March 09, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:A hell of a long post on conservatives in academia
Truly it is written "That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." Now that I've been blogging for over two years, I find we are returning to arguments of yore, with few minds changed on either side.
And yet I, too, leap once more into the fray -- stormed at with snot and yell, into the valley of death, into the mouth of hell. Psychosis, they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, pass the tinfoil and the plasticine, and let's get on with it.
The argument about the dearth of conservatives in academia can, I think, be broken down into three parts:
1. Are conservatives underrepresented in academia?2. If they are, is this underrepresentation due to action on the part of the faculty, or is there some other reason that we can't (or shouldn't) correct?
3. If conservatives are underrepresented, and the cause of this underrepresentation is due, in whole or in part, to the actions of the faculty or administration, should we try to do anything about this?
Let's take those questions one at a time:
1. Are conservatives underrepresented at institutions of higher learning?
Let me narrow this question a bit to this: Are conservatives underrepresented at elite institutions of higher learning?
I do this for three reasons. First, this debate has become linked, for good or for bad, with the debate about affirmative action in academia; and affirmative action in academia is a meaningful issue at perhaps 10% of the institutions of higher learning in this country. (Remember, the vast majority of colleges in this country will admit anyone who applies, provided they can sign their name to a tuition check, and present some sort of high school diploma). And second, conservatives are primarily concerned with the dearth of their compatriots in academia because of the effect this absence has on policy and the culture of ideas, particularly as presented in the media. The elite academic institutions exert a tremendous influence over both, both through their pedagogic function, training the future policy analysts and journalists, and through their filtering function, deciding which ideas are valid and important. And third, the elite colleges are where most of the data is; no researchers have undertaken to visit each of our nation's tens of thousands of community colleges to find out what their faculties think. So let's concentrate on the narrower question.
Anecdotally, the answer is obvious to anyone on the right (or even, in my experience, in the center): hell, yes.
But I've never once seen politics come into the classroom! protest outraged liberals.
Umm-hmmm. And I never saw black women being followed around retail stores by clerks--until a friend of mine who is a black woman pointed it out. Unless it is very, very overt, few of us notice discrimination unless it is directed at us.
Now, for most of my time in college, I was a creature of the left. And during that time, the university felt like a warm, open place, a veritable hotbed of ideological diversity. It was only when I began to cross that ideological boundary that the pointed remarks and occasional open hostility became glaring. That I noticed that my university (Penn) seemed curiously uncommitted to protecting the communication of ideas, if those ideas concerned race or gender; the administration pretty much openly sanctioned the theft of any paper that offended a woman's group or minority organisation, and it denied due process to people accused of offensive speech towards women or minorities. That the generalised assumptions on which you were expected to operate in many classes were hostile to free markets in particular, and conservative ideas in general. No, hostile isn't the right word; hostile would imply argument or discussion. These things were never argued. The rightness of the moderately left-wing view of the world was simply taken as a given.
In other words, I noticed that every single one of my professors in every single one of my classes, with the exception of two economics professors, was either a Democrat, or too far to the left to be comfortable identifying themselves as a Democrat.
Now, of course, the plural of anecdote is not data, and given that I was an English major, I'm not necessarily representative; perhaps the history department was simply teeming with Republicans.
But that isn't the case, is it? As far as I can determine, every study that's ever been done, by asking the professors, or checking their voting registration, or their campaign contributions, or what have you, generates exactly the same result: with a handful of exceptions, no humanities department at any school of any significant academic reputation has more than two or three conservatives on staff, and many, many such departments have none.
So, let's take it as a given that there is indeed an extraordinary skew towards liberals in the humanities departments of academia. Actually, skew is far too weak a word; if we take the distribution between right and left among American citizens as the normal distribution, what we have in academia is a curve that pretty much chops off before it even hits the median line. That's not a skew; it's an intellectual monoculture.
Which brings us to question two:
2. Is the underrepresentation of conservatives in academia due to action on the part of the faculty or administration, or is there some other reason that we can't (or shouldn't) correct?
In examining the hypothesis that the political composition of the current faculty determines (causes) the political composition of the future faculty, we must examine three possibilities:
a. There is a causal link; the new hires are liberal because the current faculty are liberal.b. The causal link is there, but runs the other way: the current faculty is liberal because the incoming faculty is liberal.
c. There is some other factor that makes both the faculty, and the hiring pool, left wing.
Many liberals discussing the issue like to take the strongest possible form of hypothesis a -- "Liberal faculty members, meeting in their secret dungeon, have signed a blood pact to refuse conservatives entrance to academia, and enforce this mission by ruthlessly interrogating prospective faculty about their political preferences, and then refusing to hire anyone insufficiently left wing" -- deny that it occurs, and then skip off with a blythe "Q.E.D." tossed over the shoulder to anyone who insists that there might be more to the story.
This is ludicrous. Not even the most ideological conservative, smugly convinced that we have live in a colorblind nirvana, would insist that discrimination is only present if a prospective employer leans across the desk and says "I'm afraid I can't hire you. You see, you're black." Nor would he limit it to a hiring committee sitting around a table and saying "well, it's a big stack of resumes here, but luckily we can get rid of 20% of them right off the top, because they're women." Even the most rock-ribbed, anti-affirmative action, land-of-opportunity-glorifying, whitebread midwestern meritocratic elitist would recognize that if everyone at the hiring meeting unanimously agrees that we need to toss out Candidates X, Y and Z because "they're not a good fit" -- and the reason everyone thinks that they're not a good fit is that their skin is the wrong color, or they don't have enough Y chromosomes, that this is discrimination, and it's wrong. They might not think it's possible to prove satisfactorily enough to warrant remedy; they might think the remedy would do more harm than good; they might think that the proposed remedies are unjust. But they don't deny that it is possible to discriminate without everyone sitting down and announcing they're doing it. In contrast to the south, I'd bet that very few admissions committees or HR departments in the north fifty years ago said "we don't want any negroes here" -- but just the same, they didn't get any negroes. And it's a rare person indeed who denies that this was because of racial discrimination. Certainly, it's very hard to imagine that any of the liberals advancing these arguments to "disprove" discrimination against conservatives in academia would do so.
(Does this mean, as Kieran Healy argued a while back, that I am being "forced to admit the existence of institutionalized inequality, something [conservatives] are usually loath to acknowledge"? Well, most conservatives I know, few of whom are the stolid lackwits that his post implies, acknowlege that institutionalized inequality exists. They don't think it is as widespread as those on the left who seem to see a racist behind every tree. They think that much of the institutionalized inequality comes from things that are politically difficult to fix, such as the failing schools, or politically impossible to equalize, such as failing families or the vastly better social networks possessed by the middle class--by what mechanism will we stop Dad from speaking to best friend Bill about that presigious summer internship? And they don't think that institutionalizing reverse racism is the right solution in most cases. That doesn't mean that conservatives are unaware that discrimination can happen without everyone sitting down and making a rule saying "No blacks". See above.)
In general, liberals favour hypothesis b, pointing out, correctly, that the population of graduate students from whom future professors are drawn is also very disproportionately liberal. They like to advance one of several theories to explain this:
i. Conservatives are stupid/narrowminded; professors are smart/openminded; therefore, conservatives can't be professors.No data is ever offered in support of this rather extraordinary explanation. Indeed, I was able to find no data on the relative intelligence of conservatives and liberals (and of course, any such data would be provided by the very professors whose bias we are investigating.) Nor does the general quality of the accompanying rhetoric tend to support the notion that liberals are conservatives' intellectual superiors; rather the reverse, in fact. The vicious ad hominem, farcical caricature, and tendency to dehumanise the population they are describing lends itself to many a happy hour of replacing every instance of "conservatives are" with "blacks are" or "women are" and emailing the results back to the authors for comment.
ii. Conservatives are too interested in making money to go into academia
There is probably some truth to this. But it is not, by itself, adequate. Liberals do not significantly outnumber conservatives at medical school, and prospective doctors work longer hours, in more misery, for roughly as little pay (after taxes and living expenses are accounted for), for more years, than do graduate students. And while the financial payoff in most academic fields is lower, professors, unlike doctors, can't be fired and won't be sued, and they don't have to spend much of their days sticking their fingers into peoples' body cavities. Their cost of living is generally lower, they have excellent benefits, and they get the benefit of living in a culture that, though its hierarchy is probably more rigid than that of doctors, uses non-financial metrics to assess status, and indeed actively frowns on conspicuous consumption, which lowers their cost of living still further.
Moreover, there is no shortage of little wonks willing to work at conservative think tanks, even though these jobs are not well renumerated. So by itself, this lacks explanatory vigour.
iii. Conservatives aren't interested in academic inquiry/art/literature/etc.
Oh, snore. And your mother's a big fat idiot.
iv. Conservatives don't share academic values
Possibly so. But this begs the question: are liberal academics defining their values so as to exclude conservatives? In some cases this is valid; much as I value the free exchange of ideas, I don't really think it would be appropriate to offer tenure to a biology professor who doesn't believe in evolution. But does it matter whether your English professor does? And if so, how did they let in all the folks in my English department who embraced a blatantly political, anti-scientific "blank slate" view of human behavior despite all evidence to the contrary?
The problem in general with hypothesis b is that it doesn't really help us. In the private sector, if a fellow places an employment ad and it just so happens that all the applicants are white men, we don't say that he has discriminated by hiring only white men for the available positions. But this only works because for most positions, the employers do not control the hiring pool.
In academia, they do. From what I know (and there are fair number of academics running around the Galt family tree), getting a tenure-track job at a good institution is the culmination of a 5-7 year audition process during which you are looked over by the "club", sorted, ranked, and continually evaluated for potential weakness. So when professors claim that there couldn't possibly be any discrimination because they don't ask about political affiliation in interviews, this is more than a touch disingenuous. They don't have to ask, because the faculty at the applicant's institution, which can be assumed to share the same values, has already had ample time to figure out where the candidate stands.
Not, I must emphasise, that I believe that there is some vast, left-wing conspiracy to drive conservatives out of academia. To the extent that such things happen, I believe that they happen because many academics, in my experience, would prefer not to associate with conservatives, and a small but vocal percentage actually believe that being conservative is a moral wrong that should exclude you from consideration. Those biases, unconcious and conscious, serve to exclude conservatives by making it harder for them to get the recommendations and personal introductions that can make all the difference between landing a tenure track job and deciding you'd rather be a consultant after all. Which, in turn, allows hiring committees to assume that the overwhelming majority of candidates they see share their broad political outlook.
And the few that slip through . . . well, I've been on search committees when there were a lot of applicants and a few jobs. You're looking for any excuse to winnow the pile; I've thrown out resumes because I didn't like the font. So do I think that a notation that you were the chapter president of the College Republicans, or a graduate sponsor of the Campus Crusade for Christ, might well knock you out of the running? Consciously or unconsciously, yes. Certainly, my few conservative friends who were applying to graduate school thought it prudent to expunge anything that might betray a rightward tilt.
And what about hypothesis c? Is there some X factor about academia that makes both the hiring pool and the faculty liberal? To some extent, probably. Self interest, for example: academics will tend to do better under a progressive tax scheme than a flatter one, and more money spent on government probably means more money spent on government grants. In some cases, envy probably plays a role. Not a few academics are morally outraged at the money made in the private sector for work they consider to be substantially less valuable than the work they do; a little redistribution seems to them to be very much in order. Such people seldom consider that the high renumeration goes hand in hand with a lifetime of work that most people consider very unpleasant--which I point out because I jumped off the MBA track to a career in journalism, which is also badly paid, because it's a lot more fun than being an M&A associate. Let's consider, too, the experience most academics have of market forces. The primary goal of most academics is a tenure-track position, competition for which is unbelievably fierce. A group of people who have spent a considerable portion of their adult lives pursuing, as their primary goal, jobs insulated from market forces, in a job market characterised by severely binary outcomes in which a few lucky candidates landing cushy sinecures and the rest are forced to subsist at or near poverty or leave the field, is likely to have a significantly different outlook on economics and politics than, say, a group of accountants.
To sum up: do I think that faculty are engaged in some sort of grand conspiracy to keep conservatives out of academia? No. I think that the absence of conservatives in the immediate hiring pool is a combination of genuinely different interests and a hostile environment, plus occasional overt discrimination.
I do not believe that it is because Republicans are more money-grubbing, stupid, or narrow-minded than Democrats. (Of course, I wouldn't believe that, would I?) And I'll point out that the University of Chicago Business School, hotbed of free-market fundamentalism, which is often offered as an example of how different values might produce a similar skew in the other direction, does not, in fact skew noticeably Republican. Having been there during the election fiasco of 2000, I can testify that the student body splits roughly 50-50 Democrat/Republican, and faculty members averred that the faculty was similarly divided.
This also dramatically undercuts the common argument that the fact that the liberal skew in academia is much more dramatic than the liberal skew of the general population with postgraduate education is due to the professional schools. Lawyers probably trend Democratic, and the Republican tilt of MBA and Medical students, if it exists, is very mild.
Finally, let me point out that even if the potential qualified pool of academics is, say, 90% liberal and 10% conservative, the odds of getting the result we witness at Duke--6 Republicans out of a faculty numbering in the hundreds, IIRC--purely by chance is very low, certainly less than 5%. The odds of getting those same results, by chance, at every single academic institution of any repute in the country are astronomical. It's possible, of course, that it's just random bad luck. It's also possible that the reason there were no blacks in management positions at Fortune 500 companies in the 1950's was that they all simultaneously overslept on the day of the interview. But I wouldn't bet that way.
So if conservatives are underrepresented, and it is in part because the faculty at elite institutions create barriers to their entry into academia, that brings us to question 3:
3. What, if anything, should we do about conservative underrepresentation
If you're conservative, I certainly hope you didn't say "force universities to hire more conservatives!" You're not an ideological conservative; you're an opportunist willing to sacrifice any principle as soon as it's your own ox being gored.
I'm in favor of the sorts of programs I'd favour for any group: set up scholarships and chairs for those of your ideological stripe, or for subjects you want to see covered. Harangue your college. Expose institutional anti-conservatism. Embarass those who create the embarassing conditions that drive conservatives out. But quotas? Are you barking mad?
That doesn't mean I agree with liberals who make arguments like this:
I'm getting pretty tired of incessant snarky comments from conservatives about the lack of "intellectual diversity" on university campuses:Here's more on the flap over Duke's diversity problem. "What’s clear is that the present administration has pledged a commitment to racial, gender, and intellectual diversity, but actual resources are only dedicated toward the first two components."
Duke — and other institutions — devote resources to the first two because America has a long and often ugly history of discrimination against ethnic minorities and women. America decidedly does not have a long and ugly history of discrimination against conservatives.
[Pedantic insert: it's not hard to understand. It's also illegal. I believe that the Supreme Court's Bakke decision, which I had the privilege of studying in my labour relations class, specifically ruled out quotas (or de facto quotas, such as the policy at most institutions of higher learning of altering the admissions criteria for minority students so as to produce a roughly equal number of minorities each year, which is higher than would be admitted without the alterations) based on rectifying past discrimination. Legally and logically, this makes sense to me, as it's somewhat repulsive to force some randomly selected white kids to take a bullet in order to rectify past discrimination for the rest of us. That left only "diversity" as the potential rationale for affirmative action. Having hung affirmative action on the educational benefits of diversity, it's hard to see how excluding half the political spectrum from the faculty fosters this desireable goal. But I digress.]
Our disagreement, I think, stems from one's conception of the university. Is it device for excercising power, or is it a place for education?
A little of both, I suppose. I've written before about education as a signalling mechanism, and I don't think there's any doubt that one's college degree functions as a proxy for a host of other items that have nothing to do with educational attainment, such as class, social polish, work ethic, and so forth. Given that, perhaps it's legitimate to try to distribute that signalling mechanism more evenly between races.
The problem is, I suspect it doesn't work that way; knowing that affirmative action is in place, a rational employer will discount for it, so in effect, rather than spreading the value of such degrees around, you've merely destroyed their value for those minorities who were not admitted under affirmative action. Though I might be persuaded on the morals, on the merits, I doubt that affirmative action is very effective. And it hurts two groups that really don't deserve it: high-achieving minority students who have their achievements discounted, and marginal white students, who will tend to be from less privileged backgrounds than the other white students at the school, and often than the minorities who displaced them, since minority students at elite colleges, like their white counterparts, are disproportionately drawn from the educated middle and upper middle class.
Leaving questions of social justice aside, the issue of whether or not we should care about liberal skew in academia comes down to this: do we care about what sorts of ideas our kids are exposed to? And do political ideas matter in the classroom?
Well, back when I was an english major, the surefire route to an A in perhaps 2/3 of my classes was to identify the political passions of the professor, and then cater to them. Women's studies? Queer theory? Racial and ethnic discrimination? Just write every single paper on that topic. The majority of my academic work in major thus covers such important topics as: homosexuality in Shakespeare's sonnets, power and gender relationships in Chaucer, racism in nineteenth century American literature, and so on. We didn't have to learn anything about any of these works, except that people who lived before 1975 were, by the standards of 1995, a bunch of racist, sexist and homophobic bastards, except for the ones who were probably gay.
Is that useful? To a point. But not to the extent that we generated papers on these topics. So Pope was sexist. So what? No matter how many classes you teach on his hopeless misogyny, he's not going to come back to catch a sensitivity seminar at the Wymyn's Studies Centre.
But I digress. The point is, our professors' politics did invade the classroom, even in a subject that's ostensibly apolitical. How much more would they matter in history, political science, economics?
Now, of course, many professors do try to play devil's advocate, presenting views not their own in order to round out the picture. And as a DA of long standing, I applaud them. But I also know that no matter how hard you try, you are never as forceful an advocate for the other side as you are for your own. You don't look as hard for disconfirming evidence. Studies that contradict your opponents do not set off the heart-racing, migraine-inducing, "I'll bet I can prove them wrong" reaction that makes for a vibrant marketplace of ideas.
It is simply not enough just to read the other sides' literature. It is too easy to throw something that disagrees with you aside with a quick snort of "that's obviously ridiculous!" For truly vigorous debate, which I'd argue is essential to the pursuit of truth, you need advocates from both sides right there, mixing it up face to face. (Politely, of course.) There is just no substitute for having someone who thoroughly disagrees with you pin you down and force you to defend each and every one of your assertions.
That sort of debate goes on all the time in academia--about subjects other than politics. Unlike some of the conservatives I've talked to, I recognize that there is a healthy tradition of vigorous debate in academic culture; I simply think that given the monoculture, it is unlikely that ideas with political implications get the same rough treatment as other academic questions. I think it would be healthier if the left had to expose its most cherished notions to academic debate on a regular basis--and if those notions are true, such exposure can only make them stronger. I also think that it's very important that college students, who are impressionable, prone to argue from emotion, and vulnerable to ideological hero worship, should have both conservative and liberal professors supplying their ideas.
But that's precisely why I'm against any suggestion of affirmative action for conservatives (and to be fair, I've seen no conservatives making such a ridiculous suggestion). Gaining a few quota'd positions, making conservative professors protected hothouse lilies, would destroy debate as surely as banning conservatives--perhaps more so, because the conservatives would have a cushy sinecure to protect. Besides, what criteria would you use to award the preference? Bah! The idea's too stupid to even waste more time thinking about.
So, like a good libertarian, I look to the market, and the distributed social networks of a strong society. Shop for institutions that are open to political diversity for your kids. And every time a professor opens his mouth to opine that the reason there aren't more conservatives in academia is that they're just not as good as we are, hold a mirror up to his prejudice until he writhes with shame.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 9, 2004 07:43 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksWhoaa.
When you wrote 'long post' you weren't kidding!
Nice post but the lack of data is troubling. How do we know that conservatives are underrepresented?
And why should the left/right distribution of the population be the point of reference?
Posted by: GT on March 9, 2004 09:14 PMMaybe what would be useful is to tackle this by discipline. Say English dept or Economics or History. Are we saying that left-wing economics is overrepresented in US academia?
And it may also help to better define the terms. Social conservatives have been fighting for a long time against the teaching of evolution. Is that the definiton of conservative we want to use? Is a biologist that believes in evolution a 'liberal'?
Posted by: GT on March 9, 2004 09:29 PMGT,
David Horowitz organized students who checked the party registrations of professors at a number of Ivy schools. A number of departments at a number of schools had results like 22 dems and 0 GOP. The numbers were ridiculous.
We have the statements of a number of professors such as Glenn Reynolds that he has seen systematic discrimination against conservatives.
The responses of the various Duke faculty members to the Duke situation are wonderful examples of exactly what she writes about her.
Posted by: stan on March 9, 2004 10:04 PMGood Post. Read the whole thing. Glad you're back.
"Of the nearly 100 interns working in the White House this semester, 7 are from the roughly 240 students enrolled in the four-year-old Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville. An eighth intern works for the president's re-election campaign. A former Patrick Henry intern now works on the paid staff of the president's top political adviser, Karl Rove."
As a Texan who went to a state college, I can't deny I often wonder how important the "elite" schools are, and whether the arguments about them really matter except to their alumni, and people who get snubbed by alumni.
Posted by: bob mcmanus on March 9, 2004 10:27 PMGT, it would indeed help if we could clarify our terms.
Suppose two people, A and B. A is a socially-conservative Christian; protectionist and populist and anti-internationalist, in the Buchanan mold. B is a libertarian; socially liberal; an enthusiast for free trade and for scientific research of all kinds; an atheist; and a supporter of the war on Iraq. Now try to think of one single issue on which A and B agree. Wherever you look they're at daggers drawn, be it over the war or trade or taxes or abortion or stem cell research or gay marriage or school prayer or whatever. A and B (who both exist, and anyone reading this will be able to furnish examples of both) each share many more views with Ralph Nader than they do with each other. They have no beliefs in common whatsoever. But they are both called "conservatives."
The reason, as far as I can see, is that "conservative" is tacitly defined as "not-liberal," and if you hold any "not-liberal" position you are therefore a "conservative." Anyone who wants lower taxes or opposes abortion or whatever goes into the same bin, even if half of them could spend hours trying to find a subject on which they agreed with the other half.
A very intersting topic. I wrote up a piece a few weeks ago along these lines, although not so long and no so eloquent: http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2004_02_15_tigerhawk_archive.html#107707532380950557
My own view is that a predominently liberal or left-wing faculty benefits conservative students and deprives liberal students. Why? Because one of the university's most important functions is to challenge the assumptions of those in its community. To the extent that a faculty is overwhelmingly left, it does a disservice to those students who arrive with leftist assumptions that will then go unchallenged. Conservative students may have a tough time in their classes, but they will learn more as a result of having to think through their positions more carefully.
Of course, this is little solace to conservative professors, who are isolated and discriminated against.
Posted by: Jack on March 9, 2004 10:32 PMA very intersting topic. I wrote up a piece a few weeks ago along these lines, although not so long and no so eloquent: http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2004_02_15_tigerhawk_archive.html#107707532380950557
My own view is that a predominently liberal or left-wing faculty benefits conservative students and deprives liberal students. Why? Because one of the university's most important functions is to challenge the assumptions of those in its community. To the extent that a faculty is overwhelmingly left, it does a disservice to those students who arrive with leftist assumptions that will then go unchallenged. Conservative students may have a tough time in their classes, but they will learn more as a result of having to think through their positions more carefully.
Of course, this is little solace to conservative professors, who are isolated and discriminated against.
Posted by: Jack on March 9, 2004 10:32 PMFrom the post:
But this begs the question: are liberal academics defining their values so as to exclude conservatives? In some cases this is valid; much as I value the free exchange of ideas, I don't really think it would be appropriate to offer tenure to a biology professor who doesn't believe in evolution.
Bit of cognitive dissonance right there, I shouldn't wonder. Large portions of your (very well-stated) post effectively restate large portions of Kuhn, but you didn't see the irony of using such an example? I thought the point was to test people and ideas on the basis of their earned qualifications and reasoned evidence, not toss them in some in the discard bin because their position doesn't correlate with our preconceptions of what is "known" and "correct."
You want to find an intellectual monoculture in the sciences, try reading what contemporary evolutionists are actually writing, and then see what counterpoints the modern creationists have to make. (The Henry Morris rants of the early/mid-1980s are still out there of course, but they are not the most dominant -- or best -- voices to consult.) No doubt those scentists see a hotbed of ideological diversity in their fields of study just as you once did in yours, but for those of us who want to examine the empirical base for the underlying assumptions, there's a boatload of philosophy posing as unquestionable fact. A few biology professors who don't tow the party line would actually be a welcome change (assuming their credentials and willingness to debate were up to par), because if nothing else, it would force the evolutionists to reconstruct their defense from empirics and treat the speculation more cautiously.
Essentially, the same thing you're arguing for here, except yours of course is angling on the politics side. A bit off-topic admittedly but I'm getting tired of seeing intelligent, well-meaning people speak out both sides of their mouths on this issue without even realizing it.
Posted by: anony-mouse on March 9, 2004 10:53 PMNice post. It's the longest blog post this long time blog-reader has ever read.
Here come the crooked timberites' responses.
Posted by: Mike on March 9, 2004 11:12 PMMichelle says: "They have no beliefs in common whatsoever. But they are both called "conservatives."
They're both probably voting for Bush.
Anyway, I had the chance to take classes with Harvey Mansfield, who says that grades were inflated to keep black students from flunking out, and Ruth Wisse, who--well, actually, she was pretty cool.
On the other side, there's Brian Palmer.
I don't remember much bias in physics or computer science courses, except for some Lisp symbols called 'DUBYA and 'BUBBA. I don't really know what the professor was saying with that.
Posted by: Jesse Tov on March 9, 2004 11:44 PMJesse,
They're both probably voting for Bush.
You're probably right there. But they'll be doing it for totally different reasons. A will vote for Bush because the social issues matter to him most. B will vote for Bush because Iraq matters to her most. Both will hold their noses while doing so.
OT: Re Mansfield, I think he's probably right that grade inflation and affirmative action have some causal connection. But let's not go there; the existing topic is quite big enough.
Posted by: Michelle Dulak on March 9, 2004 11:57 PMMichelle: Both will hold their noses while doing so.
So who is the C not holding her nose?
I mean, I'll cover one nostril for Kerry, but I can't imagine anyone running for president who wouldn't stink some.
OT: Re Mansfield, I think he's probably right that grade inflation and affirmative action have some causal connection. But let's not go there; the existing topic is quite big enough.
My claim is merely that there is a range of views represented, even at the Kremlin on the Charles. The conservative monthly puts the liberal monthly to shame, and I doubt that's because liberals can't write. The right-to-life group posts 11x17" glossy, color posters, and students argue about them on mailing lists. So regardless of skew in the faculty (which is surely there and I suspect less than conservatives claim), it's not like conservative ideas are invisible or taboo on campus.
Posted by: Jesse Tov on March 10, 2004 12:12 AMJesse,
The last Presidential candidate I remember being actually enthusiastic about was John Anderson, and as I was twelve at the time I wouldn't necessarily stand by that assessment.
I think there are quite a lot of people who broadly agree with Kerry on most things. My A and B agree strongly with Bush on some things, and disagree violently with Bush on other things. (I'm in that position too, though I'm not A or B.)
But to get back to the ostensible topic: The reason everyone has heard of Mansfield is that there are very few of him — I mean, obviously, of prominent, outspoken "conservatives" (of whatever variety) on elite college faculties. There are obviously scads of "conservatives" on these faculties, but I doubt most of them bring up their views on stem cell research or the estate tax or whatever at post-colloquium receptions; whereas I am quite sure that their liberal colleagues would.
Posted by: Michelle Dulak on March 10, 2004 12:46 AMMichelle,
Of course you're right that people have heard of Mansfield because he's in the minority.
but I doubt most of them bring up their views on stem cell research or the estate tax or whatever at post-colloquium receptions; whereas I am quite sure that their liberal colleagues would.
I don't know if I buy this, but I don't have anything to refute it. Do you think that faculty conservatives are cowed by the leftist majority? I think tenure, when they get it, would have the opposite effect. This would be much harder to measure than just self-reported political views.
OT: I'm tired of refreshing multiple pages to watch blog comment threads. RSS is great, but when is someone going to write an MT-NNTP gateway already? Maybe I will.
Posted by: Jesse Tov on March 10, 2004 12:59 AMJane, I think you can boil much of this down to the following:
The left tends to gravitate toward non-corporate or state run entities...like colleges.
The right tends to gravitate toward corporate or private entities...like industry.
Colleges are therefore liberal-heavy. Industry is conservative-heavy.
Given that the current government is conservative heavy, controlling two branches and well-represented at the least in the third, trying to push colleges/universities towards conservatism is unlikely to produce much empathy in most people. It is an understandable goal of conservatives to attempt to water down the only real bastion of liberalism (alas Virginia, the press truly is conservative: unless Phil Donahue and Bill Moyers dominate the world; 95+% of America doesn't read the NY Times).
I don't notice a great deal of hand-wringing as to why more liberals don't sit on the boards of industrial corporations. And indeed it probably isn't worth the time lamenting the loss of "intellectual diversity." The reasons are fairly obvious.
Posted by: Don on March 10, 2004 02:21 AMBut Don, you're resting your conclusion on the erroneous assumption that industry displays a similar skew. It doesn't. There are plenty of liberals on corporate boards--such as university professors. And as I pointed out, MBA's, which ought to be a fairly representative sample of management, are split about fifty-fifty. The only group I can think of that would display a similar skew in the opposite direction is Southern Baptist ministers.
Posted by: Jane Galt on March 10, 2004 08:01 AMI still haven't seen any evidence, other than some anecdotes, as to how skewed the faculties are.
Is Jane, or anyone else, saying that Econ Depts are skewed?
History Depts? English Lit?
Which ones?
Don,
The press isn't liberal?!!!
Over 90% of journalists vote Democratic. The average mid-sized city paper publishes the same slanted AP reports and writes the same slanted editorials that you get from WaPo, the NYTimes, and the LATimes.
If you think that the NYTimes is the only liberal news organization -- What planet do you live on?
Posted by: stan on March 10, 2004 10:03 AMIn addition to Jane's point, let's keep in mind the different purposes of academia and industry. The basis for both tenure and government support of academia is that debate and controversial ideas create an environment where policy makers can review all available options before reaching a decision. Even though I'm moderately libertarian I think this policy could be generally good.
But if academia can no longer serve this purpose, and now defends itself by explicitly disavowing it, why should the state subsidize it? They've negated the entire reason for their existence. If they can't honor their responsibilities, we should remove government funding and let them be replaced by institutions with a focus on educating students rather than influencing public policy.
Posted by: mj on March 10, 2004 10:05 AMOMG: You started the post with my mother's favorite saying/quote!
Hmmm... maybe there is something to the idea that higher education - especially (if not specifically) liberal ed. (arts, lit., philos. etc) attracts liberal minded people and enforces liberal thinking.
A more interesting set of stats would be the ideological make up of the population by educational achievement - not by party affiliation, but rather on social and economic preferences that we have determined to be either "conservative" or "liberal". There are plenty of "conservative" Democrats (e.g. the anti-free traders) and plenty of liberal (meaning libertarian) Republicans.
Posted by: Garth on March 10, 2004 10:16 AMSorry, I should have clarified. When I was thinking "industry," my mind was thinking oil, gas, textiles, automobiles, chemicals, health equipment, and so forth (producers). I was excluding things like insurance, finance, health providers, and so forth (services). Agriculture is a wildcard because they are heavily attached to subsidies, but don't like to be regulated.
I don't think Dow, Monsanto, Chevron/Texaco, and other "producer" corporations have many liberals on their boards. They represent a large chunk of power in this country.
I am, of course, generalizing. However, I am comfortable with the knowledge that both left and right have found their niches and that they try to retain power in their niches while trying to reduce power in the opposing areas. "Intellectual diversity" is an attempt to make inroads that fits this mold.
Posted by: Don on March 10, 2004 10:20 AMA well-written and reasoned post. I think Nozick's treatment of a related issue is the best I've read:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html
stan,
You don't understand. Most Democratic office-holders are corporate sell-outs. John Kerry is center-right. Ralph Nader is center-left. It folows as the night the day that the press is therefore conservative.
(If I can define the terms, I can control the answers.)
Posted by: Roger Sweeny on March 10, 2004 10:30 AMTo describe the news media in this country as "conservative" (I really think this word and it's counterpart have become devoid of descriptive value), while ignoring that the broadcasts of NBC, CBS, and ABC dwarf all other sources, in terms of mass consumption, and that at least two of the three broadcasts have managing editors and anchors that would likely vote for Dennis Kucinich for President, before they would consider casting a ballot for a Republican, is a little silly.
Posted by: Will Allen on March 10, 2004 10:53 AMGarth: There are plenty of "conservative" Democrats (e.g. the anti-free traders) and plenty of liberal (meaning libertarian) Republicans.
Ron Paul. There's one. Please name another libertarian Republican.
Posted by: Bob Dobalina on March 10, 2004 10:54 AMRoger, that was the best troll I've seen in a while. Defining John Kerry as center-right (the man with the highest ADA rating in the Senate) means that you are so far to the left of the Communists, Trotskyists, and RCYB types that there is no political description for you. From that unutterably distant viewpoint, hell yes, everything looks like right wing stuff.
But the point with these labels is to orient oneself with regard to the general population of the US: at which point your definitions are garbage, and immediately recognizable as such, by most readers
Posted by: Arnold Williams on March 10, 2004 10:56 AMDon,
Not only do I not know what world you live in, I don't even want to visit.
Perhaps Kenneth knows the frequency.
Posted by: stan on March 10, 2004 10:56 AMIt seems that I have to rehash this discussion every week or so. The reason that liberals tend to gravitate towards academia is the same reason that they tend to gravitate towards acting and music.
There is a fundamental divide between the mentality of a liberal and the mentality of a conservative as far as sucess is concerned. The liberal mindset is that economic sucess is more or less random (just look at their economic talking points), whereas the conservative mindset is that suceess is an earned reward for hard work. These mindsets are prerequisites for the two groups econonomic policies - You have to believe that sucess is more or less random to believe that socialist public policy is justified, and you have to believe that sucess is a reward for hard work to believe in a pure capitalist system.
Academia is based on an economically sick model, a model which is usually revolting to conservatives. The chance of becoming a tenured professor at a research one university is extremely small. It doesn't really matter how hard you work.
The same holds for a career in music, acting or art. Suceess is a lottery.
People who are talented artistically and conservative usually find themselves persuing careers as architects or graphic designers (or whatever). They do not produce pure art and try to make a living off of it.
Academia is the same way. It is a combination of a cartel and a multi-level marketing scheme (the primary product of academia is MORE academics).
It really is this simple.
Posted by: CJG on March 10, 2004 12:12 PM"So Pope was sexist. So what? No matter how many classes you teach on his hopeless misogyny, he's not going to come back to catch a sensitivity seminar at the Wymyn's Studies Centre."
Well, no, Pope wasn't sexist.
Unless it's sexist to tell the truth about one's individual experience with women. And, as an artist, I can vouch for the fact that telling the truth of individual experience is the job of an artist. The job an an artist is not to dispense political cant.
The tactic of demoninating writers as sexist offendors is designed to shut down inquiry and to prevent art from being viewed as art.
It's nonsense. The very notion of sexism is pretty silly stuff, in my opinion. A student in a liberal arts class should feel comfortable about saying that the concept of sexism is foolish, facile and downright stupid. It is. The notion of sorting out human life according to the sexism, racism, homophobia nonsense is, in my opinion, the turf of idiots.
And it's time for this view to be presented completely and fully in academia and in the public arena. The reason it is not is not because faculty are liberal. The reason is that the faculty is trying to maintain a quota system that puts women, blacks and gays at the top. It is no different than the old union factory setup, in which jobs were divied up among Poles, Jews, Germans, Irish, etc. We learned over time that this setup is not tolerable in a lawful society.
Posted by: Stephen on March 10, 2004 12:29 PM"The liberal mindset is that economic sucess is more or less random (just look at their economic talking points), whereas the conservative mindset is that suceess is an earned reward for hard work."
This is made explicit in Brad DeLong's admiration for a parable by Krugman, regarding fishermen versus gold-prospectors. ( http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Economists/favorite_krugman.html )
I hate it when I miss a good trashing of Duke University. I'd have to say the bias is certainly plausible. One of my favorite talk radio hosts (Dennis Prager) goes postal on this subject whenever he gets a chance.
Come to think of it, UVA had its share of liberal wonks in the early 70's. Nonetheless, the emphasis in the economics department was on the last stand of Keynesian theory and the tenured guys were getting pretty feisty about the non-tenured Monetarists challenging the status quo.
For the record, Jane, this invasion (according to the graduate assistants) was the result of hiring short timers from the University of Chicago. The GA's were the grunts in the system and loved watching the old guys stew in their Keynesian bile.
Imagine my surprise when I heard Walter Williams say during Rush Limbaugh's rehab vacation that UVA was the East Coast bastion of Monetarism in the 70's. You couldn't prove it by me.
Regarding the liberal bias issue, my position is that this is what college is all about. It's practice for the day when you're 90% of the way up the corporate ladder and you realize that the guy in charge is wrong and you can't do anything about it. After all, it's his football.
Posted by: garyowen on March 10, 2004 12:49 PMBob Dobalina:
Libertarian republicans would include all those who still believe in limited government - and I would include all those "Libertarians" who vote Republican rather than their conscience just to vote against the Democrats in a useful manner (as opposed to voting Libertarian). There remains a goodly number of non-religious fundamentalist, small-state, conservatives in the Republican party who do not like amendments to ban gay marriage nor the Patriot Act.
Posted by: Garth on March 10, 2004 01:08 PMCJG,
The reason that liberals tend to gravitate towards academia is the same reason that they tend to gravitate towards acting and music.
And then "It doesn't really matter how hard you work"; "Success is a lottery"; &c.
Speaking as a professional musician, I say the above is nuts. It matters immensely "how hard you work." Do a round of symphony auditions and then report back. Sheesh.
Posted by: Michelle Dulak on March 10, 2004 01:29 PMI can't speak to the situation in the humanities, as I have no experience to go on, but I can suggest one partial explanation for the relative absence of conservatives in the social sciences.
In my field, economics, there are a lot of what you might call "popular" sources who promote conservative/free-market ideas--authors like Sowell, Gilder or Postrel, publications like Reason or the WSJ op-ed page, as well as the pro-free-market think tanks like Cato or Heritage. I would venture to say that the majority of conservatives get their economic ideas and beliefs from these sources, rather than from the academic writings of the Chicago School or the like.
The point is that many of the "popular" notions simply don't stand up under critical, empirical scrutiny. A case in point: supply-side economics. I went to grad school in economics starting in the mid-80's, in one of the most pro-free-market departments in the country at the time, UCLA (the department was often referred to in those days as the "University of Chicago at Los Angeles). What I found when I got there was that the supply-side notions that I had absorbed from the likes of Gilder and Bartley simply didn't withstand critical scrutiny--the evidence was overwhelming, for example, that changes in taxes have nowhere near the macroeconomic impact ascribed to them by supply-siders. I would suggest that the same is true for many other "popular" conservative beliefs, both in economics and in other fields.
In short, a young conservative who heads off to grad school in the social sciences, all full of the latest Cato studies, stuffed with WSJ editorials, and having committed Tom Sowell's latest book to memory, is going to find on arrival that many of their cherished beliefs are simply wrong. And intellectually honest people change their minds when they are wrong. I know, it happened to me.
Posted by: Mark on March 10, 2004 01:33 PMMichele:
Speaking as a professional musician, I say the above is nuts. It matters immensely "how hard you work." Do a round of symphony auditions and then report back. Sheesh.
Are you saying that you had to work harder than I did to get my PhD in theoretical particle physics? I doubt that. We have probably both worked very hard, in our respective careers. My point is not that people in the arts/academia/journalism are lazy, but that the hard work is not proportionally rewarded (you need MORE than just hard work to suceed - you need luck/fortune/some abstraction beyond your control to intervene on your behalf).
Also, I would submit that the academic interview process is just as grueling as the audition process that you speak of.
Posted by: CJG on March 10, 2004 01:53 PMAbsent evidence, Mark, that's a mere assertion. What can you share?
Posted by: Ken Hall on March 10, 2004 02:09 PMMark, c'mon. The average conservative who heads off to grad school in economics will have spent four years studying economics at the undergraduate level, just like the average liberal who heads off to graduate school in economics. And while I'm second to none in my scorn for the strong version of supply -side economics, it's hardly the only example of economically popular notions that just ain't so -- perhaps you've been following the Democratic Party's quick march back to protectionism? Thomas Sowell is, in fact, a professional economist, and there are plenty of economic popularizers on the left as well as the right who aren't -- Robert Reich, for example. The liberals in my class were confronted with cherished notions that they had to change just as often as were the conservatives -- the corporate income tax, for example, or rent control.
We'd all love to believe that our beliefs about things like taxation, income distribution, and so on are somehow scientifically provable, but it just ain't so. Economics can declare things empirically bad or good only when they're extreme: rent control, for example, or highly confiscatory taxation, or high levels of corruption. In the vast middle, economics only tells us how to get what we want, not what to want: there is no model that tells us how high taxes should be, or how progressive, or how big welfare payments should be, or any other major issue, unless we've already made some pretty big decisions about how important property rights are to us, what sorts of tax levels are just and what sorts are confiscatory, whether we are more willing to tolerate some people living off the efforts of others or some people falling through the cracks, and so on. One doesn't go to graduate school and become liberal because the scales have been taken from one's eyes; perhaps your understanding of the facts has changed, but not the underlying values that informed your ultimate decision (not by economics anyway). I could cite just as many "road to damascus" experiences going the other way; I had one, when I took my first class in international economics.
And empirically, the evidence is decidedly weak: the economics department is the least skewed of any in the arts & sciences. It might seem that economics operates to turn liberal-trending graduate students into conservatives, than the other way around.
Outside of economics, this is just silly. There is nothing about eighteenth century military history, or saxon poets, or Roman tomb inscriptions, to rationally inform one's economic opinions. If people are having their opinions about economics changed by these things, they shouldn't -- and we should take them no more seriously than an MBA who claims that her investments class qualifies her to comment on Baudelaire.
Posted by: Jane Galt on March 10, 2004 02:18 PMCJG: I am confident that you had to work your butt off in getting your PhD. I only had one course in particle physics myself (I didn't mention that my undergrad degree was in Mech. E. at UC/Berkeley, because that just isn't what I do for a living now), but it was equal parts "fascinating" and "damned difficult."
As for the interview process vs. auditions, I'd say you're quite right, and it's because the interview process is much more arbitrary and capricious. In a symphony audition you are behind a screen, so that no one knows who you are, and you're evaluated on the sounds you produce — the "product," if you will. In an academic job interview, the interviewer might be put off by anything from your appearance to your casual conversation to your actual work, and you'll never know which of the three it was if you don't get hired. If anything's a lottery, that is; and by comparison an audition's pure meritocracy.
Posted by: Michelle Dulak on March 10, 2004 02:22 PMI am willing to grant that orchestral music is more of a meritocracy, yet there is certainly a random element to the selection process. Here's an example: perhaps they like the particular tonal qualities that you bring to the audition piece. I would submit that this is entirely subjective. It is based on the personal perspective of the interviewer (their artistic vision). You have absolutely no control over this filter.
This is even more transparent in popular music, where garage bands and pop singers are a dime-a-dozen. This is clearly a lottery. There is simply no way to sift through the 1000's of possible artists using a purely metocratic system (this would a. be enormously expensive, and b. would fail to select out the "one candidate"). Producers and agents thereby go by "hunches" or "instinct."
Posted by: CJG on March 10, 2004 02:57 PMCan someone refer me to some reliable numbers? Also, it's been a long time since I was an academic, but in the good old days there was a noticeably different left/right skew among departments: humanities departments (with the exception of classics) tended to be hyper-liberal, social sciences merely liberal (with economics tending conservative), hard sciences could be almost anything, and engineering conservative. Is this still true? And if so, what would explain it?
Posted by: Howard D on March 10, 2004 03:18 PMGosh, I must have missed it when Marx's labor theory of value was proven correct. The failure of the economic miracle that was the Soviet Union established what again?
As the petrified welfare states of of Europe sink farther and farther into the economic basement, what "facts" should conservatives learn to teach us the superiority of socialist policies?
Mark, I also missed it when the minimum wage, rent control, trade protectionism, the luxury tax, and higher capital gains taxes were factually proven to be great policies. Next you'll be telling us that increased regulation and higher taxes boost economic growth.
Posted by: stan on March 10, 2004 03:51 PMOne interesting thing about my experiences in academia as a socuiology/astonomy undergrad (70s) and an engineering grad student (80s): The fewer equations in a discipline, the fewer conservatives. The sociology department at my alma mater ranged from raving Marxist to mainstream liberal Democrat. The astronomy department ranged from mild conservative to mild liberal. The EE department was about the same. In one of my sociology classes (on computer modeling of social systems - based on "Limits to Growth") one of the profs told me I should go to grad school in sociology - math skills would be able to BS the sociologists and soc. jargon could BS the mathematicians. Best of all worlds. Heck, in English who can dispute your "interpretation" of gender role filtered via queer theory in "Twelfth Night"?
Posted by: ech on March 10, 2004 04:02 PMCJG,
"Liking the particular tonal qualities you bring to a piece" is (a) not how it works; and (b) not entirely subjective. There are accepted standards of "good sound" that are minimum requirements. There are also, in orchestral hiring, questions of fit with the existing ensemble, which might involve subtler questions of "tonal qualities." But that doesn't make the decision "subjective," any more than judging whether someone is a good fit for any corporate department or research team is "subjective."
To take a plain example: Until quite recently it was common for Eastern European horn players to use vibrato. American horn sections don't. A horn player who auditioned for an American orchestra and used vibrato would probably not get the job, not because the conductor has a particular prejudice against vibrato in horn-playing but because there are already other horns in the orchestra and whoever is hired is going to have to blend with them. You can call that unfair (though I wouldn't), but I don't see anything "subjective" about it.
Posted by: Michelle Dulak on March 10, 2004 04:08 PMDoes anyone dispute that supply-side economics would work/hold true if tax rates were sufficiently high?
Posted by: Bob Dobalina on March 10, 2004 04:41 PMStan, have you actually been to the European hellholes you describe so eloquently? If they are on the verge of economic ruin they are sure doing a great job of covering it up.
Posted by: Orbitron on March 10, 2004 04:50 PMNo, Bob, they don't -- the argument is over the level of taxation that causes the Laffer effect. IMHO, that level of taxation is pretty high -- and empirically, it's certainly higher than the levels we've recently enjoyed. But there are supply-siders who will, against all evidence, insist that the Reagan tax cuts in fact raised money for the treasury, which is not true. There are more moderate supply siders like Martin Feldstein, whom I trust even Mr Wylie will concede are extremely well respected, who argue that even at current levels, income shifting in the top brackets robs much of the incremental revenue from tax increases, and may possibly operate to the overall detriment of society by introducing economic distortion.
Posted by: Jane Galt on March 10, 2004 04:55 PMStan: As the petrified welfare states of of Europe sink farther and farther into the economic basement, what "facts" should conservatives learn to teach us the superiority of socialist policies?
Orbitron: Stan, have you actually been to the European hellholes you describe so eloquently?
I must have missed the part where Stan referred to them as "hellholes." Looks to me like he said their economies are in the basement. Surely you aren't arguing that Europe's economy is healthier than America's? They'd give their eyeteeth for unemployment under 6%.
And Orbitron, have you visited the banlieue of Paris recently? Not that every country doesn't have some bad urban areas, but you'd be hard pressed to find worse than the outskirts of Paris. "Hellhole" isn't far from the truth.
Posted by: Katherine on March 10, 2004 05:14 PMWhile we are rejecting the leftist solution of quotas I think we should also be rejecting the leftist assumption that statistical disparities imply discrimination. Consider the over representation of blacks and under representation of whites in pro basketball. A hypothesis that a career in pro basketball is particularly attractive to blacks seems at least as attractive an explanation as the hypothesis that whites are being discriminated against. So we should also be considering the possibility that academic careers are especiallly attractive to leftists. This seems plausible, for example a belief that capitalism is immoral will make many alternative career paths unattractive to leftists.
Regarding discrimination, one would expect it to be more apparent in fields where it is harder to objectively determine merit. For example one would expect more discrimination in the english department than in the mathematics department. However it is my understanding that science departments in general and mathematics departments in particular are still noticeably leftist compared to society at large suggesting other factors than discrimination are at work.
Posted by: James B. Shearer on March 10, 2004 05:23 PMThomas Sowell is, in fact, a professional economist, and there are plenty of economic popularizers on the left as well as the right who aren't -- Robert Reich, for example. The liberals in my class were confronted with cherished notions that they had to change just as often as were the conservatives -- the corporate income tax, for example, or rent control.
Just a quick response on this point as my time is short today.
It is true that many popularizers have academic credentials; however, there is often a clear distinction to be found between their professional and their popular publications. One prominent example would be Milton Friedman--any comparison of his professional research with books like Free to Choose will show that he is far more restrained in his conclusions in the former than the latter. Even Bob Lucas has called the latter book "careless about a lot of points." Feldstein is probably another example.
As for Sowell, he of course abandoned academia for think-tankdom long ago.
And yes, it is true that many left-wing ideas fail to withstand critical scrutiny. This is why, for example, you won't find very many political scientists in international relations who are Chomskyites. However, at least in my field, there aren't very many liberal, as opposed to leftist, propositions that are as clearly at variance with the evidence as supply side economics. The examples you and Stan cite, like minimum wages, rent control, and the corporate income tax, are nowhere near as clear-cut as you seem to think.
Posted by: Mark on March 10, 2004 05:55 PM48 posts and nobody can provide some hard data?
Anything?
Is this simply another war of anecdotes?
Posted by: GT on March 10, 2004 06:23 PMBut that's true of any popularizer. It's hard to believe that Paul Krugman, for example, would adopt the tone he chooses for his columns in his academic work, nor would he be as sweeping in his generalisations, as dismissive of his opponents' arguments, or as certain in his policy demands. The op-ed column is not an adequate format for policy prescriptions no matter what side you are on; I see no evidence that such sins are more to be found on the right.
I am eager to hear about the non-clear-cutness of rent control, which Paul Krugman, for example, has called one of the rare cases of total agreement in academic economics. The corporate income tax is pretty damn clear cut; it's very distortionary, and the same income could be recouped in a more progressive manner by recapturing it in a progressive tax on dividends and capital gains income. (Such a shift might not be politically feasible, but I think that 99 out of a hundred economists, presented with the choice between keeping the current structure, and eliminating the corporate income tax while rolling capital income into the normal income structure, would vote "aye!"). And minimum wages are less clear, even the advocates at the EPI would acknowlege, only at low levels; no one's arguing that, say, a 40% hike in the minimum wage (well within what mainstream leftist groups advocate!) wouldn't cost jobs, only about whether a much, much smaller hike did, or did not, produce a measurable decrease in employment in one case.
If you can't think of examples of blatantly wrong economic thinking on the left, you can't be trying very hard: surely the empirically awful and theoretically nonsensical arguments on trade haven't escaped your notice? I don't deny that the right has their Pat Buchanans, but then the left has their wacko tax theorists too, such as the folks who believe that rich people sock any money they don't pay in taxes under their mattress rather than spend any of it where the poor might get it, bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Why not just note that there is no shortage of bad economic ideas, and that there are values which can neither be economically proven nor disproven, rather than trying to dress up your perfectly valid opinions as scientific fact?
Posted by: Jane Galt on March 10, 2004 06:24 PMI don't think Dow, Monsanto, Chevron/Texaco, and other "producer" corporations have many liberals on their boards. They represent a large chunk of power in this country.
It's not as if we can't look these things up. To choose just one of your examples, let's look at the Monsanto board of directors, then go over to OpenSecrets.org and see who they give money to:
-- Frank Atlee has donated exclusively to Republicans.
--Hugh Grant has given to two Rs and one D.
--Gwendolyn King has donated to GWB.
--Sharon Long, C. Steven McMillan and George Poste appear to have made no political contributions to candidates.
--William Parfet is Republican all the way.
So that's one data point. Now all we have to do is look up all the other companies in America. I'm unfortunately busy, but it's an interesting exercise nonetheless.
Finally, I'd just like to point out that, on Monsanto's website, the word "governance" is misspelled as "governace" in the pages' title tag. Nice to know that being a Fortune 500 company doesn't preclude you from making dumb spelling errors.
Posted by: Phil on March 10, 2004 07:53 PMOrbitron,
Yes, I have lived and worked in Europe for two different stretches. I can tell you from experience that the socialized health care in Italy is a complete disaster by US standards.
We ended up going to some English doctors in Milan who made a good living fixing screwups by the Italian system.
The public sector (which owns half the economy) was incredibly corrupt and ineffective. Customer service was awful. The difference b/w the worthlessness of state-owned businesses and the vitality and productivity of private businesses was startling.
Posted by: stan on March 10, 2004 08:15 PMOrbitron,
Yes, I have lived and worked in Europe for two different stretches. I can tell you from experience that the socialized health care in Italy is a complete disaster by US standards.
We ended up going to some English doctors in Milan who made a good living fixing screwups by the Italian system.
The public sector (which owns half the economy) was incredibly corrupt and ineffective. Customer service was awful. The difference b/w the worthlessness of state-owned businesses and the vitality and productivity of private businesses was startling.
Posted by: stan on March 10, 2004 08:23 PMI challenge the assertion that artistic ability somehow inclines someone to lean politically leftwards. This is a popular trope that gets by without any scrutiny whatsoever. I suspect, historically, this is not the case (that most artists have been 'conservative' , though not necessarily our 2k4 conservative), and that it is only a result of the establishment in recent generations of a very narrow-minded clique that acknowledges, tolerates, supports, and produces only a limited spectrum of ideas.
I can scratch my name into an upside down urinal too, but if the message I'm trying to convey by that isn't supported by the elite critical/producer class, it'll just be an upside down urinal with a name scratched into it.
Tangential: It certainly seems like the transition from traditional art forms to "idea"-art / art that requires little or no technical mastery to produce and relies solely upon its intended message is a shift from a moderately meritocratic system to an exercise in communal intellectual masturbation. I wonder if it is connected to the increasingly out-of-touch political views of the art world?
Posted by: . on March 10, 2004 08:57 PMWhile this current discussion is undoubtedly interesting, I'd be interested in hearing about something which Jane touched upon in her post, but only briefly: what led her to abandon the left? Why did she come to embrace her current pro free-market quasi-libertarian worldview?
Not to be nosy or anything, but I'm curious about the process by which people's views change over time.
Posted by: Pete on March 11, 2004 09:52 AM"48 posts and nobody can provide some hard data?
Anything?
Is this simply another war of anecdotes"
GT, the post mentions one of Horowitz' surveys--google that as a start. Or you can try the recent survey done at Duke--the one that has brought this issue to the fore again due the idiotic comments from some of Duke's administration and faculty.
But please, before you start disparaging an issue, make sure that you're not making an ass of yourself first.
War of anecdotes, indeed.
For those seeking numbers:
At Duke -- In 8 liberal arts departments, dems outnumber GOP by 142-8.
Story out of Univ. of New Mexico today --
Dems 83%, GOP 11%, other 6%
A study of some schools from 2001 --
Brown-- parties of left 54, right 3 (2 from Engineering)
Cornell-- 166 to 6 (w/3 in Econ)
Williams has 4 repubs out of over 200 profs
Frank Lutz did a poll of Ivy profs -- 57% dems and only 3% repubs
Harvard (econ, pol sci, and soc) 50-2
UCLA -- 141-9
Ivy profs voting in 2000 -- 84% Gore, 6% Nader, 9% Bush
Posted by: stan on March 11, 2004 01:48 PMFor those seeking numbers:
At Duke -- In 8 liberal arts departments, dems outnumber GOP by 142-8.
Story out of Univ. of New Mexico today --
Dems 83%, GOP 11%, other 6%
A study of some schools from 2001 --
Brown-- parties of left 54, right 3 (2 from Engineering)
Cornell-- 166 to 6 (w/3 in Econ)
Williams has 4 repubs out of over 200 profs
Frank Lutz did a poll of Ivy profs -- 57% dems and only 3% repubs
Harvard (econ, pol sci, and soc) 50-2
UCLA -- 141-9
Ivy profs voting in 2000 -- 84% Gore, 6% Nader, 9% Bush
Posted by: stan on March 11, 2004 01:51 PMOne interesting note: While I have heard volumes about the liberal bias at Duke, the Chairman of the Economics Dept there is one of the most right-wing guys I've ever known. I don't know if he still is conservative (but I imagine he is), and if so, I hope I am not "outing him" to the Duke faculty.
Posted by: CW on March 11, 2004 04:02 PMCW-
I'm a sophomore econ major at Duke, and I know about the chair's political leanings, so we aren't talking about a big secret here. As it turns out, the econ department has one more Republican than Democrat (IIRC), making it the most balanced of the departments the Duke Conservative Union studied (I wasn't directly involved, but I know the people who conducted it).
Posted by: Steve on March 11, 2004 08:29 PMThe terms "Conservative" and "Liberal" are not helpful in this debate because they distort a lot of what is going one.
First, the Left on college campuses, faculty and students, is remarkably diverse. Not all of it is Liberal. However, I think that a lot of different viewpoints are represented there, and I think there is probably little practical selection within this group, EXCEPT that more idealists and non-pragmatists end up being university professors than, say, politicians.
Now, for the purpose of debate, I would argue that we should separate Conservative into: Libertarians and Conservatives. Now, I have seen very little evidence that Libertarians are absent among faculty or the student body. Libertarians are probably overrepresented in academic relative to their actual share of the population. I think that's worth pointing out, because so many of the conservatives who talk about these things are Libertarians.
Now, Conservatives. hmmm, I want to bring my experience to the table. I was a science major in undergrad, I worked every summer with reseach faculty. The vast majority of the scientists I met with Liberal. A fair share were Libertarian. Very few were conservative, even if they were devoutly and traditionally religious. Quite simply, the nature of conservative thought - traditionalist, authoritarian, etc does not lend itself to scientific research. What does Conservative mean, after all? ". Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change. 2. Traditional or restrained in style: a conservative dark suit. 3. Moderate; cautious: a conservative estimate. 4a. Of or relating to the political philosophy of conservatism. b. Belonging to a conservative party, group, or movement.
A long time ago I remember reading a portion of a book by Krugman on the economics of geography. Citing the work of another economist (whose name I forgotten again!), he used a simple checker board model with squares occupied by white and black chips. If the chips had a slight preference for being with their own kind, the result of many moves was that a integrated board became a ghettoized one with most of the chips together with their own color.
We try to come up with reasons for the dominance of one demographic in certain areas (blacks in pro-basketball, Democrats in academia, we might as well toss in Right Wingers in the southern Baptists).
Perhaps network effects have more to do with this than any of our off the cuff explanations (such as science and art is better suited for a left winger mentality, lack of space in urban areas makes basketball an easier sport to take up, etc.). If a group with characteristic X happens to get a slight lead in a field, it will be easier for that field to be dominated by those with trait X.
This works even better X is not essential to the field. Since your political beliefs are not that relevant to your artwork, its quite easy to make leftism the fashion of the art world. Ditto for English professors. Notice that economics is a field that often calls for decisions on public policy. That is one field that is not clearly dominated, IMO, by one ideology.
Posted by: Boonton on March 12, 2004 12:21 PMBoonton,
That other economist is Thomas Schelling, and you can find a descrition of his checkerboard experiments in "Micromotives and Macrobehavior," a very good book.
Schelling is a fabulous, wide-ranging economist, who reminds me of Ronald Coase. His earlier "The Strategy of Conflict" is a classic. Much of it has just passed into everyday understanding. Alas, unlike Coase, he hasn't gotten his richly deserved Nobel, and probably never will.
Posted by: Roger Sweeny on March 12, 2004 03:28 PMThank you Roger, alas I think you corrected me earlier when I indirectly cited Thomas Schelling's work. I hope that the people who vote on the Nobel aren't as bad with names as I am.
Thinking of his observation I've come to suspect that many of our off the cuff explanations for what we observe may be totally off base no matter how good they sound. Take blacks in the NBA. Among the huge number of theories to explain why blacks are so dominate in the NBA it could be as simple as the checkerboard model. Black players may visit their old schools, thereby inspiring other blacks. Recruiters who profitted by finding a star in black neighborhoods may return there to search for new recruits. The media will make superstars into role models for children etc. All caused by a random initial increase in black players long ago.
So take academia. Imagine a department that was 25% 'liberal' in 1972. The department may be perfectly unbiased in hiring new professors but the 'core' liberal population may serve as a magnate; it would attract other liberals to study under them and possibly hire them as professors. The 'concentration' of liberalness may cause the department to develop a 'school of thought' which will produce influential works (the University of Chicago has a free market oriented 'school of thought' in its economics dept. which has attracted many powerful 'economics superstars' like Milton Friedman). The superstars will attract admirers who will share the ideology of the object of their worship. Next thing you know you have a school dominated by liberals even though no conservative has been discriminated against.
The cause was trivial and random yet we will come up with long winded theories (like Conservatives are dumb, or that right-wingers are more motivated to go into business while left-wingers have fewer options since they 'hate capitalism'). In reality we may find that academia is dominated by right-wingers 25-30 years from now and all our explanations will be turned on their heads.
Posted by: Boonton on March 12, 2004 03:41 PMQuite simply, the nature of conservative thought - traditionalist, authoritarian, etc does not lend itself to scientific research. What does Conservative mean, after all? ". Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change. 2. Traditional or restrained in style: a conservative dark suit. 3. Moderate; cautious: a conservative estimate. 4a. Of or relating to the political philosophy of conservatism. b. Belonging to a conservative party, group, or movement.
I should like to see this argument and comparable strains of thought officially retired under a suitable sunset designator -- I think "definition fallacy" would do the trick.
The definition, as applied here, really only describes the end result; that a "conservative" is someone who supports traditional, moderated, etc. approaches. The fallacy is that it does not automatically tell us how they arrived at those positions. For some people it may be that their entire approach is to automatically support the known against the unknown, but for others, it is quite possible they tested the known against the unknown, and when the unknown was revealed, it did not have a more compelling case.
The corollary to assuming that "conservative" is an overaching descriptor of people who mindlessly stick to the status quo is to assume that a "liberal" is someone who mindlessly plunges forward for the sake of arriving at someplace different. People have run off cliffs that way. I would hope that a true liberal is someone who finds the newly revealed unknown to indeed have a more compelling case, rather than someone who merely promotes change because s/he can.
Questioning the status quo is a good way to achieve new information but the new information does not always tell us to discard the old. I have encountered both liberals and conservatives who further their knowledge through questioning, and I have encountered both liberals and conservatives who are blockheaded pedagogues for a preferred point of view. The sword cuts both ways.
If the modern university is a place that is more attractive to political liberals, it is surely not merely because it promotes questioning. In some capacity the university has always promoted questioning, but the political bias has not always been as we see it now. It may be that the scenario Boonton proposes has merit; or it may be that the academic environment has become actively hostile to conservatives and thus ensured that few of them try for the privilege of being, in their view, an unloved voice in the wilderness. Or it may be something entirely different.
But to suggest that a "conservative" approach does not lend itself to scientific inquiry is an argument born of the same curmodgenry that argues for inherent, delineated intelligence differences between conservative and liberal views.
Posted by: anony-mouse on March 12, 2004 06:57 PMBoonton,
What you're describing is certainly part of the truth. There are going to be people who experience academia as it now is as students, and decide that they'd rather work almost anywhere else. Then there's the fact that students who go to the elite universities are disproportionately likely to have parents who themselves went to elite universities, which have trended liberal for ages, so the children have likely been brought up in an environment in which liberalism is as natural as air. (In fairness, it doesn't always "take"; I offer myself in evidence.)
But so many departments, so many universities, all trending the same way? The explanation works for UChicago's econ dept. precisely because it's an exception. You have a clump of conservatives in one place because they've aggregated around one figure or one theory. Fine. But the liberals in academia aren't "aggregated" at all; they're just everywhere. And conservatives in the humanities tend to be isolated and somewhat ostracized figures in hostile departments, not clumps in majority-conservative departments. If Boonton's theory is correct, we ought to see a whole lot of conservative clusters — whole departments in major universities where the professors and the grad students are disproportionately conservative. I don't think we do see that; and the fact that UChicago is the only example anyone wants to cite (apart from the existence of tiny, avowedly conservative colleges) suggests that no one else sees it either.
Posted by: Michelle Dulak on March 12, 2004 07:02 PMBoonton,
Yeah, I'm a Schelling fan. Actually, so is Krugman, who says nice things about him in "The Self-Organizing Economy" (that may have been the Krugman book you were reading). Part of Schelling's problem is that the things he writes about and the way he writes often make you say, "Well, of course." Except that you hadn't realized the "of course" before you read him.
I don't think the checkerboard model explains the NBA, though. Every high school has a basketball team; every gym has basketball hoops. Just about everybody who has the slightest interest can pursue it.
Professional basketball players are rich and famous. Everybody knows that. And everybody with possible skills is inspired by that. College players are big men on campus, and frequently get free ride scholarships. Recruiters go to both black and white high schools.
I think you have to look at cultural differences (which historically may be related to checkerboard processes). No doubt there is a certain amount of, "Because I'm black, I won't get a fair shot in the business world but I will in the NBA." And there are any number of black school kids who will say that doing well academically is a waste of time or acting white (so you're being truer to yourself if you work on your dunk).
But the difference in the NBA is so great, and the incentive to obliterate that difference is so great (e.g., salaires that top off at $14 mil/year and are guaranteed whether you play or not) that I think some sort of physical difference is the major explanation. What gets summed up in the expression, "White men can't jump."
Posted by: Roger Sweeny on March 13, 2004 12:26 PMAs for why there are so many blacks in the NBA, start with genetics. How many white guys do you know that are 6'8" or taller?
Posted by: markm on March 13, 2004 01:50 PMComments are Closed.