From a scientist at a large university out west:

Jonah,
I just got around to reading your article about
Krugman’s column. I think you hit the main reason for
a lack of conservatives in the sciences dead on.
Salary matters and leads to strong self-selection.
I’m a chemistry professor on the tenure-track and I
could be making triple what I do now if I’d simply
taken a job in the private sector. (Granted, there
would be cost-of-living considerations if I did this,
since the amount I spent on my 5-bedroom, 1/2 acre
house in my current location would only buy me a
1-bedroom straw hut if I moved to take some private
sector jobs.) Regardless, I want to teach, and I got
into this knowing I wouldn’t be making “the big
bucks”. Let’s face it though, I’m not typical. Given
the choice between a) low salary but “freedom” to
research whatever you want and b) high salary but
research guidelines heavily dictated by your employer,
I think it’s reasonable to believe that most liberals
would choose “a” and most conservatives “b”.
I suspect that if anyone ever did a survey of all PhDs
in the sciences, you’d find the ones working in the
private sector are considerably more conservative than
the academics are. (I mean really, what liberals are
going to take jobs with the evil oil, energy, consumer
products, or pharmaceutical companies?) We have
plenty of anecdotal evidence now that university
faculties lean overwhelmingly liberal/Democrat (maybe
8:1 nationally, though we’re outnumbered 10:1 in my
department, which is in one of the reddest states.)
Yet exit polls, even from 2004, show only ~55/45 split
for the Dems among people with graduate degrees. So
that pretty much means that there has to be a subset
of masters and doctoral people that lean conservative
to balance out all the academics. Are these solely
the MBAs? Maybe–I admit, I haven’t crunched the
numbers, but I doubt it. The private sector
scientists I know ARE making the big bucks and don’t
like losing 1/2 of it to the government after they’ve
worked all their lives to get to that spot. On the
other hand, academic scientists are required to beg
the government to provide us with as much money as
possible to do our research. It’s part of our job
description and a requirement for tenure for goodness
sake! So of course most of my profession leans
liberal, we all want as much R&D spending as possible,
because the bigger the pie is the greater the
possibility we get more.
One other thing to keep in mind. Krugman points out
that the scientists and engineers in academia lean
left too, presumably to show that the logical,
methodological people are also liberal. But as I try
to point out to my students, scientists aren’t special
from other disciplines. We’re just as prone to
biases, agendas, and pre-conceived notions while
interpreting data as everyone else. Now, we’ve been
trained to use methods that are meant to overcome
those problems, if we do our experiments right. But
it doesn’t always happen that way. One of my
co-workers likes to say that you go into science
expecting everyone to behave like Mr. Spock–logical
by the book. Only after you get in do you realize
that most everyone is like Dr. McCoy–good scientist,
yes, but usually with a lot of emotion-based
assumptions about how things are supposed to happen.
Well, this email was a lot longer and drifting off
topic than I intended (hey, I am an academic.) But I
wanted to say good job on the article.
[Name and University Withheld]
P.S. while I doubt you will print any of this
longwinded rant, if you do, please don’t use my name.
I haven’t experienced any political discrimination
during my time here, but I don’t have tenure yet, so
no need in asking for it!