I want to avoid sounding like I’m generalizing here, but why is it that the vast majority of (at least American) universities are staffed by exceedingly liberal-minded professors?
Bear in mind, I’m not saying that all instructors at all universities are liberals, but it’s undoubted that they’re the overwhelming majority. I was just wondering, why is that? What about academia attracts liberal minds?
(Or is academia what makes minds liberal? Wonder, wonder…)
Why do you think they call it a Liberal Arts Degree?
I hope you get a non-partisan, factual answer to this question, but I fear you will not.
I think one exists. My guess is that the not-for-profit sectors of the economy attract liberals.
When I was a student worker in college, a supervisor explained it this way: During Vietnam, majoring in education was a way to avoid the draft. Vietnam dragged on a for a long time so many of these people finished advanced degrees. The people avoiding the draft were on the left so now you have the University level full of the people who avoided the draft.
ok, let me preface this with a few things before I get crucified. This is not my opinion, it is someone elses but it made sense to me. The woman who told me this was extremely liberal and her husband had avoided the draft this way and was a professor. This also obviously only works for the present.
I think this topic is really more for GD than GQ though.
Simple and off-the-cuff impression:
My father was an academic (as was my mother). He was a Dean at a private Liberal Arts university. While he was both very intelligent and well educated, his means of making a living was outside the economic currents that affect most of the rest of the world’s attempts to make a living.
He was very much the “ivory tower pinko” and, while I respected much of his analytical acumen (and not so much his Great White academic political skills), I came to realize as I grew up that he just couldn’t grasp what it really takes to make an economy function.
IMHO, of course.
I doubt much of value will come from this thread. There are two major theories I am familiar with:
Those making a career in higher education tend to think in abstracts and are not pressured by petty concerns. And obviously, they are quite intelligent. Therefore, they gravitate to liberal viewpoints.
College professors are isolated from the real world and the consequences of their actions and positions. This makes it easy to be leftist (affecting other people’s money and lives). Higher education became very liberal in the 60’s and 70’s and the selection process now freezes out conservatives.
I doubt that either of these explanations is very helpful. However, I think there is a real problem with the faculty selection process. Universities usually stress bringing in “outsiders” to get diversity in the faculty but i see very little evidence that this extends to political stance. In fact, there is strong evidence that some institutions shy away from conservatives.
Seeing now The Long Road’s reply, I’ll add my father was a WWII vet.
I think (you’re right, TLR, hardly GQ) my father’s perceptions of economic functions were shaped largely by the way funding and promotion, etc., seemed to work in the academic environment of his time. The university was a centrally planned economy that bore fruit not so much based on some measure of profit, but more so on the personal forces one could muster.
I’d suspect things have changed somewhat.
I too have heard ** The Long Road’s** theory from Neil Boortz (a Libertarian).
Just anecdotal, but I’ve heard professors moan and groan about Bush and his tax cuts because they won’t be able to get as much in grant money that year. Most Academia work off of government grants, so the less money the government has to spend, the smaller the piece of the pie for research. Liberals tend to be pro-big government and pro-higher taxes, while Conservatives the opposite is usually true (except lately - the government is becoming more and more bloated under Bush as well).
The real world is “survival of the fittest,” where profits & performance rule the day. In the real world, what works works, without regard to feelings or “fairness”. The rules in the real world are based on how it is, not on how we wish it were. The brutal but honest environment of the real world is a haven for conservatives, but considered virtually uninhabitable by liberals.
The university is a “safe haven” for people who have difficulty dealing with the jungle of the real world.
I’d be more comfortable answering this if it were in IMHO, as I doubt you’ll ever come up with a ‘factual’ answer. Anyway, my opinion is that academics (especially the liberal arts variety, which make up something like 75% of the total) tend to focus more on ideals and theory, rather than on the secular world of opportunism and short-sighted consumerism. They read Thoreau rather than buy the new European-style suit (out of necessity as well as by choice) or focus on ways to fleece the American consumer out of his dollar. Given that, academics are likely to favor political values that support equality and community rather than big business or corporate greed. You might also infer that intelligence and morality–both traits prized by the academy–tend to go with liberalism.
Of course, that’s just one person’s spin on the equation and fodder for a fight. Surely you’ll hear from someone happy to argue the other side of the coin.
Agree or disagree with me, as you like. I would suggest, however, that I don’t think the equation drawn by the OP (academy = liberal) is nearly so accurate as it may have been a generation or two ago.
My personal impression is that there are now PLENTY of politically conservative thinkers in the academic world. They probably don’t comprise the majority, but I would speculate that they now represent a healthy, well-spoken, and growing minority.
Of course, I would also suspect that that percentage peaked about 6 months ago and is declining now. Tradition has it that Universities are at their most liberal during times of unpopular war, so we’ll be seeing a pretty strong rebound of liberalism over the next year or two, I’d wager.
Ok, time for me to put on my kevlar helmet and flak jacket.
The explanation I read in a sociology textbook was this: professors have very prestigous jobs, yet they aren’t payed very well (relatively speaking), and this leads to enormous frustration, especially at “the establishment” which they perceive as being responsible for their financial situation. This anger at a perceived establishment leads to more and more liberal views.
A huge load of misconceptions about academia here.
First of all, the liberalness of academics goes much farther back than Vietnam. Ever heard of Socrates?
Secondly, there is a very, very strong correlation with liberalism and intelligence-education. Smart, learned people generally tend to be liberal. Of course this is a major nuisance to conservatives. They hate the idea that their views are associated with stupid ignorant people. But as many of us know, it’s a correlation. It’s not a 100% one way or the other thing.
The first true-blue Reagan conservative I ever met in academia was a complete shock. Took a while for me to catch on. Then I realized: He was completely self-centered. Didn’t care about anyone else in the least.
Now, this aspect is quite foreign to academics in general. People who teach, advise, etc. generally are in it because they are into helping others. And I think this is the biggest reason why academics has so many liberals.
I also strongly object to the notion that academics is in some what isolated from the rest of the world. That is most definitely not true at all. Most professors work hard for very little money. At my last college, no professor made as much money as a junior teacher in the local school system. (Don’t fall for the “I heard of a professor who made $100K and taught only one class” type anecdotes. That’s not how it works for most profs.) If you think college profs are ivory tower isolated eggheads, then you have to throw in public school teachers as mega-super eggheads.
Academics is definitely in the real world. Saying they’re not is just one of those Big Lie type of things that academics haters throw out.
Well, everyone’s kind of saying the same thing, and it’s pretty obvious which answers come from liberals v. conservatives.
I’m sure you have your cite handy.
My father’s economic world was most definitely part of the real world, as are all. But it was a niche that didn’t have to respond to all the stimuli that ennervate the general economy. And he, very self-centered politically driven left-wing academic that he was (which, of course, doesn’t reflect on liberal academics as a whole but is merely a counterpoint to ftg’s assertion about his meeting with a conservative academic) could never quite grasp that profit as a goal is essential to enterprise.
Those can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
I’ve known several people who have made a transition from productive careers in academia to productive careers in industry, and vice versa.
Hmm…, but none in the humanities that I can recall at the moment.
Or is academia what makes minds liberal?
I think so. It’s easy to get up on a high horse and preach liberalism to the unwashed masses when you don’t live in the real world, have access to everything you need and almost no contact with people who don’t share your politics.
Since this has degenerated into people throwing around opinions based on zero facts, I’ll throw out an opinion about professors/teachers/instructors/etc. If you wanted to make more money, you should have gotten another job. Shut your GD mouth up and live with the consequences of your choices! All right, please let the flame war begin. Yeehaaaa!!!
I strangely feel so much better. 
I haven’t seen any starving professors lately, Long Road. Starving teachers/instructors, yes. But Ph.D.'s? No.