I had no idea “black people were slaves” was a liberal position.
Just a small piece of advice for you: most of those liberal college professors you seem so angered by will not accept your ability to quote name, author, and ISBN as evidence that you’ve read the book.
What I find interesting is that, though I attended college in the midst of the “revolution,” 1972-1976, I could only guess at the political affiliations of ANY of my profs. No indoctrination, just education.
YMMV, but that was my experience.
Correction: My American History prof seemed to think the “Know Nothing” party was aptly named, so by the standards of the mid-to-late 19th century he was probably a liberal.
Assuming the OP is true and there are more ‘liberals’ on college campuses (students I’d say hands down its true…faculty? Depends on the subject IMHO), I think I’ll pick this as my answer:
While I’m sure it was said tongue in cheek I think there is a core of truth there. What else is a liberal to do with all that education if they don’t want to make money? 
I do think it depends on the subject being taught though. In my engineering and hard sciences classes I can’t say WHAT the political leaning of my professors were (well, one of my thermodynamics proffs was working for the government on SDI at the time so I’m fairly sure where he stood)…as it should be. In the softer classes I was forced to take (and which I probably had more fun with), almost to a person they were liberals and proud of it.
As to the student body…hands down it was liberal in my day. There was a very small ‘conservative’ group on campus (College Republicans), and the rest of the students were either apolitical (like yours truely) or they were very vocally liberal. And this was when we had a conservative president in office (not going to give away how old I am and say which one :)).
-XT
Most young people are pretty liberal. University is the freeist time of your life to think what you want, study what you want, pose as what you want, affect persona’s, etc while on a) parents paycheck, b) student loans or c) working your way through college.
Then real world hits when you’ve got to get a job, pay taxes, have kids, etc. IMHO a lot of people turn conservative after University and in my experience know of relatively few that started conservative and turned liberal after college.
I know this is intended as a generalization, but working your way through college is a pretty real-world way to live at least in relation to the others. And some of the most liberal people I know did that.
Is there a such thing as a college that is conservative? I know, for example, the University of Michigan is considered pretty liberal. This isn’t because the faculty or the students are super-liberals, it is just that Ann Arbor (the city that the university is at) is probably one of the most liberal cities in America. (I think Senator Kerry must’ve spent thousands upon thousands of dollars to fund the overwhelming amount of Kerry-for-President stickers that still adorn the walls of businesses and dorm room doors here). One thing that is good about the school is that they do try to be fair; for example, Michael Moore and Justice Antonin Scalia came and spoke at the graduate auditorium (not at the same day of course!).
Our teachers do slip up and say things that give away their political affliation. For example, in my Virology class, when asked about research done on Ebola glycoproteins, our teacher slipped and said that if Bush gave the NIH more funding, more research would be possible. She caught herself and apologized but we were all liberals and told her to go on with her analysis of NIH underfunding.
Now, I consider myself very liberal and I’ve always been interested in conservative viewpoint. I’ve never seen anyone being silenced because of their conservatism. I do think that this lack of conservatism is a problem and would like to see it rectified even if it meant “recruiting” conservative faculty. I think diversity is a good thing, even if one is recruiting individuals who find the concept of diversity appalling.
So, tell me, are there conservative colleges? Are there jobs or fields that liberals, on average, don’t occupy? Are there differences even in education seen in liberal v. conservative presidents, representatives or senators?
Thanks for reading!
- Honesty
let me clarify since I too am one of those liberals that worked their way through undergraduate. Not trying to say that people who work their way through college tend to be conservation (I personally don’t think they lean conservative - most people making minimum wage are not conservative). I’m saying I think the majority of people going to college are either apathetic or liberal, with a much smaller percentage that are die hard conservatives.
A few years of sucking at the corporate teat whilst kissing ass to get by seems to turn a lot of people conservative. Or more accurately have a more balanced mix of liberal/conservative views. For example, I dislike being labeled as either liberal or conservative. I am very much for a fiscally responsible government that also provides some sort of safety net for it’s citizens. Obviously that puts me at odds with conservative governments like those of Reagan or Bush (es). I’m for welfare for some of our citizens, but would certainly prefer to see a mix of workfare or ways of getting people off of welfare. I could go on an on but maybe you see my point.
Studies have shown time and time again a very strong correlation between intellectual ability (by any of the ways it is measured) and liberal political beliefs. People more intelligent than the average tend to go to college. People less intelligent than others tend to go to the military or nowhere. This shouldn’t be news to anyone, except by conservatives in denial.
Want a quick example? Find the list of states ranked by SAT or ACT performance. Find the list of states by who voted Democratic in the last election, with Republican voting states on the bottom. Compare the two lists, it’s pretty undeniable.
Student ideologies are most likely to be consistent with the most popular pursuits in college: doing drugs, getting it on, and sticking it to the Man.
If this is a valid methodology, then whites are more intelligent than Hispanics or blacks, because you can easily see that whites outperform blacks and Hispanics in SAT and ACT scores.
If you switch “more intelligent” (mainly because there’s a difference between inate intelligence and learned intelligence and you obviously want to try to drag that into it) to “better educated” then that statement is accurate. It’s not fair that whites get better education, and it’s not sayng that Hispanics and blacks couldn’t be better educated if politicians had the will to make it happen, but, yes, whites on average are better educated.
Learning to think, being able to examine situations from different sides and come to intelligent decisions, and so forth is strongly linked to liberal politics, success in school, and performance on tests that measure intelligence/scholastic ability. Trying to falsely drop the race card on this shows intellectual dishonesty, but then I’m sure it’s just part of that conservative denial that let’s you ignore facts that clearly prove you wrong.
Do you have a cite for this? I’ve heard this many times (especially from my liberal coworkers), but I’ve never seen any of these studies. If the methodology is as vague as SAT scores vs. voting history at the state level, I’m not buying it. There are much better ways to ask this question. If those ways aren’t published, it’s likely because the theory wasn’t supported.
Another thing to consider is that academia is a lot more global than most other pursuits. Academics regularly collaborate with people across the globe. Since the vast majority of the developed world is more liberal than the US, you would expect that to influence things.
Also, university students are younger, better educated and are more likely to come from a large city. These are all correlated with being liberal.
College tends to be more liberal because by definition, liberals tend to be more openminded and progressive and thus are drawn to institutions like college campuses that welcome those values. Conservatives are also drawn to college but for different reasons. More conservative people view college as a means to an end. You don’t find too many liberals in business school. At least not the extreme kind.
College also has somewhat of a liberalizing effect. You are exposed to new people and ideas and are forced to critically evaluate your own beliefs.
Also, campuses tend to be somewhat more sheltered than the real world (where being liberal doesn’t pay all that well).
There are all degrees of liberal and conservative. I mean if you go to a school where 75% of the student body are baseball cap wearing frat-guy jock types, is that a liberal campus?
So does dropping the “intelligence” card and using bogus statistics. You have shown a correlation but correlation does not mean causality. Consider this - a large number of minorities vote Democratic. They also tend to be less educated than whites. How does that factor into your analysis?
In my corner of the world, professors at the state university level do quite well, and are quite liberal. Many consevatives would be very happy with the bucks these “liberal” folks are earning. This cite is a listing of state employee salaries for 2004, listed highest earners to lowest. Please note the page after page after page of professors earning WELL over $100,000.
You might want to check your methodology a bit.
I chose 10 people at random from each of the first five pages of your list, and went to the University of Iowa website to see what department they were in.
EVERY SINGLE ONE was a medical doctor. Hardly a representative sample of university faculty. The first person i came across who wasn’t a neurosurgeon or an otolaryngologist or an obstetrician/gynacologist or a radioloigt was an engineer on page 6.
I used the search function on the salary guide, and looked up the salary of the woman who is probably the most famous American historian (my field) at the University of Iowa. This is a woman whose name is known by any professor or grad student who studies US history, and who has written prize-winning books that have had a major impact on the field.
Her salary is $130,000.
Hardly a pittance by any means, but not exactly a fortune either for someone who did a four year college degree, 5-7 years of graduate study, has been teaching for over 30 years, and has written at least four books of her own (that i can think of off the top of my head) and edited about 6 others, as well as writing many other articles and short pieces.
And her salary is unusual in the history department. I searched another 10 historians at random, and the median salary was around $70,000, with the lowest at $39,000 and the highest at $84,000.
- By the way, door prize goes to the person who can guess the occupation of the four highest-paid state employees in Iowa. I’ll give you a hint—they’re not doctors, professors, or politicians.
I’d venture students are more likely to be liberal as they are young and idealistic and reasonably uncertain of their fate. If/when they get settled in life, have families, get an established career and start making good money alot of them will become conservative. As far as faculty, many of the people in academia that I have met do it because they love to learn and they want their research to help people. Since the liberal position on an issue is, a good deal of the time, the more communal/humanistic position I can see why alot of professors would be attracted to it.
Dollars to donuts says they’re coaches of some sort. Basketball and football for sure.