What do you suggest an affirmative action like policy for registered republican in higher education? I guarantee that any school that would do such a thing would become a much disserved laughing stock and have huge Greek system.
So is there problem with the colleges for producing so many god damn liberal professors or with modern conservative thought?
Non of the professors I’ve had for a life science classes have ever said we can continue our current rates of consumptions of natural resources with out causing serous damage to our environment (which will eventually harm us).
Non of the social science teachers I’ve ever had has made the claim that there positions of political and economic power are mostly held by white males in the Untitled States.
If there are any respectable professors of economics who claim that the first world countries don’t exploit cheap labor in third world.
Finding a professor in support of invasion of Iraq was all but impossible in just about every for many reasons.
If the mass culture choose not listen to their intellectuals because they are bunch of “commie liberals” well then they are doing so at their own expense.
I think faculties should make an effort to ensure a plurality of opinion, yes, and if you feel that to make such an effort is to be a laughing-stock, then I guess I propose stand-up classes as well. May I ask what you mean by “have huge Greek system”?
No need to get tetchy. I wonder how universities are supposed to establish the problems with modern conservative thought, if there is no-one around to espouse it. I can’t remember the last time I had a useful argument with myself; debate is essential, even if only for the refining and testing of ones own ideas. Your entire argument seems predicated on the assumption that liberal thought is “correct” in some manner, and that this is reason enough to have homogeneity of opinion. Nothing could be further from the scientific or academic ideal, in my opinion.
Again, tautological. You cite the liberal skew of your professors as evidence that there should be a liberal skew of professors. Unconvincing. I also note that the position you cite is hardly exclusively “liberal”. A modern conservative might heartily agree with the proposition - the methods for dealing with the perceived problem are what will differ (e.g. carbon-trading market-based techniques, versus blanket bans and subsidy).
Again, tautological, and not really much to do with the liberal/conservative divide.
Yet again, tautological, irrelevant and in this instance, probably wrong. I’m sure there are numerous noted economists who do not believe that globalisation of manufacturing work is exploitative. I’m beginning to suspect that you would automatically disqualify such economists from respectability, however, on the grounds that they disagree with you. Academic respectability is supposed to be based on how one bases ones conclusions on the data at hand, not on the specific conclusions one reaches.
Yet again, you cite the liberal bias of professors as evidence in favour of this bias’s correctness. I don’t understand how you expect this to convince anyone. We know there is a bias. We are trying to establish why it is there, and what effect it has. You are doing the equivalent of repeating “because it is” in response to the former, and “doesn’t matter - we’re right” in response to the latter.
This is just insanely arrogant, and may I remind you that I say that as one of the aforementioned “commie liberals” (well, libertarian by UK standards). Maybe it makes you feel better to think that you’re undeniably right, and that everyone else is simply ignoring you to be petty, but ask yourself this: what’s the point of knowing exactly what to do if you can’t convince anyone to do it? And if you can’t, why not? You’re right, aren’t you? Aren’t you?
Basically that was crack saying that any such college who would do such a thing would become a joke academically and turn into a party school. This mainly meant to be a pithy and funny comment
I do think it is a fair question to ask why are the vast majority of people coming out of post graduate studies are on one side of the political spectrum?
Is it a flaw in their educations or is there a reason to justify this?
This is really stupid. Name three situations where blacks have harmed white people that deserve writing about? I’m sure you can trot out some black guy that did something terrible to some white people because they were white, but the scorecard isn’t even close. Not every side deserves equal time. Whites have never been systematically oppressed by large segments of blacks. Sorry if the facts bother you, but don’t blame the book for presenting them.
I agree that it is arrogant to say that the liberal viewpoint is always right in the social sciences, but LF has a point about the natural sciences. Many conservatives try to discount hard, proven statistics about pollution, overconsumption, etc because believing that the Earth is going to pot is seen as a “liberal” viewpoint. When you look at the hard facts about the physical state of the world (and I am not talking about stats provided by ELF, but mainstream organizations like the WWF), it is clear that some conservatives are engaging in an elaborate doublethink. When I have one guy telling me the Earth is on the brink of destruction, and he throws out stats and figures that have been compiled by actual scientists studying this stuff, and I have another guy telling me that it’s all lies and propaganda but who is not actually a scientist, I’m going to go with the first guy. I can’t think of one reputable scientific organization that has said pollution is nothing to be concerned about and that our natural resources will last into our great-grandchildren’s lives, but I can think of plenty of politicians who say that, and almost all of them are conservative.
Really, I just think politics should be kept out of the hard sciences altogether. But when you look at the facts, it is clear that some conservatives are trying to spin hard data to their own ends. Of course, liberal scientists do it too, but their lies will not have the same devastating effect upon the Earth that the conservatives’ lies will have. For instance, say we have 50 years of oil left in reality. A conservative might say we have 200 years, so people will consume more and thus this will lead to the resource being burned off faster. A liberal, to try to scare the population, might say we have 20 years, so people will consume less and the resource will be drawn out. Which of these lies leads to greater problems in the long run? When it comes to the environment, I think it is best to be conservative, in the way that means you’re actually conserving resources. When it comes to debating art or music or literature, there is room for disagreement, but facts are facts and there are things about science and math that are incontrovertible. Two and two are four, people evolved from apes, and we are running out of oil. Those are not political opinions, they are true ones, and it’s not arrogant to say so.
And liberals ignore hard evidence just as often. What happened to the ‘population bomb’? There was a famous bet between Paul Erlich, a liberal professor, and Julian Simon, a conservative professor. Erlich was claiming that we were about to run out of steel, oil, food, and all kinds of other commodities (this was around 1980). Simon knew better, and offered a bet to Erlich: He could pick several commodities of his choice, and they would track their prices for the next ten years. If the price went down, Erlich would pay up. If the prices went up, indicating scarcity, Simon would pay.
Erlich paid up. He was dead wrong. That didn’t stop him from making more equally erroneous predictions, though.
There is easily as much bad science on the left as on the right. Remember Alar? The apples were poisoned! Or how PCBs were going to be the scourge of mankind? Remember ‘scientific socialism’?
Scientists are not immune to their own bias. If you’re an ideologue, your perceptions are going to be filtered through your own ideology. Now, good science is its own defense against this, and there are good scientists who are conservative and liberal.
We should not forget that a modern element of conservatism includes dismissal of Evolution and some controversial researches like stem cells, as I remember hearing one conservative congress critter complaining on the research of Martian fossil life from a meteorite because it goes against the teachings of the bible of a very young earth, putting more of the current conservatives in position of power in academia is calling for trouble.
I would expect then that reasonable conservatives would weed out those kinds of conservatives regarding academia and politics, but I am not holding my breath.
I believe that the teachers and professors are generally bright but not necessarily in the business world. They feel far more secure under the educational shroud.
A great many liberals as I once was did an about face when we left the college/university atmosphere and tried to earn a living in the outside world.
There appears to be a certain amount of envy at the disparity in earnings from the educational field people and the earnings in the “outside world”
That’s a pretty weak argument - “it’s okay when we lie, because we have your best interests at heart”? I don’t buy it. The worst effect when scientists lie, or others distort scientific results, is a loss of faith in all scientific endeavour. Scientific investigation must be about a free exchange of ideas, not about justifying an ideological position in the most convincing manner. One of the most disgustingly damaging episodes of recent years was when the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty flatly accused Bjorn Lomborg (author of the Skeptical Environmentalist) of scientific dishonesty, simply on the basis of his conclusions and offering no evidence against him whatsoever, an accusation it was forced to recant by its own government (article). How well was science served here? What was achieved, other than to make it look as if to question received environmental wisdom invites being outcast?
I will have no part whatsoever in a debate about whose are the “better” lies; if caution is advisable, advise it on its merits, not by fiddling the figures to make the same action seem more urgent. The only effect the latter will have is to make your ideological opponents look better when the inevitable happens and the lies come to light.
I think liberals and conservatives just have differences in career preferences. Liberals seem more likely to be drawn to academia. Not that some conservatives are not, but liberals do seem to predominate professorships. Some things are the other way around- more conservatives than liberals find running corporations to be attractive. The same personality differences that lead to political persuasions also lead to career choices.
Conservative colleges? Sure, right here in Michigan. Hillsdale. Calvin. Hope. Those are the well-known and well-regarded ones. Ironically the latter two have been in the papers lately because of people on campus who expressed views normally considered “liberal.” I guess that’s what made them newsworthy.
If you want to be exposed to more conservative points of view, Professor Carl Cohen is planning to teach a class next year that is unabashedly conservative in outlook. It’s a class about affirmative action. It’s not about promoting it, and it’s not about debating its merits and disadvantages. According to Professor Cohen, it will be solely dedicated to discrediting affirmative action. I imagine it will be an eye-opener.
Having just graduated from Vandy Law, I’ll back you up on this. The undergraduate body is incredibly conservative (and fraternity/sorority dominated, but that is a different argument…). The law school has traditionally been conservative, but over the three years I was there (seeing 5 classes of students) moved more to the center and possibly even to the left. To be controversial, that is at a time when the average LSAT and GPA of incoming students rose each year.
The professors at the law school had, in my experience a liberal bent, but that is to a large extent because I took constitutional and criminal based courses and only one corporations course. Even then I was exposed to teaching by some pretty hard core conservatives. What was noticeable is that contributions in class tended to come more from liberal people than conservatives (possibly because I had such a big mouth), though that certainly never stopped resident right wingers coming up with wonderful comments that will stay with me for the rest of my life (such as the comment on exclusion of evidence under the fifth amendment “What if you have a statement that you just know is accurate, because you beat it out of the suspect, but you can’t use it directly,” or my favorite in property class discussing the expulsion of tenants from public housing because members of their family were caught with drugs, “But all these people sell drugs anyway, don’t they.”). I can’t really comment on the political distribution at the top of the grade curve, as I don’t know many people’s grades other than my good friends. On Law Review, though, it seemed to be a pretty fair cross section of political opinion, with maybe a slight liberal bias (again more than likely caused by me skewing things so far to the left…).
No, I don’t realize that at all. According to the U.N.'s best guess, the earth population will not grow exponentially but stabilize at around 9 billion people. And there’s a possibility that the population will crash to 3.6 billion.
On the other hand, if you keep saying, “The Earth is doomed!” over and over again, you’ll eventually be right. It just might take a few billion years.
That is because naive liberal idealism tends to evaporate under the cold, harsh reality of the real world. The real world is tough. It does not respect fancy credentials. They get you in the door but you need to perform or your out. I see plenty of people who say “I have this or that degree I should earn more” who don’t actually add any additional value for having that degree. The real world does not care for social experiments or cultural bias. It cares for results. It might be right to give equal opportunity to all races but if my clients only want to do business with a purple person, I’m going to tend to hire people who are colored purple.
I think a lot of liberals can’t handle this. I also think (based on some posts of liberals on this board) that liberals tend to be more at odds with their environment and less able to effect positive change. While conservatives are off creating business, liberals are whining about WalMarts and Starbucks taking over the world. I mean how many conservatives do you ever see with a “Drill more oil!” sign?
As for students? Being a college student means (for most people) that you’re young, optimistic, and you’re free to do what you want as an adult for the first time. You conduct your business answering only to yourself: your teachers could care less whether you’re going out drinking tonight, and your parents can only control you to the extent you let them. Your view of the world is probably that you’re a priveleged young individual who’s learning how to put yourself in a position to do good things for the world.
That pretty much sounds like the modern American liberal ideology in a nutshell to me.
I don’t know that that’s true to the extent that many conservatives think it is. It’s always been true that young and poor people (what two adjectives could better describe the majority of college students?) tend to be liberal, probably because the liberal ideology is about personal freedom, tolerance, acceptance, optimism and a willingness to help others.
As a Zionist, I did find myself having to explain my beliefs in college. But I’ve always felt that having my beliefs challenged only made them stronger; for how can you know your beliefs are true unless they’ve stood up to scrutiny?
I for one don’t believe that the liberalism of most colleges has anything to do with intelligence. After all, rich people tend to be Republicans. How did they get rich? Plenty of them got lucky, sure. But I’d bet the vast majority of them got there with hard work, dedication and lots of brainpower.
As someone who faced a lot of discrimination at the hands of African-Americans in my early life, I have to say that you’re full of shit. Yes, white people have been “harmed” by black people. Baseball players have been harmed by engineers, I’m sure, and hell, I’d bet there’s somewhere where it’s happened all the time. But you can’t just erase hundreds of years of real mistreatment–ranging from slavery to lynchings to beatings to institutional discrimination–with a wave of your hand. It happened, it was real, and some people are still discriminated against today. Are there much worse places to live in the world as a racial minority in 2005? Absolutely. But you can’t just throw away history by saying it’s “liberal crap”.
Please put down your brush and substantiate your claims by showing us logical arguments rather than just ridiculing views. You don’t seem to have any logical arguments.
Sure, but Libertarians (as I understand the ideology) feel strongly that the government shouldn’t tell anyone what to do or not to do with their own minds, lives or bodies. This clashes radically with traditional Republican ideologies on recreational drugs, abortion, etc.
Like dropzone, I could only guess at the political ideologies of my professors, except for one teacher who I actually developed a friendship with and discussed the issues of the day with a lot outside of class. I can make a stronger guess about my PoliSci teacher because it’s tough to keep your views out of such a discussion–but he did a pretty good job of it, and I really can’t say for certain.
Sure. Some of the most liberal people I knew in school did that, too. But they’re also young, and they’re also poor, and they also spend a lot of time with liberals, and I’d bet they’re fairly idealistic regardless of their situation. Sounds like a liberal lifestyle to me.
You yourself explicitly equated SAT/ACT performance to intelligence rather than education:
I certainly wouldn’t discuss my political views with my superiors at my recruiting center!
FWIW, I went to the Univesrity of Arizona, a primarily blue school in a blue area of a traditionally red state. Although the majority of students I ran into were liberal or apathetic, there were a significant number of outspoken conservatives, too. It was kind of entertaining; you could look at most dorms’ outside walls and see a prominent window-space battle between Kerry stickers and Bush stickers.
BTW, if you’re a college student, do yourself a favor one day and go out on the mall (or equivalent) when the Young Democrats and College Republicans have their tables set up; go up to the YD table and say “I’m a Republican–why should I vote for your candidate?” and then go up to the CR table and say “I’m a Democrat–why should I vote for your candidate?”
I got a warmer reception from the UA Young Democrats (“here are our positions on these issues, and why”) than from the UA College Republicans (“how could you possibly believe such dreck? look at the ridiculous things happening on our campus–those damn liberals!”). YMMV. Arizona Republicans may be bitter that their state is shifting slightly left, or Tucson Republicans may be bitter that they’re in a predominantly blue zone.
