Boy this brings back painful memories. When I got my PhD, I had published four articles in refereed journals, given about a dozen conference papers, co-written the Instructors Guide to a short story anthology, and taught for 7 years. I couldn't get arrested in Acedemia, partly it's true because of a generally terrible job market in my field, but at least as much because I had the temerity (and short sightedness) to write my dissertation on a dead white guy without condemning him for being dead, white, or a guy. We did mock interviews in my department in preparation for going out on the market. The committee that interviewed me looked doubtful and the head of it said, "You sound so white male conservative" in a tone that said, "Get in the political line or you'll be in the unemployment line." But without some kind of outside force, the politics of academia will never change. It's incredibly self-selecting. The teachers who give grades, the search committees, tenure committees, journal referees, and journal editors (in literary studies at least) all have politics somewhere to the left of Trotsky. And they are not afraid to use their power to exclude or purge those who don't toe the party line.

Oh, and about the professor in the WSJ article who claimed conservatives are absent in universities because they're stupid: one need only read the comment sections of Kos or Atrios for conclusive proof that the right has no monopoly on stupidity.

I think it is much more threatening that businesses are a one party state.

The whole oil industry is dominated politically by republicans.

The stock markety business is dominate by Republicans, and there politically it is a one party state.

Not to mention the electronic voting industry - whose leaders, such as the CEO of Diebold, promised to do everything he could to elect George Bush.

Since leaders of business have a much more substantive impact on our lives, it is demonstrably damaging to our our two party system, that only one party gets represented in business. What happens when business leaders urge their employees to support a particular candidate, and make their only conservative views plain? It chills speech.

As Fred has said, "But without some kind of outside force, the politics of business will never change". Get a two party representation back in business, where it belongs!

The Economist article above says in part, “The likelihood of much changing in universities in the near future is slim.” Perhaps so, but in the long term they may very well follow the path that another academic group, Christian seminaries, have followed.

Like much of our University system Seminaries of the mainline (e.g., ELCA, PCUSA, United Methodist) Protestant churches took a decidedly Left turn about 3 decades ago and have never looked back. During that same three decades those Churches that had thrived in this country for centuries have lost half of their membership. This takeover of these Seminaries by the leaders of Leftist Church politics has not been pretty. In their self-righteousness these leaders in deed and spirit abandoned any pretense of academic Liberalism and proceeded to declare unconditional war on all who would oppose their idea of what Christ’s church should be. If you think being a Conservative is difficult at U.C Berkley try San Francisco Theological Seminary.

This leadership has since blamed the loss of membership on societal and demographic changes that aren’t their fault but all that falls on its face when you see that actual Church demographic studies point to one telling fact. While mainline Christian academics and their Churches agonize their more Evangelical and usually conservative brothers prosper. The reasons for this are complex but one thing is for sure, while people are flocking to Christianity they are abandoning Liberal churches and their reactionary theology by the droves. In short, people have just plain had it with the nonsense and are moving on.

I suggest that it is quite possible that Liberal academia may go the way traditional Seminaries seem headed. They and the product they are producing will simply be ignored to death. The resistance by the education establishment to home schooling, comprehensive diversity, Charter schools, tax and other funding restructuring, voucher systems, etc. indicates to me that they recognize this danger. As the article states, this will likely not happen in the short term but I believe the Seminary experience gives some insight as to what their long-term prospects are.

A genralized "Academic Bill of Rights" is a bad idea. In some departments (such as engineering or the hard sciences) I think it would work just fine; in fact I might even support it. However, in others (economics and social sciences) it would be disastrous. In those disciplines, it's quite difficult to separate ideology from research. It would be easy for a disgruntled job candidate to "prove" that he or she was rejected based on ideological grounds. For example, let's say the candidate espoused a theory that has been widely rejected by the research community, but that is popular with conservatives because it asserts that poor people are inherently lazy. Suddenly, an issue that used to be one of professional acumen (the candidate is pounding the drum for a theory that has been thoroughly disproven) becomes one of political prejudice (he's being shunned for his beliefs). How can you have such a Bill of Rights, yet preserve a department's ability to hire quality professors that contribute to the department?

"What happens when business leaders urge their employees to support a particular candidate, and make their only conservative views plain? It chills speech."

Like George Soros?

Viacom too.

JC,

"Outside force" was probably, no definitely, a poor choice of words. "Outside pressure" would be more what I meant. I was not at all suggesting some sort of quota system or legislative coercion on universities. But something like foundations endowing conservative professorships or alumni or other big contributors to universities putting pressure on them. And your business analogy is apples and oranges. Business has no mandate to encourage intellectual development or debate. Also, any controversy over business practices will ultimately be settled by the bottom line, which is entirely separate from the ideology of those who lead or are employed by the business.

Matt,

You have a point about the "soft" sciences. Still, if--to use your example--a sociologist were to investigate or initiate a hypothesis one interpretation of which could be that poor people are lazy, is science served by immediately ruling that theory out of bounds because it is politically incorrect? If it's truly a bad theory, it will be discredited. If there's something to it but it's not completely correct, that would emerge from debate. But in the intellectual climate that currently exists in academia, that debate will never take place because the leftists in power will stifle it and ruin the career of anyone who attempts to engage in it.

(Shaking head) Yehudit, Yehudit, yehudit...

So it's examples you want? You think George Soros and Viacom (which actually supports republicans, even though Redstone agrees with a lot of democratic policies) truly count as counter-examples, to dissuade my point?

These are the exceptions that prove the rule.

For examples on the academic side, InstaHack, is a professor, isn't he? He gets quite a lot of freedom to do what he wants, now doesn't he?

As well as Eugene Volokh.

The truth still holds - professors lean democratic, in some cases severely so, but this has as much to do with self-interest as anything else. Namely, democrats funnel lots of money to universities, and are demonstrably willing to tax the well-off in order to do so.

Business leaders lean towards Republicans, because of their own interests - which usually have to do with putting profit above every other interest, instead of business profit being a necessary-but-not-sufficient component of a balanced societial structure.

At some point the Republicans will realize this is a useable partisan issue. Due to the ideological polarization of the parties, academic bias in hiring, retention and promotion has effectively become partisan, as in "No Republicans Need Apply."

I.e., Republicans are being excluded from public employment because they are Republicans. This is a useable issue because taxpayer funding is involved.

And there is suitable methodology for proving this, and implementing corrective action, courtesy of affirmative action programs.

But it will be necessary to take decisions on faculty hiring, retention and tenure away from the faculty and force it on administrators, who won't be happy with the responsibilty (another way to get fired) and work.

Fred,

Snark aside, I disagree with the "apples and oranges" metaphor, in this case.

Brainwashing, repression of free speech, enforcement of strict rules, all this happens on the job - sometimes of course necessarily, but many times not. While many CEO's have sent out emails urging to contribute, for example, to George Bush in this last election, if a University President did this, the reaction would be swift and brutal. (Not to mention that the Boards tend to be dominated by businesspeople anyway, which is a constraint on universities.)

This whole subject is a tempest in a teapot, and a type of "political correctness" on the right.

With subjects like these, people on the right, in this case, Joe included, rely on inductive fallacies. Luckily this one, at least on my side, is a matter of cheerful disagreement. By that I mean I could cheerfully argue this point, the same way I argue that Barry Bonds is the best offensive player ever, as against Babe Ruth. After and during the argument, I would order a couple more rounds, on me.

I do hear your own experience, however. Again, you can't generalize from your experience to the whole of university.

And again, if true on a small scale, this pales in comparison with other societal pressures - such as business, such as where the money goes, such as the influence of money on elections, etc, etc.

JC - "...democrats funnel lots of money to universities, and are demonstrably willing to tax the well-off in order to do so."

That seems a little odd, given that most universities get their slop-troughs filled by state legislatures and by the US Congress, which Democrats are demonstrably unable to control.

They get more fodder from their alumni, of course. Especially all those profit-crazed CEOs. If they could rely on Democrats to loot the treasury and keep them in business, colleges could get rid of their football and basketball teams.

JC,

Take a look at the donation profiles from the past election, and take a second look at many of the Democrats' big money contributors. But the old "divert the discussion" game" isn't going to work here. If you have a jihad to wage against the politics of business, we can argue that but this thread ain't the place.

We're discussing bias in academia, paid for by public funds, and perpetuated in ways that are discriminatory and an abridgment of both fundamental rights and the principle of truth as the academy's guiding force.

As for "inductive"... I find it interesting that you'd choose to ignore the volume of studies, surveys et. al. linked in this blog post. And it was very funny that you criticized inductive reasoning and then said "look at Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh" as your counterargument (earth to JC... even at 30 to 1, someone has to be the 1).

The fact that your denial is cheerful doesn't change the level of (convenient) denial here.

In fairness, ending the one-party state model of academia would impinge on a major source of ideological and financial support for the U.S. Democratic Party. So JC may feel his interests engaged to protect that.

My question is, why should the entire U.S. public be forced to fund a wing of the U.S. Democratic Party that stifles debate and persecutes students with different views?

Pressure from state legislatures and unfavourable political scrutiny are good first steps to raise the issue's profile, and the need for REAL diversity on our public campuses. The key to this whole issue, however, is going to be the alumni. They're the serious and variable money flow in this equation.

All it would take is about a 10-15% drop off in donations at targeted colleges, and we'd start to see the left's endless and phony "diversity" mantra applied to the content of their curriculum, not just the color of their skins.

Joe - "I'm shocked! Shocked!" You wish to have "state legislatures and unfavorable political scrutiny" attempt to dictate what happens in universities?

Let the market decide, buddy! Name a country, place or time, where the academic elite hasn't been decidedly left of center - unless there is vigorous "party enforcement" of a determined line.
In related news, "China is exerting "unfavorable political scrutiny on internet policies to insure social stability"

You might as well protest "dog bites man" stories.
Cmon. You can't change human nature. I'm sure you don't want state legislatures DICTATING what counts as acceptable "balance". That way lies madness - or at least quite a lot of the repression you profess to be worried about. James Wolcott writes about this in a post titled Curse of the Uncreatives.

Oh, and yes, clearly I knew by citing Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh", this was also an example of inductive reasoning. Kind of my point. My apologies if I didn't express that well.

Okay, the Wolcott piece is a little off - the point is the "intelligentsia", and the "creatives', have from time immemorial been left-of-center, tolerant, pluralistic. This just happens in a creative, intellectually fertile environment. Which a university is supposed to be.

Also, the only "facts" in the piece is "two universities—the University of California and Harvard—occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et al." and "Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as to George Bush'.

Again, this is a right, isn't it? People can contribute to what they want to.

Joe are you squawking that the largest donors to George Bush are his Texas oil buddies? Or that 99% of stockbrokers contributed to George Bush?

Again, tempest in a teapot. Sure, universities are more liberal. Creative centers have always been. And businesses are more conservative.

I certainly know which as a more direct, important impact on my life, and I'm sure you do too.

Joe, actually, JC is sort of on target with his discussion of the business world! :)

Matt touches on it a bit--
In some departments (such as engineering or the hard sciences) I think it would work just fine; in fact I might even support it. However, in others (economics and social sciences) it would be disastrous.
The difference between the "hard" and "soft" sciences, AND between the business world and academe is results. A deep core of pragmatism draws engineers and mathematicians (and businessmen) to the right, and a core of idealism appeals to sociologists, lit majors and lingistics students. However, idealists can just wave their hands, publish papers and theorize. Engineers and businessmen have to make things that work.

Sorry, JC, but academe is not a market system—it's a command system. There is no market there. Barriers to entry, remember?

FWIW this is certainly not a new phenomenon. I was given an undeserved 'D' (the only non-A or -B I ever received in college) long, long (long) ago from an economics prof with whom I disagreed politically. It precluded me from taking an Econ major.

One more example of something that deserves a lot more attention than left-wing bias in higher education.

The K Street Project. Here you have an overtly political campaign to have all sources of money, funding and political influence ONLY BE from members of the Republican party.

That's your "one-party state" right there.

Dave,

Well, for what its worth, my 1st political science class at University of Houston, the professor was deeply conservative, and this was completely reflected in the nature of the discussions (he was a fairly loud Reagan supporter.)

Since I wanted an A, this led me to write my final paper on something non-controversial - namely the line item veto. Which actually I was and am for - I get tired of all this stupid wasteful pork in the congressional budgets. I think this wastefulness is an issue beyond partisanship. Remember this was when Democrats dominated the Congress, and would have led to Reagan having more power, so I believed he was in favor as well.

I got an A on the paper, and in the class.

But I had been hankering to write on Iran-Contra, and I decided against it, as he would cut off discussions very quickly on the subject.

On the market structure, it's not as clear cut as all that, in terms of hiring. There's a barrier of entry in terms of having Masters/PhD to teach, but then I'm assuming things work on market forces. If a newly minted PhD has glowing recommendations, lots of enthusiastic and positive reviews from his TA classes, other demonstrated effectiveness in either teaching or intelligence, the market adjusts, regardless of "political bent".

Uhh, JC, what part of "our public campuses" don't you understand? Private universities are understandably in a different situation, but if you can think of one good reason why we the taxpayers should fund state colleges and universities yet have no say in how they're run, please do come forward with it.

Kirk,

If your statement was to my points, that might be useful. As it is, in my arguments, I never abstract enough so that your point applies to what I say. It's a misrepresentation.

Here's what I say.

1. That universities are liberal, is a "man bites dog" kind of thing. Creative environments always tend towards liberalism.
2. Repression of freedom. When legislatures try to give, as Joe says, "Pressure from state legislatures and unfavourable political scrutiny" then it becomes a type of government supported Right Think. Confident democracies abhor such practices, outside of quite obvious illegal or immoral studies.

One example of this that everyone here might get is the pressure to not investigate copy protection mechanisms, such as Professor Felton was researching. Say this was written as a "standard" by some legislative body in a poor state under the influence of media donations. This would be a problem, and again, chilling effects arise.
3. Tempest in a teapot. Just look at the K Street Project mentioned above. MUCH more threatening to democratic discourse.

Leftist ideological oppressors are not ruling their domains in a delicate manner. No, they are ham-handed bullyboys and girls who want to sweep this matter under the carpet (see JC's postings).

But that obscurantist approach is losing its power, as more and more talented people continue to be squeezed out of academia for ideological reasons. The backdraft from this phenomenon is going to be severe.

But if your mind is feeble enough to believe it's a "tempest in a teapot", just keep on believing it, SFB. It is a belief that probably suits you well.

JC,

Not "state legislatures and unfavorable political scrutiny", but lawyers and compliance committees, as with any other affirmative action hiring.

If this happens, I forsee the scarce numbers of conservative professors owning yachts named "Compliance" paid for with their liberal colleague's budgets.

"This is America, Jack. We ain't gonna hurt ya - we're gonna sue ya" - neighborhood low-lifes to the Hulk Hogan character in Suburban Commando

The Chinese curse is "May your children live in interesting times." The American curse is "May your life be filled with lawyers."

JC,

My experience is hardly unique. Dude, I was there. I attended two different universities, taught at three others, gave papers at about a dozen conferences and attended some at which I didn't give papers, and had professors from lots more universities. What I've lived and heard may just be anecdotal evidence, but it's a buttload of anecdotes. Of course, you do have a point about generalizing to the university as a whole. My experience is in literature, where to be liberal is to be shunned as too far to the right. As I said above, those folks have politics to the left of Trotsky. I had a colleague who returned to school one fall after working (or claiming to have worked)as a propogandist for the IRA. Even if his claim was BS, the fact that he would make it proudly and that it would be considered a good thing by most of his colleagues told me more about my department than I really wanted to know. I also stand by my apples and oranges metaphor (a cliche, I know, but appropriate). As has already been pointed out, universities are public, taxpayer supported (at least in large part) and are supposed to serve the function of promoting intellectual activity. None of that is true of business except in some cases the taxpayer part and even that not to the same extent.

PS: I forgive you your snark, and I'll get the second round.

Jinnderella,

I agree with you. Despite our ideological differences. Sigh...

My biggest issue with a LOT of poli-sci, psychology, literature, is that there isn't much utility there.
But, these areas of the academic experience (arts, literature, etc) aren't really meant for utility.

Fred,

Well, I'm especially sorry to hear that your papers might have cost you a job - and I certainly can't speak for literature, as I hung around with compsci, philos, and theater types, (but theater types get close, I suspect), so I should defer to your experience here.

But I know people who have been especially politically active, who have lost many a job, due to their political nature. During the Seattle WTO protests, for example, a couple of buddies of mine, who were in an environmental group, IN a designated zone and doing nothing illegal, got beat down pretty badly by cops on the rampage, as well as got picked up and charged with disturbing the peace, and then let go within 24 hours.

Both these guys have had issues getting jobs, due to this. And this type of stuff shouldn't be allowed to happen. And again, I think examples like this are why we will agree to disagree about the "influences" of business on political views and expression. (the apples and oranges thing) I specifically did not go to the WTO protests, well, one, because you can't reverse progress - I want the world to be more and more interconnected, and don't want barriers to trade - but two, because I didn't want the ghost of any possible legal issues on my record.

The difference between the "hard" and "soft" sciences, AND between the business world and academe is results. A deep core of pragmatism draws engineers and mathematicians (and businessmen) to the right, and a core of idealism appeals to sociologists, lit majors and lingistics students. However, idealists can just wave their hands, publish papers and theorize. Engineers and businessmen have to make things that work.

Hm. I wouldn't characterize it as "idealism" per se; all professional academics are idealistic, whether they're on the left or the right. Find me a conservative elderly b-school professor whose class has ANYTHING to do with how business is conducted in the real world, and I'll be pretty shocked. :)

I think it's simply a matter of your melieu. People vote where their sympathies (if not always where their interests) lie. Sociologists tend to work with populations that conservatives ignore. Scientists like research, and tend to follow issues that relate to its advancement (like NSF funding and deregulation). Lit theorists . . . well, I'm not quite sure what's going on in their heads, but it scares me.

JC, you’re quite wrong about the “99% of stockbrokers” thing. A large part of the financial services industry leans Democrat. Soros is not even a good example; a much better example is Robert Rubin. He is not an exception; he is a member of a substantial and influential population on Wall Street. If you count the technology sector as “Big Business”, there is a substantial diversity of opinion and contributions from the leaders of these companies. (Sorry Jinn – there are many, many engineers out here on the left coast who lean left, often way left).

I work for a big tech company and within my own group there’s quite a diversity of opinions, which we share pretty freely. Mostly they are to the left of me. We all get along, we’re all adults.

So JC your “equivalence of monoculture” doesn’t wash with me at all. That Republicans are overrepresented in the business world I don’t deny. That right wing politics are enforced as orthodoxy in business and finance with anything like the voracity that left wing politics are enforced in the Academy I deny completely.

Further, that professors have substantial power of the expression of opinion of their students, and they wield it unfairly. Your own post #20 is a fine example (and I feel for you, I would have wanted to blast Reagan on Iran Contra myself; a bipartisan issue if there ever was one).

The United States Senate is known as the world’s greatest debating society. I submit this reputation is greatly exaggerated, particularly now, with 55% of the Senate of the same party as a president who believes he has a mandate to pursue fundamentalist imperialism.

I don't have much use for the "soft" sciences either, they tend to be smokescreens for what amount to secular religions. I have even less use for what passes for theory in literary studies these days. But I do believe the arts and philosophy are defensible. Science is great. Both my father and my brother owe their lives to medical science, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in Florida without air conditioning. But let's face it, science has its limits. Some questions are just not scientific questions and science can never answer them. Maybe they can never be answered at all, but that hasn't stopped some of the greatest minds in human history from trying. Science is all about means; it can never provide ends. Ends can only be provided, or perhaps illustrated, by things like art, religion, politics and philosophy. One of the greatest illustrations I've ever seen of my point about science is Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal." Swift's speaker is a typical 18th century "enlightened man." He has an apparently rational end, ending starvation in Ireland, but apparently insane means, eating Irish babies. But the case he makes for his means is logical, empirical, and supported by the numbers. In other words, there is nothing in science by which to judge his means insane. Nor is there anything in science by which to judge his end rational. On what scientific basis do we value human life? Until there is one (and by the very nature of science I don't think there can be) literature, music, art, philosophy, religion, and politics will be worth studying.

Fred, slightly OT, but perhaps you might enjoy my Modest Proposal.
I am proposing a satirical solution to the problem of endemic testasterone poisoning. Am I, like Swift, operating in a rational fashion?:)

I think science is tempered with humanity, always. Scientists are humans, after all.

Now, this may make some people cranky, but of course I believe there is a biological basis for the dichotomy between hard science and soft science.

JC said: "The whole oil industry is dominated politically by republicans." I cannot disagree with you, however, the US oil industry is probably financially dominated by Republicans, too. The "awl bidness" is hugely high risk, especially the exploration and drilling aspects of it. Takes a certain breed of cat to roll the dice at that craps table, God love 'em. Talk to any independent oil man. They are among the finest "athletes" in the wide world of capitalism and surely know the thrill of victory as well as the agony of defeat.

Jinnderella,

I will read your modest proposal as soon as I get a chance. I'm betting it's interesting. I'm aware that Swift was being satirical. I'm just saying that among the things he was satirizing in that essay are overemphasis on instrumental reason and the idea that science has or can discover all the answers. Both of which were coming to the fore in the 18th century and have not gone away yet, as witness some of the nastier comments about the study of science vs the study of arts and philosophy on this thread.

JC,

"If your statement was to my points"... Ah, ok, forgive me for not realizing that whereas the author of the article was talking about precisely that (as he clarified right here: "We're discussing bias in academia, paid for by public funds" [emphasis added]) you wanted to talk about something else. Fine--but my comment surely does address what's wrong with your position as it relates to the stated topic of discussion here.

I worked for 4 years at a mid-size fixed-income broker/dealer in southern Connecticut. Every few months, that starry-eyed admirer of the Sandinistas, Chris Dodd, would make an appearance to thank his campaign contributors - the co-CEO's of my employer. These latter guys were ardent Democrats, in spite of their positions as co-head of a broker/dealer and investment bank.

So much for the Republican control of big, or little, business.

Doh.

JC,

Your friends' difficulties add some perspective to a tangent whose relevance was impossible for me to see. I see it now - but personal relevance to you =/= relevance to the topic here.

Their problem is being employed with a blemished legal record. That's a good liberal issue, actually, and I see it as a publicv policy problem as well - but it's not relevant to the issue of our universities as one-party states where bias, denial of rights and harassment are paid for in part by public funds.

Fred is correct, the "public" point is intensely relevant to the topic of this thread.

Meanwhile, trust you've been taken to school a bit on the nature of Wall Street. Further comments on balance in business, etc., will simply be deleted from this thread in accordance with our relevance requirement.

As for the K Street project, this will probably shock you but there are tons of Democratic Party lobbyists out there. BOTH parties work to place their former officials in lobbyist positions, as a way of keeping them politically helpful and active while letting industry foot the bill instead of the parties. Lobbying firms know they have to play both sides of the street, and do... and those who don't will get their reminder from the party they snubbed. Not a bias-related scandal, not public funds, and (again) not relevant except as a deliberate distraction.

I'll conclude by noting that surveys and data points referenced in the linked articles above included:

• Excerpts from a forthcoming study by Stanley Rothman of Smith College, who looked at a random sample of more than 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183 institutions of higher learning.

• A national study by Swedish sociologist Charlotta Stern and Santa Clara University economist Daniel Klein, using a random national sample of 1,678 responses from university professors.

• ACTA survey, conducted this fall by the Center for Survey Research & Analysis at the University of Connecticut, among students at 50 top U.S. universities and colleges.

• Study of campaign contributions in 2004 using publicly available data show two universities — the University of California and Harvard — occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups. We covered the ratio of Bush donations (less than a tenth) in our last Media Watch.

This is NOT anecdotal evidence. Saying that it is, is called lying. On the "anecdotal but still revealing" side, I'll add:

• Recent informal survey at Yale, where students answered questions about academic freedom posed by the Yale Free Press.

• Recent trends at Quebec universities, where brownshirt thugs (both students and professors) are being allowed a de facto veto over speakers on campus.

• Case list of FIRE, which often finds itself defending students transparently being persecuted (in some cases, to the point of attempted termination of their university careers), with zero due process, solely for their political beliefs.

You don't acknowledge these things because you don't want to acknowledge them. Tough, they're still there and still real. Nor is this a tempest in a teapot, unless you propose to make the case that the state of a nation's universities does not matter. It does matter - as an issue of public policy, as an issue of fairness to the parents and taxpayers who pay for it, and as an issue of the academy betraying its own ideals.

"Diversity" is a central part of the agenda at today's universities, and political scrutiny of hiring decisions and teaching is now routine as a result of consistent agitation by liberal and left-wing groups within our universities. So be it - but having made "diversity" a centerpriece of the university's vision, they are about to discover that some people are going to be equally committed to political campaigns aimed at forcing them to live up to that ideal.

The notion that CEOs and executives are overwhelmingly Republican certain does not square with my experience.

I'm only drawing on my experience in three or four corporations, but these people are usually liberal Democrats.

And political discussion has been just about non-existent in the corporations and law firms in which I've worked. I've never seen or received a political memo from a CEO or executive, and I have always worked closely with these people.

Joe,

Delete what you want - it is absolutley relevant, If you start deleting me because I disagree with you about whether it is relevant or not, I'm not posting here again. (Which might relieve you...) Again, we can agree to disagree. Notice also, that because I'm not backing down, you are the one who wishes to indulge in repression - kinda like what you want done in higher education right?

"Taken to school re: wall street, investors. Umm...no. These are all anecdotes, so far. Take a look at campaign contributions. Every third campaign contributor to George Bush, in New York, is "investor, investor, investor". In Dallas, TX every third campaign contributor is related to oil.

So, again, the importance is relevant.

I have fully admitted that universities are more liberal - again, it's a "Man bites dog" kinda thing. Unless you wish to engage in repression, (your own contributions to repression being to delete my posts), this is how it will continue to be, unless you promulgate an atmosphere of fear to force people to go along.

Going all Brent Bozell and inflating the IMPORTANCE of this is a personal judgement (the same way that Bozell's organization lodges 99% of the "moral complaints" to the FCC), and not supported by the facts.

Universities are more liberal - that's true, and we both agree. The disagreement is that this is somehow wrong, or that you can legislate (Right-Think) it away, and finally, a disagreement on its importance.

One more thing - as has been stated above, this is such a generalization about what happens IN a university. In my own experience in Compsci, there were a variety of views - but went towards libertarian. In philosophy, there were a variety of views. In business schools, you think there is a lot of "left-wing oppression"? Before you start recommending repressive correctives, you need a much more comprehensive viewpoint.

Joe, hey, look at this - I have big-time columnists agree ing with me.

What next? Quotas for Republican anthropologists?.

Thanks to chez Nadezhda for the link - and who also takes a more balanced view of the topic under discussion.

Ellen Goodman also makes the connection between political bias in business, as opposed to political bias in education.

You may disagree with her, and I know you do, but to make the comparison is not "off-topic", unless you choose to artificially define it as such.

From the LA Times on this subject...
"CHAIT:

Why Academia Shuns Republicans

A few weeks ago, a pair of studies found that Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among professors at leading universities. Conservatives gleefully seized upon this to once again flagellate academia for its liberal bias.

Am I the only person who fails to understand why conservatives see this finding as vindication? After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?

Conservatives have a ready answer. The only reason faculties lean so far to the left is that deans, administrators and entire university cultures systematically discriminate against conservatives.

They don't, however, have much evidence to back this up. Mostly, they assume that the leftward tilt is prima facie evidence of anti-conservative discrimination. (Yet, when liberals hold up minority underrepresentation at some institutions as proof of discrimination, conservatives are justifiably skeptical.)

Conservative pundit George Will recently tied the dearth of conservative professors to the quasi-Marxist outlook in African American studies, women's studies and cultural studies. And at many campuses, those departments certainly don't amount to much more than left-wing propaganda factories. It's also true that radical multiculturalist theory — which sees white male oppression as the key to everything — has taken root in plenty of more mainstream disciplines.

This no doubt makes things hard on prospective conservative academics, not to mention mainstream liberal ones. A historian I know (a liberal) used to complain that history departments showed little interest in the traditional research he did, only caring about subjects like "buggery in the British navy."

But the rise of fashionable left-wing scholarship can be blamed for only a tiny part of the GOP's problem. The studies showing that academics prefer Democrats to Republicans also show that this preference holds in hard sciences as well as social sciences. Are we to believe that higher education has fallen prey to trendy multiculturalist engineering, or that physics departments everywhere suppress conservative quantum theorists?

The main causes of the partisan disparity on campus have little to do with anything so nefarious as discrimination. First, Republicans don't particularly want to be professors. To go into academia — a highly competitive field that does not offer great riches — you have to believe that living the life of the mind is more valuable than making a Wall Street salary. On most issues that offer a choice between having more money in your pocket and having something else — a cleaner environment, universal health insurance, etc. — conservatives tend to prefer the money and liberals tend to prefer the something else. It's not so surprising that the same thinking would extend to career choices.

Second, professors don't particularly want to be Republicans. In recent years, and especially under George W. Bush, Republicans have cultivated anti-intellectualism...."

Tom and JC,

You can quote all the columns and articles you want. As a character in Robert Penn Warren's Brother to Dragons said, "Durn it, I tell ya I was thar." Or to paraphrase Groucho, "Who am I gonna believe my own eyes or you?" And Tom, the easy assumption that conservatives are morons and that truly smart people are liberal Democrats is an arrogant liberal cliche and an offensive one at that. It's an argument stopper, not an argument. I suppose Aristotle, TS Eliot, Alisdair MacIntyre, Edmund Burke, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Thomas Aquinas, and a host of others I could name if I had the time were morons.

"The notion that CEOs and executives are overwhelmingly Republican certain does not square with my experience."

Nevertheless, it does square with the data.

Can't read the WaPo link. Odd that liberals haven't seen much of a problem with quotas before, in places equally unlikely.

As for Chait's article,

(a) I'd quote those voting pattern survey results much more explicitly in terms of their results and provenance, and also with greater caution.

First, it can be taken another way of saying "well, we hire smart people, and conservatives aren't smart." Which is offensive.

Also, it could easily become an argument for a very different cause/effect: i.e. greater exposure to a biased environment creates longer-term political tilts among those exposed longer. If taken this way the problem's seriousness would be elevated, not reduced.

This doesn't even have to be a GOP vs. Dem issue. For instance, one might ask why liberals of Marc's variety are so much less common in the Democratic Party these days. Could it be that an aggressively biased academic environment has become a publicly funded mobilizing center that indoctrinates, funds, and staffs successively more extreme elements within liberalism (while shutting out more mainstream elements and conservatives), then injects them into the party? I can't say for sure. But I certainly wouldn't dismiss it as one of the factors involved. Introduction of artificial distortions into the body politic paid for by public funds would be a serious public policy problem, as well as a public accountability and fairness problem.

(b) Self-selection is another argument that cuts both ways. Traditionally, this has been seen as prima facie proof of a hostile environment in liberal diversity methodologies - which Rothman, among others, are now using quite explicitly now that they've become the standard coin in academia and many businesses as well.

As diversity programs in academia and business alike never tire of noting, this sudden slackening as one moves up the ladder is usually an indication of a serious problem - to solve it, the hostile environment and systemic barriers need to be removed. This is a traditional liberal position, not a Chomskyite one, and again I find it surprising to hear it abandoned so suddenly.

Certainly in this case, when you look at the reported discrimination, bigotry, and even outright persecution in the links above, the supporting evidence is there. By driving out conservatives at every step and creating a bigoted environment, each successive rung has fewer and fewer conservatives in it - and certainly far fewer than would otherwise be the case.

It's sort of like a 1980s South African saying:

"Look, Blacks have no managerial talent, and don't want to be in business or politics, so it's best to just keep letting the whites run things. Proof? Why, just look around at how few blacks you see in those roles."

Finally, I'll add that diversity of ideas is a relevant criterion because (a) these are public institutions; and (b) they study the life of the mind and social policy, so political diversity is highly relevant in ways that it is not in business (outside of lobbying firms).

© There is a long tradition of conservative thought and philosophy, especially but not exclusively those programs leading to the classics of the Western canon (programs usually oversubscribed when introduced, by usually strangled before introduction - one university GAVE BACK A $20,000,000 BEQUEST rather than set up such a program.) For Chait to say that conservatives are all about business not ideas indicates that he doesn't really understand them.

Right-wing think tanks seem to thrive... notwithstanding incidents like Dan Darling's professors refusing to give him any recommendations because the think tank he wanted to be part of was conservative. Indeed, the right have built a detailed intellectual edifice for conservatism that has overtaken liberalism as a set iof ideas. The thing is, they largely had to do it outside of academia. Why?

Which brings us to the copious and growing evidence of hostile and even persecutory environments, which are themselves immoral and contrary to both the academy's stated principles (diversity) and deeper principles (inquiry after truth).

Clearly, many conservatives are interested in being part of the "life of the mind". Clearly, they are finding artificial and hostile limits to those opportunities in the system the public pays for.

There are broader public policy implications to that trend.

As the WSJ, Economist, and others also note, the rise of the think tanks parallels the decline in academia's influence within politics. This represents a huge loss of value for public dollars, but it is also an expected result for a monoculture.

You'd expect to find a monoculture losing the ability to communicate well beyond its borders or political group, lapsing increasingly into jargon and self-referential trivialities, and with very little meaningful challenge (and therefore refinement or checks and balances) within. Which is exactly what academia has become these days - and which is why its influence has waned.

The road to renewed social value from the academy does indeed lead through diversity, as liberals have long claimed. Conservatives will be quite happy to take the systems liberals have carefully set up over the last 30 years, and use them to achieve that public good. And if political pressure is required to ensure that conservatives are not arbitrarily excluded from these remedies and that strong institutional incentives exist to take these issues seriously, then so be it.

First, note that the term "moron" appears nowhere in Chalit's article. He merely makes the point that academics are largely self-selected and well-educated people who overwhelmingly choose to vote Democrat. There is no conclusion or aspersion as to the intellectual qualities of conservative thinkers in general, only observance of the anti-intellectual attitudes of the Bush administration which can hardly be argued (and indeed may have helped greatly in the last election,psuedo-common man is a winning political act and intellectual of any kind is a losing political act).
Going thru both undergraduate and graduate engineering school in Boulder Colorado, my profs in the hard sciences were overwhelmingly liberal. I doubt seriously that political views were ever discussed in hiring interviews for mechanical/electrical/software engineering profs, but every teacher I got to know well during my (too many) years at CU was liberal to some degree.
To me, the only reasonable conclusion is that they were self-selected into academic life for similar reasons that they were self-selected liberals.
In contrast, the working engineering world has a hefty contingent of political conservatives, if not a majority. Clearly, engineering academics are not a representative sample of the engineering population and self-selection is a much more likely scenario than political bias in a technical hiring process for the discrepancy.

Another open question is how could any "thought-police" system for ensuring ideological diversity be consistent with academic freedom.
What if you hire someone to add conservative diversity and they change their mind and become liberal (like some Supreme Court justices)?
Do you then fire them for reducing diversity?
Any gains in diversity would be greviously offset by reductions in the free-thinking atmosphere required in a place of learning.
If a political litmus test is required to hire engineering profs, who determines which politics are "diverse enough"?
The process could end in purges and political definition of "right think" and maybe that would not bother some of the proponents.

(chuckle) ...and here I was worried JC had missed my hook and wasn't going to bite...

Delete what you want - it is absolutley relevant, If you start deleting me because I disagree with you about whether it is relevant or not, I'm not posting here again. (Which might relieve you...)

Wait a minute. Dude, are you saying that an environment that aribtrarily and forcibly suppresses certain viewpoints may cause people with those viewpoints to leave, notwithstanding their interest in the subjects in question?

Tom,

Equally open question: how can thought-police systems for eliminating ideological diversity be consistent with academic freedom?

Oddly, this question does not appear to have hit the liberal radar screen before.

I suspect the answer in both cases is that this freedom also comes with responsibilities in a publicly funded system, that there must be accountability for abuse, and that this accountability is partly public in a publicly-funded institution.

An institution would not be allowed to deliberately exclude black people from its ranks, academic freedom or no. Many legal battles, led by liberals, have revolved around forcing even military academies to admit women. Academic freedom and autonomy did not seem to be big barriers to this "interference" either. The response was that these are public institutions, and so there is a public policy responsibility to end abuses and discrimination.

The process could end in purges and political definition of "right think" and maybe that would not bother some of the proponents.

We have that right now.

The question is, what does it take to break an apparent culture of abuse, exclusion and impunity?

Given that many of the current policies and tools re: measuring "diversity" were formulated with that explicit objective in mind, and given that they have been widely accepted in academia, they are obviously appropriate (a debate aparently settled in academia, so fine) and ready for use.

As I've noted earlier, the most significant pressure in this scenario will come from alumni. But politicians can be very useful in demanding accountability, raising the issue's profile, publicly criticizing especially broken departments (Columbia's Mideast Studies group comes to mind... and a Democratic politician has already stepped up to that task), and targeting administrators who allow cultures of exclusion and the persecution of students with different views.

Once political show trials and hostile environments for conservatives begin to become a serious career-limiting move for administrators, and it's clear that the public will be scrutinizing patterns of conduct within these institutions, the incentives for administrators will shift. When caving into the academy's closed-minded and illiberal wing will no longer be the path of least resistance, the proces of reform will begin.

This battle will play itself out most prominently in the social sciences, as many of the other battles within academia have. Engineering can make a case that political ideological diversity is incidental to their discipline. Business schools whirl in their own orbit, period. Economics and social sciences, however, are stuck by the fact that politics is PART of the discipline itself... and so ideological diversity is in fact a necessary part of their job.

Joe, Re: your last paragraph above, the same argument could be made for the arts, which also have an inevitable political component. Ideologies have ranged from attempts at apolitical stances (the _l'art pour l'art and aesthete movements in the 19th century, to some degree the New Criticism of the mid 20th) to deep political engagement (the Russian "novel of ideas" in the 19th century, the Dada movement, Pound's unfortunate fascism) to outright political propaganda (Soviet "socialist realism," Nazi art and architecture). When all professors in literature, say, teach the party line that the canon has been discredited as a tool of patriarchal capitalist oppression etc, students get only a distorted version of the opposing view if any at all. They are also deprived of reading the great works their professors have been able to read. That may not matter to many of the commenters on this thread, but I'm enough of a Romantic and a humanist to believe it matters a great deal.

Oh and Tom, to clearly imply something and when you're called on it say, "I never used those words" is disingenuous at best.

Before the 1960s, academics were much more conservative. Were conservatives smarter and liberals dumber then? Did the IQs change in the 60s? Rational argument evidently is unfamiliar to academics in the monoversities. Typically, they fit the data to their conclusions. Procrustes would be proud.

Fred,

While art does seem to have a political component these days, politics is not integral to art in the way it is for, say, economics. I can listen to John Lennon quite happily without having to concern myself with his politics, or even the politics of "Imagine." Likewise, I can real Roald Dahl's wonderful childrens' stories, and not care about the fact he was a sympathizer with fascism. And remember A.L.'s recent article about the Wagner performance at Disney Hall?

The politics isn't the part that matters, because the politics aren't the essence of the function art performs. As such, they aren't the essence of the argument to have about choices. As opposed to social "sciences", of course, in which politics is the essence of the function and the need for debate makes intellectual diversity a priority.

With that said, if it was becoming clear that there were many artists who were being denied public grants or excluded from major public organizations on account of being GOP supporters (or Democratic PArty supporters, for that mater), then yeah, you'd have an obvious political issue on your hands.

Joe, I see we've graduated to maturity...ok, I can play along with that too - all in the spirit of fun!

(snicker snicker) Dude, I SO knew you were trying to get me to bite, that I played along! Haha!! YOU'VE BEEN SERVED!!! (is that what kids say today? Something like it? In my day it would have been, "huh-huh-huh...cool". Who can name the reference?)

At any rate, back to the question at hand.

Fred, since your experience here is apropos, the one thing that CAN be admitted, is that "groupthink can have deleterious effects on free speech/expression." And that's why your own personal example rings true - we can see that happening, and clearly it sucks. But, as my example showed, it can happen in the other direction as well.

That groupthink can be harmful is true, but that is true of any group on god's green earth - journalists, liberals, conservatives, catholics, muslims, SF Giants fans (me), businesses or whomever.

But that's the human condition, and for all the reasons I've said above, its a tempest in a teapot, it's swimming upstream to try to change it (dog bites man - shocker! universities are liberal! shocker!), this doesn't apply to all areas of university, and the "cure" is worse than the disease.

Last post on this subject - Elvis is leaving the building, so Perry Como can have the floor.

:)

Oh man, trying... to... resist... can't... Perry Como, ladies and gentlemen - take it away:

"Angry, please don't be angry,
'Cause I was only teasing you!
I wouldn't even let you think of leavin'
Don't you know I love you true!

Just because I took a look at somebody else,
That's no reason you should put poor me on the shelf!
Angry, please don't be angry,
'Cause I was only teasing you!

Don't believe a thing you hear, just wait 'till you see,
Then you'll find no cause to show that you're jealous of me!
Oh! Angry, please don't be angry,
'Cause I was only teasing you! "

Thank you... he'll be here all week!

"the point is the "intelligentsia", and the "creatives', have from time immemorial been left-of-center, tolerant, pluralistic. This just happens in a creative, intellectually fertile environment."

Oh,really,now JC!

The "intellentsia" is NEVER tolerant and pluralistic,those are merely tactics and propaganda invoked till power is gained the pretense is dropped and intolerant conformity imposed........

....as you yourself "cheerfully" admit!Talk about "newspeak"!

The university has become a monastery where the bitter priests of a failed religion have withdrawn from the wicked world and they speaketh in tongues(except when demanding public subsudies).

Since the only thing of true public value they produce(technical training in business,science and technology)can easily be done outside traditional academia,I predict that in 20 yrs Harvard will be a resort featuring golf and horseback riding.
"Harvard University" or rather,what's left of it,will reside in cyberspace.
Why travel to the chilly environs of Cambridge and submit to the petty tyrannies of politically correct,puritanical parasites when I can get what little of value they offer online from the comfort of my home and at less cost?

Tom's article made what I think is an extremely salient point: as the article in question pointed out, professors in the hard sciences are overwhelmingly liberal too. Many scientists directly benefit when funding increases for, say, defense-related research. And if ideology enters into the hiring process for science faculty, it must be in a pretty damn subtle way. Yet they're still not voting for Republicans, and those who want to call academic liberalism a conspiracy need to figure out how to deal with that fact.