OTOH, left-wing ideas sometimes are passed vertically. (Ever heard of “red diaper babies”?) And conservative ideas can be passed horizontally. Right-wingers have been making increasingly successful efforts there ever since the “Republican noise machine” first started to get organized back in the '70s.
I suppose some people think of academics as not having a “real job” in the “real world” because professors are shielded, to some extent, from day-to-day market pressures; they have tenure so they can’t be fired except for cause, and they are not responsible for drumming up business, i.e., recruiting students for the university. And they produce nothing of immediate economic value. Of course, the same things can be said of soldiers. Does that mean soldiers are not part of the “real world” or do not have a “real job”?
I agree with that. Academia is very much the “real-world” and it is much more brutal than any business I have I been exposed to since. I was once in a PhD program in an Ivy League institution. I have never worked so hard in my life even though I landed in the “so-called” cut-throat world of consulting after that. I have never seen anything so cut-throat as the higher levels of academia and never want to again. It is a very brutal “real-world” and most people don’t make it.
Although academics tend to be much smarter than average, they aren’t omnipotent and simply have their limited life-view like everyone else. They depend on grants which is a largely government function and large-scale budget cuts are a threat to their well-being. Liberal philosophy is supposedly to let the money run free through tax and spend so that is desirable from an individual academics viewpoint. Academics also tend to care deeply about one subject and would love the government to expand money to the effort (archaeology, art, mental health etc.).
When I went into Ivy League graduate school, I was initially in awe of the brain-power and assumed that they had all the answers for everything. They do not. They are simply smart people that pursued a sub-sub-speciality to the extreme and got good at it. They can’t even know all that is going on in their general field much less the world in general.
My step-father is a business professor and is libertarian because he cares about business. My ex-adviser in neuroscience is liberal because she needs lots of grants to further her career.
Tenure? (Laughs bitterly.) I only wish. I don’t have it, I’m not getting it in my current job (a limited-term contract with no further chance of renewal, BTW), and I don’t have any reasonable expectation of getting it any time in the near future. And my situation is becoming more and more prevalent. When you think of my job security, don’t imagine tenure; imagine moving out-of-state (or out-of-country) every one to three years.
So, what ever happened to tenure? Do only a minority of profs have it these days?
No, tenure’s still out there. But from where I’m sitting it seems that the academic job market has simply tilted in favour of the institutions. If the College of Upper Northwestern Nowhere can post an ad for a two-year untenured wage-slave position on the internet and still get a hundred applications, then why should any decent university offer tenure except as a means of attracting upper-tier research talent? If you want tenure these days you have to earn it, typically with a kick-ass record of research.
And of course, even if you have tenure that still doesn’t guarantee anything beyond a basic salary (not even that if you get fired for cause). You still have to fight for research funding, including salaries for grad students, lab materials, funds for academic travel, et cetera. But that’s another story.
Very good points. I’d also like to add that even with a kick-ass record of research, it’s still no sure thing in obtaining tenure (particularly at top-tier schools in a given discipline). At these institutions, one needs to have a kick-ass record of research published in the “appropriate” academic journals AS WELL as a kick-ass record of obtaining grant/research funding for the department/university.
The old adage “publish or perish” is still effective, but I know of one professor who was denied tenure at a university because he didn’t publish in the “right” journals. Even though he had his research published in more journals than any other professor in the department over a 5-year period.
And for those who think academics aren’t part of the real world, you might to check out the list of professions that have the highest divorce rates. University professors are near the top of the list. To succeed at the highest levels of academia basically means you need to be married to your job.
That’s why I said "tend" to be.
Really? Strikes me as being an extremely lame reason for avoiding it if you were otherwise interested. It also doesn’t explain how the supposed dominance of the politically left in college/university staff (which I don’t necessarily accept exists at all, although you apparently do) came to exist in the first place.
I think it is probably important to differentiate between social and economic views of the left.
I think higher education tends to correlate with higher social liberalism because of being exposed to a broader world of ideas and viewpoints (something along the lines of what rjung stated in post #4, although I think there is more than just fear involved). In this regard, I would be willing to bet that there is also a high correlation between social liberalism in the U.S. and having travelled outside of the country (or even having travelled more widely within the country).
For economic liberalism, I am less sure. However, one factor that plays into it may be self-selection…I.e., economic conservatives who are highly educated would tend to look on the business world more favorably vis-a-vis the academic world whereas for economic liberals that would tend to be the opposite.
the left dominates higher education because the more education you accumulate, the less susceptible you are to the right wing bullshit machine.
It’s not that you start out left and get educated.
you get educated and then you move left.
As opposed to all those wide-eyed college student liberals that move right as they gain life experience? That seems be a larger trend.
I am quite educated and consider myself libertarian/conservative. What went wrong with me and others like me according to your theory?
the deplorable transformation to which you refer, and to which a depressingly large (if still a minority) of graduates subject, arises not from the accrued education, but from personal failings, in this instance a prediliction to greed, fear, and a sense of personal emptiness.
Those who were so wounded in their childhood, alas, are susceptible to these perversions of human(e) nature.
Fascinating. Tell me more.
the right wing paradigm, which is essentially competitive, zero-sum, scarcity based, uses tokens of worldly success to ameliorate the essential tension that afflicts human beings, cursed with a knowledge of their impending mortality.
EG, “he who dies with the most toys wins”
Education tends to highten appreciation of the “eternal” and also to bring into sharper relief the folly of sacrificing eternal values for temporal gains.
See, inter alia, Dr. Faustus, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Etc
Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? If we’ve got this fifth column of adacemics, “indoctrinating” our precious youth, how come we’re not up to the armpits in wild-eyed, molotov cocktail-throwing anarchists?
One hallmark of your average college student is the uncritical rejection of orthodoxies. Then they graduate and become uncritically accepting of same. The smart ones try to avoid both.
Wow, that’s deep. And completely wrong. The conservative vision is NOT ‘zero-sum’. That’s the liberal vision, in which the rich can only get richer off the backs of the poor. Conservatives are all about policies that create growth and make the economy bigger. Liberal policies are all about taxing the engines of growth and redistributing it to the ‘have-nots’.
As for ‘scarcity based’ - economics is scarcity based. Another concept liberals seem to have a hard time with.
Before you can make the outrageous claim that conservatism arises from a lack of education, or that colleges are more liberal because the people there are smarter and better educated, you’re going to need to explain why so many Nobel prizes in economics have been awarded for essentially conservative insights.
That’s how it worked for me. In college I was an ordinary liberal with libertarian leanings. In grad school I started to move further left. In law school I became a socialist.
Who decides on the award of those prizes? Are there any socialists on the relevant committee?
I think we have a chicken and egg problem there.