Asymmetrical Information

I learned that expression as "dumb as a sack of hammers", possibly because bag, rather than sack, is standard usage in my neck of the woods.

Is said flexible container dumber, or less dumb, than a box of rocks?

As soon as people start to employ the words "conservatives" or "liberals", to make generalizations, I assume the writers or speakers are either intellectually challenged themselves, or simply yammering in pursuit of partisan advantage. A yawn is the reasonable reaction.

I learned that expression as "dumb as a sack of hammers", possibly because bag, rather than sack, is standard usage in my neck of the woods.

Is said flexible container dumber, or less dumb, than a box of rocks?

Please tell me I misunderstood that quote. Is someone there saying that Planned Parenthood is about "eugenics"? Please, please tell me I misunderstood that, that this offensive, ignorant implication was fully unintentional. Please.

Sad person,

Well, I don't think that PP is about eugenics today, and perhaps it never was, but its founder, Margret Sanger, was a believer in eugenics and in racial purity.

So were a lot of people in those days, of course, and it's of pretty questionable relevance today. But it's still there.

The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was also an outspoken advocate of eugenics. Not that this necessarily says anything about the current makeup of Planned Parenthood, but an interesting factoid nonetheless.

"The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was also an outspoken advocate of eugenics."

That's a little disingenious. Margaret Sanger did wish to provide the lower classes with the means of birth control but actually eugenics?

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."

Ryan -- yes. I don't have time to dig up the quotations now, but it's very clear that Margaret Sanger felt the world would be a better place if the lower classes, particularly immigrants, didn't reproduce.

The link below explains my point regarding the Conservative Party of 19th Century England. You would think a Professor at Duke would know better.

http://volokh.com/2004_02_08_volokh_archive.html#107655043874146972

Kieran Healy alleged that our alleged imbecility was the "parsimonious" explanation for this underrepresentation

If you want to put it in economic terms, a human capital account is the most parsimonious explanation, assuming for the moment that conservatives really are underrepresented in academia. Now, I don't think that human capital explanations are all that convincing in many cases. But the question raised in my post -- which you ignore, in favor of a misleading summary of it -- is why conservatives themselves don't think this explanation is plausible in this particular case, when they generally refuse to be convinced by strong evidence of much more serious institutionalized labor market inequities in other areas, instead strongly preferring explanations emphasizing that labor market outcomes are due to differences in innate abilities, acquired skills and personal preferences.

Um, I really don't care if Margaret Sanger was into eugenics, becuase the quote, I'll remind you, was

"It's a good thing [liberals] don't believe in eugenics or we'd really be in trouble. Ooops. Sorry. I forgot about Planned Parenthood."

I'm fairly certain the historical founder of Planned Parenthood is not the one being maligned here. If you want to read it that way and ignore the, er, parsimonious reading, hey, I guess I just don't know what the meaning of is is.

But Kieran, as I pointed out, there are other, equally parsimonious explanations that reflect less favourably on liberals than conservatives, falsifying your assertion that it is "the most parsimonious explanation".

Moreover, you are grossly oversimplifying the conservative position on affirmative action, to such an extent as to make your discussion of it nearly totally false. (Most) conservatives don't deny the existance of racism in some places in the labour market; rather, they

a) reject that as an explanation for why the children of affluent minority parents post huge disparities in grades and test scores
b) disagree that the remedy is quotas
c) disagree that some sort of cosmic justice requires admitting the children of affluent minority parents to elite schools with test scores and grades that are on average several standard deviations below the mean for white and asian students
d) believe that such admissions and job quotas are unfair to the children they displace, who disproportionately tend to be from more modest backgrounds than the children admitted
e) believe that the lowering of standards may make race relations worse, by institutionalising disparities between white and minority students
f) deny, with good evidence, that there is institutional bias in the schools that produce underqualified applicants.
g) We will build a race blind society more quickly if we make it race blind. My ancestors suffered pervasive ethnic discrimination, but quotas for the Irish in government didn't, IMHO, help us build a society where the Irish were integrated.

None of these things have anything to do with denying that institutions can be racist; of course they can, though I think the evidence that a large number are is pretty sparse. And they can, even if not racist, form barriers to entry through familial ties and so on. Conservatives simply disagree that these institutional biases are too dramatic to be overcome, or that the correct way to overcome them is to have a separate and most unequal hiring track.

Of course if I grossly oversimplify someone's position, as you have done, it's easy to lampoon it as silly or hypocritical. The actual position, however, seems to me to be neither -- it may be arguable, but it is not ridiculous. I could proceed to make affirmative action proponents sound equally, if not more ridiculous right now by applying the same sorts of simplifications and selective reasoning that you've applied, to an audience that might be as glad to jump in with self-congratulatory comments about how clever and good we conservatives all are compared to you nasty, hypocritical liberals, as were your commenters. But it's pointless. There are people who believe that affirmative action is the best way to deal with racism in our society. I disagree with them, but I don't need to pretend that everyone who disagrees with me is stupid or hypocritical.

Michael Kinsley has often written about the supposed discrimination against Conservatives in academia. Here are some questions:

1. If there is no bias, what would the breakdown be? It would seem pretty unlikely that the breakdown between liberal and conservative philosophy profs would be exactly 50-50. No one seems to argue that the number of black professional basketball players represnts a conspiracy to discriminate against whites.

2. What if conservatives are just not interested in being Duke philosophy profs? This isn't as strange as it seems. A lot has been written about network effects. Many jobs are obtained thru friendships & other informal contacts. If a certain group happened to become dominate in one area (say liberals in Duke's philosophy dept or monetarists at the Univ. of Chicago) then people with similar thinking will be attracted to them. Before you know it you may have a department with 19 liberals and one conservative but no case of a qualified conservative being rejected for a less qualified liberal.

Anyway, the whole thing is based upon a logical fallacy. Even if we accept as true the statement that stupid people are generally conservative, it does not in any way follow that conservative people are therefore generally stupid. It could simultaneously be true that brilliant people were generally conservative as well, or that really stupid people are generally liberal, or that in fact all people are generally conservative - making liberals aberrations.

Statements about the political inclinations of stupid people simply shed no light on the political inclinations of the rest.

I don't think anyone is proposing that there should be a 50/50 split. But a 142/8 split in a country that is itself split roughly 50/50, and in which the pool from which graduate students are drawn trends slightly republican, seems unlikely to be random.

Conservatives are probably rare in academia because they leave owing to the "hostile atmosphere," as it were.

I received my PhD at Berkeley (God help me) before spending 15 years as a professor in the Ivy League and later a premier foreign university (widely characterized as a bulwark of socialism in that country), by which time I'd had it up to the eyeballs, gave up my tenured position, and left for industry. A number of conservative friends in academia have either left also, are thinking about it, or are resigned to suffering in silence to minimize the otherwise inevitable flak.

The incessant left-wing yammering just became tiresome (as did the risible paychecks, the stifling bureaucracy, and the lack of opportunity). It is stressful and unpleasant to be entirely out of step with most of your colleagues, to be a lightning rod for vociferously expressed left-wing disapproval of any conservative policy (to which my support would invariably be imputed, regardless of my actual views), to be lumped in with particularly distasteful figures on the right-wing, to be patronized as not having yet seen the light, and generally singled out for opprobrium. Imagine being an American in France right now, and you have the picture.

That social pressure is probably the primary mechanism for keeping academia left-wing. Academia most likely became left-wing in the first place because homogeneous population distributions tend to be metastable in the presence of a disruptive force. An simple analogy would be a tray of water that, unless lifted in a perfectly level fashion, will tilt and slosh water to the low side, thereby generating a torque that aggravates the original tilt. Steven den Beste has written a superb essay ("Formation of residues")

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/08/Formationofresidues.shtml

on how this phenomenon leads to inhomogeneous population distributions.

Academia has concentrated those of a left-wing viewpoint because such opinions historically would make those holding them unpopular elsewhere, or at least on the fringe. Tenure insulates academics holding unpopular views from retribution directed toward their employment, while the pressure to produce creative independent thought too often degenerates into garden-variety contrariness ("the prevailing orthodoxy is capitalist, so …I guess I'm a socialist") in a misguided (and somewhat pathetic) attempt to establish intellectual bona fides. Add a jigger of late adolescent rebellion to appeal to the student body, and voila! A left-wing faculty member is born (in the US; in Eastern Europe it worked the opposite way). Repeat the process a few times, the trend accelerates, and academia becomes a left-wing bastion, as new entrants try to distinguish themselves from the pack by staking out still more extreme positions (much like Janet Jackson, on a topical note, and the Jacobins in the French Revolution, on a historical one).

Nothing to do with intelligence, necessarily, much as those in academia would like to believe in that self-serving explanation.

As I've said before, I'm all for Eugenics. Stupid people (liberal or conservative) should not breed. Ugly people should not breed. Retards, midgets, dwarves and other similarly physical and mental deficiencies should get a free trip for a vasectomy or historectomy.

This would solve many, many problems. The unhealthy, unwealthy, unclean masses wouldn't exist. They wouldn't be a drag on the economy and the Mexicans could still do our housework. Racism would be nearly non-existant, since blacks, whites, jews, hispanics, whoever would now have a new "THEM" to point the finger at.

To be frank, I very well might not be in existence right now, as I am the eighth child and overbreeding by the poor is also grounds for sterilization.

Thanks, Jane. (For those confused, I am Sad Person above.) I am mollified, chastened but perhaps still insistent at the same time.

I am a bit of a blog neophyte. While I do have a website, it is new, not an argumentative-style blog, and therefore I wasn't aware that I'd need to read a lot of back-story to jump into the fray here. I try to follow the principle that the website should be able to make its point stand alone without making the user go to the background links. The background should be optional, if you ever want your readership to be more than bloggers talking to bloggers about blogs.

This is becuase most blogs create a different kind of "network effect": sometimes people think that everyone is working from the same blog-backstory. Since I didn't read the JS Mill quote first, I took Jane's excerpt from the Right Coast about Planned Parenthood at face value. It does indeed seem to imply something offensive to my eyes, ie that Planned Parenthood stands for eugenics. If I am wrong, apologies to the Right Coast for my lack of blog etiquette awareness. If I'm right, though, I still say shame on Right Coast.

Prof. Brandon has committed the worst blunder one can make, he has underestimated his opponent.

"Whom the Gods would destroy, first they make mad"

Given your misreading of the Crooked Timber post, the parsimonious explanation is the best fit in the instant case.

I believe that the major democrat demographic for light-weight academia is due largely to self selection. As any free-thinking person knows, free-thinking in the social "sciences" is not allowed. Of course, some hard-headed free-thinking and self-critical folks choose to swim upstream.

The ridgid orthodoxy spills over into university life in general; creating a "hostile" environment of harassment for free-thinking folks. This results in a moderate majority demo demo in the hard sciences.

Another self-selection away from acadamia is that smart folks want to be rewarded by increasing responsibility and money for productivity and innovation. The potential is limitless in our world-beating free-market economy.

My insight into this minor dust-up is that squishie POMO libs that engage in endless academic mental masturbation circle-jerks are terrified by free people. Cheers, Horst

I don't think anyone is proposing that there should be a 50/50 split. But a 142/8 split in a country that is itself split roughly 50/50, and in which the pool from which graduate students are drawn trends slightly republican, seems unlikely to be random.

I agree it isn't random, the question is whether it is the product of discrimination or bias. It isn't random that probably a majority of NBA players are black even though blacks represent 12(?)% of the population. This does not prove, though, that there is discrimination against hopeful white basketball players. Nor that there is some vaste affirmative action program going on in the NBA.

I noticed that some of the complaints here do not seem to be that conservatives faced discrimination, only that they felt 'uncomfortable' being in an environment that is 90% liberal. I don't doubt they feel out of place but that is not quite the same thing as saying they are being discriminated against. As Kinsley pointed out, there are plenty of places where liberals would also feel out of place.

I think it was Krugman (yep your favorite economist!) who wrote a few pieces on the economics of geography. He took a checkerboard to create a very simple model with white chips and black chips where the chips were allowed limited movement with a very slight preference to move next to their color. After numerous ieterations the chips ended up in segreagated 'ghettos' almost as effectively as if they were ruled by the old South Africa.

A very slight trend (say a philosophy dept. that's 60% liberal in 1969) can balloon into a dominate feature (say a 95% liberal department in 1995) even though there is no bias or unfairness being exercised. To take the Duke example, can you show me a professor who was denied tenure because he was Conservative?

Academia has concentrated those of a left-wing viewpoint because such opinions historically would make those holding them unpopular elsewhere, or at least on the fringe. Tenure insulates academics holding unpopular views from retribution directed toward their employment, while the pressure to produce creative independent thought too often degenerates into garden-variety contrariness ("the prevailing orthodoxy is capitalist, so …I guess I'm a socialist") in a misguided (and somewhat pathetic) attempt to establish intellectual bona fides. Add a jigger of late adolescent rebellion to appeal to the student body, and voila! A left-wing faculty member is born (in the US; in Eastern Europe it worked the opposite way).

This also exists on the right. Before the modern left wing academia there were (and still are) areas where conservatives ruled. Sometimes this groupthink can be a good thing. For example, the monetarist bent of the University of Chicago let the best non-Keynesian economists gather in one place to work up their counter-theories. That might not have happened in a world where every economic department was exactly 60% Keynesian, 20% Monatarist and 20% other.

I suppose in theory, Bonton could be right; a slight trend could turn a 60% liberal philosophy department into a 95% liberal one over time. But in practice, that's not what's happening here.

Crooked Timber's post suggests that conservatives can't have it both ways: they can't argue away evidence of bias in other professions/industries and then claim the imbalance at Duke is a sign of discrimination.

It seems to me that a similar argument applies to liberals. Don't the Duke philosophy and history (etc) departments practice affirmative action? Are we to understand from Boonton that affirmative action is not sufficient to overcome "a very slight trend"? Looking at the end result, don't liberals have to agree that either Duke's affirmative action program has failed in this case, or admit that there is bias in the hiring process?

Which takes us back to the original situation: "The purpose of the ad was basically to bring to light the fact that the faculty in many humanities departments are completely skewed toward the left," said Madison Kitchens, executive director of DCU [Duke Conservative Union]. "Their viewpoints don't represent a broad, diverse intellectual balance of opinions, but rather a monochromatic look at certain subjects."

If Duke is going to play the affirmative action game, and claim that they have a diverse faculty as a result, they need to consider political orientation. The alternative, as the DCU has shown, is not a diverse faculty, but a bunch of different colored liberals.

I would imagine that the most strenuous advocate of a "human capital" explanation of, for instance, the dominance of men in some fields of engineering, would pale if he heard a manager of an all-male engineering team say, "We don't have many women because women aren't good at math." That would be the rough analog of what happened with the DCU and the philosophy chair. I doubt any conservative would deny that invidious discrimination was at work in such a case.

But such cases are very, very rare. Most of the time, we are asked to draw conclusions from raw numbers alone, and refuse to do so. On the other hand, wildly skewed faculty numbers combined with idiotic comments from within the faculty are not so very rare; this is just the latest example.

I don't think conservatives are trying to have it both ways here, I just think the two situations are not the same.

Aye but how serious was the chair being? The numerous 'white men cant jump' statements doesn't establish a bias against qualified white basketball players in the NBA.

Likewise what do you mean by 'practice affirmative action'? Does Duke make efforts to have minorities in the student body? What would that have to do with the political orientation of its philosophy professors? In new hiring, should the school hire conservative philosophy professors that are deemed less substantial than liberal professors who are also applying?

Does this mean the University of Chicago should seek to break the lock that right wing theories have on their famous economics department by hiring liberal professors?

how serious was the chair being?

I don't know. But these sorts of comments are 1) very common on campus, and 2) would be utterly unacceptable even in jest if applied to most groups other than conservatives.

should the school hire conservative philosophy professors that are deemed less substantial than liberal professors who are also applying?

Absolutely not, under no circumstances. Or maybe: if the con. professors are "deemed less substantial" than the libs because they are conservative, then perhaps so. But I don't think that any serious conservatives want to see underqualified faculty on campus because of their political affiliation.

Does this mean the University of Chicago should seek to break the lock that right wing theories have on their famous economics department by hiring liberal professors?

Well, I don't know much about Chicago, but if they don't have some left-wingers then their students are getting an inferior education.

"Well, I don't know much about Chicago, but if they don't have some left-wingers then their students are getting an inferior education."

It would seem you are stuck in a bind. On the one hand a school must have at least some right-wingers (or left-wingers if the department is right wing) which means something other than 'intrinsic quality' (if such a thing can be at least partly defined objectively) when hiring. On the other hand you seem to feel a school must never give a person points for having the desired political beliefs...only their quality must be considered.

But the world is not as uniform as our theories would like it to be. A while ago we were talking about attempts to get a liberal talk radio show host with the influence Rush has. Back then none of the conservatives were complaining about discrimination against liberal talk show hosts...we heard claims that conservatives were just 'better at talk radio'.

So why can't liberals just be better at academics than conservatives? I'm not saying in all cases or for all time, perhaps at this point in our history liberals are better at being academics than conservatives hence they dominate the departments.

Given the evidence presented that republicans are on average smarter than democrats, the parsimonious explanation is that liberal-arts and social-science professorships are not the pinnacle of intellectual acheivement in this country.

Given the evidence presented that republicans are on average smarter than democrats, the parsimonious explanation is that liberal-arts and social-science professorships are not the pinnacle of intellectual acheivement in this country.

The explanations for why liberal-arts and social-science professors aren't the smartest people in the country, and why they think they are, are left as exercises for the reader.

How exactly does one judge the "quality" of a philosophy prof? It strikes me that quality would be a fairly objective thing in engineering or the sciences, but what about the humanities? I suspect that a philosophy prof's "quality" is determined by the consensus opinion of his peers -- and if all those peers are leftist...

Let's just say that there could be a self-fulfilling prophecy here. A right-leaning prof could not break into a philosophy department regardless of his level of intelligence, because the people who determine what "quality" is have already decided that only leftist views are worthwhile.

I think we only have a piece of the argument. I'm curious as to the split of Democrat/Republican among professors of engineering and the sciences. I think seeing the distribution in departments where quality can be much more objectively measured will cast an interesting light on whether there is a bias in hiring based on political viewpoint.

The comparison between the composition of NBA players and political preferences in academia isn't completely valid because in former, race doesn't alter the fundamental character of the output while in the latter it does. You can't speak of a black or white jumpshot, but you can speak of a leftist critique of society. Do we care that Jews may be overrepresented in the financial industries? It does not affect the functioning of my savings account to any perceptible degree. However, would I care if I had no choice but to send my son to a school that taught a certain political point of view? I might.

Boonton,

It was Thomas Schelling who originated the checkerboard model. You can read about it in his great book, "Micromotives and Macrobehavior."

Krugman also used it, and cites Schelling favorably in his little book, "The Self-Organizing Economy."

Every October, I wait for the Nobel Committee to give Schelling the Prize he deserves. Alas, it seems to have decided that anything more than 20 or so years old is no longer worthy.

Thank you Roger for the source of the checkerboard model. That's what I get from trying to quote from memory of a book I scanned thru in Borders years ago.

I agree that measuring the performance of a professor is much less as clear cut as measuring a player in the NBA. On the other hand, that doesn't mean the idea of making a decision is hopelessly subjective. If that was the case then we shouldn't have philosophy departmments but a department of leftist philosophy and a department of rightist philosophy.

I can see many reasons why a professor who DID share the department's general political views would NOT get the job. For example, he may have little work published and what s published is not in well respected journals. His work may not be cited often by others in the field. His teaching skills may be sub-par and so on. All this cannot be overcome simply because he shares a dislike for Bush.

So we can see how a department may reject someone who shares their politics we can likewise see how a department may respect someone with whom they disagree politically. Their work may be well known and often cited by others. They may have excellent teaching skills and so on.

My point is that it is quite possible for a liberal philosophy or right-wing economic department to be fair to iconoclasts in their hiring. That doesn't mean that you won't encounter a department that ends up 90% in favor of one ideology.

There's a valid diversity argument here. I can see someplace like the University of Chicago saying 'we have enough monetarists and real business cycle theoriests...we should hire a Keynesian to keep things less unbalanced'. So a Keynesian may be given an edge over an equally qualified monetarists.

What's a valid measure of diversity, though? In economics the schools of thought are not so much conservative.vs.liberal but things like monetarism, Keynesianism, and so on. Some of the schools are more friendly towards political conservatives (or liberals). What are the major schools of thought in philosophy & do they divide into liberal vs conservative or is the distinction forced?

I would just like to add that many times people may judge those that share their politics *more* harshly than those that don't. I find that a good portion of intellectuals enjoy debate and to enjoy debate you need someone who is taking an opposing opinion. I think more than a few departments might like having a 'house conservative'.

To understand if there is an unfair bias or not, though, we have to ask ourselves if conservatives would like to dominate philosophy departments? If there are more opportunities for conservatives at DC think tanks and right wing journals like the Weekly Standard (or publishing their own work outside of working as a full time professor)...then many conservatives will shun academia and departments may end up dominated by liberals even if they are not discriminating against conservative applicatants.

I would just like to add that many times people may judge those that share their politics *more* harshly than those that don't. I find that a good portion of intellectuals enjoy debate and to enjoy debate you need someone who is taking an opposing opinion. I think more than a few departments might like having a 'house conservative'.

To understand if there is an unfair bias or not, though, we have to ask ourselves if conservatives would like to dominate philosophy departments? If there are more opportunities for conservatives at DC think tanks and right wing journals like the Weekly Standard (or publishing their own work outside of working as a full time professor)...then many conservatives will shun academia and departments may end up dominated by liberals even if they are not discriminating against conservative applicatants.

Hello

There is a false dichotomy at play here. It isn't accurate to assume that if someone isn't a registered Democrat they are necessarily a Republican. Nor is it accurate to Portray a "Liberal" as a Party line zealot, nor those who do not possess leftish politics as a "right winger".

The Independent Womans Forum undertook a poll of D.C. summer interns. It's at their site IWF. This poll, which obviously is highly conditional, has as a starting assumption a fairly classic bell curve distribution across the political spectrum. It's worth looking over for a source for likely student views in general. And although this selection of college students, due to the fact that they were interning in D.C., was not split along a true Gaussian, it never the less managed to present the political spectum as other than polar (which is a foolish assumption).

If one were to take a more accurate view of the electorate, then an incidence of a consistant 75+% Leftish identification amoungst Universtiy professors becomes more troubling. For the Leftish Professor who starts guessing about the unsuitability of Conservatives before he starts guessing about the unsuitability of the great unwashed Independent and Libertarian middle doesn't seem to understand what he is implying. And I'd like to hear an explanation regarding Independent and Libertarian voters lack of intelligence and ability while the Leftish professor is on a roll... hey, might as well insult everyone while he's at it.

The Democrats have around a third (to be kind) of the electorate. The Republicans have another third. The middle is made up of Independents and Libertarians. Now are we to believe that not only is the Republican unfit to hold 75+% of academic posts but so is the Independent, and so is the Libertarian. In fact, it should certainly strike those of us who are not Democrats that somehow 75% of the electorate that doesn't not walk in lock step with them doesn't seem to need bother apply to Publically supported institutions that Democrats control.

Considering this Democratic Party is going to be asking Independents and Libertarians to vote against the big bad Bush this fall, maybe Democrats should stop calling us stupid and unfit when it's fairly obvious that they're merely abusing their authority in order to exclude equally talented candidates for positions primarily based on LACK of CONFORMITY to their socio-political worldview. So they are feeding at the public till, and giving themselves academic degrees and money to indoctrinate those with poor logic and alienate those with superior rhetoric or mere common sense.

Let's examine another fact. The proportion of female to males entering University. The estimate is that there will be 147 females for every 100 males, over 60%. Moreover, those that are excluded are predominantly middle to lower income white men (white trash, we've been called), and middle to lower income black males. South and East Asian males are "over-represented minorities". The principle beneficiaries of this trend? Bourgeois white females.

This would certainly explain political affiliation weighting if it translated into advanced degrees and professorships. It'd also run contrary to any claims of merit in higher education, as women certainly don't score proportionally high enough on standard tests to justify the ghettozation (trailer parkization) of white and black males due to a testing lack.

In fact, women score across a checkable curve on MENSA testing. Look it up. Does it suggest that, on average, standards have been lowered or rigged to such an extent that the bias has become institutionalized discrimination? Or perhaps the Democrat white men in the professorships just believe having more girlys around is a perk due to the fact they're "more intelligent" than Republicans, Independents, Libertarians, or those of a lower socio-economic status, black or white. Naaaa.

Probably it's nothing. Wait!! You DIRTY little would be BRAMeN! I smell a campaign issue!

There is a false dichotomy at play here. It isn't accurate to assume that if someone isn't a registered Democrat they are necessarily a Republican. Nor is it accurate to Portray a "Liberal" as a Party line zealot, nor those who do not possess leftish politics as a "right winger".

The Independent Womans Forum undertook a poll of D.C. summer interns. It's at their site IWF. This poll, which obviously is highly conditional, has as a starting assumption a fairly classic bell curve distribution across the political spectrum. It's worth looking over for a source for likely student views in general. And although this selection of college students, due to the fact that they were interning in D.C., was not split along a true Gaussian, it never the less managed to present the political spectum as other than polar (which is a foolish assumption).

If one were to take a more accurate view of the electorate, then an incidence of a consistant 75+% Leftish identification amoungst Universtiy professors becomes more troubling. For the Leftish Professor who starts guessing about the unsuitability of Conservatives before he starts guessing about the unsuitability of the great unwashed Independent and Libertarian middle doesn't seem to understand what he is implying. And I'd like to hear an explanation regarding Independent and Libertarian voters lack of intelligence and ability while the Leftish professor is on a roll... hey, might as well insult everyone while he's at it.

The Democrats have around a third (to be kind) of the electorate. The Republicans have another third. The middle is made up of Independents and Libertarians. Now are we to believe that not only is the Republican unfit to hold 75+% of academic posts but so is the Independent, and so is the Libertarian. In fact, it should certainly strike those of us who are not Democrats that somehow 75% of the electorate that doesn't not walk in lock step with them doesn't seem to need bother apply to Publically supported institutions that Democrats control.

Considering this Democratic Party is going to be asking Independents and Libertarians to vote against the big bad Bush this fall, maybe Democrats should stop calling us stupid and unfit when it's fairly obvious that they're merely abusing their authority in order to exclude equally talented candidates for positions primarily based on LACK of CONFORMITY to their socio-political worldview. So they are feeding at the public till, and giving themselves academic degrees and money to indoctrinate those with poor logic and alienate those with superior rhetoric or mere common sense.

Let's examine another fact. The proportion of female to males entering University. The estimate is that there will be 147 females for every 100 males, over 60%. Moreover, those that are excluded are predominantly middle to lower income white men (white trash, we've been called), and middle to lower income black males. South and East Asian males are "over-represented minorities". The principle beneficiaries of this trend? Bourgeois white females.

This would certainly explain political affiliation weighting if it translated into advanced degrees and professorships. It'd also run contrary to any claims of merit in higher education, as women certainly don't score proportionally high enough on standard tests to justify the ghettozation (trailer parkization) of white and black males due to a testing lack.

In fact, women score across a checkable curve on MENSA testing. Look it up. Does it suggest that, on average, standards have been lowered or rigged to such an extent that the bias has become institutionalized discrimination? Or perhaps the Democrat white men in the professorships just believe having more girlys around is a perk due to the fact they're "more intelligent" than Republicans, Independents, Libertarians, or those of a lower socio-economic status, black or white. Naaaa.

Probably it's nothing. Wait!! You DIRTY little would be BRAMeN! I smell a campaign issue!

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