Thanks to David French for taking the time to think through a phenomenon that has taken off beyond any reasonable discussion. Self-selection versus discrimination — parsing this distinction could go on forever. I like the commenter on IHE who said,
So, if I understand this, self selection is AOK when it results in a predominance of liberals on campus, but it is not OK when it results in a shortfall of women in science?
But don’t expect any intellectual intercourse over this question. We are talking past one another, particularly because liberals who want to preserve their tattered image of tolerance cling to face-saving concepts such as self-selection.
Yes, conservatives self-select away from academia. When they are undergraduates, their professors do not esteem them and thus do not encourage them to move to higher academic levels. It’s pretty easy for them to look around and see that introducing their ideas into university discourse will be difficult and unpleasant. Any conservative who seeks positive career outcomes is likely to hesitate about entering academia.
The reason this matters is that higher education needs a variety of viewpoints, especially conservative and libertarian ones.
I am not convinced that this fight is worth having. While I agree that a variety of viewpoints is a precondition for worthwhile higher education, higher education's current incarnation doesn't seek that variety.
Let them have their orthadoxy. Let them consign themselves to their own echo-chamber purgatory. We'll make do with think-tanks, foundations, market forces and alternative media.
And one last thought. My brand of concervatism is small-government, federalist, and constrained by a 200+ year old document. Its motivated by a distrust of authority, validated by a human history chalk full of power-corrupted institutions and indivduals crushing individuals in the name of the greater good. When my children enter college, they will get a front-row seat to witness that authority abused, the moral corruption and the personal tragedy it creates. They will have my support in navigating through those waters (as I had my fathers). In the end they will have personal experiences to draw from; reinforcing why they believe what they believe.
TLDR; "Higher Education" does wonders for crushing utopian idealism out of budding concervatives.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMy own experience in research and the inherent biases in what gets published or studied etc. would lead me to seriously question the results of so-called "research" in many, many fields. It is not a problem necessarily with methodology at the micro level of a particular article, although it certainly could be that problem too, but rather the politically correct biases that dictate what can be studied and what can be published as well as the bubble in which so many academics live with its own comfortable and self congratulatory world view. I was at TNR reading the comments on this thread and it was a veritable comedy. Bottom line was that conservatives don't go into Academia because liberals are thoughtful and analytic and not troglyditic boorish rubes who can't think correctly etc. etc. This supposedly explains the self-selectivity. Conservatives are just dumb. And there ya go! Case closed...move on...I actually think this is great since the more it continues, liberalism will just implode. They remind me of the philosophical anarchists and nihilists who took over the city of Barcelona during the civil war. Strangely, after three days they were through since they could find no authority or leadership among themselves...DU-uh!! While this may not have ended nihilistic tendencies, it ended such practical movements. I hope Obama can do the same for us.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt appears to me that bias exhibited towards (or should I say "against") people who are not sufficiently "liberal" or leftist drives self-selection against careers in academia.
After all, no one wants to be where they are not wanted.
Ostracism comes in many forms, often very subtle forms but humans are mostly intuitive and take the hint.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDoesn't have to be leftist. Doesn't have to be humanities or social sciences. It only has to be absurd.
I recall a community college colleague (instructor) from some time ago. He was a graduate of West Point, and had served in the military. Vietnam, I believe. I presumed that he got the teaching job via military old-boy network, seeing as how he had no particular training or experience for it, but that was in an era when such jobs were easy to get. It was before my time there.
In any case, somewhere along the line he got the idea that human destiny involved space colonization and expansion into the universe. He actually wrote that into one of his science course descriptions. When he retired, he was quite adamant that his replacement share his views on what to teach and how it should be taught. The "diversity" committee didn't care, as long as the race and gender beans were counted.
I still think of Jack D. Ripper and his "purity of essence," from Dr. Strangelove.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat academia needs is to be defunded.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere is a definite bias in getting published if you do not publish the "right" topics. I have seen this in the computing fields. But an interesting trend that is occurring is that there are more people in sciences and computing that are doing research with the DoD and DHS. Big dollar research. Before it would have been hard to get tenure because they were not NSF grants and they were relatively small. NSF of course is the gold standard among academics. But I am seeing DHS/DoD grants that are millions per year and these people are getting tenure and promotions! Nice Change :)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnd it is being supported by a new set of peer reviewed journals and conferences that are oriented toward this work. So not only is there money which can not be ignored you are also able to publish in good journals sponsored by top Universities. Win-Win
I disagree with the premise that Conservatives self-select away from academia. As a principal architect of enterprise risk and scenario planning systems in the Fortune 250, the majority of my post-graduate theory education has had to be self-initiated and supplemental to the applied theory opportunities we have greater access to in the business world.
Repeatedly, my inquiries into graduate (Ph.D track) theory work has resulted in polite rejections, using the excuse that "you're clearly of the 'applied' world and you'd find our world boring" as a common excuse for rejecting challenging, "conservative capitalist tainted" thought from having any proximity to their world.
While vitally remarkable theorists in the post-structural tradition advanced a materialist philosophy and spoke to the urgent necessity of engaging it "in the real world," academia has made it remarkably clear: unless you are pursuing a path toward becoming one of us in the professoriate, you are not welcome to study here.
It's of little surprise that as such, these historians (one should not disparage the word "theorist" by using it in their context) do little than write absurd, meaningless, parametric papers that have no connectivity to the material environment they attempt to comprehend. As such, the problem is much greater than a bias against conservatives: there is an inherent rejection of capitalism, the corporate model and aspects of applied thought, where working with reality "out there" is beneath the academic ivory tower.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMuch of the most interesting work in my field is going on outside of academia. Groupthink has made it virtually impossible to publish anything that goes against the reigning orthodoxy (as was the case in climate "science" until recently). Orthodox work is heavily funded with the result that even the graduate textbooks are biased.
People who disagree with the orthodox view realize that surviving in academia means spending the next decade doing carefully designed work slanted towards supporting the orthodox view and ignoring the glaring holes in it. Most of the people attacking the orthodox view from outside academia have degrees in allied fields--that's how they avoided the brainwashing.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'll add my self-selection story. I was doing a post-doc at the U. of Chicago in 1967, at the time when the Czech Spring was underway. In a discussion with a bunch of graduate students, with whom I shared an office, there was speculation whether the Soviets would invade to put down Czech independence. All the graduate students assured me that it could not happen, as the force of world opinion would not allow it. Somehow hobbits came into the argument, too, but my memory on that is hazy. In any event, it was then that I began to wonder if I had the mental apparatus that would allow me to survive in academia, and not long after I went into the defense industry.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe traditional response to "self-selected" is "hostile work environment".
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAcademia is not remotely a place where ideas are explored, challenged, tested and rethought. It is, rather, a place where orthodoxy is enforced to a degree that would make Puritans blush. A writer in First Things noted that a ratio of 266 to 1 (that's liberals to conservatives in an informal poll of sociologists) would set off an alarm in anyone remotely honest about respect for competing ideas. To the contrary, academic leftists are comforting themselves that there's nothing to be alarmed about regarding that disparity. As an academic (and by necessity a closeted conservative), I am personally disgusted with the state of affairs.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDo conservatives self-select themselves away from academia because they have more job opportunities elsewhere? Put another way, do leftists self-select themselves away from jobs outside of academia because they cut themselves off from opportunities due to their aversion to corporate capitalism?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCharles Martel, Jr.:
Isn’t enforcing orthodoxy the traditional reason for a university in the first place?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse