Universities’ Anti-Conservative Bias
Professor Robert Maranto takes a risk and publicizes he’s a Republican. Then he gets into his disappointment with a national university culture that doesn’t accept conservative ideas and thinkers:
Now there is more data backing up experiences like mine. Recently, my Villanova colleague Richard Redding and my longtime collaborator Frederick Hess commissioned a set of studies to ascertain how rare conservative professors really are, and why. We wanted real scholars to use real data to study whether academia really has a PC problem. While our work was funded by the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, we (and our funders) have been very clear about our intention to go wherever the data would take us. Among the findings:
Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors’ political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.
In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)
Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.
A similar situation faces students in the Netherlands:
I know how he feels. Although I’m probably a Centrist or slightly right-of-center in America, I am conservative - and quite conservative at that - in the Netherlands. When we have debates in class, and we often have them, I’m just about the only one who’s arguing from a conservative point of view. Most of my fellow students are farther left than my father, who’s a moderate socialist. The same can be said about my professors. Last year I had passionate debates with one anti-American and anti-Israeli teacher. He was constantly talking trash about America and Israel and acted as if capitalism is the root of all evil.
Once upon a time I thought about getting a PhD. and becoming a professor. But I don’t think I’d make that great a teacher, and I don’t want to deal with university politics. Being a conservative certainly wouldn’t help me in that aspect.
I’m not in favor of some kind of affirmative action program for conservative professors. I would hope universities could be embarrassed to where they deeply examine their anti-conservative attitudes.
“As a Republican, I’m on the Fringe” [via memeorandum]
I’m not in favor of that either (it would be slightly ironic I think if we were), but there’s a serious problem and I’ve got to say that, at least in the Netherlands, professors don’t give me the impression they want it changed.
Why would they? They all ‘know’ that all conservatives are dumb [censored].
Ph.D.: actually, I think there’s something conservatives can do about it… be active in universities. Become professors. Get that Ph.D. etc. TAke it back in other words.