While some have raised concerns that Marxism is a dire problem in higher education, a more realistic concern is that higher education is dominated by liberals (or at least Democrats). Conservatives (or at least Republicans) are in the minority, sometimes to an extreme degree. Such a disparity certainly invites inquiry. One motivation, at least for liberals, would be to see if there is any injustice or oppression behind this disparity. Another motivation is intellectual curiosity.
While sorting out the diversity problem of higher education might prove daunting, a strong foundation of theory and methodology has been laid by those concerned with the domination of higher education by straight, white males. That is, professors like me. These tools should prove quite useful, and beautifully ironic, in addressing the worry that conservatives are not adequate represented in the academy. But before delving into theories of oppression and unfair exclusion, I must consider that the shortage of conservatives in the ivory towers is a matter of choice. This consideration mirrors a standard explanation for the apparent exclusion of women and minorities for other areas.
One possible explanation is that conservatives have freely chosen to not be professors. This does make considerable sense. While not always the case, conservatives tend to be more interested in higher income careers than lower income careers. While the pay for full-time faculty is not bad, the pay for adjuncts is terrible. Professor salaries, with some notable exceptions for super-stars, tend to be lower than jobs with comparable educational requirements. So, someone who is interested in maximizing income would not become a professor—the same amount of education and effort would yield far more financial reward elsewhere, such as in the medical or financial fields. As such, conservatives would be more likely to become bankers rather than philosophers and accountants rather than anthropologists.
A second possible explanation is that people who tend to become professors do not want to be conservatives (or at least Republicans). While there have been brilliant conservative intellectuals, the Republican party has adopted a strong anti-expert, anti-intellectual stance. This might not be due so much to an anti-intellectual ideology, but because the facts are often against the Republican ideology—such as is the case with climate change. Republicans have also become more hostile to higher education. In contrast, Democrats tend to support higher education.
Since becoming a professor generally requires a terminal degree, the typical professor will spend six or more years in college and graduate school, noting the hostility of Republicans and the support of Democrats. As such, rational self-interest alone would tend to push professors towards being Democrats. There is also the fact that those who want to become professors, almost by definition, are intellectuals and want to be experts. As such, the attacks on experts and intellectuals would tend to drive them away from the Republican party. Those pursuing careers in the sciences would presumably also find the anti-science stances of the Republicans unappealing.
While my own case is but an anecdote, one of the reasons I vote for Democrats and against Republicans is that Democrats are more inclined to act in ways that are in my interest as a professor and in the interest of my students. In contrast, Republicans tend to make my professional life worse by lowering support for education and engaging in micromanagement. They also tend to make things harder for my students. The anti-intellectualism, rejection of truth, and anti-science stances also make the Republican party unappealing to me. As such, it is hardly surprising that the academy is dominated by liberals: Republicans would tend to not want to be professors and potential professors would tend to not want to be Republicans.
But perhaps there is a social injustice occurring and the lack of diversity is due to the unjust exclusion of conservatives from the academy. It is to this concern that I will turn in my next essay.
TJB says
December 5, 2018 at 10:07 pmMike, you may think you are siding with the little guy, but the Dems are the party of the rich these days.
So, in reality, you are siding with the rich against the poor. This is ok, but you shouldn’t fool yourself.
Michael LaBossiere says
December 6, 2018 at 6:01 pmBoth parties are parties of the rich; although there are some Democrats who are opposed to how tight the Democratic establishment is with the rich.
Also, I’m advocating for the inclusion of conservatives in the academy-I don’t think that they are the little guys, just that they are underrepresented in academics.
TJB says
December 5, 2018 at 10:18 pmThe left has inflicted far more damage on science than the right.
My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?
My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?
Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.
All three are in his first chapter, during Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html
Michael LaBossiere says
December 6, 2018 at 6:21 pmWell, that is what that person claims. But why accept his claims over the opposing claims?
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/12/07/for-republicans-being-anti-science-is-a-feature-not-a-bug/
I do agree that Republicans were, in the past, often supporters of funding research. However, they have also embraced anti-science and anti-expert positions and, of course, Trump and his lot have taken a strong stance against truth.
https://www.nature.com/news/republican-scientists-negotiate-the-trump-era-1.21846
But, I do agree that there are liberals who do not understand the scientific method and believe absurd claims. However, the two parties (as parties) pursue very different policies. While the Republican Party has made climate change denial a core tenet, the Democratic party has not written crystal healing or anti-vax into their core party tenets.
DH says
December 6, 2018 at 9:11 pm“they have also embraced anti-science and anti-expert positions…”
Total crap. “Anti-science”. Your science, maybe. If you want to define “science” as “funding”, then maybe. If you want to define the current political position on Global Warming as “settled science”, well, you are the one who is “anti-Science”.
Here’s an excerpt from a Charles Krauthammer editorial a few years ago …
“I repeat: I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or 50 years are white-coated propagandists.
“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.
Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.”
And it’s very easy to say that someone is “anti-expert” if you’re the one who assigns the credibility to the experts.
“An expert is only an expert if he supports my political point of view. Your so-called experts are nothing but post-truth hacks”
There. Glad that one’s settled.
Michael, if you are going to post a link, you should at least read it. In the “Nature” article that you post, seemingly in support of your statement that “Trump and his lot have taken a strong stance against truth”, the tenor of the argument is that scientists – conservative scientists – have to negotiate dangerous waters on campuses, because of the hatred for conservatives:
““A lot of people snuck over and said, ‘Hey, I hear you’re a Tea Party guy. I am too,’” says Stopa, who lost the election and eventually left academia, but has stayed active in Republican politics. He rejects the idea that his party is anti-science, arguing that “you can find rubes and lunatics on either side” of the US political divide.”
But that idea has become a hard sell on many US university campuses, putting Republican researchers in an uncomfortable position, despite their party’s history of strong support for science. Between 1976 and 2013, one study found, US government research and development spending was highest under Republican presidents “
The article goes on to say
“Yet during that period, party leaders rejected mainstream climate science, opposed environmental protections, and sought to ease regulation of medicines.”
Once again, just because one opinion is more “mainstream” than another does not make it true. Global warming, by your own description, has become highly politicized, to the point where there are lies and exaggerations on both sides. I applaud the scientists who are challenging that “mainstream” thought.
And of course, opposing environmental protections and easing regulations is political – there is no absolute truth in any of that for anyone to accept or reject.
“Republicans’ anti-science reputation seems to have deepened under President Donald Trump, who has embraced ‘alternative facts’ and proposed steep spending cuts for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), among others.”
Realize, of course, that this is about perception, not truth, it’s about opinion, not fact. It is true that Trump has proposed those spending cuts, but it’s important to understand that the cuts are very much “across the board” – the sentence does say “among others”, doesn’t it? Did Trump say that he was cutting the funding because the research leads to lies? Of course not.
Further, the linked article is grossly out of date. Since that statement was made, (the Republican) Congress completely rejected Trump’s proposal, and proposed increases of their own, which Trump himself signed into law in September. The budget provides for $36 billion in funding effective immediately, which is the third consecutive year that there has been an increase in funding for the NIH and health agencies of $2 billion or more.
The EPA fared similarly – Trump’s proposed cuts were rejected by Congress, and the recent spending bill keeps their funding at the same level as last year.
Talk about alternate facts!
But the real gist of the article you link, something that I feel myself every day, is the assault on basic freedom – freedom of speech. No, it’s not a matter of law – but it is thick, oppressive, and downright dangerous on University campuses.
“On 22 April, thousands of protesters are expected to attend the March for Science in Washington DC. Organizers describe the event — one of more than 500 planned for around the globe — as non-partisan, but it has sparked concern that it could politicize science and alienate Republican politicians.”
“Many Republican scientists who spoke to Nature say that they don’t talk politics in the lab, because they are afraid that discussing economic policy or the role of government could damage their friendships or even their careers. And some worry that by supporting the party of Trump, who has been accused of racism and misogyny, they risk being tarred by association.”
Get that? Scientists are afraid for their friendships and their careers. This is a mob mentality, one based on blind hatred and distortion of facts (see above), and an assumption of guilt by association.
“What is clear is that conservative and liberal scientists have trouble engaging with each other, says a biologist at a public university in the Midwestern United States, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her career. Only one person at her university has ever asked her why she is a Republican, she says. “For most of my colleagues, anyone who is a conservative must fall somewhere on the continuum between stupid and evil,” the biologist says.”
There’s a lot in that statement.
A Republican biologist at a public university wants to remain anonymous to protect her career.
And the perception that for her colleagues – presumably well educated academics, anyone who is conservative is somewhere between stupid and evil.
Did I say “well educated academics”?
Michael, the entire article you post is about the absolute bigotry, hatred, suspicion, and prejudice levied against educated people by educated people – because of hatred, tribalism, a refusal to listen or understand, and a complete rejection of the principles of discourse and critical thinking.
“Encouraging political diversity among scientists could improve research by helping people to see beyond their own views and prejudices, says Richard Freeman, a labour economist at Harvard who studies gender and racial diversity in science.
Nice thought. Fat chance.
“[Richard Freeman] notes, “Republicans are not alone in staking out political positions contrary to mainstream science. Surveys show that Democrats tend to be more sceptical than Republicans about the safety of genetically modified organisms and nuclear power, even though many studies have concluded that the technologies are safe.”
Yeah, well, we don’t talk about that, do we? After all, this really isn’t about truth, is it? It’s about Trump. It’s about hatred. It’s about tarring and feathering, and selectively promoting stories, regardless of their veracity, that supports that agenda.
“The causes of this ideological divide are murky. Politically conservative scholars may drop out of academia because they feel unwelcome…”
Ya think?
DH says
December 5, 2018 at 10:54 pmSeveral years ago, I was part of a museum project wherein we interviewed a number of Jewish men and women who had had their lives somehow touched by World War II. Many of these interviewees were veterans of the military, but some were refugees, others were involved on the home front.
One man, who had served in the Navy, told us of an experience he had had in boot camp. He awoke in the middle of the night one night to find himself surrounded by several of his bunk-mates. When he asked them what they were doing, they confessed that they were trying to get a closer look at his horns.
Your essay is like that – it would be endearing if it weren’t so devoid of factual data or logical conclusions in a very bigoted sort of way.
“The Republican party has adopted a strong anti-expert, anti-intellectual stance.”, a quote which you link to an article in the Washington Post that claims that “a certain kind of populism distrusts intellectuals and experts”
There is a basic assumption in both that article and your post that implies, “Well, we Democrats are right, and if the Republicans refuse to accept that, then the only conclusion is that they are anti-intellectual”.
Another assumption is that the so-called “Ivory Tower” is a bastion of pure intellectual thought, and anyone who does not believe that this should be the golden aspiration for all is also some kind of populist boor.
Here’s my case in point:
In the linked Washington Post article, we find this statement:
“Since 2015, according to a new Pew Research Center poll, Republicans’ attitudes toward colleges and universities have become much more negative. The poll found that the number of Republicans who believe colleges have a “positive impact on the way things are going in the country” dropped from 54 percent in 2015 to 36 percent in 2017. Meanwhile, Democrats’ approval held constant at 72 percent.”
In your post, you make a similar statement:
“Republicans have also become more hostile to higher education. In contrast, Democrats tend to support higher education.”
Only if you accept as truth that Higher Education is some sort of immutable holy grail would you then conclude that Republicans are “anti-intellectual” and Democrats are somehow way more enlightened. Or you might just not want to give it that much thought, and simply be a little lazy and a lot narcissistic. “I’m right, you’re wrong, so I’m smart, and you’re dumb. Nyah, nyah, nyah.
Putting on our critical-thinking caps for just a moment, and asking if there might be another explanation … well, the answer is right there – in the question you ask in your very essay.
Could it be that the Republican/Conservative disdain for “higher education” is not the lofty concept of “education” they eschew, but the institution it has become – a citadel for liberal indoctrination, a fertile ground where seeds of identity politics, victim ideology, and entitlement mentality are sown?”
To consider that point, I think you’d have to take a slightly deeper dive into the particulars of higher education. Republicans and Conservatives, for example, are extremely supportive of STEM education, but seek results – astute, cutting-edge scientists and engineers, programmers and mathematicians – and support efforts on the part of institutes like mine to produce them. Research, medicine, chemistry, energy – these are not eschewed by the right.
The watering-down of quality education by entitlements, “fairness” over merit, and taxpayer funded coursework is, though. Coursework like, “Reproductive Politics”, “Public Policy in the American Racial State”, and my favorite, “Friends with Benefits?” which meets the Gen Ed requirement for Culture and Belief at Harvard.
“The eight Ivy League colleges offer a slew of blatantly biased classes to educate America’s gullible best and brightest. From bashing Christianity and organized religion to preaching the hazards of capitalism, these schools have it all.
And of course, as long as we’re dissing the Right as anti-intellectual, it is of no small import that 96 percent of the 2012 presidential campaign donations from Ivy League professors and staffers went to the coffers of Democrat President Barack Obama. At Princeton University, Obama managed to pull in 99 percent of all presidential political donations.
So is it really hostility toward “Higher Education”, as described in my comments about STEM education? Or is it more about fighting back against a political game that involves federal funding, entitlements, lavish grants and other support in exchange for the kind of liberal indoctrination and the heavy campaign support it brings about?
To your credit, you are departing from your liberal peers in your questioning – but I’d have to caution you on this one. You’re on dangerously thin ice. You say in your essay …
” I must consider that the shortage of conservatives in the ivory towers is a matter of choice. This consideration mirrors a standard explanation for the apparent exclusion of women and minorities for other areas.”
Careful there …
Are you saying that the shortage of women in math and science may not be the result of gender bias or some other sinister activity, whether seen or unseen? Are you saying that there just might be an actual difference between men and women – emotionally, psychologically, biologically, or other – that might cause women to choose those fields less frequently than men?
Of course, we all know the fate of Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard (Oh, did he leave? Why?) who offered some probing questions as to why women are underrepresented in top positions in math and science. Anyone who is interested in truth would consider those questions, and the context in which they were asked. Attitude? Aptitude? Choices which may provide a broader sense of self-actualization for complex human beings? Self-actualization that might just support the fact that they are different? (not inferior, just different)
His comments are deep and probing; he put forth theories, meant to be thought-provoking – but the tribal outrage was too much. Institutes like Stanford and MIT scrambled to issue statements to distance themselves from Summers and from Harvard – he was called all kinds of names, and eventually run out on a rail.
We may be able to talk about why conservatives, as a matter of choice, aptitude, or proclivity may be underrepresented in higher education. We may, as Summers did, consider the statistics that reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture … but Summers crossed some kind of line there.
I think I said in a previous post that the minute an institute of higher education bars certain kind of speech, or certain areas of inquiry from intellectual discussion, they cease to be institutes of higher education, and become something else entirely.
And I would suggest that that “something else” is where the anti-intellectualism truly lies.
The anti-intellectualism, rejection of truth, and anti-science stances also make the Republican party unappealing to me.
Science is inquisitive. Science is probing. Science is not “settled”. Science does not reject lines of questioning because they are politically sensitive.
There is also a difference between “truth” and “faith”. You have faith that anthropogenic Global Warming is true, based on a faith in a consensus of scientists who are on your “team”. You also have faith that somehow, some kind of carbon tax or other contrived wealth-redistribution scheme is going to save the free-tailed bats of Texas from some horrible fate predicted by others on your “team”, while ignoring the fact that evolution (the science you think that Republicans deny out of whole cloth) is all about adaptation. Your “team” does not consider that, whether a result of human activity or not, the potential changes in the migration habits of bats is exactly the kind of evolutionary adaptation that has been going on for millions of years.
And so, just as it is for Christians, Jews, Muslims – faith is truth. And just as it was during the Crusades, so goes the politicization and even weaponization of the bulwarks of the faith in liberalism – Global Warming, which threatens us all (just wait for the return of the Messiah – you’ll see then, pal!), identity politics, gender equality, homogenized society, wealth redistribution, and protected speech, among others.
And the truth of these concepts is beyond reproach, just as the existence of God. They are not to be questioned, they are to be held and revered. And so to whatever extent the Institutes of Higher Education promote these values, they, too, are to be revered – and federally funded, too, by the way.
And if anyone does question them, well – they must be anti-truth, right? Anti-intellectual. And they make things difficult for you and for your students.
WTP says
December 5, 2018 at 11:43 pmOnly if you accept as truth that Higher Education is some sort of immutable holy grail would you then conclude that Republicans are “anti-intellectual” and Democrats are somehow way more enlightened.
But Mike does that. He’s been doing it for over ten years now (…gee, has it really been ten years…). Why do you say “Only if”?
DH says
December 6, 2018 at 9:16 pmIt’s the same issue as what’s going on in speech these days. The meaning of a word is irrelevant, and the intent of the speaker is irrelevant – the only factor that is meaningful is how the speech is interpreted by the professionally offended.
And so it is in this case. I can say,
“I oppose what is going on in Universities today”
And by that statement, I am referring to everything I posted – identity politics, “safe spaces”, the proliferation of liberal ideology …
But Michael and others deny that this opinion is valid. To them, the University is the bastion of pure knowledge, untouchable, an intellectual Eden where truth presides.
So the natural conclusion, as long as you can ignore my meaning, is that I am “anti-intellectual”.
WTP says
December 6, 2018 at 10:13 pmThe parallels to official responses to criticism of religion, and more publicly if not more specifically of the Roman Catholic church over the last 50 years are glaring to me. And what did that obstinance in the face of criticism bring them? To this day there are those true believers who still believe it was the critics of the church who were in league with Satan yet it was, in context, Satan working through the church. None of which should, logically, discredit the good work religion or specifically the Catholic church(for the record, I’m not Catholic). But the church has been significantly damaged, at least in this country where the scandals were most exposed. With academics who view criticism of the Ivory Tower can only come from the ignorant and from philistines, there is the same glaring blind spot. And thus, just as the church did for evil, they make themselves the home of ignorance.
CoffeeTime says
December 6, 2018 at 2:52 amThere are many possible reasons for ideological imbalance. Some are very simple. Of course, once a population settles into a majority on one side or another, it becomes easier for the imbalance to increase than decrease.
The simplest explanation I have heard for the left-right imbalance is that the state, and taxes, is what pays teachers at any level. You have noted this in your essay, and I agree. Professors eat from the rice-bowl filled by collecting taxes from the general public. Thus, all the arguments for increased spending in their area, to make it richer, more important, more lucrative, provide more advancement opportunities, more grants, more conferences, are on the side of tax-and-spend, a method favoured by the left. So, even if someone enters academia as a centrist or weak conservative, their self-interest, and the immediate self-interest of their peer group, pushes them leftwards every day.
Another comes from the old but commonly seen idea that “Any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at 40 has no head”. Late teens get radical ideas. Usually not very well informed. I once believed that vaguely leftist policies would be better and more effective than I have subsequently seen them to be. Just as professors influence students, so younger students influence professors. Professors are continually exposed to all the would-be revolutionary ideas floating around just like they are exposed to the latest flu strains.It’s not exactly “peer” pressure, but it is pressure.
These factors seem so obvious and plausible to me that the question is not whether they have an impact, but rather how much impact they have. While they so not specifically boost the far left specifically, they are constant pressures pushing the whole distribution left.
Another I find interesting, in the Humanities and Social areas at least, is the prevalence of the idea of blank slate-ism. This goes back beyond Marx, of course, but it is certainly strong in his writings. I would consier it almost a requirement for Social Science and the Social Studies areas of the Humanities that students and academics believe in the dominance of social and environmental factors in determining personality, achievement and behaviour, since almost all of those fields now rely on them; if/when they are shown to be false or very weak, whole areas will collapse. Conservatives tend not to believe in this hypothesis, which would certainly lead to self-selection out of those fields.
In areas where verifiable, visible results have to be achieved, like medicine or physics (well, some of physics these days!) on the other hand, there is some counterbalancing pressure to the right, since output can’t be too obviously in conflict with reality.
I certainly agree with DH that conservatives strongly support areas of study that produce verifiable results. Not so much the ones that produce discussion. (BTW, I’ve been wondering for some time: has sociology ever produced anything that has improved our lives?)
As for the Republican distrust of global warming consensus, I am constantly stunned by the level of ignorance of people claiming that global warming is an existential threat, who haven’t bothered to learn the first thing about it. These are people who would sign petitions to ban DHMO – DiHydrogen MonOxide) if told it was a major constituent of acid rain, which of course it is.While I have no doubt there is a roughly equal lack of information among Republicans in general, this does not show an anti-science bias. While there are lots of observations, the whole edifice of global warming alarm rests on guesswork icorporated into models, not verifiable facts.
I would love to do another round of global warming trivia, but life’s too short.
I’m sorry; I got off point.
Anyway, I agree that I would expect a self-selection bias of anyone who wants to work with verifiable results, or anyone who wants to make money, out of academe, and this should be a pressure towards difficulty in retaining conservatives as well. But I also don’t discount the very simple explanations.