And we have a winner!
Ill bet on cops getting lots of overtime.
But you have to consider the input that went into those jobs. In general, professors will have been in some sort of training position until they’re in their 30s. For most, those positions don’t pay well at all. Many of these positions will leave you at the poverty line. Once they do get a “first real job” (in their 30s, remember), salary goes up significantly…to around $40,000. Most tenure decisions come about 5-7 years after you start at the University. So, now Prof. is about 40 years old and making $60,000 -$70,000. To get a full professorship, it’s probably going to take another 10 years. So, finally at 50-something you have a hope of make 6 figures. It’s certainly enough money to live well, but to have such a high level of education, the money is low and long to be realized.
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the MDs. Their academic standing is earned just like any other professors. Though med schools pay on ahigher pay scale, their professors go through the same career progress I’ve outlined above.
What do you mean “dismiss” them? I did no such thing, and i’m well aware of how much work is required to become a medical doctor and a faculty member at a university hospital.
JXJohns, though, was using their salaries as evidence that professors are very well paid; i was merely pointing out that salary level of medical doctors is not indicative of salary levels in academia as a whole. Which is something that you acknowledge in your own post.
It’s part of getting older, and seeing how the world works outside of the ivy covered walls. You start to realize the difference between “what might be” and “what is”. You also gain more experiences, hear more differing opinions, and somehow try to make sense out of it all. I want to ask - did you really go that far right, or simply drift more toward the center? Neither left nore right is absolutely right in all things. We pick and choose the bits that make sense to us and discard the rest. That takes time, and nobody can do it for us.
First, let’s get rid of the notion that Democrats tend to be smarter or more educated than Republicans. Here’s the data from the Pew survey on religion and public life:
As educational levels go up, more people are inclined to be Republican. Americans with less than a high-school education are overwhelmingly Democratic, 41 percent to 20 percent, while people who have just a high-school degree are Democrats, 34 percent to 28 percent. People with some college training tend to be Republicans, 32 percent to 31 percent while those with at least bachelor’s degrees are Republican, 33 percent to 32 percent.
However, when you get up into the graduate degrees, Democrats lead Republicans by a few percentage points.
Next, whether Liberals outnumber Conservatives on college faculties:
College Faculties a Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds
Now, I’d argue that this bias is really irrelevant in the hard sciences. I don’t think I knew the political bias of a single one of my physics professors, for example.
But in the social sciences I believe it’s a real problem. Are conservative positions ridiculed on campus? By some professors, yes. But even if they aren’t ridiculed, let’s just say it’s a hell of a lot easier to get a good mark on a paper if your conclusions happen to match those of the professor. This is just human nature - when someone makes an argument you don’t believe, you’re going to scrutinize it a lot more heavily than if he says something that you think makes him perceptive and right.
True Story: I was in an English class with a very uptight professor who was always using historical novels as a jumping off point to lecture us on what she thought the various social ills of the day were (always from a liberal perspective). Anyway, for our final exam we were to write an essay on one of the four novels we read during the course. Unfortunately for me, I had only read three of them, and didn’t get around to ‘Pride and Prejudice’. As I was swamped with lab work, I decided to gamble and hope that book wouldn’t be picked on the final exam. Well, I got unlucky, and when I sat down to write the exam, I discovered that I had to write for two hours on ‘Pride and Prejudice’, a book I had only read the liner notes for. Of course, I knew enough about the book to know roughly who the characters were, and the era it was set in. So I proceeded to write an essay on how women were oppressed, and how their struggles to find the right man took on more meaning because women could only achieve advancement through marrying the right man, yada yada yada. I managed to pad it out enough to look credible, and handed it in, hoping I’d get enough kiss-up marks to at least get me a passing mark on the exam. I wound up getting an A+ on the exam and an A in the course, along with a comment from the prof about what insight into the book I had shown.
I’ll tell you what - I could have read that book from cover to cover and known every detail by heart, but if I had written an essay discussing it from a conservative viewpoint, I would have been docked marks for shallow thinking and not understanding the real essence of the book or something.
I had another class where the textbook for the class was written by the professor himself, and a good mark could be achieved by simply quoting answers verbatim from the book written with a suitably awed tone. Deviation from that professor’s orthodoxy was simply not a good idea, and you didn’t have to be yelled at or ridiculed in class to figure that out.
Smart students know which way the wind blows, and it’s always easier to go with the prevailing wind than against it. Given that most people are really not that political in the first place, it’s not surprising that most students would just go, “yeah, whatever” and take the easy road.
I read your post as dismissing MD professors as not representative of the professoriate. Yes, they are at the high end of the salary scale at a university, but they aren’t that far out of line from other professors. Especially if you exclude money earned from non-academic pursuits (i.e.-seeing patients, hospital admin, etc.)
I would argue that MD professors are a good example here. Most of these professors likely gave up a much more lucrative career in private practice to pursue research and not see high salaries until the end of their career. Just like any other faculty position, teaching in a med school is not the fast track to a life of leisure.
Definitely. Both sides have their share of geniuses and idiots. Intelligence (or lack of it) crosses party lines.
Educational level however does not necessarily denote intelligence. There are people out there who, as a friend once said “are educated beyond their intelligence”. There is a difference between book smarts and common sense.
That is how it should be. Numbers and equations don’t care what political leanings a person has.
Been there, done that too. Great story, and we all have similar ones. It looks like you had already learned some lessons, far more inportant than the highly skewed one your professors were trying to foist on you.
- Some things are not worth fighting over.
- Pick your fights carefully.
- Sometimes it’s necessary to stroke an ego or two to get what you want.
Liberals do tend to “accumulate” in the more fuzzy “social” studies/areas, and some of them are pretty intolerant (but don’t tell them so unless you want to fail the course). You done good
Well, theyr’e NOT representative of the professoriate, in terms of their remuneration. Go to the link provided by JXJohns. You’ll see literally dozens of doctors on that list earning well over $200,000.
Sigh.
I never said that they didn’t give up more lucrative careers. i never said they had a life of leisure. Let me do this slowly and in caps so you understand:
I WAS SIMPLY POINTING OUT THAT THEIR SALARY LEVELS ARE CONSIDERABLY HIGHER THAN THOSE OF THE AVERAGE PROFESSOR (BY A FACTOR OF AT LEAST 2:1, IF THE LIST IS ANY INDICATION), AND THAT POINTING TO THE SALARIES OF A BUNCH OF DOCTORS IN ORDER TO MAKE GENERALIZATIONS ABOUT ACADEMIC SALARIES IS NOT REALLY APPROPRIATE.
I’m not saying that the MDs don’t deserve their salaries, or that they are being overpaid, or that they couldn’t get more in private practice. I am simply saying that their income is not representative of the professoriate.
I’ve already given examples from the History Department at Iowa showing that even the highest-paid historian, a person with an endowed chair, earns only $130,000, and that the typical salary for the history department is more in the order of $80,000.
I did some random sampling in the Mathematics, English, and Political Science departments to add more data points to my argument. In each department, after sampling ten random professors, and also seeking out the Chair of the department in each case, the average salary i found was well under $100,000. In fact, of the ten people i sampled in each case, only one in each department had a salary of over $100,000.
And note that i sampled only full professors, not associate professors or assistant professors.
Would a true conservative accept a position he earned through affirmative action? Politically he shouldn’t, but then again, conservos love the green.
Anyway, to answer the OP I went to a state school (California University of PA) in a rural area and I’d say the political climate of my school was centrist/apathetic, leaning towards conservative. Most of my professors, though, were liberal when I could discern their political leanings; one of my favorites gave a stirring speech about how traveling the world and growing up has made him more of a liberal that I wish I would have transcribed so I can post it here. As far as the students, there was a large contingent of “South Park Republicans” who were socially liberal (but not totally… gay people didn’t really speak up much at my school and I remember seeing a few defaced women’s rights posters although that might not have been politically motivated) but economically libertarian. These SPRs tended to blindly support Bush; the week of the 2004 election there was a big rightie gathering in front of the student union. I didn’t see a Kerry rally, but it might have been moved to a different location (I wasn’t an undergrad during the election so I wasn’t involved with campus politics). I know for a fact that there were more people in the campus Republican club than the Democrat one, though the left might have been fractured into different contingents like the Green club, Rainbow Alliance, feminist clubs, etc. Roughly, I’d say that conservatives and liberals were fairly even, with any perceived conservative slant probably due to my own bias as well as the fact that most of the outspoken conservatives were imposing males who took over more sheer physical and psychological size than their more negligible counterparts. But I think there’s lots of schools like mine: a lot of the more well-known and better-respected colleges have more liberals but there is a slant toward conservatism in backwater rural schools, as well as state colleges in the more unfashionable states like Mississippi and Alabama.
Well, aren’t you just a peach?
There’s no need to be insulting about it. I know they make more than the average professor, but that doesn’t make them irrelevant to the discussion at hand (as lost as it appears to be).
The money issue was initially raised as an explanation for the liberal professoriate ("they’ll work for nothing!). JXJohns rebutted that with a list of faculty salaries. My response is that, yes, professors eventually get significant monetary reward, but that’s balanced by the time spent in school and training/entry-level positions. You seem to be arguing the same point, but dismiss MD professors.
As it relates to the initial (well, first tangential) discussion, MDs are a good example. Academics accept working for less money, pretty much regardless of their field of study. MDs are no exception. So, back to the OP: is this related to their liberal leanings in any way?
I don’t think they are irrelevant.
No. you are incorrect. I do not dismiss MDs at all. I’m simply saying that we cannot makegeneralizations about academia based on MD professors alone, which is what JXJohns was doing. You might want to look up the word “dismiss” before misusing it again.
The list that JXJohns provided started at the highest salary and worked its way down. Among professors, there was nothing but MDs on the first five pages.
And JXJohns’s attempt at a rebuttal was to argue that there was “page after page after page of professors earning WELL over $100,000.” It was no rebuttal at all, because it failed completely to take into account the type of salary that most professors receive.
I’m not comparing professors in department X to professors in department Y. We’ve both quite clearly shown that the department makes a difference in salary. However, for this discussion , the appropriate comparison is academics vs. non-academics in the same field. You don’t choose to be a professor then wonder what field. You pick a field you love and decide to make a living as a professor.
Once again, as it relates to the “liberals will accept lower pay” debate, MD academics are an appropriate example. In some cases, they are perhaps more appropriate than some of the social sciences.
I agree with this.
But JXJohns was making the opposite argument; he linked to the list and said, in effect, “Hey, look at the huge amounts of money these professors get.”
Well to be honest I think the question that should be asked is why are people who read broadly and devote their life’s work to the study of the worlds biggest question mostly liberal?
Well i have sort of a companion question how many conserivative artist are there?
True, but the military and (probably) law enforcement are predominately conservative, the same arguments could be made about moving up the ladder in those fields. You have to fake it to make it, some fields are dominated by conservatives and some are dominated by liberals.
Your first version of the question is highly loaded, and the implication of your second is, like so many others’ in this thread, merely tautological. The simple fact of a majority of liberals in academia is not an explanation for said majority; while you may posit that this majority is the inevitable result of more education, it is just as plausible that, since academia is a self-selecting sample, a pre-existing bias has simply perpetuated itself.
Academia does not represent the whole sample of those who “read broadly”, let alone those who have an interest in “the world’s biggest question” (whatever that may be); it is merely one segment of those people, and one which appears to attract and select people of its own kind. We are trying to answer the question “why are the people here liberal”, and the frequent response comes “they are liberal because they are here”. Unsatisfying, to say the least.
I’m also worried by the sanguine attitudes displayed with regard to the pretty undeniable imbalance in university representation. It’s just as facile (and wrong) to say that the liberal domination of social sciences departments represents a victory for liberal thought as it is to say that Bush’s second term proves the correctness of whatever sort of conservatism he happens to espouse. It’s not only conservative thought that is damaged by a lack of representation in universities; the absence of real debate impoverishes liberal thought, too. With people outside being able to dismiss universities as “liberal elites”, universities become more marginalised in the exchange of ideas. Great, so liberal thought has won out in the campuses of the USA; what’s the point if nobody listens?
Perhaps a more interesting question than “why are there more liberals in universities” is “what can be done to rectify this situation?”* No solution by fiat will be satisfactory; no, the sort of introspection utilised in peer review needs to be applied to hiring policies. Unfortunately, this requires universities first to realise that overwhelming liberalism is a problem, regardless of which political viewpoint one holds to be correct, and to gain the will to overcome vast amounts of institutional inertia.
FWIW, I consider myself really quite liberal in every sense (albeit probably not quite in the US sense of the word), and am in academia (but not in the social sciences or anything like it). I’ve met my share of screaming lefties, and my share of larded (oops, “landed”) gentry, and I think the imbalance is actually less extreme than is made out. However, registered Dems apparently outnumber Repubs at Stanford and Berkeley by something like 9 to 1 among professors, and by 30 to 1 among associate and assistant professors, so there’s clearly something wrong.
- Apologies here to the OP, who has undoubtedly posed an interesting question in its own right; it’s just one I don’t have an answer to…
In this thread we saw quoted a study that put the percentage of self-described liberals on faculties at 49%. Now it’s jumped to 72%. I’ll admit right now that I don’t know which one has correct methodology, but the later study was funded by a right wing organization, according to the article, while the former was not. We have, in past debates on this, discussed that you can skew the results by only considering, for instance, the top 500 schools in a certain field.
I’ll say this much. There are six colleges and universities within ten miles of where I live. Of those, two brag about being conservative on their homepages, one has a front lawn litered with anti-abortion signs, and one painted “Bush/Cheney” on the wall of an office building last fall (in 10-foot-high letters). So all in all, I don’t think conservatives are being denied options for a college education. Whether they’re being denied good options is less clear.
Interesting.
Obviously, i don’t know exactly where you live, nor exactly which universities you are refering to, but when someone asked earlier in this thread about conservative campuses, i was actually going to nominate Vanderbilt.
This, admittedly, is based not on personal experience but on stories from a friend of mine who taught there for two years. She said that quite a lot of her students were noticeably conservative, and that the campus itself had a pretty conservative field.
And this is no fourth-rate university. Vanderbilt is a good school.
That would be “conservative feel.”