Spare me. I can rattle off the names of any number of well-known constitutional law professors who are liberal (Laurence Tribe, Ronald Dworkin, Sanford Levinson, etc, etc, etc). I can only think of a couple on the conservative side.
Most law professors hew to the left. This is not a new observation, nor is it a controversial one.
Yet oddly, those societies embracing capitalism have far, far better human rights records than those that do not.
Most of my business or engineering professors seemed apolitical to moderate conservative. When I did have professors who I would characterize as “liberal”, it tended to be in more “touchie feelie” soft classes like Negotiations or Organizational Behavior.
Spoken like someone with little or no understanding of economics. Economics simply tries to explain why things happen the way they do in an economy. Saying economic theory is “opposed to human rights” is as ignorant as saying that gravity is opposed to human rights because you’ll get hurt if I throw you off a building.
Liberals have no more or less moral character than conservatives. Was Clinton morally superior to Bush because he championed liberal causes while cheating on his wife and partaking in shady investment schemes? It’s all well and good to say that everyone deserves a living wage or free health care until it’s time to figure out how to pay for it.
And finally, the notion that it’s better to “make a diference” (whatever the hell that means) than to make a profit is ridiculous. One must earn a profit first before they can use it to do any good.
Like these evil capitalists from the Dec 1 issue of Business Week:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_48/b3860605.htm
So how much diference does some liberal professor hiding in his ivory tower and living off government grants make by comparison?
When did the conservatives pick up an exclusive contract on the love of capitalism? Will us liberals now have to pay royalties whenever we mention the concept?
Mmm… I scanned the thread and I did not notice this: something obvious has been missed:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/kurtz_18_1.html
I wonder if conservatives, especially of the religious bent, are ignoring on purpose that attacks to academia for being liberal have other reasons to be. Like Franklin said: they have an ax to grind.
My post was specifically directed at eli’s point that suggested that capitalism and economic theory somehow conflicted with a basic respect for human rights, not at all liberals generally.
I’d say you’ve provided an excellent example in support of this conclusion, except that the premise that you’ve put careful thought into your position appears to be contrafactual.
For crap’s sake, why are we going over the same old ground? I thought we covered the issue of “academics can’t deal with the real world” and “Golly, the faculty isn’t monolithic” on page one, back when we were actually seeking factual data on this thorny topic. I am wondering how many of you newcomers to this discussion even READ the previous responses to his thread.
As it happens, when measured or attitude and political orientation scales, law professors do seem, on average, to be more liberal. And yes, business and engineering professors more conservative.
I’m going to go weep into my turkey if one more person says this thread is all about “wild-ass generalizations” and “anecdotes.” It doesn’t have to be. People have actually looked into this topic. There is interesting research on faculty attitudes out there (some of it even done with reliable research methods!), and also ample findings on how college affects students.
Its just that some things cherished most by liberals, eg minimum wage, less flexible working hours, etc have been found to be worse for the economy in the long run (eg min wages raise unemployment).
Most economists would argue for things like free trade, a less regulated economy, and so on, ie generally conservative positions (although this position has been reversed lately, what with Clinton supporting NAFTA and Bush protecting farms and steel industries).
Back to the OP, I read in the NY Times a few months back about this issue. Yes, it has been established that most US (indeed western nations) have universities that are to the left of the population. The writer takes the theory that while liberal intellectuals stay and teach, conservative intellectuals “go to Washington”, ie go into the US policy circles or work in think-tanks (predominantly conservative).
I’m not sure most of us would agree with Noam Chumpsky on what a liberal or a conservative is. He’d probably tag Sandino and Olentzero as centrists. 
My personal experience is that the social sciences are pretty darn liberal, esp. sociology and anthropology. Economics is split into thirds.
Steven Pinker, in ‘The Blank Slate’ gives a good account of how left wing people can be just as obstinate in denying Evolution as right wing theologicals. So I don’t think people on the left have
a good claim to being more willing to be open-minded to evidence and theories that threaten to undermine their political principles.
I think it is true that the personality types that go into academia are more likely to be interested in analyzing, dissecting, and engineering Things. For many disciplines, Things’ are sub-atomic particles or jellyfish. Thus we would not expect natural scientists to be much more liberal than average. But when the Things are ‘human nature’ or ‘society’ then…
3a) We would expect academics to be irreverent towards established institutions. This does not imply liberalism, but rather radicalism and utopian tendencies. The irreverence towards the status quo is, in my mind, equally compatible with being a radical luddite, a radical statist socialist, a radical anarcho-socialist, a radical fascist, or a radical libertarian. In short, academics tend to be free-thinkers and free-thinkers tend to be more radical than average.
3b) Part of the academic mindset is liking to tinker with things, to build and modify. Radical theological social engineering is, in the West at least, antithetical to the separation of Church and State. Radical fascist social engineering is tainted due to our having fought the fascists in WWII, having eliminated those systems at the heights of their crimes, before they could become more moderate as Communism did post Stalin/Mao. Radical socialist social engineering has not been as tainted, both because Communism helped defeat fascism, because we never fought a life-or-death hot war against an equally powerful Communist foe, and because Communism mellowed in it’s dotage. Therefore, academic Communists, socialists, and fellow-travelers are emboldened and tolerated.
3c) Academia stresses creativity, abstraction, and elegant logic. Even in the Humanities, which have a greater reverence for the past than most other disciplines, someone who says of Shakespeare “I’ve nothing new to add about Homer. The 5,000 published articles pretty much cover all the bases. The meaning of Homer is a nuanced topic, so nuanced in fact that it’s ineffable. In fact, I often find myself in a vacilating muddle on what to think of Homer.” isn’t long for this world. But life is often like that. Complex and muddled. And, if millions of people have been doing something some way for hundreds of years, there’s probably some kind of good reason, though it may not be obvious. Thus some academics get ahead in life by disrespecting traditions, whereas non-academics are less likely to.
3d) Finally, it’s human nature to think the abilities that define your life and role in society are more important than the abilities that define other roles in society. Academics will therefore tend to think that ‘book smarts’ are more important other qualities. They will be attracted to political ideologies which flatter them by making book smarts central. These will tend to be political conceptions which are Statist and Centralized.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the labels of “liberal” and “conservative” ceased indicating what they’re supposed to indicate several decades ago.
Which, of course, has no answer to the question of why the liberal slant is there in the first place. Is God a liberal as the first mover and teacher? 
Of course God is a liberal – if Jesus was a conservative, he wouldn’t bother to cure the lepers or feed the hungry, since that would constitute an entitlement program. 