Those Liberal Academics

13 Comments

1. 

   on January 18, 2010 at 10:38 am

   I have been in 2 universities as a student (both public colleges), and have taught/researched at 5 to date.  I have been a member of faculties of psychology, business, psychiatry, pediatrics, and biostatistics.  Thus, I feel that I can address this question quite cogently.

   In terms of those who I have known in various departments over the years, this is probably 200-300 enough to classify their political beliefs.  I have acted to hire a number.  Of those that I have known, hired, and dealt with, 3-4 were conservative, 10 or so more moderate, and the rest pretty liberal.

   Not all faculty are liberal.  Conservative to liberal, departments generally may be ordered engineering, business, medicine, law, liberal arts.  Business faculty are quite strongly conservative, as are engineering.  Law and medicine faculty can fall on either side.  With medicine, doctors are often conservative, due to income, and professionalism. Research faculty are more like liberal arts than physicians.  Liberal arts faculty are predominantly liberal, although political science can be an exception.

   There are  reasons for liberalness in faculty members.  These are:

   1. Selection factors: Those who are interested in making money are often (not exclusively) conservative.  These tend to go to schools of business, law, and medicine, and do professional things.  Those who are interested in intellectual pursuits go to academic grad schools, and these are less dogmatic, less rigid, and more often liberal.
   2. Orientation of liberalness/conservativeness: Conservatives are interested in pat answers, set results, and known truth.  This is antithetical to the academic approach.  Liberals are more open to change, and less happy with stated fact.  This is the academic orientation.  As an academic, you progress by finding that an older organization of facts is incorrect.  This requires that you redo an organization, and reject the tired shackles of the past.  
   3. Hostility of conservatives to research and study: In recent years in particular, the Republican Party and conservatism has maintained a stated, strong, and powerful anti-intellectual approach.  Thus, if you are a conservative, to become an academic requires that you reject the argument of conservatism that intellectualism is bad, wrong, effete, etc.  This requires a re-orientation, and often requires that you become more liberal.  Thus, becoming an academic requires that you be liberal in some ways.
   4. Orientation of the current funding environment:  In the current time, funding comes from the federal government for 75% of research.  This requires that you be in favor of or at least comfortable taking money from Uncle Sam, or put another way, be in favor of science socialism.  We in the research field do act in a competitive manner, in that competition for grants is quite high.  But it is not the competition for dollars from people.  It is a socialist, government run enterprise.  This is antithetical to many conservatives.  To be a conservative in research involving the government, you must agree that your living comes from doing things that your political ideology opposes.

   Truth and reality has a liberal orientation.  This is not just a statement, it is the fact of academic life.

   • 

     on January 18, 2010 at 11:14 am

     One final point.  Business schools have finance sections, psychology sections, law sections, and so forth.  The closer you are to money, the more conservative you seem to be (finance).  The behavioral/sociology types act like other behavior/sociology types, although you must be a little more conservative to consider the school of business.  The law types are more conservative than many law types (the single most conservative person I ever knew was a law professor in a b-school – he later resigned to become a proselytizer for Jews for Jesus).

     This is also true in law schools, although there is a little less diversity of background.

     So, when you talk about “business schools” or whatever, there’s a lot of diversity there.

   • 

     colinski on January 18, 2010 at 5:54 pm

     I had some other comments supporting yours but I came upon something ironic while sorting and adding to my bookmark section — a site by a corporate law professor with comments on a Rick Perlstein article. His bio section is a long legal disclaimer.

2. 

   Frank Schnittger on January 18, 2010 at 11:02 am

   Would it be academically nitpicking and effete for me to point out that the The Brothers Karamazov is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky and not an example of British literature? Bush probably thinks that makes him a Commie….

   • 

     BooMan on January 18, 2010 at 11:07 am

     yeah, I was adding Russian to British, not misidentifying Dostoyevsky’s nationality.

3. 

   TarheelDem on January 18, 2010 at 11:39 am

   Why are most professors liberal in their political orientation?

   I assume that you have data that shows that this assertion is true, because in the underlying paper this fact is mostly assumed based on studies going back to the 1950s.  And I assume that the data covers all professors, including agriculture, business management, engineering, law, and other areas not generally separated out in studies.  So the first question, and one often dodged, is about the truth of the assertion.  I think it might have been historically true when the tenor or American thought was liberal (certainly in the 1950s), but only in certain institutions and places.

   A better question is why did the conservative movement adopt an anti-intellectual stance in the first place?

   There is not monolithic conservative movement; there is a substantial part of the bi-coastal conservative establishment that is enamored of Edmund Burke and still seeks intellectual defenses for neo-conservative foreign policy and “neo-liberal” economic policy.  And these folks are mostly silent so long as the GOP is winning — then they will pipe up with vague comments about returning to conservative principles.  Or they will get exercised about the lost of emphasis on the Western canon.  Most of them realize that the GOP candidates are conning the rubes with its anti-intellectualism.  The problem for them is when the rubes take power, as in Dover PA.  And there are lot of public conservative intellectuals who know that counter-intuitive books sell and produce large academic donations from the rubes who have done well and want a little academic gloss.

   When you say that liberal arts professors are the least conservative, you have to again specify where, what institutions, and in what way you mean conservative.

   For all the anti-intellectualism you list, there are institutions with definite financial agendas supporting this anti-intellectualism with specious intellectual arguments.  Theological seminaries concerned about a loss of faith in the literal words (not Word interestingly enough) of the Bible are behind attacks on scientific theories, merely reciprocating the acts of scientism in the early 1900s on religion.  All of the polluters are behind the attacks on global climate change, even to the point of hiring their own scientists.  The National Humanities Center has been populated for years with conservative liberal arts academics (especially under the leadership of William Bennett).

   I don’t know a whole lot of liberals who curl up with British literature or The Brothers Karamazov either.  Or pieces of the Hippie Canon either.

   “Those liberal academics” like “the liberal media” is a rhetorical sucker punch delivered by conservatives to hide the fact that they are themselves highbrow and in control of the media.  It’s GOP faux populism.

   How many liberals are there really among the audiences at the Metropolitan Opera or purchasing at Sothebys?

   Now the academics who actually move the culture, that’s a different matter.  And that explains the reason for the attack.  Conservatism by definition is not capable of moving the culture.  Inflaming reactionary responses to movement going on in the culture, yes; actually contributing. No. So we come to a post-modern theory of knowledge in which there is no privileged point-of-view, a theory that is the demonstrable result of the limits to proof found in symbolic logic and the collapse of logical positivism as a helpful philosophical approach.  And anti-intellectualism uses this limitation to reassert long-dismissed dogma.  Or new nonsense (the liberal form of anti-intellectualism).

   For liberals, the sucker punch is “academic establishment”, which embraces the fact that academic hierarchies are fundamentally conservative in operation if not in the popular political sense of conseravtism.  And that sucker punch can let through all sorts of what at one point was labeled “New Age” anti-intellectualism.

4. 

   Real History Lisa on January 18, 2010 at 1:00 pm

   Geez, this is a no brainer.

   Because the more educated you are (as opposed to the more propagandized you are) the more liberal you become.

   FACTS support the liberal viewpoint. Ignorance does not.

   • 

     Real History Lisa on January 18, 2010 at 1:01 pm

     And as a case in point, the only demographic that didn’t vote for Reagan when he swept into power were those who had more than a college-level education.

5. 

   CrapIsKing on January 18, 2010 at 2:07 pm

   I’m with Lisa: if you actually know what you are talking about, it lessens the chances you will think, for example, that Bush Jr. or Reagan are adequate leadership for your nation.

   One quibble though. The last study I saw – it’s been a while and wish I could cite it – showed that the less educated and the highly-educated were most likely to be liberal-left, while those with a Bachelor’s or some college were most likely to be conservative-right. A little education is a dangerous thing: you may know much less than you think you know.

6. 

   colinski on January 18, 2010 at 4:24 pm

   This is a digression but it somehow seems to uncover a certain psychology that underlies anti-intellectualism, which is at its core anti-elitism.

   The Law of Jante has been referred to as the dark side of egalitarianism.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law

   THE LAW OF JANTE

    The ten rules are:

      1. Don’t think that you are special.
      2. Don’t think that you are of the same standing as us.
      3. Don’t think that you are smarter than us.
      4. Don’t fancy yourself as being better than us.
      5. Don’t think that you know more than us.
      6. Don’t think that you are more important than us.
      7. Don’t think that you are good at anything.
      8. Don’t laugh at us.
      9. Don’t think that anyone of us cares about you.
     10. Don’t think that you can teach us anything.

   Digressing even further, it should be noted that the same anti-elitist attitudes discussed in this topic existed around the turn of the 20th century in places such as Kansas and were directed at Eastern intellectuals and bankers. The populism of that era was Democratic, and the only thing that’s changed since then is the party affiliation of the adherents.

   Another root that occurs to me is found in the Anti-Federalist papers. I believe that the “Culture wars” and largely symbolic (not instrumental) stances of the Republican coalition find their roots in the reflexive contrariness of the anti-Federalists. This distrust of any and all power transfers easily to an anti-government stance and also feeds the belief that whites are under attack, which is common among (mostly) lower class white males.

   The following excerpt from David Paul Kuhn’s “Dems must woo white men” to win gives insight into the alienation that underlies rightwing populism.

   http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=68225069-3048-5C12-00FA02842EFBC1AA

   “Democratic primaries and conventions often rocked with the language of rebuke,” McPherson wrote in a 1972 memoir. “Very like, it has occurred to me, the language many wives use in speaking to their husbands, particularly toward the end of marriages. You never think of the children, or of my mother, or of me; only of yourself. Substitute the ignored disadvantaged, the homeless, people trapped downtown. The reaction among husbands, for whom read `white male voters,’ is what is normally provoked by attempts to burden people with a sense of guilt.”

   As portrayed by the new breed of liberalism, the white man held all the cards, and everyone else’s bad deal was his fault. The problem was that the bulk of white men did not feel like dealers or players. They felt like pieces on someone else’s table, and their livelihood, their family’s very stability, was in richer men’s hands, as well. Increasingly, as Reagan assumed the presidency, many white men, particularly those in industrial trades, found their lives marked by instability. This was true in the home, as cultural changes refashioned the role of women and the place of sex in popular culture. And it was especially true in the workplace, as many once-secure union jobs disappeared.

   The assiduous cultivation of lower class whites was aided by the civil rights movement but it was also a conscious strategy adopted earlier, by Nixon and others, and notably by Reagan. Here’s another excerpt from Kuhn’s article.

   Early in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, his pollster Richard Wirthlin wrote a book-length campaign plan — never previously obtained — detailing a strategy expressly designed to “break up” the Democratic coalition. To “target the populist voter,” the campaign would work toward the “development of the aspiring American populist theme of `anti-bigness — big government, big business, big labor.'” The media messages were to be “simple, direct and optimistic.” They were to focus on “blue collar” voters utilizing “principal themes” that “project a realization that these voters are no longer solely motivated by economic concerns but by larger social issues, as well.”

   It was an idea that informed not simply the 1980 campaign but also the next 25 years of GOP strategy. It was to “position [Reagan] as a doer, a man of action,” the “decisive leader capable of making tough decisions.” But above all, Reagan was to “solidify a public impression” that he “has concern for the common man and understands the problems facing voters in their daily lives.”

   Thomas Frank wrote an excellent article on this subject in 2004.

   http://www.alternet.org/story/18192/

   Chip Berlet has made significant contributions to this topic, too.

   http://www.publiceye.org/tooclose/populism-01.html

7. 

   DaveW on January 18, 2010 at 5:30 pm

   It gets harder to be an authoritarian, which is the driving impulse of the American right, when you’re exposed to multiple persuasive viewpoints. Nothing does that as well as fiction, drama, and poetry.

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     FlipYrWhig on January 19, 2010 at 1:21 am

     That’s essentially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s argument, that literature trains you to have empathy.  (Probably part of why Brit Lit is unmanly… said the Brit Lit professor who should be prepping for class.)

8. 

   OldBean on January 18, 2010 at 8:37 pm

   Does it have anything to do with the fact that most of the conservative ideology is based on bad-faith arguments? Seems like that might be an important factor.