What Liberals Think About Academia

Reverence is the word that first comes to mind. Academia is the Mount Olympus of the secular faith, inhabited by the high priests of the left. When liberals look to university campuses they see 1960’s caricatures of themselves, frozen in time and ideology.

According to a new study by Robert Lichter of George Mason University, Stanley Rothman of Smith College and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, “college faculties lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined.”

“By their own description, 72% of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15% are conservative. The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where 87% of faculty are liberal and only 13% are conservative. The professors are in favor of abortion rights (84%); believe homosexuality is acceptable (67%); and want more environmental protection "even if it raises prices or costs jobs" (88%).

What's more, the study found, 65% want the government to ensure full employment, a stance to the left even of the Democratic Party.”

These professors are ideologically out of step with the majority of Americans. A Harris Poll of the general public last year found that 33% describe themselves as conservative and only 18% as liberal. Thus university faculties are about 4 times as liberal as the public at large. One wonders how the academies got to be so intensely liberal.

According to the liberal media pundits it is the Republican’s fault. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asserts that one reason is “self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.” Krugman has a point here, since real men tend to like the competition found in the military and in business.

Then, however, Krugman dives into the fever swamp claiming that the Republican Party “is increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research - doesn't respect science or scholarship in general. It shouldn't be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.”

So let’s see, Republicans and conservatives do not respect scholarship or science. But liberals, as we all know, have a deep respect of science, particularly social science, political science, even library science. They pretend that courses in Chicano Studies, Women’s Studies and Peace Studies are scientifically based. They revere intellectuals such as anti-American linguist Noam Chomsky of MIT and African-American studier and hip-hopper Cornel West of Princeton.

On the flip side, mathematician James Miller was recently denied tenure by the Smith College faculty for being a known conservative. Fortunately, Smith's faculty Grievance Committee found that Miller's academic freedom had been violated during the tenure review and tenure was granted. Dr. Miller advises other conservatives to think twice about joining the ranks of academia. In a recent commentary Miller addresses Krugman’s claims.

“Of course, recent events at Harvard indicate that it's the academic left that rejects science. Harvard President Larry Summers was castigated for suggesting that politically incorrect science be conducted. Dr. Summers infamously suggested that researchers consider the possibility that biology partially explains the dearth of female science professors. For this comment, his Arts and Science faculty passed a resolution expressing lack of confidence in him.” Furthermore, urged on by their leftist faculties the “presidents of Stanford, MIT and Princeton have condemned Larry Summers for the crime of politically incorrect speculation.”

Most of the leftists in humanities departments don't even believe in science and are offended when hard scientific knowledge is given preference over other types of knowledge. “Leftists have been known to use literary theory to demonstrate flaws in science. Such anti-scientific silliness led to the Social Text hoax.”

Physics professor Alan Sokal of New York University was bothered by the anti-scientific viewpoints of many left-wing humanities professors who often used their French literary theories to attack science. “To prove that these humanities professors actually knew nothing about real science he wrote an article titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity agreeing with the leftists' view of science. But as the author himself wrote, his article contained a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever. The article was, however, published in 1996 by the academic journal Social Text as a serious piece criticizing the scientific method.

Only after it appeared did Professor Sokal reveal that his article was a parody. That such an article could get published would surprise few Republican college professors as we well understand how many leftist humanities professors both hate science and are ignorant of its workings.”