from the 1930s.

[Crawdad]

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON FACULTY SENATE MINUTES – November 28, 2001
Barry Ames of the University of Pittsburgh, has received an NSF grant for $220,000 to conduct a study of political behavior in Brazil. The study consists of a three-wave panel survey, elite interviews and media content analysis in two cities during the 2002 elections for President, Governors, Senators, and state and national Congress Members.

[Crawdad]

Check this out: http://ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=242638

[Nita Nupress]

Ames et al are the authors of the response, not the original article. Here are the abstracts:

 

ORIGINAL RESEARCH STUDY / ARTICLE:

TITLE:
Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty

AUTHOR:
Stanley Rothman, Smith College
S. Robert Lichter, Center of Media and Public Affairs
Neil Nevitte, University of Toronto

SUGGESTED CITATION:
Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte (2005) "Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty", The Forum: Vol. 3: No. 1, Article 2.
http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol3/iss1/art2

 ABSTRACT:
This article first examines the ideological composition of American university faculty and then tests whether ideological homogeneity has become self-reinforcing. A randomly based national survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities finds that liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins, and the differences are not limited to elite universities or to the social sciences and humanities. A multivariate analysis finds that, even after taking into account the effects of professional accomplishment, along with many other individual characteristics, conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats. This suggests that complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study. The analysis finds similar effects based on gender and religiosity, i.e., women and practicing Christians teach at lower quality schools than their professional accomplishments would predict.

 

RESPONSE:

TITLE:
Hide the Republicans, the Christians, and the Women: A Response to “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty”

A reader's reaction to: Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte.

AUTHOR:
Barry Ames, University of Pittsburgh
David C. Barker, University of Pittsburgh
Chris W. Bonneau, University of Pittsburgh
Christopher J. Carman, University of Pittsburgh

SUGGESTED CITATION:
Barry Ames, David C. Barker, Chris W. Bonneau, and Christopher J. Carman (2005) "Hide the Republicans, the Christians, and the Women: A Response to “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty”", The Forum: Vol. 3: No. 2, Article 7.
http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol3/iss2/art7

 

ABSTRACT:
Do conservatives suffer discrimination in academe? In “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty,” Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte argue that “conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats.” Using a survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities, they conclude that their results are “consistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism confers a disadvantage in the competition for political advancement.” In this response, we show that Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte’s work is plagued by theoretical and methodological problems that render their conclusions unsustainable by the available evidence. Furthermore, we offer an alternative hypothesis theoretically consistent with their findings. Unfortunately, we were unable to subject our alternative hypothesis to empirical assessment (or even to replicate the initial results of Rothman, Lichter and Nevitte) since they have refused to make their data available to the scientific community.

[Crawdad]

Thanks.

[Nita Nupress]

check your mail.

[ClaireSolt]

A lot of what passes for the scientific method these days really isn't, as they are just looking for data to plug into theoretical models.

[BIRDS]

They DO sound a tad too similar to the Taliban for my comfort, I don't mind saying...

[Neoliberalnot]

Most scientists from the age of enlightment were devout Christians. Sir Isaac Newton, the father of calculus and many laws of physics was a devout Christian.

Just for the record, I reside at a research #1 institution and I am a conservative Christian at a College of Veterinary Medicine. The liberals dominate the liberal arts programs while many scientists, especially in medicine, veterinary medicine and engineering are more conservative then many would think. FWIW

[Clara Lou]

Thanks for setting it straight.

[JennysCool]

Silly hippies.

[Savage Beast]

The obvious irony is the reliance of such academics on credentials to hide their fundamental stupidity.

[wizardoz]

What's particularly ironic about that conservatives-avoid-scientific-method remark is that leftists in academia are largely clusterd in the humanities. You don't need a smidge of scientific method to deconstruct literature or surmise that linguistic identity markers are a subconscious repudiation of capitalism.

You do, however, need some verifiable system if you're going to pursue engineering, physics, or economics.... which, by some strange coincidence, is where you find far fewer leftists.

[wizardoz]

ahem... "clustered."

[Congressman Billybob]

Thank you for providing an e-mail address. It inspired me to send the following letter to Barry:

Dear Sir,

I have just read the exchange between you and your colleagues and the authors of a study concerning discrimination against Christians, conservatives and women, both studies referred to by the initials of the authors, respectively RLN and ABBC.

You refer to the "scientific method." Would that this published work of yours had a better than passing contact with that method.

I remind you of what the "scientific method" means, and then comment. It means to advance a specific hypothesis, and then to test it against controlled, observable facts. One of your attacks is against a straw man which the original authors specifically disavowed. All of the others are pure conjecture, free of any constraints from observable facts.

The only surprise in the RLN study is the discrimination against women. In view of recent events at Harvard, those I observed in the Ph.D. program at American University, general literature on feminism on college faculties, and courses and programs offered, I did not expect that result. Women were non-existent in the undergraduate student body, and few and far between on the faculty, when I graduated from Yale back when ice covered the Earth. The same was halfway true when I graduated from Maryland Law School. By the time I entered Ph.D. program at American, decades later, the sexual balance among both students and faculty were at near equilibrium and headed for majority status for women.

(My use of my academic background has included teaching in a university, but is now largely restricted to practice in the US Supreme Court, and in publishing books and articles.)

But the reason I am writing to you are your attempts to explain away the statistics is the assumption that Christians and conservatives somehow "self-select" themselves, so they huddle together in out-lying communities where the locals spit and scratch and move their lips when they read, unlike the cultured major cities where your folks congregate. Do you even realize that the early studies, before the ones that underlay Brown v. Board of Education, advanced a similar thesis, that blacks "self-selected" their segregated communities, that they "wanted" it that way?

As for your suggestion that the faculty doing the hiring "don't necessarily know" the politics of a potential new hire, I did some relevant research in the 90s on that point. There were two main candidates for Mayor of D.C. after Marion Barry was convicted and removed. One had attended Howard University and served as an official of the NAACP. The other had attended Georgetown Law, and had been a corporate lawyer. The interesting wrinkle was that the first man was white, and the second was black. We were surveying garden-variety voters in D.C. on their preferences.

We gave just the resumes to half of the survey participants. To the other half, we added the statement that "This candidate is [black/white]." The preferences of the voters switched by 40%, between question A and question B. But the point is that academics are not as ill-informed as average voters. I defy you to take the curriculum vitae of any professors or professorial candidates and not having (almost always) a clear idea of that person's political leanings.

My respect for your work will be higher if you tell me that you and your colleagues met and said to one another, "Let's cobble together a back-of-the-envelope 'study' that slaps these guys around." Please tell me that that was your approach. It was a joke, wasn't it?

Or did you mean it seriously, and actually did not see the manifest flaws in your methodology?

Sincerely,

I will post the response I receive, if any, to my e-mail.

Congressman Billybob

Latest column: "South Pacific" Lesson about Muslims

[M-cubed]

hmmmmm.....Looks like a beady-eyed Pentacostal to me!.....
NOOOOO! just spoofing!

[dirtboy]

Or did you mean it seriously, and actually did not see the manifest flaws in your methodology?

Given that the left also calls someone like Clarence Thomas an activist judge, I'd say these guys have gotten to the point where the meaning of the scientific method is any approach that that achieves a desired liberal outcome in a study.

[Nita Nupress]

After further digging, Crawdad was right. Sorry 'bout that.

[Psycho_Bunny]

It's hardly confined to Academia:  I didn't truly grasp the meaning of the word "vitriol" until I started living and working in downtown Seattle.

Interestingly enough, while I am not Christian, my father was a psychologist with Focus On The Family for some 8 years so I had a good deal of exposure to "The Far Right" the Left hates so much.  I never once heard an uncivil or hate-filled word come out of anyone at Focus.

But here in Seattle, Leftist hatred and smarminess permeate my day to day life.  It's everywhere.  I literally won't talk politics with anyone I don't already know is a conservative because otherwise, I honestly don't know who's going to go loopy on me and start yelling.

I'm not - in any sense of the word - "oppressed", but the net effect of of the way people behave around here leaves me with the choice of keeping my mouth shut about anything political or having people yell at me.  There's no middle ground.  You can't have a relaxed talk with the average leftist here:  either you nod your head and keep your mouth shut or someone's going to jump down your throat.

 

 

[geezerwheezer]

I too have a hypothesis, that being; Most eastern, liberal, snooty professors are dumber than a box of jell-o. My case studies show that to be true 97.67509% of the time, while the remainder, 2.32491% are certifiably brain-dead! This applies to all who teach in Ivy league -type schools and receive federal funds to study things like elections in places that Jimmy Carter certifies as being honest.(see "Elections in Brazil" by some dips**t professor for reference) In fact, this hypothesis has become so true, I'm calling it "Mike's law of Stupid College Professors who think they are smart" law. I don't think it can be to be negative or wrong, and can easily be replicated by picking up any copy of the New York Times and reading these types of articles. Can I get a patent on my new law or is it in too much common usage?

[Dust in the Wind]

Yes and as a matter of record there was more permafrost melted in 1940 than is now.

[Right Wing Professor]

I know Bob Lichter, one of the authors of the original study. He's a good scientist and was a good university administrator. But oddly enough, even though I'm in the same field of science and interacted with him professionally at least on a monthly basis, I had no idea of his politics. I think that speaks to his objectivity more than anything else I could say.

The critique that conservatives are fundamentalists and thus drawn to fundamentalist institutions, or away from prestigious institutions, is bull. Most conservative scientists I know are not religious fundamentalists, have mainstream scientific philosophies, and would like a job at MIT or Harvard as much as anyone else.

[driftless]

One of the big myths that libs are going to have to knock out their tiny minds is the notion that all conservative Republicans are fundamentalist Christians. I'm not, and neither are most of the Republicans I know. However I do know a few people that might be, but I'm not sure. In short, whether they are or aren't, they don't inflict their views on people. But I welcome the religious segment of the Republican Party. There's far more to fear from the atheistic, amoral segment of our society than there is from religious conservatives. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I sincerely doubt any of the communists killers of the last century were fundamentalist Christians.

[Gunrunner2]

My gawd. . .excellent letter. Impressive.

[RightWingAtheist]

The impression I've gotten from reading some of the comments by conservative scientists and academics on blogs and in interviews is that conservatives in those areas at least take much more of a "closed door" approach to discussing politics. It's just not something they prefer to discuss in public, if at all, whereas those on the left, partly because they are emboldened as members of a majority (or a supposed majority in the case of the scientific community), partly as being followers of an ideology that dictates that the personal is political, will be much more outspoken, and prone to interject political commentary into areas a conservative will find inappropriate.

[untenured]

As Rothman et al. comment, "If we try to surmount the difficulty of imagining how a candidate's ideology can sometimes be discerned, we might examine her CV \[curriculum vitae], her publications, the reputations of her advisers, references, and granting agencies. Increasingly, personal information can also be gleaned by examining her blog or personal Web sites and by Googling her to pick up any stray comment that wandered into the Internet."

Absurd. Where you got your Ph.D. is often a significantly reliable indicator of your politics.

On faculty e-mail discussions several times at my university people have casually tossed in sarcastic mocking of Christian beliefs or expressed unusually harsh hostility to public expressions of religious belief. They further react with grest surprise, and sometimes anger, when I call them on it, as if prejudice is something only those people have.

Why Does the Academy Tilt Left?

[.cnI redruM]

>>>>liberalism - even while the left hangs onto it's ancient (and obsolete) claim to true intellectualism

The liberals live in what I call Legacy America. They, like the Labor Unions and certain Country-CLub Republicans, reached their apex back in the period from 1950-1980. They haven't left this period and our just becoming more and more wrong and irrelevant.