Remember when liberals were spitting on soldiers and desecrating the flag during the previous administration and, if anyone pointed that out, they screamed we couldn't question their patriotism?
College Professors should be REMOVED and we should have Conservative Gestapo Instructors installed to make certain ALL students in America are properly indoctrinated with required Corporate Propaganda. Otherwise, they're not 'MERICAN!
Conservative Kempetai would be better, because they're Japanese and can learn the kids maths as well.
"Batman is only meaningful as an answer to a world which in its basics is chaotic and in the hands of the wrong people, where no justice can be found. I think it's very suitable to our perception of the world's condition today... Batman embodies the will to resist evil" -Frank Miller
"Conan, what's the meaning of life?" "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!" -Conan the Barbarian
"Well, yeah." -Jason E. Perkins
"If I had a dime for every time Pariah was right about something I'd owe twenty cents." -Ultimate Jaburg53
"Fair enough. I defer to your expertise." -Prometheus
By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page C01
College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.
By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.
The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.
"What's most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field," said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study. "There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It's a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you'd expect to be dominated by liberals."
Religious services take a back seat for many faculty members, with 51 percent saying they rarely or never attend church or synagogue and 31 percent calling themselves regular churchgoers. On the gender front, 72 percent of the full-time faculty are male and 28 percent female.
The findings, by Lichter and fellow political science professors Stanley Rothman of Smith College and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, are based on a survey of 1,643 full-time faculty at 183 four-year schools. The researchers relied on 1999 data from the North American Academic Study Survey, the most recent comprehensive data available.
The study appears in the March issue of the Forum, an online political science journal. It was funded by the Randolph Foundation, a right-leaning group that has given grants to such conservative organizations as the Independent Women's Forum and Americans for Tax Reform.
Rothman sees the findings as evidence of "possible discrimination" against conservatives in hiring and promotion. Even after factoring in levels of achievement, as measured by published work and organization memberships, "the most likely conclusion" is that "being conservative counts against you," he said. "It doesn't surprise me, because I've observed it happening." The study, however, describes this finding as "preliminary."
When asked about the findings, Jonathan Knight, director of academic freedom and tenure for the American Association of University Professors, said, "The question is how this translates into what happens within the academic community on such issues as curriculum, admission of students, evaluation of students, evaluation of faculty for salary and promotion." Knight said he isn't aware of "any good evidence" that personal views are having an impact on campus policies.
"It's hard to see that these liberal views cut very deeply into the education of students. In fact, a number of studies show the core values that students bring into the university are not very much altered by being in college."
Rothman, Lichter and Nevitte find a leftward shift on campus over the past two decades. In the last major survey of college faculty, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1984, 39 percent identified themselves as liberal.
In contrast with the finding that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are liberal, a Harris Poll of the general public last year found that 33 percent describe themselves as conservative and 18 percent as liberal.
The liberal label that a majority of the faculty members attached to themselves is reflected on a variety of issues. The professors and instructors surveyed are, strongly or somewhat, in favor of abortion rights (84 percent); believe homosexuality is acceptable (67 percent); and want more environmental protection "even if it raises prices or costs jobs" (88 percent). What's more, the study found, 65 percent want the government to ensure full employment, a stance to the left of the Democratic Party.
Recent campus controversies have reinforced the left-wing faculty image. The University of Colorado is reviewing its tenure system after one professor, Ward Churchill, created an uproar by likening World Trade Center victims to Nazis. Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences voted no confidence in the university's president, Lawrence Summers, after he privately wondered whether women had the same natural ability as men in science and math.
The study did not attempt to examine whether the political views of faculty members affect the content of their courses.
The researchers say that liberals, men and non-regular churchgoers are more likely to be teaching at top schools, while conservatives, women and more religious faculty are more likely to be relegated to lower-tier colleges and universities.
Top-tier schools, roughly a third of the total, are defined as highly ranked liberal arts colleges and research universities that grant PhDs.
The most liberal faculties are those devoted to the humanities (81 percent) and social sciences (75 percent), according to the study. But liberals outnumbered conservatives even among engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent).
The most left-leaning departments are English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative, the study says.
"In general," says Lichter, who also heads the nonprofit Center for Media and Public Affairs, "even broad-minded people gravitate toward other people like themselves. That's why you need diversity, not just of race and gender but also, maybe especially, of ideas and perspective."
Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.
EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
Academics, on average, lean to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving even more in that direction.
Among full-time faculty members at four-year colleges and universities, the percentage identifying as "far left" or liberal has increased notably in the last three years, while the percentage identifying in three other political categories has declined. The data come from the University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute, which surveys faculty members nationwide every three years on a range of attitudes.
Here are the data for the new survey and the prior survey:
..........................2010-11......2007-8 Far left.................12.4%..........8.8% Liberal..................50.3%........47.0% Middle of the road..25.4%........28.4% Conservative.........11.5%........15.2% Far right.................0.4%..........0.7%
Gauging how gradual or abrupt this shift is is complicated because of changes in the UCLA survey's methodology; before 2007-8, the survey included community college faculty members, who have been excluded since. But for those years, examining only four-year college and university faculty members, the numbers are similar to those of 2007-8. Going back further, one can see an evolution away from the center.
In the 1998-9 survey, more than 35 percent of faculty members identified themselves as middle of the road, and less than half (47.5 percent) identified as liberal or far left. In the new data, 62.7 percent identify as liberal or far left. (Most surveys that have included community college faculty members have found them to inhabit political space to the right of faculty members at four-year institutions.)
The new data differ from some recent studies by groups other than the UCLA center that have found that professors (while more likely to lean left than right) in fact were doing so from more of a centrist position. A major study in 2007, for example, found that professors were more likely to be centrist than liberal, and that many on the left identified themselves as "slightly liberal." (That study and the new one use different scales, making exact comparisons impossible.)
In looking at the new data, there is notable variation by sector. Private research universities are the most left-leaning, with 16.2 percent of faculty members identifying as far left, and 0.1 percent as far right. (If one combines far left and liberal, however, private, four-year, non-religious colleges top private universities, 68.6 percent to 67.7 percent.) The largest conservative contingent can be found at religious, non-Roman Catholic four-year colleges, where 23.0 percent identify as conservative and another 0.6 percent say that they are far right.
Professors' Political Identification, 2010-11, by Sector
.......................................Far left......Liberal........Middle of the Road.....Conservative..... Far right Public universities.............13.3%.........52.4%......24.7%.......................9.2%................0.3% Private universities..............16.2%.......51.5%......22.3%..................... 9.8%................0.1% Public, 4-year colleges .........8.8%........47.1%......28.7%..................... 14.7%.............. 0.7% Private, 4-year, nonsectarian 14.0%......54.6%......22.6%......................8.6%.................0.3% Private, 4-year, Catholic.......7.8%........48.0%......30.7%.....................13.3%.................0.3% Private, 4-year, other religious 7.4%.....40.0%......29.1%.....................23.0%.................0.6%
The study found some differences by gender, with women further to the left than men. Among women, 12.6 percent identified as far left and 54.9 percent as liberal. Among men, the figures were 12.2 percent and 47.2 percent, respectively.
When it comes to the three tenure-track ranks, assistant professors were the most likely to be far left, but full professors were more likely than others to be liberal.
Professors' Political Identification, 2010-11, by Tenure Rank
...............................Far left.....Liberal......Middle of the Road.....Conservative.......Far right Full professors...........11.8%......54.9%......23.4%......................9.7%...............0.2% Associate professors...13.8%......50.4%......24.0%....................11.5%............ ..0.4% Assistant professors...13.9%.......48.7%......25.9%...................11.2%................0.4%
So what do these data mean?
Sylvia Hurtado, professor of education at UCLA and director of the Higher Education Research Institute, said that she didn't know what to make of the surge to the left by faculty members. She said that she suspects age may be a factor, as the full-time professoriate is aging, but said that this is just a theory. Hurtado said that these figures always attract a lot of attention, but she thinks that the emphasis may be misplaced because of a series of studies showing no evidence that left-leaning faculty members are somehow shifting the views of their students or enforcing any kind of political requirement.
Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, has written extensively on faculty political issues. He is the co-author of the 2007 report that found that while professors may lean left, they do so less than is imagined and less uniformly across institution type than is imagined, and that many are in the political middle.
He said that he couldn't be sure why more professors were identifying as far left, but that "during periods of significant economic downturn, and significant rise of inequality, it's not surprising" that such a shift would take place, especially given that in academe, "radicalism is still a live possibility."
Gross said that the "optics" of the data could lead to criticism of higher education. "From the vantage point of some folks, that will make academe look bad. For others, it will make academe look like a place concerned with the country."
Daniel Klein, a professor of economics at George Mason University who has written extensively about faculty political attitudes, said he was not surprised by the shift to the left. He said that he has seen "tendencies toward uniformity" in disciplines and departments, and that these trends tend to build upon themselves.
Klein said academe should worry about the impact of being further tilted to the left. He said that those in the ideological majority in higher education "shouldn't be so confident in their own outlook" that they don't see the cost of being seen by many as outside the mainstream. "For all the people who are skeptical of the left, and that's a lot of people, they will see academe as this vast apparatus of leftist groupthink."
The Rutgers University faculty council has passed a resolution calling for the school to rescind Condoleezza Rice’s invitation to speak at commencement.
The former secretary of state drew the ire of the school’s professors for her “prominent role in [the Bush] administration’s efforts to mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the existence of links between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime.”
Her efforts in the administration, according to the resolution, ”led to the second Iraq war, which caused the death of over 100,000 men, women and children, and the displacement of millions of others.”
The professors concluded that Rutgers should not honor someone who “participated in a political effort to circumvent the law” and pleaded for the school’s board of governors to rescind Rice’s invitation to speak.
The school newspaper, The Daily Targum, published an editorial that agreed with the faculty’s resolution that Rice should not speak at commencement and argued the student body wasn’t comfortable with anyone who has “questionable” politics.
“The point is, we just don’t feel comfortable having politicians as commencement speakers at all. A commencement speaker is meant to be someone who has made some extraordinary and meaningful accomplishments in their lives to inspire a generation of college graduates. Rice probably has a lot of advice on perseverance, dedication and hard work that she can offer to this year’s graduating class, but what she chose to do with those qualities is certainly questionable to us,” the editorial stated.
A university spokesman said that Rice’s selection was “unanimously approved” by the board of directors and there are no plans to cancel her appearance.
A similar situation occurred last year at Swarthmore College where another Bush official, Robert Zoellick, withdrew from speaking at his alma mater’s commencement after students vocally criticized his selection.
Superior liberal "tolerance" on full display. So much for open dialogue at the university level, and hearing all perspectives.
If this is how they treat a highly accomplished secretary of state, just imagine the propaganda and liberal intolerance they unleash on their students in the classroom on a daily basis.
Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.
EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
Victor D Hanson; Explains How Hypocritical the Left is when it comes to Equality
While discussing the Democrat political leadership too, he mostly focuses on how liberal college professors demagogue middle class white Americans for "white privilege" and so forth, but in fact these academics enjoy enormously disproportionate salaries and perks, and gloss over the suffering of the white working class over the last 150 years or so for what little "white privilege" they might actually have.
A great citing of facts, listing ironies that abound, which at points are quite funny.
Not surprisingly, the academic scientific community likewise harasses and punishes scientific researchers who objectively question liberal orthodoxy. It's gratifying to see that so many are resisting that, once their tenure is secured.
Fifty-one thousand Canadian engineers, geologists, and geophysicists were recently polled by their professional organization. Sixty-eight percent of them disagree with the statement that "the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled." Only 26% attributed global warming to "human activity like burning fossil fuels." APEGGA's executive director Neil Windsor said, "We're not surprised at all. There is no clear consensus of scientists that we know of."
Dr. Joanne Simpson, one of the world's top weather scientists, expressed relief upon her retirement that she was finally free to speak "frankly" on global warming and announce that "as a scientist I remain skeptical." She says she remained silent for fear of personal attacks. Dr. Simpson was a pioneer in computer modeling and points out the obvious: computer models are not yet good enough to predict weather -- we cannot scientifically predict global climate trends.
Dr. Fred Singer, first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, and physicist Dr. Seitz, past president of the APS, of Rockefeller University and of the National Academy of Science, argue that the computer models are fed questionable data and assumptions that determine the answers on global warming that the scientists expect to see.
Recently we've had a perfect example of the enforced global warming consensus falling apart. Berkeley Professor Muller did a media blitz with the findings of the latest analysis of all land temperature data, the BEST study, that he claimed once and for all proved that the planet is warming. Predictably, the Washington Post proclaimed that the BEST study had "settled the climate change debate" and showed that anyone who remained a skeptic was committing a "cynical fraud."
But within a week, Muller's lead co-author, Professor Curry, was interviewed in the British press (not reported in America), saying that the BEST data did the opposite: the global "temperature trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all - though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly."
This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting," Prof Curry said. "Whatever it is that's going on here, it doesn't look like it's being dominated by CO2." In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics' arguments were now taking them much more seriously. They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation - as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.
Other scientists jumped in, calling Muller's false claims to the media that BEST proved global warming "highly unethical." Professor Muller, confronted with dissent, caved and admitted that indeed, both ocean and land measurements show that global warming stopped increasing in 1998.
Media coverage on global warming has been criminally one-sided. The public doesn't know where the global warming theory came from in the first place. Answer: the U.N., not a scientific body. The threat of catastrophic warming was launched by the U.N. to promote international climate treaties that would transfer wealth from rich countries to developing countries. It was political from the beginning, with the conclusion assumed: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (U.N. IPCC) was funded to report on how man was changing climate. Its scientific reports have been repeatedly corrected for misrepresentation and outright fraud.
This is important. Global warming theory did not come from a breakthrough in scientific research that enabled us to understand our climate. We still don't understand global climate any more than we understand the human brain or how to cure cancer. The science of global climate is in its infancy.
When Betsy DeVos on Thursday accused liberal faculty members of trying to force their views on students, the new education secretary infuriated many professors -- and won praise from some conservatives. Most faculty members who weighed in on social media denied the indoctrination and unfairness charges. While not disputing her assertion that they are more likely than others to be liberal, they said it was unfair to say that this meant they were indoctrinating anyone. Many conservatives who applauded DeVos said their personal experiences (or those of their children, nieces, nephews, etc.) showed she was correct.
For all the back-and-forth of traded anecdotes, there is research on these subjects -- in peer-reviewed articles, books published by scholarly presses and so forth. And most of these studies reach a consensus.
Yes, professors lean left (although with some caveats). But much of the research says conservative students and faculty members are not only surviving but thriving in academe -- free of indoctrination if not the periodic frustrations. Further, the research casts doubt on the idea that the ideological tilt of faculty members is because of discrimination. Notably, some of this research has been produced by conservative scholars.
DeVos is not the only one to raise the issue recently. A state senator in Iowa has introduced a bill to require that no professor or instructor be hired by a public university if his or her most recent party affiliation would “cause the percentage of the faculty belonging to one political party to exceed by 10 percent” the percentage of the faculty belonging to the other dominant party. The bill, like the DeVos speech, has angered many professors.
Are Professors More Liberal Than the Public at Large?
The most complete study of the politics of professors is 10 years old. The study is unusual among such research efforts in that it included community college faculty members (who are left out of many such analyses) and looked at age and positions on social issues. The study's age may be a disadvantage, but it also followed a presidential election (George W. Bush's successful re-election bid vs. John Kerry) in which the incumbent was ridiculed by many campus activists. The study was called "The Social and Political Views of American Professors" and it was based on a survey of 1,417 full-time faculty members.
Among the key findings: ◾Faculty members were more likely to categorize themselves as moderate (46.1 percent) than liberal (44.1 percent). Conservatives trailed at 9.2 percent. ◾Faculty members, when examined by sector, differed widely. At community colleges, 19 percent of faculty members called themselves conservatives, and only 37.1 percent said they were liberals. Liberal arts college faculty members were most likely to identify as liberal (61 percent, compared to only 3.9 percent as conservatives). ◾When it came to voting, professors (even in the humanities) were not a monolith, with 15 percent in the humanities saying they had voted for President Bush in his re-election bid. Bush won just under a third of the vote in business and just over a third in computer science and engineering. And Bush won a narrow majority of votes from faculty members in the health sciences. ◾The professors approaching their emeritus years were significantly to the left of those coming into academe. Among those aged 50-64, 17.2 percent identified themselves as left activists, while only 1.3 percent of those aged 26-35 did so. ◾On social issues, professors had strong views in support of gay rights and abortion rights, and most believed Bush misled the nation about Iraq. But professors were split on affirmative action.
Some criticized the study for not viewing any imbalances in political attitudes as troubling, while others defended the study and said it challenged the notion that everyone in academe was liberal and voted for Democrats (or Ralph Nader). The study was conducted by Neil Gross, then at Harvard University and now at Colby College, and Solon Simmons, of George Mason University.
What Have Other Studies Found?
Research since the 2007 study largely confirms the idea that faculty members at four-year colleges and universities (the focus of these studies) lean left. But here, too, studies find differences when looking at different groups. A 2016 study published in Econ Journal Watch considered voter registration of faculty members in selected social science disciplines (and history) at 40 leading American universities. The study found a ration of 11.5 Democrats for every Republican in these departments, but with wide variation. In economics, the ratio was 4.5 to one, while in history the ratio was 33.5 to one.
Another 2016 analysis of faculty members at four-year colleges and universities found that political leanings of faculty members are lopsided, but far more lopsided in New England. The analysis, based on 2014 data, found that nationally, colleges and universities had a six to one ratio of liberal to conservative professors. In New England, the figure was 28 to one. The study was by Samuel J. Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Abrams, a self-described conservative, said he views that New England ratio as problematic. At the same time, he said he believes faculty members encourage students to consider many views, and that his career -- tenure at Sarah Lawrence, not known for its many conservatives -- suggests that right-leaning academics are hired and succeed in academe.
Other studies focus on educational attainment. These studies tend to find liberalism more likely embraced among those with at least some graduate education -- a group that includes professors but also many others.
A 2016 study by the Pew Research Center found that among those with graduate education of some form, 31 percent hold consistently liberal positions based on an analysis of their opinions about the role and performance of government, social issues, the environment and other topics. Another 23 percent hold mostly liberal positions. Only 10 percent hold consistently conservative positions, and 17 percent hold mostly conservative positions. Since 1994, the share of those with graduate education holding consistently liberal positions has increased substantially, the study found.
Does the Academy Shut Out Conservatives?
So if academe is lopsidedly liberal, does this demonstrate that search committees must be discriminating against candidates they perceive as conservative?
There are some anecdotes that suggest cases of discrimination. In her book Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity and Faculty Gatekeeping (Harvard University Press), Julie R. Posselt, assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California, was able to watch elite graduate program deliberations on admissions. In one case she describes in the book, an applicant to a top linguistics Ph.D. program was a student at a small religious college unknown to some committee members but whose values were questioned by others.
“Right-wing religious fundamentalists,” one committee member said of the college, while another said, to much laughter, that the college was “supported by the Koch brothers.” The committee then spent more time discussing details of the applicant's GRE scores and background -- high GRE scores, homeschooled -- than it did with some other candidates. The chair of the committee said, “I would like to beat that college out of her,” and, to laughter from committee members, asked, “You don't think she's a nutcase?”
At the end of this discussion, the committee moved the applicant ahead to the next round but rejected her there.
Posselt did not write that this was typical of the reviews she saw, but graduate admissions tend to be decentralized and hard to monitor.
One national experiment, by Gross of Colby College; Ethan Fosse, a graduate student at Harvard University; and Joseph Ma, an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, employed a "secret shopper" approach to look for political bias -- and didn't find it.
Posing as undergraduates getting ready to apply to doctoral programs, they sent email messages to graduate program directors in top sociology, political science, economics, history and English departments. The inquiries were similar in describing their academic preparation, their undergraduate institutions and their interest in applying. Some of the emails made no mention of politics, but some mentioned having previously worked on either the Obama or McCain presidential campaigns.
The researchers then had independent (and politically mixed) observers rate the responses from the graduate directors on frequency, timing of replies, information provided, emotional warmth and enthusiasm. In a few cases, the researchers found "traces" of a political impact, but "no statistically or substantively significant evidence of bias."
These findings have generally been used to suggest that professors' political lopsidedness reflects self-selection (much like the way those in finance may be more conservative than the public at large).
Gross and Fosse, and Catherine Cheng, a graduate student at the time, contributed to a 2010 book, Diversity in American Higher Education: Toward a More Comprehensive Approach (Routledge), that built on the theory of self-selection. Their research suggested that academics tend to form their views on politics early in life and tend to have certain characteristics (aside from being academics) that are associated with political liberalism. They argued that 43 percent of the political gap can be explained because professors are more likely than others: ◾To have high levels of educational attainment. ◾To experience a disparity between their levels of educational attainment and income. ◾To be either Jewish, nonreligious or a member of a faith that is not theologically conservative Protestant. ◾To have a high tolerance for controversial ideas.
Yet more evidence for the self-selection theory comes from a 2007 study, "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates," by the husband-and-wife social science team of Matthew Woessner of Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College.
Woessner and Kelly-Woessner based their findings on analysis they did from national surveys of freshmen and seniors conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. They found that in both choices of majors and in personal values, conservatives seem to be taking themselves off the track for academic careers well before graduate school. The authors did not find evidence of statistically significant differences in grades or measures of academic performance, so most of the report is based on the premise that interests and experiences are at play, not aptitude.
For starters, the paper finds that conservatives are much more likely to pick majors in professional fields -- areas that tend to put students on the fast track for an M.B.A. (or for a job) more than a Ph.D. Only 9 percent of students on the far left and 18 percent of liberals major in professional fields, compared to 33 percent of conservatives and 37 percent of those who identify as being on the far right.
Further, the study finds that not only (as has been reported many times previously) do students who identify as liberal outnumber those who identify as conservative, but that those who are liberal are much more likely to consider a Ph.D. The UCLA survey of seniors found that only 13 percent of all students were considering a Ph.D. But the numbers were significantly higher for those on the left (24 percent of the far left and 18 percent of liberals) than on the right (11 percent of the far right and 9 percent of conservatives).
Does Political Imbalance Make Life Difficult for Conservative Students?[/'b]
DeVos and others suggest that the liberal dominance must make life difficult for students who have other political views of the world. Again, the evidence suggests a much more nuanced reality, and one in which many conservative students thrive.
A 2012 book widely cited for covering these topics is [b]Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (Princeton University Press), by Amy J. Binder, professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, and Kate Wood, then a doctoral candidate in the UCSD sociology department. The book is based on extensive interviews with self-identified conservative students and other research conducted at two institutions (which the authors don't identify, but describe as liberal).
Some students at both institutions had complaints. Conservative female students, for example, said they felt judged by peers who were shocked at their desire for a family and not just a career. And some students said they felt marginalized.
But the students said that attending the colleges they did was a positive experience and helped shape their -- conservative -- political identities. The students said they wouldn't want to change institutions. "There was this sense that being in an environment they perceived to be overwhelmingly liberal did challenge them, but in ways that were positive and beneficial for them,” Wood said in a 2012 interview. “It made them clarify values and ideas about different issues or about what being a conservative means.”
Woessner of Penn State, who describes himself as a conservative, has also written about how other studies he and his wife have done show that students are aware that their professors have various views, but that students don't change to conform. Writing that "students aren't sponges," Woessner explains, "Whereas some disciplines, such as political science, often shun partisan advocacy, many fields, including sociology, ethnic studies and social work, openly advocate a distinct ideological worldview. If these and similar studies are correct, it suggests that student beliefs are surprisingly resilient. For every one student who is actively recruited to a leftist political cause, a vast majority complete their education with their values largely intact."
And what of students who do complain of political bias? A study published last year, in the journal Teaching in Higher Education, surveyed undergraduates at two unnamed institutions -- one in the United States and one in Australia (where allegations of professorial political bias are also much discussed). The study asked undergraduates a series of questions about their perceptions of bias, and also of other qualities. The study found that students with certain characteristics -- a sense of entitlement and an orientation to focus on grades -- are much more likely than other students to perceive their instructors as being biased.
The study was by Darren L. Linvill, assistant professor of communication studies at Clemson University, and Will Grant, a lecturer in the Center for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University.
Can Professors on the Right Succeed?
A recent book based on interviews with conservative professors and a national survey both suggest that faculty members who are Republicans are succeeding and finding happiness in academic careers.
The book, [Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University (Oxford University Press), was written by Jon A. Shields, an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, and Joshua M. Dunn Sr., an associate professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. The authors interviewed 153 conservative professors in the humanities and social sciences on 84 campuses.
Some complained of discrimination based on politics, but not of careers being ended. One productive sociologist was voted down for tenure by his colleagues and dean, only to have the vote reversed by a provost -- due in part to some liberal colleagues who cried foul at the process. Conservative scholars also complained that some journals seemed to reject views that were inconsistent with liberal thinking.
But the book's bottom line is that conservative professors are succeeding and happy in academe -- and that there is not a wall of liberal academics blocking their way.
A study published by the Social Science Research Network and written by Abrams, the Sarah Lawrence/Hoover institution scholar, suggests that conservative scholars are happy in academe. The study included this question to a national sample of faculty members: “If you were to begin your career again, would you still want to be a college professor?”
The results showed that most professors answered in the affirmative. But while 56 percent of liberal professors did so, 66 percent of conservative professors did so. The result, Abrams wrote, suggests that conservative professors are aware they are in the political minority on campus, and are also content in their careers.
My own university experience left me with many personal examples of liberal bias by professors I either observed or personally experienced.
Tim Groseclose, a UCLA professor, and author of the book Left Turn that cites quantifiaable statistics of liberal media bias, in an interview said he waited until he had tenure to write the book, to insure that writing it didn't result in him being denied tenure. Even so, he described a persona-non-grata treatment by his colleagues at UCLA that compelled him to leave UCLA anyway after a few years.
One of my own experiences, I had a "Criticism and Communication" class in 1986, what was the flagship course of my Florida Atlantic University far-left department's course curriculum, that basically broke down all movies, television, even commercials as brainwashing an establishment/patriarchal/conservative/materialistic worldview into the public. For example, they saw Sigourney Weaver in the movie Aliens (which I consider a very feminist and strongly independent female lead role, where far from a damsel in distress, she is the protagonist and the the hero, who rescues everyone else) a role they spun as a typically female role where she was subordinated into a protective/motherly role caring for the young girl Newt. There was just no reasoning with these cultural marxist feminists.
I recall one time with a smile on my face challenging the "patriarchal hegemony" they read into one movie, and somehow mentioned then-rising Reagan conservatism and how that was disproving the logic of their liberal narrrative, jokingly saying to the assistant professor: "You'll never get us all." Which she mumbled under her breath and another student after class closer to her told me she had said: "That's what they say about virgins."
A third example was a class where we had a guest professor, a polite conservative-looking guy with glasses, who I realized a few minutes in was interviewing for a job (somewhere in 1985-1987) and three of the most committed cultural marxist radical professors in my department sat in the back of the class. He started out very confident and articulate, but they kept bombarding him and tripping up his pace with complicated interrupting questions that no student would ever ask, and it became clear to me they were trying to destroy this guy and make him break. They were successful. By the time it ended, he was nervous and shaking, and barely able to finish. I think they did this to insure a conservative was not hired in their department, only another cultural marxist like themselves. There was hardly a class in my 2 and a half years in the department that they didn't inject marxism and feminism into whatever film history or journalism class that I took.
If I challenged the text, even with well thought out supporting quotes and examples, I made C's and D's. I quickly learned that as long as I agreed with the text and made no effort to challenge it, I made A's. That was the beginning of my intense hatred of liberalism, as people who were bullies in positions of power, and utterly intolerant to dissenting views.
I also recall highly inflammatory political cartoons on the walls of the professors in my department when I visited their offices, contemptuous of capitalism and Reagan, and supportive of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
After I graduated, I interviewed for a P R position for the United Way in Fort Lauderdale (circa 1990), and while waiting for my interviewer to get off the phone, I looked around at what was posted on the walls of his office. Including a photo of Newt Gingrich with a cartoon word balloon making him say "Screw the poor!" I was quite shocked that this guy would have something this partisan on the wall of his office, that could only anger 50% of the people who came in his office in its incendiary partisanship, putting words in Gingrich's mouth that any Republican would find absurdly untrue. I wasn't overly disappointed when I didn't get the job.
I'd also point out the example Bill O'Reilly cited (circa 2009-2010)of his alma mater at the history department at Harvard, that at the time had about 35 liberal professors and not one conservative. That kind of one-sidedness just doesn't happen randomly. It is a clear manifestiation of discriminatory bias in hiring, to not have a single Republican/conservative professor. A liberal echo chamber.
So while I accept that there can be examples of conservatives existing and thriving among university professors, I think that at all too many universities it would hurt your chances of being hired, or of being advanced to tenure, or advancing to higher positions such as chairing the department. And certainly, my own experience as a conservative student has confirmed there is bias in the way liberal professors will treat you. Including liberal indoctrination and vindictive grading if you deviate or dissent in the slightest from their programming.
Liberal indoctrination. And when asked about his classroom rants, he turned away and hid like a coward and wouldn't defend his views.
What's scary is this jerk is only one of tens of thousands indoctinating the last two generations of college students. One of the few caught and exposed. And the college will do absolutely nothing to reprimand him.
Professor values refer to the common value system embraced by a large percentage of professors, just as Hollywood values refers to the common value system of many in Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Professor values are currently one of the most prevalent forms of liberal indoctrination. Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the conservative news site Breitbart News Network, at one point intended to create a category "Big Education" in order to expose professor values, but he died before he could implement it.
An extremely high percentage of professors disagree with conservative principles, but very few replace them with the discredited philosophy of postmodernism.[1] Professors' common value system typically includes anti-Christian politics, censorship, socialism, unjustified claims of expertise and knowledge (for example, the dogmatic promotion of the theory of evolution[2]), liberal beliefs, liberal grading, liberal bias,[3] historical revisionism, anti-patriotism, anti-Americanism, lack of productivity, bullying or discouraging conservative students (for example, homeschoolers),[4] and promotion of sexual immorality.[5] Although a majority of academics believe in God, a disproportionate percentage of academics are atheists compared to the general public (see: Atheism and academia).
Such attitudes are also shared by educators in the public education system from grade school through high school, and even by members of public school boards who take an elitist attitude toward parents of the children being indoctrinated with those same beliefs (particularly the promotion of sexual immorality and the encouragement of experimenting with homosexuality) by liberal educators.[6][7][8][9] These same educators, knowing that what they are doing is wrong, go out of their way to deliberately hide the truth from their students' parents, who they know would not support what they do in the classrooms and would call for the resignation or firing of the offending teachers and school board officials who support them; to that end, liberal elitist school boards stand up for the teachers and the professor values they support by ignoring parents' complaints, denying any wrongdoing to them, attempting (by means of deceit and disinformation) to discredit any information on educator wrongdoing uncovered by parents,[10] blocking their inquiries and even resorting to intimidation and making outrageous false accusations[9] and criminal threats against them (and later denying making such threats when publicly called out on them afterward)[11] in an attempt to silence parental opposition to what are clearly illegal actions against underaged students.
An excellent example of academics going beyond their expertise is the example of the cryonics movement. Cryonics is a pseudoscience that tries to extend life or achieve immortality in a non-theistic way after a person is legally dead (Cryonic procedures are performed shortly after a person's death).[12] Robert Ettinger was an atheist and American academic who some consider to be "the father of cryonics" because of the impact of his 1962 book The Prospect of Immortality.[13] Isaac Asimov was a popular American science fiction writer and a professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He was also an atheist.[14] According to The Cryonics Society, Asimov said of cryonics, "Though no one can quantify the probability of cryonics working, I estimate it is at least 90%..."[15] See: Atheism and cryonics
In a Zogby poll, 58% of Americans said that the bias of professors is a serious problem, while 39% said it is a "very serious" problem.[16] The survey demonstrated further that "an overwhelming majority also believe that job security for college professors leaves them less motivated to do a good job than those professors who do not enjoy a tenured status—65% said they believe non-tenured professors are more motivated to do a good job in the classroom."[16] One study in 2008 found that "Texas university professors overwhelmingly favor Democratic candidates in their campaign contributions,"[17] and a survey in 2018 found that 88% of Harvard professors thought Donald Trump did a "very poor" job as President.[18]
[Regarding the notion that] Professors rarely engage in wrongdoing while completing research: "About 1,000 potential incidents of fabrication, falsification or plagiarism in scientific research go unreported every year, according to a survey that suggests such misconduct is far more prevalent than suspected....[A]bout 22 percent was by a professor or senior scientist."[19]
“ There is no place on earth so close-minded as the modern University. The lack of diversity of thought is unmatched anywhere on earth.[20] ”
Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.
EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
"Without an intellectual sparring partner to oppose them, liberal arguments become weaker. They are less truthful, less meaningful, and less useful in the pursuit of knowledge. Everyone is harmed by these trends." --Akshaj Turebylu, class of 2023
This June, The Chronicle published an astounding report revealing that there are nearly 13 times more registered Democrats than registered Republicans on Duke’s faculty.
That kind of gap sounds improbable—if not impossible—and yet, here we are. And if, for whatever unholy reason, you keep up with national higher education trends, you know that this discrepancy fits the norm. The disparity between liberal and conservative professors is large, and growing; national statistics showed a 6:1 ratio between the two. In New England, the ratio was found to be 28:1.
As is clear through The Chronicle’s reporting, different fields appear to be affected differently. At Duke, Pratt has the least amount of disparity. Although its faculty is left-leaning, Pratt had the largest percent share of Republicans (and the lowest percentage of party alignment of any of the disciplines studied). And while the natural sciences leaned Democratic, almost all of their departments have some share of Republicans. It is the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines that seem to lack conservative professors. Most of the departments in these disciplines lack any conservatives. The Social Sciences do have some Republicans, but they are focused in a few select fields (like economics and political science).
How did we get here? Some might assume this to be the natural state of academia; there have always been more liberals than conservatives, right? Not at all. This trend has only become prevalent over the past twenty-five years.
In the face of such glaring imbalance, it’s easy to make claims of discrimination. The reason there are so few conservative professors is that administrators are part of a nefarious Communist agenda to take over the universities. But, of course, correlation does not equal causation.
There have been anecdotal reports of discrimination against conservatives in graduate admissions, but a nationwide experiment found no significant evidence of bias. There are many reasons why such a disparity could have been created. For one, liberal-leaning students generally consider graduate school more often than their conservative counterparts. Conservatives also tend to gravitate towards professional work.
Conservative politicians have used the trend of left-leaning faculties to accuse universities of indoctrinating students and propagating a liberal agenda. What does this really mean, though? Universities have two major functions: to share knowledge and to create knowledge. The first is accomplished through teaching. The second is accomplished through research, peer review, and debate.
Is teaching corrupted by a liberal-leaning faculty? Not really. Students don’t passively accept the opinions and arguments of their professors. Conservative students, apparently, cannot be programmed by their professors. Despite the fears of conservative politicians, indoctrination is not so easy.
It does seem, however, that the creation of knowledge is threatened by a homogenous professoriate. In a lecture given at Duke, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes the importance of viewpoint diversity.
As individuals, we regularly use motivated reasoning to confirm our beliefs. Even when we look at the evidence, we resist conclusions we dislike and actively work to find what we want. A university setting is built to remove these biases by pitting biases against each other. Haidt calls this institutionalized disconfirmation. Scholars are forced to prune their biases out of their work before submitting it. If not, they get called out by their colleagues. For this reason, the reputation of a discipline is predicated on how well it peer reviews the knowledge it produces.
Journalism is a strong example of this principle. In recent years, public trust in journalism and mainstream media has sharply decreased. Inaccuracy and bias are stated as the leading reasons for distrusting journalists. This perception comes from faulty and hasty reporting by newspapers caused by a lack of proper editing and peer review (usually due to a rushed deadline). Universities have—by and large—maintained their respectability as a result of the rigorous debate they encourage. But, Haidt notes, debate is weakened when there is a lack of different viewpoints. When an orthodox position is created (in this case due to a certain political leaning), it is less likely to be debated rigorously. Those who hold the position accept it strongly but adopt weak arguments with which to defend it. This creates a certain intellectual fragility where the orthodox idea can be broken easily—but isn’t—because of a bias in the group.
Rigorous debate isn’t just damaged between academics, it’s also lost between students. This is seen in national data regarding debate among university students. Conservatives and libertarians are far less likely to share their beliefs and are more likely to receive poor treatment due to their politics. A majority of students in a 2017 survey stated that their university did not encourage intellectual diversity. How can knowledge be created when you’re too scared to speak?
Where is knowledge creation being influenced? Left-leaning bias probably won’t matter in most departments. A biologist will not lose their ability to research bacterial DNA because they believe in universal healthcare.
In general, it is the social sciences that are most affected by political bias. Whether it is economics, political science, gender studies, or sociology, these fields produce politically engaged work. Trying to objectively measure the success or failure of Reaganomics is made more difficult if you voted for or against it. The best way to ensure that you do is to have someone of the opposite persuasion looking over your work.
It is critical that the social sciences remain impartial in the pursuit of knowledge—these fields regularly influence government policy and public opinion. The public needs to know that when they read about sociological studies they are receiving unbiased and meaningful information.
Let’s take history for example. The History Department has no registered Republicans; its faculty is almost 75 percent Democratic. What does this mean for coverage of Republican Party history, or even the history of conservatism in the United States? The problem isn’t that professors are scheming to get their viewpoints supported. As stated before, humans have an innate difficulty in fairly defending and recognizing positions they disagree with.
But… why should historians care? In fact, why should liberals care? If they’re winning the debate stage, why cater to conservative complaints? Haidt uses a quote from John Stuart Mill to answer this question.
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”
Without an intellectual sparring partner to oppose them, liberal arguments become weaker. They are less truthful, less meaningful, and less useful in the pursuit of knowledge. Everyone is harmed by these trends.
There are definite problems when the professoriate has a political leaning. The cries of apocalypse by conservative politicians, however, are moot. Students aren’t being indoctrinated and many conservative professors are content with their careers. In fact, most of the concerns of a crisis are coming from older Republicans. As in, the ones who are not actually in school. But, does there need to be a response?
Well… yes and no. Yes, we need to study the effects of bias more. We need to know the result of having a 13:1 Democrat-Republican ratio. But also, no. How much can we do? Purposefully hire more Republican-leaning professors? That’s actual discrimination (not to mention an impossible hiring metric). Creating that kind of ideological barrier to entry for a professorship would be mayhem.
We need more data, more research, and more debate about this topic itself. Letting liberals ignore it won’t solve anything; we also can’t let conservatives bemoan political bias without proper research. Journalism succumbed to a lack of public trust—let’s save universities from that fate.
