I don’t know if this thread will even demonstrate enough vitality to merit the move to GD.
Snoopy, I figured since it was had no basis in fact and was pure opinion, I might as well make one huge sweeping generalization.
Speaking as a former social worker and current academic, I regard this as utter horsecrap. Many if not most of the PhDs I know think of teaching as a pain-in-the-ass distraction from their scholarly work.
As an actual liberal (as opposed to the “left-wing” connotation associated with the word in America) I think the correlation is so complex that we’ll never find a root cause. I’ll throw out a few (complete) guesses as to why, feel free to shoot them down if you like:
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Conservatives generally will do something more “real world” like start a business rather than deal in academics, just from the nature of their views.
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There is an (unfounded) stereotype that conservatives are stupid. This is in part founded by people like Fred Phelps and the worse elements of the Bible Belt. Thus, a person working in academics might alter their views as to avoid this stigma.
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This is tied in with #2: Since the majority of academics are left-leaning, there is pressure on up-and-comings to adopt the views of their profs, who in turn do the same to their future students.
Any insults that this might imply aren’t intentional. This is just how I see it could happen that a situation like this evolves.
How is this relevant to the discussion? I’m a starving academic myself and I know I can make more money if I get another job, which is why I never complain about my financial status. And I fail to see how that affects one’s views on politics and economics.
Once I recovered from laughter, I resorted to a little web searching. The statement above can be taken as true as long as you suscribe to the elitist theory that there are a small group of highly intelligent people who are generally in academia and who are supremely qualified to run the world. However, if you expand the “intelligent, educated” people pool to include those who have college educations, the picture changes. Here is a link to a study that shows that, in Arkansas, 39% of Republicans have college degrees and 23% of Democrats have college degrees:
Arkansas Education
You have to remember that we’ve been beaten with the mantra “Republicans are the party of the rich”. If we accept the above quoted education relationship, we have to conclude that ignorance leads to wealth. You just can’t have it both ways.
Interesting observation, there, KenGr.
And thanks for trying to take a level-headed approach to the subject Speaker for the Dead.
Here’s a study that confirms the assumption of this thread:Bias Evident in Professors
Well…
No I don’t have a cite handy, but I think it is true that the academic professor, especially the humanities and social sciences professors, are, as a group, politically far to the left of American society as a whole.
Rather than argue about whether this is because they (a) are smarter, more selfless, wiser, more thoughtful, or (b) have their head in the clouds, can’t deal with the “real world,” are out of touch, etc., I would propose that the difference results from the fact that people of different political orientations are attracted to different types of professions.
If you are critical or skeptical about capitalism, the free market, etc., then I suggest you are going to find the academic world more attractive. The benefits of being in academia are going to outweigh the fact that other jobs have higher salaries. Notice that I’m not saying someone is inside our outside the “real world” (whatever that means) or “can’t hack it” or something equally inane.
If, on the other hand, you believe in the free market, and you believe that captilism is the best way to organize a society, then being an academic will–all things being equal–be a less appealing option for you. To this type of person, the lower salaries available to academics will be a larger factor. So, in general, these types of people will tend to gravitate to higher paying jobs outside of academia.
On top of that, there is a reinforcing process, where people will tend to choose–again, all things being equal–to be with people like themselves.
Obviously there are way too many people posting here that just don’t get the concept of “The Straight Dope.”
Let’s see, we have someone who thinks “Liberal=Democrat” and “Conservative=Republican”. So Sam Nunn and Nelson Rockefeller, etc., accidently joined the wrong parties?
We got the anti-syllogism that “Republicans are rich, stupid people are Republican therefore stupid people are rich.” Of course not, but there is this astonishing recent trend where rich people manage to convince poor people they have their best interests at heart.
The overwhelming majority of college classes have nothing to do with politics. You very, very rarely get into that except when that is in fact the topic of the course. I only had two admitted liberal profs in all my years as a student. Both in History! What a surprise. One was fired for having liberal views. (Didn’t know that could happen, did you!) The other was an old tenured guy who like to gloat that he predicted everything about Vietnam all before it happened. (That only makes him a liberal according to the recent rewriting of American history. Goldwater was very anti-Vietnam, Kennedy pro-Vietnam, remember.)
And again, Colleges are very much The Real World. Their are extremely tight budgets, huge demands on times, Pointy Haired Bosses working above you, and on and on.
I know a dept. chair that tells his new hires “You have 6 years to bring in $1,000,000 in grants or you’re out.” That’s not exactly what WalMart tells new cashiers. Tenure is also vastly misunderstood. I had tenure. It took no pressure off me at all. I had to bring in money, teach, go to meetings, publish, just like before. If you goof off once you have tenure, they will make your life even more miserable.
Ivory tower my foot.
My former dept. chair was offered positions for twice the salary. But she stayed at her job because that’s where she knew she was doing the most good. To denigrate someone with that kind of dedication is loathesome. For some people, the goal is to help others, not make money. Why put them down for such a wonderful ideal?
How intelligence really figures into this: Saw Mary Matalin on Meet The Press yesterday. She pointed out how the Bush administration has “accelerated” the process to turn over government to the Iraqis. So instead of 3-6 months after the invasion they originally promised, it will be June of 2004 (if you can believe that).
Smart people recognize this as an outright lie. Dumb people get fooled.
If this demographic stops at an undergrad degree as the college education, and if you use this definition of college to correlate with intelligence, I call Bullshit! An undergrad degree is primarily a matter of regular hard work, rather than intelligence or analytical skills. Half of the graduates from past Spring in Elec. Engg. at Purdue, that I know, can’t do shit, without substantial background and guidance. Their conceptual understanding and ability to analyse are moderate at best and rudimentary for the most part. Some of them even have GPAs in the range of 3.6-3.7 / 4.0
I’d put more credibility in a study that compares graduate degrees and doctorates. Anything where you are required to conduct research or write a thesis and then defend it.
I don’t know how well they fit with reality, but those seem like reasonable observations constatine.
That still leaves us without the mechanics of the question resolved (and I doubt it can easily be).
It may rather be that academia is repellant to conservative minds: Researchers help define what makes a political conservative The entire study, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition” is available as a .pdf from this page.
ugh can I please recant my statement now?
I am fascinated by the misconceptions about what is “the real world” and what is not. It seems to me that the more exclusive you become, the less natural (real?) your world is.
What’s real Zoe?
So, ftg, have you summoned up your cite to the effect that anybody who relates to conservative politics is dumber than a rock?
Such as yourself. How interesting that your little rant here should appear in a thread about presentation of the facts being colored by one’s own personal political biases.
Cite? Or did you just mean this as an unsubstantiated political potshot in a GQ thread?
In principle yes, in practice no. Besides the obvious poli sci classes, you have related ones such as history, philosophy, and economics. Furthermore, there are rather large political considerations in many art and literature classes. While they may not be the sort of things you can vote on, to deny that political issues become important in these things is just silly. Then of course you have “ethnic studies” departments (and their counterparts in women’s studies and GLBT studies), which even if they are not biased against conservatives in their hiring and teaching, go against much conservative philosophy in their very existence. Of course there are political issues covered in sociology and psychology as well. And the main academic critic of US foreign policy is a linguistics professor! Plus you can’t deny that there are political issues in religious studies departments as well. The cultural relativism frequently tied to anthropology is also debatable. So what was that you were saying about “nothing to do with politics”?
Anecdotal. And probably not true (i.e. they may very well have admitted their liberalism in other fora besides the class). And in any case not relevant. Bias is just as infectious, indeed more so, if the student is not aware of the possibility for bias.
Anecdotal again. And of course probably speculation on your part, unless the school said, “Professor Smith has been let go because of his liberal political views.”
True, except they are not the Business World, which is where most people earn a living. Funding, hiring, deadlines, job security, etc., all work differently at universities than at corporations of comparable size.
I don’t see how anybody with that kind of dedication was being “denigrated.” Pointing out the flaws of an institution that is by nature idealist does not constitute denigration of said institution.
One might wish to follow forum rules in the future.
As a grad student who will shortly be facing the jungle of the academic job market, I’m extremely amused by answers like this:
Frankly, I’ve always been baffled by the idea that professors are somehow isolated from “the real world,” whatever that means. It’s a career like any other career, and it’s a demanding, competitive one that doesn’t pay particularly well, at least for the first few years. Most people with doctorates have spent several years living close to the poverty line. Moreover, it’s a job that brings you into contact with people from all walks of life; my students and colleagues are an incredibly diverse crowd.
I’m inclined to think that the “liberal bias” of academia is somewhat overstated (often, the people who throw around this phrase are so conservative that everybody looks liberal to them), but can be accounted for by the fact that people gravitate toward environments where they’re comfortable. All other things being equal, we tend to seek out careers where our colleagues share our own values, priorities, and philosophies. There’s a similar “conservative bias” in other, equally influential, fields such as the military, although for some reason fewer people complain about this. Anyway, I don’t think there’s anything sinister afoot in either case.
I am awed that so many of you feel qualified to pass judgment on and put down a profession that you know so little about. And in GQ, too. What, are the holidays making us all cranky, and forgetting our manners? Thanks loads, friends.
All your “real world” comments are particularly galling to me right now as we face another $20 million cut in our budget. Right, I’ll just escape that by running up into my ivory tower–no real world concerns here! Never have to touch reality in my little world! Sarcasm aside, if you look at collaboration between industry at academe, if you look at startups, if you look at how employers gladly hire the product of universities, I think you’d have to give some ground on the idea that professors have little footing in reality or real world operations.
Bob55, I’d like you to clarify what you mean by “most Academia work off government grants” I don’t believe that’s true, not by a long shot, so I’d like to know where that information comes from.
As for politics, instead of pulling pejorative statements out of the nether parts of our anatomy, let’s look at some research. Way back in the 70s Ladd and Lipsett did a pretty thorough study and published a book on the findings.
One of the things that found is that political “leanings,” if you will, vary considerably by field. When measured on a Liberal-Conservatism scale (measuring attitudes on national issues) social scientists were the most liberal, whereas business and engineering faculty were the least. Interestingly though, looking at all faculty together, more faculty came up as conservative as liberal.
Those differences still hold true, and that’s the problem with some of the current studies which claim campuses are rife with liberalism–Horowitz’s 2002 survey, for example, only surveyed faculty in humanities and social sciences, and grossly oversampled some disciplines like philosophy.
Now, admittedly, if one is talking about “political” issues more in such classes than in others, than it’s true that your average college student is going to hear more liberal attitudes from professors (I’m assuming their bias can’t help but infuse their teaching) than conservative ones. That is, it doesn’t matter that your chemistry prof is conservative since you don’t talk about sociopolitcal issues over the beakers and bunsen burners. But it doesn’t change the fact that people or mischaractetizing the faculty as a whole
I am certain I saw some research on the connection between education and liberalism elsewhere, and I’ll go look for it. In the interim, I’m posting this to encourage posters to this thread to answer this question factually, instead of speculatively.