Many conservative critics of the academy believe that liberals dominate because of anti-conservative discrimination. While there are likely some cases of that, the evidence was always weak for discrimination as a general explanation. For example, liberals dominate in fields that are not political, like math. In technical fields, people are recruited from all over the world. I’d be surprised if the engineering professor knew the politics of the new guy from Kazakhstan, unless he made a big deal out of it.
My view, as I’ve stated before on this blog, is simply that there’s a massive self-selection process at work. Being conservative is probably correlated with certain attitudes toward work, such a desire for high compensation, that are hard to satisfy in the academy. There are also field specific self-selection effects. Sociology for example, studies all kinds of deviant behavior and the faculty tend to skew liberal, not the sort…
View original post 349 more words
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments