Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently caused a stir by calling President Obama a “snob” for saying that he wanted all Americans to go to college (it’s actually not what the president wants, but that’s beside the point). “There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day,” Sen. Santorum explained indignantly, “that [sic] aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them.”
Gathering momentum, he later claimed in a radio interview that when he was in college, his professors deliberately gave him lower grades because he was a conservative.
Santorum’s lament reiterates a familiar complaint from those on the political right in America, who have long charged that university and college faculties are loaded with left-wingers, and that these academics bring their political opinions into the classroom, where millions of impressionable young minds await reprogramming.
No one with any grasp on reality can deny that academia does have a liberal accent. Numerous studies and polls have shown that an overwhelming majority of higher education faculty members hold left-of-center political views. As Dr Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, has noted, this cannot be down to chance, since the percentage of the general public who self-identify as conservative is 40 percent, double the percentage who identify as liberal.
Numerous theories have been put forward for why this phenomenon exists. Those on the right charge, and say they have the documentation to prove it, that conservatives are systematically frozen out of academia. College students aspiring to be educators, they say, are discouraged by their professors if they have conservative views; faculty members tend to hide conservative beliefs for fear of ridicule by their peers; and conservative academics have a harder time getting published because the peer review process is controlled by their liberal colleagues.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Glenn Contrarian
Doc -
I'm really sorry to comment on your article with an article-length reply, but I just had to.
I've got an article pending that addresses the fact that although Santorum won the Republican primary in Mississippi, Romney decisively won in the majority-black counties while Santorum overwhelmingly won in the majority-white counties (while statewide about one percent of the votes were cast by blacks). But more pertinent to your article, there seem to be only two majority-white counties - Grenada and Oktibbeha - where Romney beat Santorum. These are also the homes to the two largest universities in Mississippi, Ole Miss and Mississippi State University. Romney (the "Father of Obamacare") beat Santorum by double digits in both.
And it all goes back to the same drumbeat I've been using for the past few years - with allowances for local culture and religion, it's the level of urbanization that drives the politics of a region...because it's the level of urbanization that not only attracts big business and industry (and the academic institutions which support them), but also forces daily interactions of people with those who are different from themselves.
And what are most colleges but melting pots wherein young and impressionable adults are forced to interact with other young adults not just from every corner of America, but from all over the world? This cannot help but result in the spread of ideas, of concepts, of acceptance of those who are different.
Think about the spread of acceptance of homosexuality in campuses, Doc - did this happen in the classroom? Or did it happen in the dorm rooms, not just over decades, but over many generations?
Of course there are outliers among college institutions as well - witness Jerry Falwell's "Liberty University" where "creation studies" is a required course. But such places are certainly the exception and not the rule.
It boils down to this - with allowances for local or regional culture and religion, the greater the degree of direct interaction that a people have with those who are significantly different from themselves, the greater the degree of that "liberal mindset" among those people. This is true not only in America, but all over the world...
...and the two factors of "level of urbanization" and "degree of interaction with those who are different" go hand-in-hand. Even in the reddest states, the major population centers are the most liberal...and in the bluest states, the most rural areas are the most conservative. Again, this is true not only in America, but all over the world (though one must allow for statistical skewing by local religion and culture (read: Riyadh)). In China, who are the dissidents most likely to be - peasants or businessmen? Or professors and students?
And to throw the door open the rest of way, this also explains why in the grand sweep of history, humankind as a whole has ever drifted towards the liberal and away from the conservative. The drift has been glacially slow, filled with leaps of progress and tragic slips into the abyss of tyranny, but the drift is there nonetheless...and with the advent of radio/television/internet/cell phones, it has accelerated beyond the dreams of liberals such as Galileo, Newton, and da Vinci, all of whom held social ideas that were in their day seen as beyond the religious pale.
Witness the sweep of history towards the liberal, Doc - and while this progression in our perception is so very slow and political painful, in the long view of history, it's now happening in the blink of an eye!
2 - Dr Dreadful
I saw your article in pending when I submitted mine this morning, Glenn, along with a few other pending Politics screeds, so I'm not sure how I managed to leapfrog the queue.
Yours is an interesting point and it's kind of the opposite of Mooney's. He says that a "biological" openness to considering multiple viewpoints predisposes one to be an academic; you say that exposure to those viewpoints, at college or in a cosmopolitan urban setting, encourages liberal-style openness.
There are a few grey areas if you're right, though. I grew up in an outer suburb of London that, while increasingly multicultural, consistently returned Conservatives to Westminster and the local council. (It still does.) It was (and is) one of the most conservative constituencies in the country: at general elections the Tory candidate invariably wins by a landslide, followed by the Liberal Democrat (centrist) and then the Labour guy shuffling in a distant third.
But it's far from being a rural area.
3 - jamminsue
Dreadful and Glenn, excellent! And, thank you. As a college student, and also a GA,and have graded many many undergrad papers. May I point out that those conservatives that complain about being knocked down for the message of their papers may have themselves to blame? I say, the student did not answer the questions spelled out in the syllabus, or did not follow the required format (MLA, Chicago, etc) spelling, sentence sructure, grammar, etc. Same as the kids who were moderates or liberals.
Actually, a conservative paper is welcome as often it is DIFFERENT.
Further, it may be that academia was 100% Liberal at one time, but in my college the younger professors are likely to be more conservative than the older ones.
Also, the Young Republicans are more visble than the Young Democrats, and the anti abortion people are more often on campus preaching their stuff than anyone ele.
4 - Dr Dreadful
You're probably right about substandard work rather than conservatism being the usual reason for marked-down papers, Sue.
Going by the caliber of Santorum's utterances thus far, I have little doubt that this, not ideology, was the reason for his low grades.
If indeed his grades actually were lower, and he's not just making shit up.
5 - Glenn Contrarian
Doc -
Nature versus nurture? I'd say the biological argument has much to recommend itself as I pointed out in this article (and there have been subsequent studies since that reach much the same conclusion.
But in the big picture, I think the 'nurture' side of the argument is the bigger factor - and that's due to my own experience (which means it's non-scientific) in that among the kids that grew up where I did in the deepest part of the Deep South, I'm very much the exception to the rule. I resisted the 'nurture' part. The vast majority of the other children where I grew up - if the 'nature' part of the argument held true - should have had more among them who turned out more liberal, if not so liberal as myself.
6 - Glenn Contrarian
And Doc -
Concerning your experience in London, there will always be exceptions to the rule...but the rule stands nonetheless. For instance, what is the general education level of that suburb, and how prosperous is that suburb compared to the rest of London? How strong was/is religion there, as compared to the rest of London?
Please understand that the 'rule' I'm speaking of is generally true - but only generally. It's just like human psychology - mass psychology is much easier, much more predictable than individual psychology. So it goes with the rule about urbanization, academia and liberal mindsets, for while the overall trend is easy to see, the individual stories are devilishly difficult to pigeonhole.
7 - Dr Dreadful
To answer your three questions, Glenn: higher than average, very, and about the same.
8 - jamminsue
Also, it just occurred to me, my professor on Tuesday said, the purpose of college is to encourage you to question authority and be able to do some critical thinking.
No wonder the conservatives think its a liberal bastion
9 - Dr Dreadful
Your professor had a good point.
Conservatives are authoritarian by nature. The only time they question authority is when they're deprived of it, as is the case right now with the current occupant of the White House.
For that reason I don't really regard libertarians as conservative, for all that they claim theirs is true conservatism.
10 - Igor
The accomplished Marxian Economist Richard Wolff, Ph.D testifies that ALL his education is from Stanford, Harvard and Yale (all supposedly liberal schools), and yet he was never required to read one word of Marx during his education!
How do you explain that?
11 - Dr Dreadful
Dunno, Igor. Perhaps they gave him a copy of Das Kapital with the cover missing and told him it was Friedman.
12 - Igor
I'll reveal the answer to #10 tomorrow. Meanwhile, anyone can prove that he actually took a legit econ course from a legit University by answering it himself. But I'm not hopeful. There are any number of idiots posting on discussion groups who claim they took econ, but are obviously faking it.
13 - troll
(geeze...that old challenge Igor? - you'll have to change your handle again)
14 - El Bicho
Igor was known by another name, eh? I thought he or she got into the flow of things rather quickly around here. Hope to solve the mystery soon
15 - Cannonshop
Okay,
1. Santorum's a whiner, who probably screwed his own grades himself.
2. From my observation, it's the "Liberals" who favour and defend authoritarian "Solutions" and structures. It isn't the Conservatives who sit and endlessly justify TSA, PATRIOT ACT, the "Individual Mandate", the Kyoto Protocol, Carbon taxes, "Free Speech Zones" to restrict free speech, the detention of uncharged americans on military bases, etc. etc, nor was/were it Conservatives whose DoJ is recommending radical measures to monitor and detain based on political criteria naming citizens who do NOT riot as "Domestic Terrorists."
The "Liberals" ARE the Establishment, the Authority, and the ones in power do NOT brook questioning, ergo the hypothesis and accusation that Conservatism is Authoritarian is bogus.
16 - Glenn Contrarian
Cannonshop -
HUH?
Who was it that demanded the TSA and the Patriot Act? BUSH administration.
Whose idea was the 'individual mandate'? The HERITAGE FOUNDATION, backed by Newt Gingrich AND Mitt Romney right up until Obama started about using it for the Affordable Care Act.
Whose idea was "Cap and Trade"? That's ANOTHER Republican idea, thank you very much.
Whose idea was it to commit TORTURE and implement indefinite detention without charges????
Cannonshop, you are doing some serious Kool-Aid over there, blaming us for YOUR boys' ideas - and there were at least two good REPUBLICAN ideas that (as soon as the Democrats decided to run with them) all of a sudden the Republicans wanted to disown!
Come off it, Cannonshop - you're not hating liberals because we're liberal, or because of what we stand for. You're hating liberals because they're the 'other team', the 'other side', the 'opposition', the 'enemy'...the ones who aren't Republican.
17 - Glenn Contrarian
And Cannonshop -
I suggest you stop using blanket accusations about 'liberals' - because when was the last time the senior Republicans in Congress spoke out about the Patriot Act?
Because for the past two years it's been DEMOCRATS on the Senate Intelligence Committee who have been speaking out against the Obama administration on the Patriot Act.
But you just keep on talking about how authoritarian the Dems are, and whatever you do, don't question your fantasy about those badbadbadevilevilevil liberals....
18 - Dr Dreadful
Cannon: We're talking about colleges here, not Washington.
It's different intellectual approaches I mean, not policies and institutions that one or the other side sees as "authoritarian". Conservatives tend to be highly dogmatic in the positions they hold: time and again they convey an absolute conviction that they're right and exclude any possibility that another point of view might have some validity.
As I said a few days ago on another thread, if I had a penny for every time a right-winger boasted that their argument was watertight and couldn't possibly be refuted, I'd be one of the 1%.
You're not going to get very far in academia with that sort of approach.
Liberals have a greater tendency to weigh both sides, which is one reason why there are a lot more "moderates" in the Democratic Party than there are in the GOP. If you must go all DC on us, I'd say a consistent theme of federal politics over the last 20-30 years has involved Democratic administrations and congresses constantly compromising while Republican-controlled ones seldom if ever budge.
19 - Igor
Sorry, I had more pressing things to do. Glad to see that the hall monitors are still patrolling, though. BC is a lot like high school.
Wolff never was required to read Marx for the same reason he wasn't required to read Hayek or Friedman: they are all moralists and politicians, not economists.
Only a lazy teacher with a lazy student body would teach the discursive moralists. Perhaps at a community college, but not at Harvard, Yale or Stanford. Besides, the canny Prof knows that students passing through the campus bookstore are attracted to such books by the glamorous dust jackets promising easy solutions to difficult problems, such as "The Road to Serfdom". Those books will get read, or at least the dust jackets.
20 - Clavos
Only a lazy teacher with a lazy student body would teach the discursive moralists. Perhaps at a community college, but not at Harvard, Yale or Stanford. Besides, the canny Prof teaches only the liberal "economists," lest, [horrors!] his students turn out to be conservatives who eschew Keynes and his successors.
There fixed it fer ya, Iggy.
21 - Dr Dreadful
I must say I'm stunned, Clav, by the panache with which you advance the debate.
22 - Glenn Contrarian
Doc -
If you must go all DC on us, I'd say a consistent theme of federal politics over the last 20-30 years has involved Democratic administrations and congresses constantly compromising while Republican-controlled ones seldom if ever budge.
A great example was the debate this past summer on raising the debt ceiling. John Boehner bragged that he got 98% of what he wanted...and he was STILL roundly castigated by the Tea Partiers for compromising with the oh-so-socialist Lefties!
23 - Dr Dreadful
Exactly what I mean about right-wingers' ideological conviction, Glenn. Doesn't itself make them wrong, or right... but it's got to be 100% either way for them.
(BTW, did you mean to post using your real handle, or was it an oopsie and would you like Chris or me to change it back?)
24 - Glenn Contrarian
Doc - thanks for noticing that right away - I hate it when I do that - please correct to my normal handle ASAP - Thanks, Doc
25 - Glenn Contrarian
And that one too!