Asymmetrical Information

Well, did these folks say this somewhere in particular? I don't see any links in your post.

The primary product (a marketable degree) is mostly unaffected by a marked political bias, but it does reflect on the overall value of the product. If it were an automobile it's as if the drive train were good but the A/C is iffy. Fine until a better product comes along, then the value of your product is drastically reduced.

When I was in engineering school 30 years ago, we had to take an obligatory course in 'Science, Technology and Values'. The instructor droned on and on about greenish issues including how we could all live on 40 acre farms in Vermont. That came to an embarassing stop when a student whose family were real vermont farmers pointed out how ridiculous that was. An opportunity to spark some real thinking was turned into the usual 'What a load of BS' experience.

This is in a 90% Engineer/Scientist school, so if the administration had really wanted to they could have created a first class adjunct to the harder departments. A good selling point for future managers etc.

My comment on Miron's blog:

Why does academia get to resemble the market? Wouldn't it also resemble non-markets, too, say government and/or monastery?

How does the tenure process resemble what a trader or an entrepreneur goes through? The latter will go through the darwinian experience of spending money to gain some future return. How does the candidate for professor go through that? They invest time and energy, but they receive stipends more than having to take financial risks.

And, my takeaway from reading Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that most academics subscribe to paradigms the same way monks subscribe to their respective traditions. The status quo is unfriendly to breakthrough shifts; rather, such progressive thinkers are treated with apostate suspicion.

Beyond the peer-review publishing, what direct accountability is there? Can't a professor simply show up for her classes, and then hide out in her office the rest of the work day? At least that's what my Ivy League professor buddy tells me.

I think there is a market for conservative universities, or at least for non-liberal universities. However, it takes a long time for educational markets to evolve. Typically, it's a long time between when you attend college and when you send your kids to school. If you were upset with the liberal (or conservative) slant of your school, it'll be two decades before you're able to vote with your dollars by selecting a school with a different perspective for your kids.

I don't think the response in the original post answers the question. I get the idea that political orientation is not the primary product of a university. But even if it is a minor secondary effect there still needs to be some explanation of why it exists.

As an example, if you saw that all cars had a ugly hood ornament, you could ask "why do they all have that hood ornament." If someone tells you that most people care about fuel efficiency, or power or leather seats, that explains why the market exerts _less_ force in removing the hood ornament. It does not explain why the market fails to remove the hood ornament. Unless of course, the ugly hood ornament somehow helps with the fuel efficiency or power or ...

Tom

Why are smarter people liberals and libertarians, instead of conservative? Damned if I know. Maybe it's because they aren't smarter, it's that conservatives are dumber? Moving the bell curve rather than a real correlation?

The question is flawed because it assumes that academia is part of the marketplace. There is no tenure in the free market.

Ed,

But schools are in the marketplace. If no one wishes to attend radical left U than radical left U will fail. If univerisities are inefficient, the marketplace should provide alternatives for 18-22 year olds wishing to build their human capital.

Tom

It should be observed (and has been many times before) that smart, educated, competitive adults don't have to go into academia -- they can also go into the world of business. And the world of business offers a far broader range of opportunities than does academia. So if academia has any relationship to a market, it may be that it only represents a minority fraction of that market.

Another possible corrollary of that is: The Academy is a small but desirable part of the market, so it will be highly selective and the current ruling caste will tend to select more of the same. Only when a popular point of view is suddenly and cruelly discredited by overwhelming evidence, even unto the destruction of its dearest proponents, will an ideology shift occur suddenly in the Academy. This doesn't happen very often, so most ideology shifts are glacial.

would it not be fair to argue that ivy league institutions started out as conservative places only to be hijacked at some point along the line?

OK, I was going to complain that, despite this being a blog read by the presumably economically literate, nobody had mentioned the law of comparative advantage. But then anony-mouse kinda-sorta did.

Assuming it as given that a certain percentage of the general population is going to be leftist cretins no matter what (it's not provable at this point in history, but the evidence certainly seems to lean that way), an economically efficient system will tend to channel them to the occupations in which they can do the least damage, even if simply because all the competent people are (and indeed should be) out in the real world doing the work.

If you're a better businessman or engineer or whatever than you are a teacher, then it doesn't matter a whit how much better a teacher you would be than the folks who are actually doing the teaching...you and society are still economically better off if you farm out the job of teaching and focus your efforts on the work you're best at. The folks who are left to utterly nonproductive work (such as is represented by professorships in most academic disciplines) will be the dregs of the competency barrel, simply by process of elimination.

All things considered, universities are not a bad place for such people...at least, putting them there is more just than locking them in prisons, and more humane than committing them to asylums for the incurably insane. Occasionally pretending that we think their opinions matter even keeps most of them from getting angry enough to take up politics (as distinct from ideology), and the fewer lunatics we have trying to take over the country, the better off we all are.

It is worth noting that, in academic departments which are _not_ well described as "utterly nonproductive work", the leftist bias is far, far less powerful.

The useful question is not "why are universities dominated by leftists", but rather "why is the known-to-be-dominated-by-leftists university system still trusted with _monopoly_ power to grant credentials for entry into fields of productive endeavour?". This is the only respect in which these folks have any actual power, and I think it's high time we took it away from them.

I think the problem is the bundling combined with oligopoly power of the top (as in wealthiest) universities.

Most parents don't really take the humanities and softer social sciences seriously. Unsurprisingly, this is where we have high grade inflation and lots of PC nonsense.

If the top schools were to set up programs that only focused on science, engineering, and training for professional school (law, business, and medicine) while offering a non-researched based liberal arts core in lit, writing, history, etc there would be so much student defection it wouldn't be funny. But remember, this would require taking and paying for all the top technical profs and their toys (business and econ included) while only hiring less fashionable, non-researcher types for the softer liberal arty subjects.

The leftist professoriate would scream bloody murder, but the funding, enrollments, and grants would all follow the top professionals.

Sadly, in the Ivy League, first rate technical training is bundled with second rate PC nonsense. No one without 10 billion dollars to start a competing HYP or Stanford can do better. However, Larry Summers's attempts to refocus Harvard on sci-tech suggests that smart Ivy Leaguers know which side of the bread is buttered.

I would make two observations:

1) As the austrians point out, market process does not happen overnight. Christian colleges are growing rapidly. My wife went to one of them, and some (many?) students were largely secular, but their parents didn't want them partying their way through school. So the market is speaking.

2) When you consider the government grant money coming in, there are rent seeking reasons to support anti-libertarian positions. It would almost be self-refuting (or hypocritical!) for libertarian professors to enrich their school with government money while arguing for laissez-faire government policies! It reminds me of Sideshow Bob in the cartoon the Simpsons, "Yes, I'm aware of the irony of using television in order to decry it."

But there is still a market failure causing this. The private sector mistakenly relies on these acedemics to decide whom they should hire.

Of course, this could easily be blamed on HR regulation which forces companies to resort to credentialism in making hiring decisions.

Several commentators have proposed the "don't worry, be happy" response to the leftist takeover of American universities because no one pays attention to what the professoriate is screeching anyway. I am not sure we can be so blithely unconcerned. Every year, I interview a crop of recent college graduates for a prestigious internship. And every year, I am shocked anew at how unimpressive they are, including (especially) the Ivy graduates. They can't reason. They can't argue, unless you count parrotting leftist slogans as argument. And they definitely cannot write.

I increasingly share the view of a retired professor from Harvard whose 30 year career coincided with the leftist take-over. He wrote that when he started teaching, his students for the most part were extremely smart. Gradually, and then with increasing speed, that all changed. He described the current typical Ivy League student as "good at school" as distinct from "smart." A kid who is "good at school" long ago figured out that his only real task consisted of figuring out what the teacher wanted to hear and delivering it. Guess what that almost always turns out to be? After four years in the echo chamber, it's game over. After indoctrination that long and that intense, only a very rare person will ever question his own assumptions. Nothing can penetrate the hard shell of smug self-congratulation.

The value our elite universities now deliver is the brand, not the education. Pure free-marketeers may now roll their eyes and say, "Splendid! Spending the money on the prestigious brand does translate into higher salaries down the road -- see, the free market works, QED."

But that requires you to accept the starting premise: that getting an actual education doesn't matter. Sorry. I'm not with you. (Or to put it in your terms, I ain't buying it.) That's the impatience I feel with libertarianism in general, that the market will eventually correct everything if left to its own devices, and that furthermore, the marketplace is the appropriate model for all human endeavors.

I also have to love the commentator who wondered why smart people were either liberals or libertarians whereas dumb people were conservatives -- as if that were a fact. Newsflash: liberals who are good at school flock, unsurprisingly, to academia. Smart conservatives, correctly realizing that they would find no welcome in academia, flock elsewhere, mostly to think tanks which, you may have noticed, actually do influence public policy.

annie,

Seriously, Thanks for Being.

If this: "Nothing can penetrate the hard shell of smug self-congratulation.", doesn't encapsulate the essence of the Scene extant, I'm not sure what would.

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