| Conservatives have long regarded universities as the last spider holes of liberalism. They regard professors as lefty holdouts who spend their days indoctrinating the younger generation on the virtues of Che Guevara.
While many of us assume that the right is busily targeting the highest court as its last unoccupied power base, a whole subset of conservatives is after higher education. Every year conservative groups put some $20 million into campus politics and publications. While liberal students may organize against sweatshops and sneaker factories, conservatives organize against campus liberalism. One group, led by David Horowitz, has been pushing an "academic bill of rights" aimed at what is called liberal bias. There is now more ammunition for the battle of the intellectual bulge. Two new studies point to campuses as oases of blue. The first, a survey of 1,000 academics, shows that there are seven Democrats for every Republican in the humanities and social sciences. The D-R ratio is 30 to 1 in anthropology and even 3 to 1 in economics. A second study of voter registration records shows that Democrats outnumber Republicans 9 to 1 on the faculties at Berkeley and Stanford. And as a side dish, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that the biggest donors to John Kerry's campaign were employees from the University of California and from Harvard. All of this adds to the complaint that conservatives are as marginalized on campus as synchronized swimmers. This in turn is used to back up complaints about discrimination in hiring and teaching, and the need for what is called ideological diversity. The authors of the faculty survey put it this way: "The social sciences are pretty much a one-party system." They add, "A campus that had six males to one female would be universally recognized as very lopsided." So, they infer, is a campus that's 7-to-1 Democratic. |
Isn't it possible that there's a simple explanation for this? One that doesn't involve discrimination against conservatives?
Leaving aside for the moment the bizarre yet hilarious fact that conservatives are railing against discrimination in the workplace... Two thoughts.
In this recent election, Kerry beat Bush 55% to 44% among voters with post-graduate educations. Considering how close the election was, that's a fairly large and statistically significant gap.
And what does it tell us? It tells us that post-grads are by and large much more likely to be liberal than conservative. Now... I'm going on a hunch here, since I can't find the actual data anywhere, but something tells me that if you removed biz school grads from that mix the number would skew much further left.
And what does that tell us? That the talent pool from which colleges and universities can hire professors is skewed to the far left. Hence, the stats they sites.
And who's to blame for this oh-so-tragic situation? The free market!
The people choosing to apply for jobs as professors are also people who hold liberal beliefs. If the talent pool is skewed far left by huge margins, so too will be the workforce. Unless, of course, we want to start affirmative action programs for those poor conservatives.
It's been proven time and time again by political scientists that the more education you have, the more likely you are to vote Democratic. So.. I know! Maybe we should allow conservatives to become professors without PhD's! If we lower the bar for them, maybe that'll do it!
But seriously, I wonder... if discrimination against conservatives is such a big deal, why aren't they also railing on about this:
| Well, let us not forget that campuses are still lacking in the old-fashioned kind of diversity. As for lopsided? Among full professors, 87 percent are white and 77 percent are male. |
Hypocrisy is the greatest luxury, innit?
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