ultrafilter writes:
> It’s not necessarily quite as simple as that. If you look at a map of the 2004 US
> election results broken up by district, you’ll note that the bluest parts of the
> map are nearest the major cities, where you have (on average) wealthier
> people.
>
> Of course, it’s also not necessarily as simple as saying that the Republicans are
> conservative and the Democrats are liberal…
This post was in reply to Richard Parker, who said that wealth correlates with conservatism. It’s in fact even more complicated that this. On the average, wealth correlates with conservatism, but it’s only a modest correlation. There’s also a correlation between liberalism and coming from urban areas rather than a rural one, but again it’s more complicated. Suburbs don’t tend to be particularly liberal. Big cities tend to more clearly be liberal. In general, predicting whether someone will be liberal or conservative based on how close they live to a big city, how much money they make, how much education they have, what part of the country they live in, what racial and ethnic ancestry they have, whether they are male or female, how religious they are, etc., is very complicated. If you asked someone about all of these things and probably a few more such things, you could reasonably well predict someone’s liberalism/conservatism, but it would take all of these things.
I think it’s interesting that no one has given any real statistics on the liberalism/conservatism of academics. Does anyone know of such statistics? Is there any correlation with the academic field in which they teach? Is there any correlation with the academic quality of the university or of the department? Are there any accurate, comprehensive statistics about this? The only surveys I’ve seen in articles about this subject are surveys of half a dozen departments in half a dozen universities, deliberately chosen I think to be the most liberal departments in the most liberal universities. I’d like to see far more comprehensive statistics.
My memories of college and grad school were that the opportunities that you had to be affected by the political beliefs of your professors were actually fairly small. I was much more affected by the bull sessions with my fellow students than my interactions with my professors when I was an undergraduate. Grad school I mostly remember as being years of never getting enough sleep, never having enough money, working like crazy to get through the material, and not even being that much affected by fellow students, let alone my professors.
I did most of my undergrad work at a college that was very liberal. On average, I suspect, most of the students are still moderately liberal. There was hardly any consensus even in that, though. The only two alumni of the college that might be recognized in national politics are moderate Republicans.
One of the most accurate things I’ve read about college students being affected by liberal professors was an article in The Weekly Standard, a moderately conservative magazine, several years ago. One of the editors spent a semester teaching at a well known university generally considered fairly liberal. This editor’s conclusions were that, first, the students were no more liberal on graduating from the university than when they arrived. They were slightly more liberal than the average American, perhaps, but so were their parents. The sort of parents who wanted to send their children to this university are somewhat liberal on average. The editor’s other conclusion was that students are not nearly so easily swayed by professors’ opinions as people think. The students would discuss among themselves which professors were weirdly liberal (or weirdly conservative, I presume) and warn other students about them. They would joke about them, not be persuaded by them. Again, students are more affected by other students than by professors.
