Should college faculties seek political diversity?

Great Debates
21

It’s a question of interpretation. My bold-faced quote said, “College campuses tend to be representative of leftist views, he said, which is self-sustaining.” The idea of being self-sustaining suggests to me that liberal faculties tend to hire more liberals. YMMV.

I refuse to address this point. I don’t want to find myself with tarpal in the Pit. :eek:

<< If [december] refuses to recognize that, for example, the Economics department at the University of Chicago is overwhelmingly right-wing…>>

I haven’t addressed that point at all. The existance of a single exception, consisting of one department in one school, wouldn’t invalidate the general thesis. Yes, of course, the U. of Chicago has long been noted for the Chicago School of conservative economic thinking, led by Milton Friedman, George Stigler, et. al.

22

Anyone heard of Simpson’s paradox (no, not Homer Simpson).

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<<Anyone heard of Simpson’s paradox >>

It occassionally comes up in my wife’s bio-statistics work.

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december, for statistics on the (shrinking but still-present) correlation between high income and political conservatism, as well as the (growing) correlation between business/entrepreneurial occupations and political conservatism, see this Washington Post article. Still working on the stats for faculty at b-schools and law schools; I trust you aren’t contesting the claim that faculty at self-described conservative Christian colleges tend to be conservative.

EJ: *I think it goes without saying that college campuses, their students, and their faculty, tend to be liberal. *

For a number of institutions, I agree with you; for a number of others, I don’t. How about Texas A&M? Babson? Notre Dame? Brigham Young? Vanderbilt? Yup, the “elite” institutions of the Ivy League, Stanford, etc., tend in my experience to be strongly liberal—at least in their humanities departments—but there are a whole bunch of students at other schools, you know.

I think it’s generally unfortunate, as it gives students a very narrow view of the world.

I echo jshore’s question: then where are all the conservative grad school applicants yearning to get PhD’s in English and history and sociology? If this imbalance is bothering conservatives so much, then maybe some of them should quit their jobs and go back to school in order to level the playing field.

*I find it ironic the colleges fall all over themselves to profess their commitments to diversity of superficial qualities such as race and gender, yet have no problem with a complete dearth of diversity of thought, opinion, and ideology. *

BWAAAAHAAHAHAHAAA! :slight_smile: Honey, if you think that college faculties have “a complete dearth of diversity of thought, opinion, and ideology”, you ain’t been to a faculty meeting lately, nor for that matter to an academic conference. There are a lot of different opinions on academic campuses, even if there happen to be a minority of registered Republicans.

Uncle Toby: *I always had the impression that for a lot of people who favor quotas a disparity of numbers was de factor proof of discrimination. I know this is not he legal definition but it seemed to me to be the way institutions who have taken affirmative action to heart have viewed it. Is this a mischaracterization. *

Yes, I think so. Representative numbers are an easy and obvious yardstick for gauging levels of diversity, but I think that all institutions who have to deal with the actual nuts and bolts of affirmative action programs are quite aware that the issues are often more complex. Recall my comment above about whites and males being overrepresented in college faculties, even the faculties of the liberal institutions most committed to ethnic diversity. Even allowing for residual discrimination, you can’t get away from the fact that sometimes the qualified applicant pool just doesn’t reflect the proportions in the general population. What this usually means, as jshore notes, is that we need to work harder for diversity in the earlier stages of the training process.

Is diversity important? Absolutely, IMHO: working, studying, and living only with people who are overwhelmingly like you has a very sheltering effect, and I think we want the intellectual effects of higher education to be the reverse of sheltering. Should the quest for diversity trump all other considerations? No.

25

Hey, I’m only going with what you gave me. You said:

You did not say:

It would seem to me to be commonsensical that anyone whose goals do not coincide with the institution that is doing the hiring will be discriminated against in the hiring process. If you are now suggesting that conservatives who are not outspoken white supremacists are believers in “other forms of conservatism that don’t directly conflict with the institution’s fundamental goals”, then this should not be offered as a reason for such conservatives not wanting to work in these institutions either. Bottom line is that I see “goals not coinciding” as being something that would influence the hirer as much as the potential hiree. You seem to be suggesting that this consideration explains decisions of candidates but not of employers - I don’t see it.

There are exceptions to everything, as you know. Frankly, the fact that these conservatives are “bloody damn smart and high-achieving in their fields” points the other way (to the extent that a few people can be used to show anything) - generally a group that is discriminated against tends to have to overachieve to accomplish what others can do with a normal level of accomplishment.

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IzzyR: Bottom line is that I see “goals not coinciding” as being something that would influence the hirer as much as the potential hiree. You seem to be suggesting that this consideration explains decisions of candidates but not of employers - I don’t see it.

I see your point, but I don’t know how you reconcile it with the absence of evidence (except december’s single anecdote from Robert Bork) that there is overt discrimination against academic job candidates because of political conservatism. Where are all these conservative candidates that you assume must be “discriminated against in the hiring process”? Are they just too committed to free-market employment principles to object to such discrimination?

Frankly, the fact that these conservatives are “bloody damn smart and high-achieving in their fields” points the other way (to the extent that a few people can be used to show anything) - generally a group that is discriminated against tends to have to overachieve to accomplish what others can do with a normal level of accomplishment.

I think you’re reading too much into my statement. I didn’t say that these conservatives of my acquaintance were overachieving with respect to their competition; their liberal colleagues, AFAICT, are “bloody damn smart and high-achieving in their fields” too.

Cites update: I continue to look for stats about b-school and law school faculty political affiliations (and I hope december’s busting butt on the cites I asked him for too!). No luck so far, except a Business Week reference to Olin’s S. Greenbaum as “relatively liberal for a B-school dean”, which I take to mean that at least BW thinks that B-schools tend to be conservative.

Rather a surprising discovery, though, on a slightly different topic: perhaps those students at elite institutions aren’t as liberal as we’ve all been assuming. From a 1996 survey of Harvard undergraduates:

Hmm. Would you have guessed that over 50% of Harvard undergraduates would describe themselves as “moderate to conservative” on economic issues? I’m going to be redoubling my vigilance about cite-free generalizations about “campus liberalism” from now on. In the meantime, I hope it won’t be considered too flagrantly socialist of me to wish everybody a happy Labor Day, :slight_smile: and see you after classes start!

27

<<I hope december’s busting butt on the cites I asked him for too!>>

Here are two, George and Stout.

This next one doesn’t prove bias in hiring, but it’s funny. It praises the openness of a school that allows a professor to speak his mind, even though he’s so far to the right that he’s a Truman-Kennedy Democrat! It’s nice to see the whole political spectrum is welcome – from left to far left to loony left. :wink:

In fact, the article goes on to say that this moderate Democrat is not always welcome to speak his mind. “He never got a chance to speak, though, because a large group of leftist protesters – a “mob of thugs,” as he puts it – made so much commotion that he was not allowed to speak.”

Dartmouth and Cornell: “left-wing supremacy”

Here’s a list of demands from a Columbia University conservative alumni association. They evidently perceive a bias in the treatment of conservative faculty

Incidentally, I wasn’t looking for Ivy League examples. These are simply the first ones to pop up out of google.

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—It occassionally comes up in my wife’s bio-statistics work.—

Can you see it’s possible relevance here?

29

Sorry, Apos, I do not see what you’re driving at.

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Let me hypothecate an oversimplified example of the paradox in a college with just two departments, A and B (A is larger, while B is smaller, but more prestigious).
70 of 100 liberals (70 percent) who applied to department A are admitted, and so are 15 of 20 conservatives (75 percent) who applied.
In department B, 5 of 20 liberals (25 percent) who applied are admitted, and so are 35 of 100 conservatives (35 percent).

Notice something odd: in each department, a higher percentage of conservatives are admitted than liberals.

But if we combine the numbers, however, we find that 75 of the 120 liberal applicants (62.5 percent) were admitted to the college as a whole, whereas only 50 of the 120 conservative applicants (41.7 percent) were.

This example can be generalized to chairs within a department as well.

Of course, whether or not this is what’s happening I have no idea. But it could account for some of the disparity (though not those things as extreme as in the OP): again assuming that conservatives have, on average, different preferences for what sort of positions they want (for instance, the more limited but higher paying and more prestigious chairs)

31

That’s my hypothesis as well. The question then becomes why this is so (assuming, for the moment, that it is). It might be suggested that this is a result of indoctrination by the liberal faculty; personally, I reject this pretty firmly, and don’t believe it can be more than a quite minor effect. It might be, as Kimstu posited, that liberals are more attracted to the less than high paying world of advanced studies to begin with. I’d accept this as a partial explanation, but I would be surprised to learn that it would account for differences as vast as cited in the OP. (Parenthetically, I would also be somewhat surprised to find that what was cited in the OP is entirely representative.) I might suggest that an openly conservative person in the liberal arts might feel at least uncomfortable in a work environment that leans far to the left, so that in some sense it may be self-selecting. That’s just idle speculation, though (it’s true of at least one conservative professor I know, but then, he’s still here, after all, and discomfort or not, he took the job).

More to the point is whether this is a problem or not. While I suspect that the majority of the professors teaching the humanities classes that I took were liberal, they certainly didn’t really do much about my political beliefs. Perhaps that may be due to the fact that the majority of my studies were in science rather than in humanities, but I’m not at all convinced that this is really a problem.

32

Kimstu, it’s time to throw in the towel. You lost this entire argument a great many posts ago. Quoting anyone’s post that points out that Harvard undergraduates are 80% moderate-to-liberal is the kiss of death, if you consider that almost all Harvard graduates are unblessed by even the acquaintance of someone conservative. You’ve dug your own grave here, I think.

33

Perhaps the problem with lack of alternative POV in the humanities is illustrated by a story I heard last night over dinner.

The speaker had a petitioner come to her door with a host of argument designed to defeat voter apathy and get her to take the time to sign on for a version universal health care legislation. His back up arguments were concerning the remote possibility that the person might not be apathetic but did not agree with provisions of this particular version of state mandated health care The lady in question was not apathetic but was against any form of government intervention in health care (she works in the industry and has seen what they’ve accomplished so far first hand). The petitioner could not even conceive this possibility, how could anyone be against health care? It didn’t compute. He had never been exposed to the reasons she gave and could not even grasp their parameters. He was a humanities graduate student at the local university.

34

Apos, ISTM that what you are calling “Simpson’s Paradox” is pretty similar to the idea that the applicants are mostly liberal. There may well be truth in that idea. However it doesn’t account for the extreme ratios. In your hypothetical examples, 25% of faculty were conservatives; that would be a terrific improvement.

Incidentally, someone mentioned the idea that college faculty were poorly paid. This is no longer the case. When I went to college in the early 60’s, college faculty were paid less than high school teachers. Today, college teachers receive quite a decent income. Salaries where my wife teaches are unusually high, because it’s a medical school – many are in 6 figures. However, even liberal arts colleges tend to pay respectible salaries.

35

I’ve been plugging stuff into Google to try to get a some sort of references about colleges and universities that don’t fall into a the Ivy League or UC category. For example, I’d like to see what the conservative/liberal ratio is in engineering and the hard sciences, as well as land-grant ag-oriented colleges.

While the Texas A&Ms and the Virginia Tech’s of the world may not hold the same name recognition as the Harvards and Cornells, these kind of institutions, in my experience, have decidedly conservative faculties. Furthermore, these ag and engineering schools pump out far more students than those prestigious liberal arts schools, and it could be argued that the impact these more blue-collar schools have on society at large may make up for the fewer students that their more cisible counterparts produce.

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Umm, visible.

Not to leave out the cisable counterparts, though.

37

You know, thinking about it, I’m not too surprised that Harvard students tend to be more economically conservative than socially conservative, due mostly to the fact that it take a heck of a lot of money to go there to begin with. I hadn’t thought about that before, but it does make a certain amount of sense to me that if Harvard tends to have lots of students from wealthy backgrounds, then one might expect it to have lots of students who are economically conservative. Again, though, this is just speculation.

I do want to point out, though, that the political beliefs of the students are not particularly relevant except in that if most liberal arts students are liberal than naturally most liberal arts faculty would be expected to be liberal as well.

38

I would think that any time such a huge lack of diversity exists we should be suspicious of underlying issues, especially with something that essentially seems to boil down to political affiliation (not asserting a cause, here, but wow is that a pretty large gap as I see it).

I would tend to agree with the notion that fiscal conservatives would rather be in the workforce than in the education force (not to say teaching isn’t work, of course). I would also think that most of a person’s education in colleges do not tend to provoke political leanings.

39

—Apos, ISTM that what you are calling “Simpson’s Paradox” is pretty similar to the idea that the applicants are mostly liberal.—

No: the applicants in total is perfectly equal. It’s the differential rates of application to one position or another that make all the difference.

—However it doesn’t account for the extreme ratios. In your hypothetical examples, 25% of faculty were conservatives; that would be a terrific improvement.—

Sure: but it could account for some of the difference, making the situation a lot less extreme from the position of anyone being biased against conservatives (though it doesn’t help much those colleges that support affirmative action)

—Incidentally, someone mentioned the idea that college faculty were poorly paid. This is no longer the case—

I think you sort of missed the point of that one. It’s not that college faculty are dirt poor: it’s that they are paid FAR LESS than someone of equal education could make in the private sector: making the private sector a heck of a lot more attractive for many people.

40

Apos – I re-read your example more carefully, Yes, that would be a case of Simpson’s paradox.

However, note that the academic comparisons cited were mostly department by department, rather than in total. Simpson’s Paradox can only come into play if one is considering overall rates across departments.

<<It’s not that college faculty are dirt poor: it’s that they are paid FAR LESS than someone of equal education could make in the private sector: making the private sector a heck of a lot more attractive for many people.>>

Maybe so, in some cases. Certainly in the hard sciences and in the professions.

However, the liberal arts majors don’t have that many high-paying opportunities in the private sector. At least, there aren’t many opportunities in their chosen fields. There are no giant Comparitive Literarture factories, nor are there highly paid executives selling wholesale literature comparisons. :wink:

Some English majors may find that the commercial value of their education is the ability to speak to words, “Do you want fries with that?” :frowning:

For these people, a professorship paying $50,000 - $100,000 a year may be quite desirable from a economic perspective.