Every three or four years someone conducts a study aimed at arguing that college students are being indoctrinated by an overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic-leaning professoriate.
Titled “A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California” the California Association of Scholars rolls out evidence that they claim illustrates that faculty in the UC (and by implication all universities) is dominated by political activists who are teaching a politicized curriculum in the interest of promoting social justice.
…a ratio of about 4 Democrats to 1 Republican in departments in the professional schools and about 10 Democrats to 1 Republican in the hard sciences. In the humanities that ratio was 17:1, and in the social sciences it rose to 21:1. Once again, we see confirmation of the two findings seen in national data: left faculty now outnumber right faculty by huge margins in every department, but the margins become virtually exclusionary as politics become more relevant to the work of the department.
Is this evidence of an imbalance? Yes. Am I surprised? No.
Conservatives insist that this imbalance reflects systematic discrimination aimed at conservatives. Conservatives are the victims of a liberal plot.
Wendy Brown, a faculty member at UC Berkeley, disagrees. As Debra Sanders reports in the San Francisco Chronicle
The reason behind the unbalance, she told me, is that conservatives don’t go to grad school to study political science. When conservatives go to graduate school, she added, they tend to study business or law. “If the argument is that what is going on is some kind of systematic exclusion,” then critics have to target “where the discouragement happens.”
Brown’s argument is supported by Ames, Barker, Bonneau, and Carman’s critique of an often-cited study that likewise claims that academia systematically discriminates against conservatives (and women and Christians).
Is this imbalance unique to academia? No. Take, for example, the US military. According to a study by Jason Dempsey, military officers are more likely to identify themselves as Republicans and conservatives: “…the upper echelons of the military tilt right… about two-thirds of majors and higher-ranking officers identify as conservative…”
The reality is that individuals tend to self-select into different professions. Conservatives are drawn toward structure, hierarchy, and well-defined rule systems: the military, business, the law. Liberals are drawn to pursuits that challenge the status quo: academics, entertainment, the arts.
According to Debra Saunders we are wrong to accept this imbalance (in academics anyway).
The old, discredited excuse about why women didn’t work in management that I heard when I was young – because they didn’t want to – now somehow works for the left when it comes to conservatives and academia.
When liberals saw systematic discrimination against women and minorities in the workplace they responded with affirmative action policies that required the recruitment of individuals in protected classes for positions in organizations. Women and minorities benefited from these policies and are now better represented in the workforce than they were 40 years ago.
What is the solution to the lack of conservatives in academia? Simple: Affirmative action for conservatives.
Universities should be required to actively recruit conservatives for faculty positions. When all other factors are equal universities should be encouraged to hire conservatives over liberals. Government needs to enter the the equation to redress this historic pattern of discrimination.
Finally we liberals have found a way to get conservatives on the affirmative action bandwagon! Allow them to turn themselves into victims.
