I am a registered Republican. There, I said it. I’m not a particularly ardent one, but I am not ashamed of being a Republican. I have no idea if there are any other Republican bloggers here at Science Blogs, even nominal ones like myself. Additionally, my impression is that aside from David Ng everyone here at Science Blogs is pretty pale faced. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but someone should chi square this and see if they scry prima facie grounds for discrimination. I kid of course.
In any case, Bora has a long post about liberalism and the academy. He talks about a long of different things, and I don’t have time to dash and dance throught it all right now, but:
1) He elides over the reality that more mathematical & applied disciplines are more conservative than sociology or English.
2) This brings into question Bora’s assertion, in my mind, that cognitive acumen is at work here in differentiating empirically fallacious conservatism from liberal realism. I don’t think engineers are less grounded in reality than English literature professors. I think there is some evidence from preliminary GRE scores that the most stridently liberal disciplines are not the most intellectually stacked.
3) Additionally, I am skeptical that individuals really have a good grasp of much outside of their own discipline. We all know this anecdotally, but heuristics & biases research tells us that highly intelligent people can be rather retarded out of field (to the point of making mistakes in Bayesian inference out of field when they use Bayesian methods within field!)
4) Cognitive power does seem to correlate to some extent with liberalism, broadly speaking, but the liberalism of the academy is far greater in magnitude than a simple linear regression would predict based on years of education (also note that politics tends to polarize at the educational heights). There are other main effects at work here, and I think the biggest one has to do with lifestyle, academics are self-selected, prioritize prestige & abstraction over monetary returns (most of them could make a good living as lawyers, doctors of MBAs) and are less likely to have children than other professionals.
5) “Liberalism” is a big word. I think academic liberals best intersect with what Beliefnet terms Seculars:
The group that is most uncomfortable when candidates talk about their personal faith (54%). Very liberal on social issues: 83% are pro-choice and 59% favor same-sex marriage. Liberal on foreign policy, moderate on economics, and quite young (47% under age 35).
I believe that it is important that Bill Clinton vetoed the ban partial birth abortion but pushed throught NAFTA & welfare reform, it shows where the priorities of the commanding heights of the American Left is today, and that is on the social & cultural issues which are most relevant to economically secure, if not hyper-affluent, academics. Not that there’s anything wrong with this, on many social issues I tend to agree with the modern Left, though with a mellower demeanour. I don’t mind a soft-pedalling some of the issues of economic justice (also known as “takings” in some quarters) which seems to be part of the pattern with the rise to ascendancy of the New Class, the mandarins of our age.
Addendum: This assertion seems a little bizarro to me:
People like von Hayek, Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, Thomas Sowell, Robert Nozick, or Gertrude Himmelfarb need to be read by students in order to learn how to see through the deceptive rhetoric and destroy the argument, just like they need to know how to destroy arguments of Creationists.
Nozick & Kirk thrown together? The minarchist and traditionalist? Hayek and Strauss? The classical liberal and, well, original Straussian? One issue that makes me skeptical about this supposed liberal grasp on reality is the easy and fluid ability with which liberals can eliminate all the texture and difference on the Right and throw libertarians and conservatives together as if we were fundamentally the same. Some traditionalist conservatives would assert that libertarians are simply a different kind of liberal! Not a big deal, but liberal sensitvities toward letting the Other define their own identity stops somewhere to their Right.
Post-Addendum: This is not an apologia for the Ann Coulter Right, of which I’m obviously not part. Rather, God’s own chosen people who dwell in his grace are held to a higher standard for they are a light unto the ignorant nations. To whom deep knowledge and insight is given, as Bora and most liberals seem to assume they are gifted with, a genuine fidelity to the goddess of truth is demanded to the utmost extent.
Amen.
Finally: Adding more conservatives to the academy would make it more insightful in its understanding of the poltiical landscape just as adding more liberals to the ranks of CEOs would make business more compassionate: it wouldn’t do jack shit. Scientists know science, but they often know shit about politics. As far as indoctrinate of students, it’ll happen or it won’t. My personal experience is that most academic liberals are flaccid in their rhetorical skills with non-liberals of a non-religious brand because they aren’t exposed to them, so no need to cower in fear.
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