Casey - Congratulations on engendering an excellent debate! There are many worthwhile opinions expressed here in the "much-ignored comments section", and only one of the many participants is shamelessly evangelizing.
Having read the sixty-five comments preceding this one, may I take the liberty of summarizing what I have read?
Your original point, I believe, was that it is bad that conservatives in government are trying to influence liberals in academia. You began inauspiciously by lowering yourself to David Horowitz's level and calling him a "nut-job". The vivacity of this debate gainsays your attack.
Commenters have addressed:
- The actual conditions in academia.
- The condition of students entering and leaving mainstream institutions.
- The sources of the academic disparity.
- The dominance of conservatives in other fields.
- The importance of this debate (do Ph.D.'s matter? do students' politics matter?).
- The fairness of professors.
- The effect of the echo chamber.
QUESTION: How important is this? To me, this debate needs to start with #5 - is this important? Better, which aspects are important? In some fields, it is clearly important: political science, economics. In some, it is unimportant: nursing, physics. I think it is instructive that in the fields where politics is most important, the greatest political differences emerge. That is, while conservatives are less inclined to enter academia in general, they are especially unrepresented where their presence would be most beneficial.
Why are faculty politics important in social science disciplines? First of all for balance. Students should be taught not only multiple sides to an issue (which many professors strive to do despite their own bias) but also multiple worldviews. Growing up in Massachusetts, I've found that conservatives tend to be more articulate, nuanced, and worldly than liberals - because they have their views constantly questioned. I'm sure the opposite is true in Kansas. Thus, if I were a university president seeking to offer my students - liberal and conservative - the best education in political science, economics, etc, I would hire a balanced faculty. Also, academics play an important role in pushing new ideas into politics, lower education, and other areas of American life.
CONCLUSION: This is important to the quality of education, but not vital to society in general.
QUESTION: Whence arises the disparity?
One of the most important contributions to this debate was Chris (April 9th, 10:40 am) on the barriers to advancement. I think it is safe to say that the disparity, drastic as it is, is not a conspiracy.
Another theory is that this is entirely self-selection: conservatives prefer business, liberals prefer academia. This is true to an extent, but I think (without evidence) that it is insuffient to explain the drastic differences in some disciplines. Also, conservatives may opt for fields that fit their worldview, such as economics. But in econ, the ratio is still 3-to-1, and my department, which is considered quite conservative in the field, may be something like 2-to-1 among American professors (a minority).
Neither of these explanations seem adequate to me. Instead, I think most of the difference comes during the educating process. Very few disciplines see an active role for politics; rather, students pick up the biases and worldviews of their professors. Likewise, young professors will tend to fit into their surroundings, similar to Supreme Court Justices, who often drift to the left because of peer pressure despite their unequaled job security.
But even this, combined with the other two explanations, doesn't give me a sense for how political science could end up with an 81-2 ratio. PoliSci students should be the most confirmed in their views and the least conformable. Their departments should be most attuned to lopsidedness. Their corresponding industry is split almost 50-50; this is not true for anthropology, sociology, etc. So why is PoliSci so ridiculously one-sided?? Theories?
CONCLUSION: The academic environment tends to conform people to its existing liberal angle, but this isn't enough to explain PoliSci departments.
QUESTION: Are academics fair to conservatives in their midst? Somebody above said that if liberals were unfair to conservatives, we would see examples of conservatives being drummed out of departments. But note that the disparity already exists; the remaining conservatives are quiet, tough, or uncontroversial enough to stick around. We should instead look to see when in history the disparity arose, and whether examples existed back then.
There are still instances of faculty being drummed out of positions of influence for supporting conservative politics. Larry Summers is an important example: he was the first moderate conservative in decades to occupy perhaps the most prominent position in academia, and he was brought down by a concerted, organized, liberal faculty movement after suggesting that academics should research a question that is politically incorrect. That's censorship, something no conservative political body has yet imposed.
In the classroom, most professors make a studied effort to be openminded. Former Governor Mike Dukakis was one of my professors; now he's assisting a former student to run for office in Massachusetts as a Republican. Many other profs went out of their way to treat conservatives as intellectually capable people. Marshall will no doubt see this as evidence of an insidious conservative conspiracy, but to me it is eminently equanimious.
CONCLUSION: Academics are generally fair, but sometimes not.
QUESTION: Are there fields in which we see conservatives overwhelmingly overrepresented?
My candidates would be business, religious clergy, government, and the military, two of which have been mentioned above. Business is the best analogue: it is a wide field that requires a good deal of education. I don't have statistics, but my experience is that while conservatives may have an edge here, it is not to the tune of the 70 or 80% that would mark this as a good mirror. Does anyone have data here? In addition, businesspeople are evaluated on their profit-making, not their ideas, and there's competition rather than cooperation between businesses (unlike universities), so each business is much more independent.
Religious clergy in some denominations will show similar numbers to the extreme academic fields; but other denominations will show an equally liberal bias. So if you're wondering whether the Southern Baptist church you go to is preaching the gospel or conservatism, you can always go to the American Baptist church down the street for the liberal take.
In government, all the appointee-level managers are Republicans. But in 1999, they were all Democrats. So this field flip-flops with the president. In addition, a sizable majority of career government workers are Democrats, including managers.
The military is probably the most politically uniform institution in this country. There's self-selection, peer pressure, and echo chamber effects all over the place, and this is probably a more important issue than liberalism in academia, since a single-party military is a dangerous thing.
CONCLUSION: Conservatives have their bastions, but nothing that functions as an equal-and-opposite alternative. The military is a conservative bastion.
QUESTION: What is an appropriate response to the issue?
I think it should be handled by schools. They already go out of their way to diversify undergraduate populations geographically and to diversify the faculty across areas of expertise. Many schools also have preferential hiring for various politically correct minorities. A similar attempt should be made by PoliSci, Econ, Soc, etc, departments to recruit professors who can bring a different political perspective to their work. An unwillingness to do this voluntarily shows them to be truly partisan, but should not (and will not) be addressed by government.
In state schools, there is always a blurry line between politics and school administration (the UMass president had to step down because he wouldn't cooperate with an investigation of his brother, who is Mass's most famous mob boss!). I would say that any effort to diversify political views should be undertaken in the same measure as attempts to diversify the faculty by gender, race, or sexual preference.
CONCLUSION: Universities should take the initiative to better themselves by diversifying as appropriate.
That's all I will say for now. Like a good academic, I have attempted to draw on the previous work in formulating my own contribution. This is an interesting conversation, and I'm interested to see if anyone has answers or data to address my questions.
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