I find it surprising that you would assume the most intelligent people become university professors. Does that mean Bill Gates and the heads and executives of major corporations are failed university professors?
I would guess it takes more to make it in the real world of business, politics, etc. than to make it in Academia. Intellectuals have the easy part of criticising what others are doing so they tend to be anti-whatever-is-in-place. During the cold war it seemed communist intellectuals were all in Western universities while in the Communist Countries intellectuals were not so enthusiastically communist.
University professors may have a very high degree of knowledge in their field but in many cases they have an extremely narrow view of things. I have known several such cases. When it comes to everyday common sense sometimes they can be way behind the common guy who has a basic education and a general interest in things.
Another point to take into account is that people tend to cluster around similar people. Probably persons with conservative and with politically incorrect views are not going to be so attracted to a job where they would feel surrounded by people who do not like their views.
I think it was William F. Buckley who said that he would rather be governed by 100 random people picked out of the phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. And I agree completely.
I have to agree that there is nothing special about a masters or Ph.D, especially in the softer sciences like history or philosophy. The easiest courses I ever took in University were graduate-level philosophy courses. I had a harder time with introductory electronics in junior college.
I know an awful lot of very average intellects with advanced degrees. And we used to joke after the Berlin Wall fell that Communism was finally tossed on the ash-heap of history, because everyone knew it was a failure except for the faculties of Western Colleges.
One thing I have learned is that you cannot guess anyone’s intelligence level. Certainly, college profs are more learned in their field of study than the average university, but as for having a higher I.Q., I don’t buy it. As a matter of fact, I recently got into a discussion of “imaginary time” as covered by Hawking with a carpenter. Was he an expert in any field? I dunno. Was he well rounded and highly intelligent? You bet.
Although I don’t know the political bend of Dr. James Van Allen, my “professor” in Astronomy my freshman year of college, I can guess that “Dirk”, the T.A. for my class was very liberal. Again, I hate to guess without knowing, but I would say that T.A.'s tend to be more liberal than the actual professors.
Ultra left-wing liberals can’t be smarter because:
They don’t understand that there is a price to be paid for everything. No one wants anyone else to go hungry, but you have to draw the line somewhere. If the general public would actually do something (i.e. Habitats for Humanity, soup kitchens) instead of griping about our social condition, we’d all be in better shape.
If I may extend the generalization, it has been my subjective observation that engineering/science profs are generally conservative, and humanities/arts profs are generally liberal. The rivalry between these groups is a dirty little secret of academia.
Good point…at my Uni, the Engineering Profs were almost all Arch-Conservatives, and would sometimes go off on tirades in class about how much they hated the liberals over in the aptly-named “Liberal Arts” College on campus. There was often talk of “seceding” from the University due to personality conflicts.
On the Kansas election atlas, only two counties voted predominantly Gore: Douglas (home to the University of Kansas) and Wyandotte (an inner-city’ish county). It is interesting to note that the county holding the other big University, Kansas State, voted Bush.
I have a family member who is a faculty member at a university in the northeast. I once asked him how he got the job. He told me that he walked into the interview and immediately recognized the head of the hiring committee - they had been arrested together at a protest.
This supports the “liberals associating with liberals” theory.
I also suspect that university life lends itself to a more idealistic outlook. What I mean is, if you put together a bunch of people that are above average in intelligence and self-discipline, stuff works a lot better than it otherwise would.
I think a lot of social problems – crime, drugs, etc., --are caused by a chunk of the population - perhaps 5%, that simply make a lot of trouble.
On a university campus, there are far fewer of these “bad apples,” so it’s easy to be more idealistic.
Hey now, don’t you be dissin’ Hercules. I mean the Max Volume and the Naked Lady Wrestlers were from there. IIRC there are some really attractive petroleum refineries right there too.
Economic’s professors that I had seemed to be split between extreme liberals and conservatives. I remember Dr. Schnell in particular, who was one of Reagan’s supply side economic advisors and he couldn’t get any more right.
I would like to reply to the argument of some that the reason behind the liberal/college connection is that the more educated tend to be open minded and then thus more liberal.
While I agree that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be open minded, I do not think that being open minded necessarily leads to a liberal view of things. If someone is open minded they are able to consider the other sides viewpoint and understand why the other side had the views that they do. I have met closed minded liberals and open-minded conservatives and visa-versa.
Liberalism does not necessarily increase with education. It was mentioned here that “A person who is open minded is less likely to continue to hold on to the past” However one would be considered educated if they were knowledgeable about the past and that means knowledgeable with what has been successful political practices and unsuccessful ones. Sometimes the conservative practices have proved to solve a problem better, and someone arguing for these policies would definitely want to “hold on to the past” if they were knowledgeable about past social, economic, or foreign political policy.
I’m also not too sure that the right/left split in academia is so lopsided. I tend to think that a lot of the generalization expressed in the OP is a common misconception. I believe that the public misconception is based on the trend that in nearly any university/college setting the liberal factions tend to be a good bit louder. The English and liberal arts departments (whom I would consider to be generally liberal in makeup) are usually protesting about something. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or at least the press coverage.
As another note, it is misleading to cite some standard “liberal” and “conservative” causes and assume that they are automatically are espoused uniformly throughout the liberal or conservative establishment. For example there are republicans who are seen as pro-environment or democrats who are for the death penalty–both causes that are commonly more strongly espoused by the other party.
This is the very definition of “liberal”. Anyone who doesn’t think like that doesn’t qualify as a liberal.
Applying well-analyzed knowledge of the past to descisionmaking is liberal. Holding onto the past because you are in awe of your forefathers is conservative.
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I have met closed minded liberals…[/quote
They may have held left-wing views, but that doesn’t make them liberal; there’s a difference. Liberalism is a process one uses in reaching conclusions, conservatism is a list of conclusions.
“Political Correctness” isn’t liberal at all, it’s a new kind of left-wing conservatism in that it’s based on prevailing assumptions about race, etc. (There’s plenty of right-wing PC too, i.e. ‘support the Boy Scouts’.)
Left-wing postions may have started out as the product of liberal thought, but an important part of liberalism is the need to periodically re-evaluate one’s positions. This may land you on the conservative side of some issues, but then again the conservatives may be right for the wrong reasons.
In conclusion I’d say it’s tough to answer the OP without carefully defining the terms.
Applying well-analyzed knowledge of the past to descisionmaking is liberal. Holding onto the past because you are in awe of your forefathers is conservative.
The fact that there are people who believe this frightens me to no end.
To clarify: Left-wing(liberals) favor heavy government involvement in people’s day-to-day affairs, up to and including the usurpation of personal freedoms.
Right-wing(conservatives) favor self-reliance and lesser(or no) government interference, up to and including the overthrow of said government(if tyrannical).
sqweels, as riserius1 points out, there are different ways to define “liberal”. You are alternating liberal in outlook with seeking a liberal (i.e. powerful, active, controlling) governement. They are not the same thing. One can also be economically liberal with money (trade in high risk stocks, for instance) while being governmentally conservative (keep the feds out of my bank account, limit restrictive laws).
That is why I love these types of terms. What persactly do the labels mean, and is everyone using them the same?
Hmm, so it’s the Liberals who are trying to restrict reproductive choice ? I think that “definition” might be a little simplistic. That bit on the virtues of conservatives could use a bit of work as well.
OKay, square those definitions with the respective camps’ positions on sexual conduct, reproductive rights, and consumption of psychoactive substances.
I would never say that all conservatives are less intelligent (the unspoken flip side of the question here). A handful of the stupid people I have met in my life have in fact held liberal views.
However, I have yet to personally met a diehard conservative - and I have met many - whose intelligence extended anywhere beyond what I would call ordinary peasant shrewdness at best.
To top it off, all the REALLY smart people I have ever met were all diehard liberals, with well under half a dozen exceptions (moderates all). So take from that what you will.
Curious question for RTA: Do you feel deep down that there is some possiblity that your judgement of people’s intelligence is biased by their expressed political views? Or are you convinced that your judgement (about these people of your experience) is truly an unbiased one?
