[University of British Columbia sociology Prof. Neil Gross] and Solon Simmons of George Mason University surveyed more than 1,400 full-time professors at more than 900 American institutions. Only 19.7 percent of professors identified themselves as “any shade of conservative” (compared with 31.9 percent of the general population), while 62.2 percent identified themselves as some flavor of liberal (compared with 23.3 percent of Americans overall).
Gross found variation between disciplines. Social sciences and humanities contained the highest concentration of liberals. Conservatives were as numerous as liberals in business, health sciences, computer science and engineering.
Why so liberal? The most obvious explanation — one favored by conservative activists — is discrimination. Even some liberals buy it.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” proclaimed the not-especially-conservative social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at last year’s Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting.
A show of hands had revealed three self-proclaimed conservatives in a gathering of 1,000 psychologists. Presented with such underrepresentation by gender or race, Haidt said, “our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation.”
h/t Bemused
Discrimination, sure, but I have to wonder how much is self-selection, informed or otherwise. An environment that nurtures “liberalism” is likely inimical to conservatism.
One only needs to read the French revolution chapter of Ann Coulters book Demonic to see where this will eventually lead. The similarities between what is happening in the US right now, and the mob occupy mindset that was evident in France are exactly the same. Parents, have to teach junior how to work, the university pony-tailed scraggly bearded enviro-whacho professor, and the lesbo feminist tank sized professors only teach junior how to take, from someone else who has worked for it.
Even back in the early ’70’s any student with conservative ‘leanings’ got leaned on by left wing professors. Papers were marked down and even seminar discussions put the conservative in the worst light. It didn’t take a genius to realize what was going on.
“no Republican remains who is willing to unequivocally defend evolution and climate change. What self-respecting scientist wouldn’t reject such politics?”
Perhaps it’s time for separation of the state and the churches of evolution and AGW.
But, you see, thinking about responsibility makes me feel bad! We can’t have that in psychology!
Discrimination, even as it exists, isn’t the issue.
The issue is that there are too many professors in social soiences and humanities and not enough in business, health sciences, computer science and engineering.
After all, if the population as a whole doesn’t see the value in the former, then why should universities?
On the bright side, they are keeping the easily led off the streets for four or more years, and making it easy for me to identify and not hire them.
Yes, it’s unfair. As is life kids.
I completed a Master’s degree in History. I recognized it’s uselessness, but I was interested, already working at a real job and just wanted to do it. Nonetheless, when I was finishing up my Thesis, I was asked many times by the department and friends if I was planning to go into the Ph.D program. My answer was always a rousing “Hell no!” I knew that a white male who specialized in Military History would never, ever, ever get a position at any University History department. I’m sure I could share office space with a Woman’s history professor doing research on fuzzy unicorns, who would take great offense at the hostile work environment and emotional stress caused to them by my bookcase, filled with such male-dominated studies and books on the military and past conflicts. The imagery alone contained within such works would create a negative workspace.
No way I’d ever get a teaching position in my field. Ever. So why bother. I’m happier in business for myself, and the M.A. behind my name is used only to impress those too weak-minded to work in any field other than government or academia.
I did my Masters at UBC Faculty of Ed. . . if you wanted to graduate you went along with the system or else you got nuked . . . low marks, rejected projects, refused thesis.
I would not have graduated except I got dragged aside one day by a prof who “explained” how things work and volunteered to be my thesis advisor as long as I would STFU until the Dean signed off my graduation papers.
“Social sciences and humanities contained the highest concentration of liberals.”
The Devil you say!!!
Liberal arts, humanities and social sciences have become a virtual ideological cesspool, turning out diseased minds, ever since cultural marxism’s inhernet nihilism was dismissed as “just diverse opinion” – I suppose it is in the way militant statist Stalinism is divergent of liberal democracy and free socities. The thing our universities never understood is there ARE some ideologies so toxic they cannot coexist in the free environment that spawed our liberal democratic learning institutions. To the cultural marxism which now pervades all the social sciences. humanities and liberal arts, freedom is the antithesis of their indoctrinated agenda.
Cultural marxism now poisons every one who has indoctrinated in any non precise discapline in our universities.
Fred, one of my sons-in-law said the same thing about his time at the University of Saskatchewan. Write the lies, STFU and get his graduation scroll.
By and large the universities are nothing but Marxist indoctrination mills.
BTW, he is now a teacher in Saskatoon and is doing what he can to counter the Marxist influence.
Discrimination may play a part, but I think it has more to do with the occupation.
Who but a liberal would want to be a professor, particularly in non-technical field?
Anyone grow up wanting to work for an NGO?
I think it’s the profession that draws the soft-headed bleeding hearts like moths to a flame.
This is just the intended end result of Gramski’s “Long march Through the Institutions”.
THE COLD WAR IS OVER AND THEIR SIDE LOST but they battle on….
It’s a rigged game, a private club of idealistic elitists who have monopolized the system to have control on young future adult’s minds.
anyone ever hear of statistics
it’s the same effect in hollywoodn’t and (j)uranlists, likes attract and hire/encourage likes
and 2004 (as I recall) study by the UoT concluded that 87% of upper college?univerity perfessers in NA were left leaning
The leftist professoriate range from Robin Hood redistributionist to zealots on the verge of bringing back the ovens. The one thing they all have in common is their support for the coercive power of the state in a range of areas far beyond the police, military, and courts.
The fact that the disciplines that have ideologically cleansed their ranks the most is proof of the charge that the majority believe their role to be one of indoctrination rather than encouraging critical thinking. Critical thinking would entail debate rather than eliminate any challenge to the current PC group-think environment.
Public institutions are not allowed to discriminate nor should they but they obviously do and they have therefore been corrupted beyond repair.
Monopoly delivery from bigoted and coddled elitists contemptuous of those paying their fat salaries is not a model a rational civilization can afford.
The solution is to get governments out of delivery and funding for education. Education is just another service that the market can provide at far less cost and in a manner appealing to a full diversity of customers. Perhaps vouchers would be a transitional tool or a residual for the truly indigent.
We all practice discrimination everyday – whether in our choice of partners, products we buy and the food we eat.
So just when, why and how the word “discrimination” began to convey a negative connotation in the common vernacular continues to befuddle me.
I suspect that socialist/progressive types in our public education system were the drivers.
From a Libertarian perspective we all have only one singular “negative right” – the right to be left alone – coupled with the responsibility to respect that very same right for all others.
On the other hand “positive” rights – e.g., rights for fairness etc.impose contrived obligations on others as promulgated by progressive public education, coercive socialist governments and their agencies.
I’m not really surprised. How could there be so few conservatives in a venue where the earth is all-too-often often perceived to be more than 4000 years old?! Until these moon bats start to realize that dinosaur bones were put here as a test of one’s faith, then I would continue to expect our institutions to be dominated with these non-conservative “critical thinkers”.
Hey Brian, I hear dinosaurs show up on SDA comments threads from time to time, too. Lumber off now. We’ve had our comeuppance.
The reason for the preponderance of left-liberals in the Social Sciences and Humanities is that, in Canada, we have a fiefdom mode of both hiring and research awards.
I have yet to experience a hiring committee, which is made up of faculty, hiring anyone who would not both fit into the current departmental ideology AND above all, not pose an intellectual risk to the hierachy and status quo within the department.
Second, in Canada, almost all research is funded by the federal govt (SSHRC) and the review committees are made up of a narrow set of Canadian faculty. They must be bilingual which narrows these review committees to be heavily based in the Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec corridor. This corridor is basically left-liberal.
Then, SSHRC is itself staffed by a bureaucracy raised within the left-liberal mindset and its range of academic areas which they will fund – is narrow and limited.
Canadian research is, as a result, narrow, stuck in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and isolated from the more critical work being done elsewhere in the world.
To be a conservative in Canadian academia, both as a student and as faculty, is to be exposed to malicious and hostile actions by the liberal Set in the departments – and they ARE malicious and hostile. Only a left-liberal can be smugly sanctimonious in their malice.
This should come as no surprise, most conservatives have real jobs.
In the 1960s I had a number of those “Marxist professors”, who, despite their ideological biases, were first of all real professors, with a commitment to academic rigor, intellectual integrity, and the ability to engage with students who did not share their point of view. They, and others like them, began to retire and die off in the 1970s, replaced by now a second-generation of academics who lack both academic integrity and a solid grounding in their disciplines, even to the point of having little knowledge of this Karl Marx whom they claim to appreciate.
Funny,
The professor who taught me military history was a white male.
Imagine that.
In the 1960s I had a number of those “Marxist professors”, who, despite their ideological biases, were first of all real professors, with a commitment to academic rigor, intellectual integrity, and the ability to engage with students who did not share their point of view. They, and others like them, began to retire and die off in the 1970s, replaced by now a second-generation of academics who lack both academic integrity and a solid grounding in their disciplines, even to the point of having little knowledge of this Karl Marx whom they claim to appreciate.
Because being a liberal … like being an academic …. does not actually entail having any brains or any ability.
Although … there must be some liberals who are not complete goofs… even liberal academics.
Discrimination is obvious, but you only see the tip of the iceberg.
First, if you want to be a conservative professor of English, sociology, anthropology, etc, you must suffer through four years of insufferable leftist indoctrination. To get good grades, you must, at the very least, be able to glibly regurgitate the doctrine on command. Assuming you are not outed as a sleeper agent, you must then get letters of recommendation from three of those faculty members and gain admission into a PHD program.
In the PHD program, you will suffer through two more years of core and field indoctrination, diving more deeply into the BS. Assuming you are not suffering from Stockholm Syndrome by this point, you must find a dissertation advisor. That advisor must approve of your research agenda. Then you must actually prove your leftist training by confirming preconceived ideas.
After that, you must collect a committee of leftist professors who will bless your dissertation and grant you your hood.
But the fun is just beginning. You must then go on the job market and maintain your stealth beliefs and get hired. After you get a tenure track job, you have to produce enough leftist dogma shitma published in the People’s Journal of Your Pseudoscience over the next five years to get tenure. You’re not quite home free. You must produce more opiate for the masses to make full professor.
Then AND ONLY THEN are you free to shed all pretense and become apostate. Your job is safe, but your teaching load, committee assignments, and other privileges are still subject to leftist discretion.
So THAT is what a conservative undergrad faces. True, some liberals are more supportive and accommodating than others. I benefitted from three such professors. But many people don’t make it that far.
Self-selection is always trumpeted by apologists like Krugman. The two problems with that is 1) choices are based on the opportunity cost and 2) choices are based on the incentives and environment one will face. The selections are not made free from duress and intimidation.
Not only do leftists discriminate in grading, mentorship, recommendations, encouragement, hiring, peer review, promotion, and tenure decisions, by virtue of their majority within departments and in the number of departments, they OWN the university committees and faculty senates that make ALL the university rules. They decide which new courses get approved, which courses meet interdisciplinary requirements, and which departments may offer minors.
Guys like Haidt are free to rebel ONLY because they have risen above the fray. Even so, his peers think he has lost his marbles.
Nothing less than affirmative action to eliminate the intrinsically leftist departments and hire conservatives will their ever be diversity. Only a student and faculty Bill of Rights or law prohibiting political discrimination will stop it.
Diversity is a good thing at universities, but it is best expressed through IDEAS, not by skin color, ethnic background, or genitalia.
Not surprisingly, this same discrimination infects government. Government employees are treated to monthly indoctrination into leftist dogma by agencies and from the public sector unions. Affirmative action for women and minorities is transparent. Liberal ideas are sounded by the trumpets of angels, and conservative ideas are treated with derision and.scorn, if not by open hostility.
I, personally, was thinking of doing a PhD in history, but I finally changed my mind this year because I have had enough of all the socialist tripe I hear from professors. What sort of conservative would want to work in such an environment? I think, then, that this discrepancy in conservatives in the humanities might also be explained by unwillingness to work in such a left-wing environment.
I think Brian missed the point.
The entire leftist worldview has its origin in academia, through mystical philosophers like Kant and Hegel. Socialism is the creation of those who rejected rationality, and who are out of touch with reality.
This is true at U of S also, but they don’t oppress conservatives here. Or at least the philosophy dept listens politely to my harangues featuring Hayek or Mill. There are a few brazen NDP touts to be sure. I wonder how many people are classed as some kinda liberal when they call themselves “classical liberal” which is the basic worldview conservatives want to conserve these days, since we won the argument all those years ago. To avoid confusion, I now call myself a “Whig and Williamite” because that’s what Dan Hannan calls his blog.
If you want proof of the failure of diversity at the college/university level in the US, simply click through the sports channels on TV at night.
I can get three or four college basketball games every night, many more on a weekend. Most of them are OK, but in a startling number, there may actually be one or two white players on the court at the same time.
Diversity must mean all black players, all the time! Any white player is proof of institutional racism and the failure of diversity.
Every campus is an oasis!
BLAHHAAGAAARRGGG
please excuse me for vomiting.
In my University experience my viewpoints were met with a range of response from derision and condescension to outright violence.
Fortunately being 1.85 Meters and around 80 Kg the sh1htheels shaking their fists in my face were offered to step outside and settle matters.
The cowards always back down.
[d]
“our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation.”
Unlikely. Try “systematic policy of eradication by entrenched ideological fanatics”.
On the bright side, the Internet is probably going to destroy the existing educational system in this generation. So the sonsabeatches are going to end up starving.