It seems to me that the OP should be restated to ask why humanities and social science professors tend to be liberal. For my part, I have no idea if my professors in electrical engineering, computer science etc. were liberal or conservative. (Except for Stuart Reges!!)
And I agree that people are speculating here, but what the heck, I’ll speculate a little too.
IMHO, a big part of the reason is culture. The culture of modern American academics in humanities and social sciences is liberal already. So to succeed, it helps a lot to conform. For example, when Mrs. Lucwarm wrote her dissertation (modern literature), one of her advisors advised her to make sure she discussed at least one black person. She did not do so (and has not been able to find a job.) A more liberal person would have been more likely to enthusiastically sing the praises of some black writers and would have been better positioned to get a tenure track job.
Another reason is that educated intellectuals tend to be liberal. While it’s comforting to believe that being smarter makes you more likely to be liberal, I think it’s not that simple. IMHO, educated intellectuals tend to think a lot about how to make the world a better place, and it’s natural for such folks to think that one way to do this would be for the government to redistribute wealth to those who are less well off. Note also that a hugely disproportionate amount of academics are Jewish and that there is a strong tradition of liberal thought among Jewish people.
Last, I agree that there is a certain amount of self-selection. People who are not terribly liberal may not want to put up with the rampant liberalism.
Cranky: My comments were not unqualified. I also work at a university, and am required to interact with fellow researchers and facility members on a daily basis. Fortunately, my position also affords me the opportunity to work with outside commercial customers with the same frequency.
Here are my observations:
My commercial customers do indeed live in a “real world.” They are concerned about performance, value, profit, schedule, and results. And not surprisingly, they tend to be conservative in their political outlooks. (How do I know? Because I’m always going out to lunch with them, and politics always seems to make its way into the chit-chat.)
By contrast, the professors I work with tend to be very liberal. And not surprisingly, most do not have the faintest concept of performance, value, profit, schedule, and results. They really do live in their own “safe” world.
I don’t really see this in most of my classes. Then again, I’m a chem major, so the few non-chemistry classes I’ve taken are degree requirements only. Anyway, I do remember one time when I was sitting in my analytical chem class in the spring of 2003 and was told by the prof that we should be out protesting the build-up to the Iraq war instead of being in the lecture hall listening to him talk about anal chem. The amusing part was, none of us left, as we all needed anal chem and it’s a five-credit course.
Sorry to jump on your ass, Crafter_Man. The sum total of the snarky things being said here made me darn pissy. Your posts, though based on anecdotal evidence, are owed some credibility if you’re a faculty member.
I’ve always chafed at the “real world” charges. Faculty members aren’t removed from reality–they shop, they raise children, they pay the mortgage, they vote, they fret over the stock market, they get their oil changed. They live in the real world. People seem to be qualifiying the ‘real world’ as knowing how a business is run–which then means that faculty are unfairly singled out as being removed from the real world. The same could be said for garbage men, nurses, bricklayers…
I’ve got a lot more to say about this but I’d be veering off into one hell of a hijack.
This isn’t consistent with my observations. It’s true that the concept of “profit” is somewhat foreign, since you can’t measure academic output in dollars. Still, “publish or perish” is a fact, and academics are keenly aware that their future depends on their performance. I don’t think the average blue-collar worker or white-collar corporate employee knows any more about “the real world.”
Even if there is a factual answer to the OP, I find this one of the most difficult topics to keep in a GQ mode.
I would second FP’s emphasis on the big picture: plenty of other institutions have biases that don’t get addressed in studies (e.g., I’ve never seen a study on it, but does anyone doubt that the military is predominantly conservative?) Some of these biases may indeed be natural (even necessary) institutional biases – I would certainly not expect to find as many pacifists in the military as in the general public.
In my own contact with academia (I’m a research engineer in the United States), I don’t encounter much liberal bias. I deal with a lot of foreign nationals, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find a liberal bias on, say immigration issues or foreign policy, if the topics ever came up. (It’s important here to not assume that liberal on a single issue equates to ideologically liberal).
If anything, I would estimate that the population of native-born American engineering faculty at public institutions (which teach the largest number of students) has a slight but distinct bias to the right. (Then again, I work for the military, so my data may be skewed).
Regarding the study cited by aeropl: it deals exclusively with the Ivy League. To generalize about all academia from this study would be specious – does anyone question the proposition that the Ivy League is politically to the left of center of the rest of academia?
The Professor’s conclusion is so blatantly biased as to cast some doubt upon the study. One could easily characterize the results in the exact opposite way: people who are too stupid to know any better are liberal, higher intelligence makes them good conservatives, but super-smart people have their heads in the clouds, are out of the real world, etc. In the word’s of Thoreau, there are some ideas so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them.
Without a clear definition of liberal and conservative it’s tough to make any sort of useful statement of correlation between politics and intelligence.
I think the “academia ain’t the real world” idea is based on some truth. The system of academia certainly is the real world. Faculty are not any better protected from the work-a-day pains that everyone else has to face. Faculty are just as up on their current events as everyone else.
However, academics tend to specialize in esoteric knowledge. In my laboratory, we have folks who study the behavior of invertebrates in response to pollutants. In the lab across the way, we have people who concern themselves with gamete production in sea urchins. Then there are the folks upstairs who are mapping monkey brains and ferret brains and rooster brains…
Yes, all of these projects can be related to human health in some way. That’s how they get funded. But sometimes their relationship to the “real world” is quite tenuous. Case in my point: my own dissertation. I spend my time counting nematodes, fer Pete’s sake! Imagine the wastefulness of counting nematodes when I could actually be doing something productive!
I think liberals are more likely to be supportive of knowledge-for-the-sake-of-knowledge than conservatives. The conservative views education as something that should be practical and useful for humans. One they get their education, they leave academia to put their knowledge to practice. The liberal views education as something that can be rewarding in itself, and is more permissive of “out in left field” ideas.
Hence, liberal arts institutions are more liberal than engineering institutions and trade schools.
I’ll repeat my point made above: the study is not problematic because of the study locale so much as the study sampling. They didn’t ask faculty across the university, and worse yet they oversampled certain disciplines so that htey are grossly overrepresented in the responses.
As an academic (middle of the road independent politically) I’d probably be majorly insulted by this if it wasn’t something that popped into my head at almost every faculty meeting. The “poor mouthing” professor is somewhere between the poodle and the telemarketer in the list of “Most Annoying Creatures”. (Yeah yeah yeah… go whine to the waitress at Waffle House about how hard you work for so little money.)
The above professors are also the ones who seem to favor the stereotype that all of their students are spoiled rich kids spending Mama & Daddy’s money on keggers and Abercrombie&Fitch fashions. To a true “starving student” (which I was in the 80s and which still exists, though less than it once did due to Direct Loans) this forms fantasies about icepicks and professorial pain.
I agree with the poster who said that job trends and economic currents for academia are generally different than for the rest of society (then there’s the issue of tenure , which has few parallels outside of academia), but I think that the causes of leftist academics are wwwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy complex and polygenetic and would require a multivolume work.
Incidentally, some of the best and brightest professors I’ve ever known were those who had worked in “the real world” for several years before becoming a professor. These are the ones who came into it eyes open because it was what they wanted to do. (I was a wage slave and corporate drone myself for many years before becoming a professor, and I definitely have a perspective that’s different from those who earned a Ph.D. at 25 and have limited non classroom experience.) Also strangely enough, these tend to be almost uniformly left to middle moreso than most professors.
What’s interesting is the Islamic World, where faculty members have exactly the opposite reputation. Students are more likley to to enter the universities as moderates and emerge as radical conservatives/fundamentalists than they are to emerge as liberals.
It’s not so much that conservative politicians spend less government money, as that they spend it in different places (such as the military). But it is true, in this country and this time, at least, that liberal politicians tend to be more supportive (in a real-world, dollars sense) of education and academia. And college faculty as a rule think that education and academics are important (I hope I don’t need a cite for that statement), so it’s logical that they’ll be predisposed to vote for others who share those views.
Of course, one can debate whether this is a cause or effect. After all, there must be some reason that the liberal politicians tend to support education. One might still argue that education causes liberal views, or that liberal views cause sympathy towards education, via any of the mechanisms proposed thus far. At the very least, though, this effect would tend to reinforce and perpetuate any existing bias.
One thing we need to look at is the university’s liberalizing effects. Kids that start out conservative usually leave quite a bit less conservative. Surely college students arn’t mindless sheep just waiting to be brainwashed by their professors, nor are they so spineless that they’d adopt a radically different worldview just to fit in. So whats the deal?
warning: I’m massively liberal, so of course I’m going to think that is a good thing in these arguments
I think the big factor is exposure to new things. Everybody is going to meet some new segment of the world when they go to college. Poor kids are suddenly taking classes with rich kids. Kids that never sat next to a black person are now working in groups with them. Everyone mingles with international students from all over the world. Gay people (who for many kids existed only in rumors or in their parent’s condemnations) are everywhere. I’ve seen college freshman wig out because they’ve never been around gay people. They’ve never had a friend of another race. They’ve never thought about what it was really like to be rich or be poor. They’ve always thought their life was the default, and now they are realizing just how big the world is.
It’s a lot easier to speak badly about gay people when you havn’t seen your roomate talk whistfully about all his crushes on guys. It’s a lot easier to take a hard line against immigration if you’ve never hung out with yhr bright daughter of an illegal immigrant who has strove all her life to make good on where she is. It’s easier to say "turn glass into sand’ when you’ve never co-written a paper with a Muslim student that is worried about his family back home. It’s easier to characterize the poor as “lazy” when you don’t see what your brilliant hall-mate, who is only here by grace of grants, has had to fight against.
Conservative literally means to favor the traditional, established route. This is a lot harder when you realize that the world you’ve been living in for 18 years isn’t the only one out there- that your life isn’t actually the default. Going to college is a big huge wake-up call to a lot of kids who have never really been asked to think on their own or step outside their comfort zone. And I think that is naturally going to have a liberalizing effect. I think this is also why big cities tend to be more liberal- more exposure, bigger world, more tolerance and more concern with others.
There are other factors, too. Some diciplines are pretty much naturally liberal. Sociology, for example, is the study of how structures fudamentally organize society. That is a patantly liberal concept. I’ve never heard a liberal tell me that it was stupid to analyze literature and film (what I did in college) because that is “reading too much into things” or "it’s just entertainment’, but I’ve heard that from plenty of conservatives. Naturally people with these views are unlikely to become lit or film studies majors. It seems that the foundations of many majors are liberal concepts to begin with.
even sven, college does have a “liberalizing” effect on many students, but not all. I am not sure how you measure “Quite a bit less conservative” when documenting change in students who entered as conservatives. I certainly feel that statement requires some qualification, because it’s not true for all conservative students.
It’s pretty unusual for a student who reflected conservative or far-right viewpoints as freshmen to exhibit liberal viewpoints four years later. Most of them (over half) stay conservative; the majority of the remainder become “middle of the road.” Maybe that’s “quite a bit less;” I dunno. But it’s meaningful to me that most of them don’t change.
One thing you are right about is the fact that experiences which expose students to others with different backgrounds and beliefs are correlated with increased liberalism. That includes study abroad, participating in community service, dicussing racial issues, and so on.
As long as we’re all tossing wild-ass generalizations here, I’ll throw in my contribution…
Conservatism is about retaining your current beliefs/maintaining the status quo.
Academic environments are about exposing people to new beliefs/challenging the status quo.
Ergo, conservatism and academia do not mix.
That is not to say that all conservatives are dummies, or all liberals are geniuses, or whatever. But it does seem to me that academia is going to attract folks who want to broaden their horizons and have their beliefs challenged, which runs counter to conservative ideology.
I think the relative conservatism of those in the physical sciences and engineering has to do with the more strictly self-correcting nature of the hard sciences.
It is really hard to disprove something in literature, or sociology, or Women’s Studies. It is much easier to show what is bullshit in chemistry or physics, because of the nature of the problems. Thus the humanities will tend to attract those who don’t change their opinions so much as get really good at defending them eloquently. Sort of like our favorite message board. Thus the physical sciences and so forth attract more of those with a preference for “tried and true” rather than something new and plausibly defended.
As far as the general slant to the left in the humanities, it is (IMO) mostly momentum. The radicals of the 60s are tenured now, and tend to vote to extend tenure mostly to those who agree with them. Since they get a lot of practice teaching and defending their positions on the new batch of freshmen every year, they tend to be reinforced in their opinions mostly by default. By holding the whip hand of grades over the heads of students, they always have the option of imposing on the dissenters by force.
Not that this always happens, but the temptation is always there. Conservative students figure out pretty soon that some professors grade lower unless you spit back the sort of thing they expect, which either pushes the student to start agreeing with the enforced opinions out of a desire to reduce cognitive dissonance, or change his major to business or something where it is not perceived as necessary to agree that phallocentrism is a major theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and is a key source of oppression of the Guatamalan Indian population of Central America.
If you see what I mean.
Which is nonsense, of course. Liberals have no more interest than anyone else in challenging a status quo unless it disagrees with them.
Unless you can point to all those liberal professors telling their pro-choice students, “Maybe you should rethink your position on Roe v. Wade”, or “Reagan was the greatest President of the 20th century - discuss”.
I see that everyone has bought into the myth that all professors are liberal. I don’t see any evidence supporting this claim. Actually, according to Noam Chomsky (I know, I know) the liberal professors are all crammed into the Humanities, and if you look at the University overall it is actually quite centrist. Professors in law, business, medicine, and various other disciplines lean to the right. Also, it is too easy to dismiss the fact that people with advanced degrees (not BAs or professional degrees) are liberal because liberalism goes hand-in-hand with intellectual inquiry.
I agree, in fact, with Chomsky that the liberals among faculty seem to concentrate rather in the humanities. How this squares with the assertion that people with advanced degrees are liberal because liberals are all about intellectual inquiry eludes me.