Another Silly Article On Liberal Professors

Academics are, on the whole, more liberal than the population at large. I would be interested to know why this is so, and what effects, if any, it has. I don't usually find conservative reporting on this subject illuminating, since it generally doesn't go beyond reporting anecdotes which, while bad, are not obviously more than occasional episodes of the sort that one would expect, human nature being what it is. (Nor is it obvious to me that a disproportionate number of cases of professorial bad behavior involve politics: I knew a professor once who spent the better part of a class making fun of a student for not drinking beer at parties. Really.) It is amusing to see conservatives responding with the sort of horrified cries of victimhood that they disapprove of in other contexts, e.g. those involving racism and sexism; but it's not particularly enlightening.

An article by John Fund looked as though it might be an exception: it actually cites studies and not just anecdotes, for instance. But on closer examination it's not. To start with, the studies themselves don't seem to prove much. Of the three Fund cites, two just claim that a disproportionate number of professors are Democrats, which says little about why this is so or what effects it has. But a third claims to do more. Here's how Fund describes it:

"A forthcoming study by Stanley Rothman of Smith College looked at a random sample of more than 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183 institutions of higher learning. He found that across all faculty departments, including business and engineering, academics were over five times as likely to be liberals as conservatives.

Mr. Rothman used statistical analysis to determine what factors explained how academics ended up working at elite universities. Marital status, sexual orientation and race didn't play a statistically significant role. Academic excellence, as measured by papers published and awards conferred, did. But the next best predictor was whether the professor was a liberal. To critics that argue his methodology is flawed, Mr. Rothman points out that he used the same research tools long used in courts by liberal faculty members to prove race and sex bias at universities. Liberals criticizing his methods may find themselves hoist by their own petard."

Now: Slartibartfast can correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds as though this study uses regression analysis. And if memory serves, regression analysis establishes correlation, not causation. (Strictly speaking, regression analyses do not "explain how academics ended up working at elite universities"; they show what factors are correlated with working there.) If a regression analysis shows a correlation between A and B, this is consistent with the following claims: (1) A causes B, (2) B causes A, (3) some third variable, C, causes both A and B, and (4) it's a coincidence. When researchers run regression analyses to prove that (say) white males are more likely to get jobs at universities, they can eliminate the possibility that getting a university job causes a person to become a white male, since we know, for reasons that have nothing to do with a grasp of statistics, that that doesn't happen. By contrast, in the case at hand, one possibility is that people get jobs at elite universities and then become liberal, perhaps as a result of academic peer pressure.

Moreover, researchers studying racism generally go to great lengths to eliminate my third possibility above: some third factor which explains why one group does better than another. (This is, of course, why any good study of the effects of race will make statements that begin, "Even after we control for differences in wealth, parental education levels, and social class...", or something analogous.) I don't want to criticize the study Fund cites, since it hasn't been published and therefore I haven't read it, but nothing in his account indicates that the study made an attempt to control for related variables.

Fund then moves on to discuss explanations of the disproportionate number of liberals in universities and how to combat it. The explanation he seems to endorse is that it's due to groupthink. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that he's right. It would seem to follow, first, that the fact that academics are more liberal than the public at large is not due to any bias in hiring or tenure. 'Groupthink' is an explanation of how people who initially hold different views come to think alike, and if it explains the liberalism of academics, there is no need to invoke unfair hiring and tenure practices. Second, if groupthink explains the proportion of academics who are liberals, then it's not clear how one might change that proportion. Groupthink is a psychological mechanism that is not in any obvious way alterable through legislation or university policy; and it's hard to see what steps conservatives might take to combat it, other than exhorting academics to think for themselves and/or hiring enough conservatives at enough universities to make academic peer pressure cut the other way. Since, according to the study Fund cites, academic excellence is currently the strongest predictor of professional success at universities, it's hard to see how this could be done without compromising quality.

Oddly enough, however, Fund then goes on to propose "solutions" that don't seem at all consistent with the explanation he has just given, and which are, independently, very bad ideas. Here's what he says:

"One way to combat groupthink would be if donors to universities and regents began pressuring faculties to adopt an Academic Bill of Rights that would forbid university faculties from hiring, firing, and granting or denying promotion or tenure on the basis of political beliefs. When Mr. Horowitz suggested the idea be adopted at Colorado's public universities, he was accused of advocating "quotas" and "McCarthyism." He calmly explained that his plan eschews quotas and only requires universities to judge professors on their merits, not ideology. After several legislative hearings, Colorado university officials voluntarily adopted a variation of his Academic Bill of Rights to ward off a more muscular one the Legislature was considering.

Colorado has also gone further and adopted a reform that could serve as a model for how to make higher education more accountable to students and the taxpayers which pay its bills. Starting next year, the state will start shifting its higher-ed dollars from direct payments to universities to vouchers that will go directly to students. The idea is hardly radical. It is taken from the GI Bill of Rights, which is widely credited with giving returning veterans a chance at college through a program that won universal acclaim.

Debating such reforms is perfectly legitimate given that about half of the budget of public university systems come from taxpayers. Private universities derive about 35% of their budgets from public money, largely research grants. In addition, much of the student loan and grant money used to pay college tuition flows from taxpayer sources.

Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University, argues that its [sic] time to scale back taxpayer subsidies to universities and move towards a voucher plan so that schools would have to compete for students as paying customers. That might also end the punishing double-digit tuition increases many schools have been imposing. Our colleges and universities would benefit not only from some intellectual diversity, but also some diversity and competition in how they pay their bills and how students and taxpayers hold them to account."

The Academic Bill of Rights Fund mentions is in itself a fairly innocuous document. It says things like: "Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty. Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination", and "All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs." I don't know any academics who would seriously quarrel with it as a statement of our ideals. It becomes contentious only when people start talking about its being enacted into law by legislatures, at which point one has to ask: who, exactly, gets to decide when these principles have been violated, and what remedy should be sought when they are? If the answer is 'the legislature' -- that is, if legislatures get to decide whether not teaching creationism counts as 'indoctrination', or whether a department has tried hard enough to achieve 'a plurality of methodologies and perspectives' -- then we academics get very nervous. And for good reason: legislators are usually not expert in the various academic disciplines, and there is no reason to assume that they would be particularly good at making these determinations. (Nothing against legislators; I don't think most university professors would make very good state reps either. We each have our own areas of expertise.)

The idea of replacing university funding with vouchers for students is, frankly, silly. As Fund notes, much of the money that the government pays to universities takes the form of research grants. Is the idea to cut off all this funding and replace it with tuition vouchers? In that case, either universities will take a huge financial hit (and biomedical research, for instance, will be decimated), or tuition will have to go up dramatically. (Especially since tuition, as high as it is, does not begin to cover the costs of running universities even excluding research costs.) If, on the other hand, the idea is for states to replace that portion of state university budgets that constitutes a tuition subsidy for their residents with vouchers, that might be a good idea (I don't know enough to say, though offhand it would make budgeting for long-term costs more difficult); but it would not alter the political complexion of private universities at all.

But there's a broader point about all of this. Conservatives, I had always imagined, tend to be skeptical of government intervention. Even I, a liberal, don't leap to the conclusion that problems require a governmental solution: I tend to want to see, first, that there is in fact a problem, second, that government is the best available means of addressing it, and third, that the proposed solution (even if it's better than any alternative) would not do more harm than good. I would have thought that conservatives would be less inclined than I to think that these tests had been met in specific cases: I, for instance, think that they are met in the case of health coverage, and I assume that the fact that conservatives disagree is because they set the bar higher. So what am I to make of this case? I have heard the usual anecdotes, but I know of no evidence that there is a systematic problem that cannot be corrected by means less intrusive than legislative oversight of hiring or cutting funding. Nor have I seen any evidence that governmental action would be better than any available alternative.

What does seem clear to me is that there's good reason, in this case, to worry that governmental intervention in university hiring practices and/or cuts in funding would do considerable harm. The United States has the best universities in the world. Whatever we are doing, we are doing it well enough that students from abroad come here to study, and almost none of our students go overseas (except for terms abroad, which are usually more about experiencing other cultures than about the pursuit of academic excellence wherever it might be found.) Lots of things in this country are broken -- the congressional budget process, health coverage, communication between red and blue states -- but I would not have thought that universities would be high on our list of dysfunctional institutions in desperate need of repair. (I am not trying to deny that there are aspects of university education that can be improved, or that there are individual professors who are jerks; just that there's the kind of systemic problem that would make the solutions Fund talks about appropriate.) Why conservatives, of all people, would want to start fixing what isn't broken via intrusive government action is a mystery to me, since charity forbids the idea that they are just attacking institutions disproportionately populated by liberals as such.

Comments

[lightning]

It'd be interesting to see how the correlation works for universities having a reputation for conservatism (Purdue, Texas A&M) vs a reputation for liberalism (UC Berkeley, Harvard).

I'll agree that the whole subject is a non- problem; I've not noticed that conservatives are an endangered species.

[Michael Cain]

I've been to some of the presentations by the leaders of the University of Colorado and Colorado State University about state funding in their budgets. IIRC, state money makes up 8% of CU's budget in all, and 11% of CSU's. Colorado's support of its top two four-year schools has declined dramatically over the last 10 years. The last three years have been particularly bad, due to a pair of voter initiatives to amend the state constitution that have created a fiscal nightmare. Without changes, Colorado will be out of the higher education business entirely in another five-six years.

I believe that the inability (or unwillingness) of the Republicans, who controlled both houses of the state legislature and the governor's office this past session, to offer any reasonable compromises to the fiscal mess led to the Democrats winning control of both houses this month. I'm taking a class from one of the new Senate leaders, and he tells us that the budget mess and restoring some of the higher education funding are the top two priorities for the upcoming session.

[liberal japonicus]

I recommend the following post by Geoff Nunberg, from the always interesting blog languagelog. Perhaps Fund's newer studies avoid the pitfalls of previous studies, but somehow, I doubt it.

[Jesurgislac]

Well, but, Hilzoy. While in theory conservatives object to unnecessary government interference, just as in theory American conservatives approve of states rights, in reality what matters (to most people, not just to conservatives) is being publicly seen to be right.

Paul Krugman isn't violently disliked by so many conservatives because he's a bad economist, or because he's a "liberal academic": he's violently disliked because he sees that Bush's economic policies are majorly broken, and says so - and is clearly speaking with earned and reliable authority.

I would think that most people probably want to be publicly seen as right. For some people, however, the want is a need, and a need intense enough that principles go down before it: liberals can't be allowed academic freedom, and forget all talk of "unnecessary government interference", if what "liberal academics" are saying is that modern conservatism is broken - and saying it with authority.

[WillieStyle]

"A forthcoming study by Stanley Rothman of Smith College looked at a random sample of more than 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183 institutions of higher learning. He found that across all faculty departments, including business and engineering, academics were over five times as likely to be liberals as conservatives."

I think this is one of the most interesting points from the new study. I've seen David Horowitz's "work" on this issue before. He invariably makes a distinction between "hard sciences" and "social sciences", claiming that while there are strict standards of truth in the hard science, the social sciences have become mushy loads of leftist pap made to indoctrinate our young. As proof of this, he shows that on issues that divide the nation (say the war in Iraq) academics are more unanimous in taking the left of centre view.

I see no reason why this form of reasoning cannot now be applied to the physical sciences. After all, 100% of Princeton Biologists believe in evolution whereas only 35% of the general public does. If that's not bias by Horowitz's standards, I don't know what is.

Hilzoy, asks who would get to decide when academics violated the bill of rights. I believe Horowitz et al. would answer, the general public. If academic views on an issue do not mirror those of the public at large, then that is in of it self, evidence of liberal bias and academia must be made to change its views. The new study Fund mentions simply implies that they'll extend this standard to all of science. Predictably, hillarity will ensue.
Look for legislative sessions questioning the close minded focus of University of [insert Red State here] physicists on the big bang to the exlusion of other theories. This nonsense will continue until the next "Sputnik".

[liberal japonicus]

more than 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183 institutions of higher learning

Thanks, Williestyle, for pulling that out. Dividing 183 into 1,700 (in order to give the benefit of the doubt to Rothman) gives 9.2 faculty members per university. Perhaps there is some randomization here, but 9 faculty members per university?

Googling to see if I could find anything about Rothman's study turns up this

-In 1981, S. Robert Lichter from George Washington University and Stanley Rothman of Smith College found that 56 percent of journalists from the most renowned publications and broadcast mediums such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, ABC, CBS and NBC said the people they worked with were mostly on the left, and only 8 percent on the right - a margin of 7-to-1.

http://www.dailyvanguard.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/05/25/40b2edb6cab38

And this from an interview

Political science tends to be among the more conservative of disciplines. Unlike sociologists or anthropologists, political scientists tend to be more conservative because they are concerned with questions of power. We assume there is such a thing as disorder and that you need power to bring it under control.
Nevertheless, the profession is turning in ways I find dissatisfying. There is tremendous emphasis on queer studies, gender studies, all of the postmodernist stuff. You also have the group that is concerned with "rational choice" that applies economic categories to everything. They also are very important, though I find them dull.
But I find the stuff that is done by the queer- and gender-studies people--people on the left--to be worse.

And this co-authored one arguing that the death penalty is not applied in a racially discriminatory manner
http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba121.html

And this one is interesting

"Surveys are always questionable, including ours," said Stanley Rothman, an author of the study who is a professor emeritus at Smith College. "But it shows that those who argue diversity will improve the education of everybody haven't made their case. The data does not support them."

This article points to this interesting passage

While Mr. Rothman's study did not concern itself with the latter point - that diverse colleges produce more civic-minded adults - it evaluated the question of educational quality by asking about 4,000 students, faculty members and administrators on about 140 campuses what they thought about the instruction offered at their universities. They also asked what they thought about the students around them, and whether discrimination existed in their college settings.

Which is an average of 28 people per campus. As we used to say back in the day, take of the shirt, it's too late to save the pants...

[votermom]

Isn't it just as simple as academics spend a lot of time thinking?

[wilfred]

Are conservatives asking for some sort of affirmative action to solve this 'supposed' problem?

[John Kelsey]

Er, relatively small samples from many colleges doesn't seem like evidence of bad research, unless there's some reason to think he's getting biased samples. In particular, why would sampling 28 people at random from each of 140 colleges be inherently bad? (I'm assuming it's really that they somehow tried to get N people from each university to answer their questions, and got an average of 28 or so per university.)

--John

[liberal japonicus]

Well, it's interesting that all of his conclusions seem to mirror conservative talking points. I don't know, maybe he's found a way to randomize it. But I would suggest that it's a warning flag. Apparently, the results were controlled for demographic biases, but it would seem that the affirmative action programs (and the student perception of them) would differ from school to school, especially since how affirmative action is administered for admissions is not common knowledge, so I'm wondering how a generalized perception about affirmative action programs can be considered to be data about how well these programs work.

Rothman's discussion of the results of that survey

"Three out of four oppose 'relaxing academic standards' to increase minority representation, as do a majority of faculty members. And an overwhelming 85 percent of students specifically reject the use of racial or ethnic "preferences" - along with a majority of faculty members. More telling, 62 percent of minority students oppose relaxing standards, and 71 percent oppose preferences.
Among the most striking findings is the silent opposition of so many who administer these programs - yet must publicly support them. Although a small majority of administrators support admissions preferences, 47.7 percent oppose them. In addition, when asked to estimate the impact of preferential admissions on university academic standards, about two-thirds say there is none.
Most dismaying, of those who think that preferences have some impact on academic standards, those believing it negative exceed those believing it positive by 15 to 1.

Yet in the abstract, it says that "We utilized a more indirect approach that asked members of the university community non-controversial questions about their perceptions and experiences" I'm not sure how asking if schools should relax academic standards to increase minority representation is not a controversial question.

Lani Guinier noted (and in the link that I gave she was selectively quoted to make it seem that she was saying something she didn't) that this may be a question of a persistence of racism rather than a true reflection of what is going on. Here's what the link I gave said:

The results were worrying enough for Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier to append her public criticism of the study with the caveat that "They may be onto something.".

and here is what she said in the NYTimes

Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, also took the study's method to task. In particular, she questioned whether the researchers had incorrectly emphasized race in the study, when their own findings showed that the selectivity of an institution had more of an impact on attitudes about educational quality.
Still, she agreed that the persistence of racial discrimination, even on the most integrated campuses, seemed plausible. "They may be onto something," Ms. Guinier said. "Universities cannot simply add more students of color and expect miracles to happen."

This sounds more like a tipping point phenomenon rather than a failure of diversity programs (or should I say the failure of diversity programs as an integrated part of a program to improve inter-racial understanding)

Perhaps someone with access could pull out the methodology. The abstract with a link to a full text version (for subscribing institutions) is here

[Bernard Yomtov]

This study, or at least the description of it, sounds ridiculous. What was the dependent variable? What were the regressors?

Did he define some of the 183 as "elite" and do some sort of logistic analysis? I assume he did something like that, otherwise he found out that liberals are liberals. Also, it is irrelevant that political views, however defined, are the "next best predictor." The question is whether they are a significant predictor, and what the other predictors were. Given that the population he starts with is 83% liberal, it's very hard to believe that this coefficient is significant.

Did Rothman include a dummy for "received doctorate from elite school" among his regressors? Elite schools hire from other elite schools. This definitely should have been included.

[ken]

I have never, ever, read anything John Fund wrote where he has not been wrong in some fundemental way to the point he was trying to make.

A more interesting topic would be why John Fund, being wrong about almost everything, gets any attention at all.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"Well, it's interesting that all of his conclusions seem to mirror conservative talking points. I don't know, maybe he's found a way to randomize it. But I would suggest that it's a warning flag."

Or it could be because he is correct. You should never discount the highly remote possibility that conservatives might, wholly by accident of course, have stumbled into the truth--and failing to recognize it as such decided to tout it instead of their usual fare of cynical lies. Sheesh.

As for liberal profs and groupthink, isn't the term being used to describe both informal peer pressure, and formal pressure used to enforce it in hiring practices?

Frankly I'm not going to support affirmative action for conservatives at universities, but neither am I excited by discriminatory hiring practices. But discriminatory hiring practices are incredibly hard to prove when you are only hiring three or four people a year in a department, so I would be surprised if we can get that to a legally actionable level.

I think more time publically exposing professorial idiocy to donors would be time better spent. That would cause pressure on departments to police their own--a highly effective method since it is how they have kept out conservatives in the first place.

[Edward]

aren't conservatives all to busy cheating old ladies out of their pensions to lower themselves to bother teaching? ;p

[Jackmormon]

Sebastion, discriminatory hiring practices are incredibly hard to prove when you are only hiring three or four people a year in a department, so I would be surprised if we can get that to a legally actionable level.

It will be impossible to prove to a legally actionable level. As a grad student on a hiring committee, I was instructed how to cover the department's ass from complaints from affirmative action pressure groups and from ideological criticism. It amounted to writing on the rejection form: "candidate's project doesn't fit departmental needs," or something like that. But we ended up hiring someone who wasn't entirely in lockstep with the ideological groupthink (ie, someone whose method and projects didn't really excite the faculty or students) because he/she was so damned qualified.

The point? Yeah, the game's loaded. But I think, I honestly do, that the system will self-correct, as long as the "conservatives" in question (always a problematic term in these contexts) are doing kick-ass work.

[WillieStyle]

Sebastian Holsclaw wrote:
I think more time publically exposing professorial idiocy to donors would be time better spent. That would cause pressure on departments to police their own--a highly effective method since it is how they have kept out conservatives in the first place.

Is it your contention Sebastian, that otherwise qualified conservatives have been frozen out of engineering and physics departments because of liberal bias in hiring practices?

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

If you want my general contention on engineering departments, they are more liberal because the good conservative boys and girls are making money at Qualcomm and Microsoft. Considering the private corporation hiring profile for the humanities, that isn't as likely an explanation for those departments.

[Jadegold]

No, Sebastian, Rothman isn't correct. And he has a long history of producing these 'poor conservative martyr' studies.

Good and great universities and colleges build their reputations over time. If all these liberal elitist profs are so bad--surely the marketplace would take note and Adam Smith's invisible hand would make the necessary corrections.

Surely Harvard and Stanford and Berkley would be swept asunder by George Mason U. and Bob Jones U. and Liberty U.

But it hasn't happened. And, frankly, it's not gonna.

So, what to do if you're a conservative academic? Why, force your way onto the successful university faculty.

The question that goes a-begging, of course, is if there all these super-talented conservative academics out there--why aren't there any top-notch conservative universities or colleges?

[liberal japonicus]

Or it could be because he is correct. You should never discount the highly remote possibility that conservatives might, wholly by accident of course, have stumbled into the truth--and failing to recognize it as such decided to tout it instead of their usual fare of cynical lies. Sheesh.

Sheesh yourself. I am prepared to entertain the possibility that some conservative talking points are more correct than their corresponding liberal talking points and I don't think that is a remote possibility (I will only mention in passing how the Bush admin's approach seems to willingly ignore any conservative talking points that I think have a chance of being correct) But to have the whole panalopy of conservative talking points proved by this one courageous professor (emeritus) without any apparent evidence that the corresponding liberal talking points might not be correct in some way to be as ignorant.

Rothman seems to be a force in the National Association of Scholars, which seems to have a bee in its bonnet about anything to do with race, gender or ethnicity.

[WillieStyle]

If you want my general contention on engineering departments, they are more liberal because the good conservative boys and girls are making money at Qualcomm and Microsoft.

Yes, we all know that silicon valley is a bastion of conservatism ;)
But how does one explain physicists?

Considering the private corporation hiring profile for the humanities, that isn't as likely an explanation for those departments.

Perhaps realizing the employment prospects in the humanities are slim, good conservative boys and girls decided to go make money at Qualcomm and Microsoft instead? See, no liberal conspiracy is needed when you bust out the conjecture gun.

[Jadegold]

Another question: how do you recognize a conservative or liberal engineering professor? Maybe the liberal EE prof teaches the 'left hand rule' vice the 'right hand rule.'

[Jesurgislac]

You should never discount the highly remote possibility that conservatives might, wholly by accident of course, have stumbled into the truth--and failing to recognize it as such decided to tout it instead of their usual fare of cynical lies.

Conservatives, possibly. The Bush administration, never. ;-)

[radish]

Or it could be because he is correct.

Man I love philosophy of science! Here we get a peek at the subtle difference between the way that "hard" and "soft" scientists approach their data.

"Hard" scientists have a tendancy to freak if you assert something like the above. Show an astrophysicist a data set that perfectly supports their theory and they'll immediately start by trying to find the methodological flaw that must exist, even if they had nothing to do with collecting that data. But show the same level of confidence and methodological formality to an anthropologist and they'll publish today and expect tenure tomorrow, even if they collected the data themselves (which, technically speaking, makes it automatically more suspect than it would be otherwise).

Now there's obviously nothing wrong with collecting your own data. And there's nothing wrong with the "soft" approach (and even if there were I wouldn't be in a position to diss it). Some kinds of inquiry that just don't lend themselves to methodological purity (plus it just creates too darn much work!).

But heed this simple truth, O scientists of all plasticities and ideological stripes: the null hypothesis is your true friend and the data is your true enemy -- not the other way 'round.

Jadegold, I don't know about EE, but lefty chemists can easily be recognized by their preference for levorotary isomers ;-)

[Anarch]

Perhaps realizing the employment prospects in the humanities are slim, good conservative boys and girls decided to go make money at Qualcomm and Microsoft instead? See, no liberal conspiracy is needed when you bust out the conjecture gun.

I've made virtually the same argument to Sebastian at least three times before, WillieStyle. Let's see if it takes this time.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

I'm not invested in the 'liberals control the university' argument. They do. I don't really care why. I've personally experienced their contempt for competing viewpoints. I know others who have experienced worse. And it doesn't bother me that much because they destroy their own influence by embracing silliness.

I do find it amusing that in general, conservatives and liberals flip-flop on the burden of proof on this issue. Generally liberals are perfectly happy with the idea that disparate population distributions in the workplace strongly suggest discrimination. Only when the discrimination alleged is against a non-favored group do they get all huffy about proving causation. This is especially interesting since the deviation from the norm is far worse at the university than it is in even very blatant racial/sexual discrimination cases. In those cases a 15-20% deviation would be considered almost damning. The observed deviation in the humanities is MUCH greater. Conservatives flip-flop the other way. They typically want proof of causation. Whatever the appropriate burden, it is crystal clear that it ought to be applied in both cases. But we don't live in a rational world. I typically want proof of causation. I want it for racial discrimination cases and political discrimination cases before legal action is taken. The evidence is typically very difficult to obtain. I'm fine with that.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

But if we are talking about bad behaviour, I'm not ok with this dismissal: "Nor is it obvious to me that a disproportionate number of cases of professorial bad behavior involve politics: I knew a professor once who spent the better part of a class making fun of a student for not drinking beer at parties. Really." Precisely how many cases of bad professorial bad behaviour involving politics would be 'disproportionate'? How many cases of employment discrimination would have to occur for it to be disproportionate?

[Anarch]

Generally liberals are perfectly happy with the idea that disparate population distributions in the workplace strongly suggest discrimination. Only when the discrimination alleged is against a non-favored group do they get all huffy about proving causation.

Apparently you didn't read any of my posts on the matter during our past three conversations. A pity; some of them contained far better exposition than I have time for now. In brief: the underlying analogy you're trying to make assumes that a) conservatives are as likely to want to join academia as liberals and b) ideological differences are functionally isomorphic to biological/genetic differences; and furthermore that c) conservatives have been the victim of a sufficient history of discrimination throughout their lives (irrespective of education, career, etc.) as to require government intervention to rectify the matter.

Thus far, you've failed to prove any of these and, if memory serves, you've failed to even address most of them. Fourth time's the charm, I guess.

[WillieStyle]

I'm not invested in the 'liberals control the university' argument. They do. I don't really care why.

Really? You don't? I for one think it's a fascinating question.
You've floated two reasons:
1) Liberals discriminate against conservatives in hiring.
If find this explanation especially implausible because:
- in society conservatives, unlike minorities, have just as much power as their ostensible oppressors.
-Liberal Universities vastly outperform conservative ones
-Apolitical fields like physics and engineering are also predominantly liberal.

2) Conservatives are too busy making money. I find this a plausible argument as to why conservatives are under-represented in such fields as art history, but I think it fails to explain the situation in such fields as engineering. A quick look at the voting patterns of tech centers like Sillicon Valley, Austin, Boulder, The Research Triangle in NC and elsewhere strongly suggests that conservatives are not over-represented in high-tech industry either.

There is one other explanation I can think of.
3) Cultural liberalism correlates strongly with higher education. This has a lot to do with religion. I've seen surveys that suggest that atheism is far more prevalent amongst scientists than the general populace.
Look at the blogosphere (another place where the highly educated seem to be over represented) where even conservative bloggers are likely to support gay marriage.
Now this sort of thing wouldn't have mattered 50 to 100 years ago when your average Democrat was probably just as culturally conservative as your average Republican (if not more so). Today, however, cultural conservatism/liberalism correlates very strongly with political conservatism/liberalism hence the bias towards cultural liberalism amongst academics, scientists and engineers that has always existed has become much more obvious.

[Slartibartfast]

My take on this, in case anyone's interested, is that I'd want to see the data. But regardless, assuming the results are correct, hilzoy is right: correlation isn't always causation; the causal mechanism might be some other factor that's also got a high correlation coefficient. Liberalism in the faculty, assuming that's a foregone conclusion, may be the effect and not the cause.

I also agree that the sample size leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Only querying a few faculty members per university, for example, opens up the question of whether this is a random sampling, or whether the sampler cherry-picked the faculty members in question so as to yield the desired result.

Finally, in disciplines where political persuasion is utterly irrelevant (the Stefan-Boltzmann constant doesn't care what party you belong to), concern about liberalism in the faculty is...misplaced, to be kind.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Great post, hilzoy.

It occurs to me that anyone planning a career in higher education must either be comfortable with state funding, or endure a great deal of cognitive dissonance. You would expect principled free market ideologues to shun academia on general principle--it's full of public universities, subsidized student loans, and government funded research. Can you imagine how humiliating it would be for a true John Bircher to beg the NEH for grant money?

[Katherine]

Someone survey entering grad students and compare it to surveys of professors, to give ANY evidence that this is ANYTHING besides self-selection. (I do not believe that there is any deliberate discrimination against conservative grad students, and unconscious bias would be much less of a problem when you're going off of GRE scores and grades as much as anything else.) It is also useful to separate the humanities and the hard sciences--but only to a point; I would guess there is minor discrimination in some humanities and none in the hard sciences, but I bet there's more self-selection too. I don't think the lack of male women's studies majors or straight people doing queer studies is mainly on account of gender discrimination, and a lot of conservatives tend to look at sociology, psychology, etc. as "soft" and "made up."

Get some data. It's not such an impossible task. Then we'll talk. Until then it's just knees jerking in opposite directions.

[hilzoy]

Sebastian: "But if we are talking about bad behaviour, I'm not ok with this dismissal: "Nor is it obvious to me that a disproportionate number of cases of professorial bad behavior involve politics: I knew a professor once who spent the better part of a class making fun of a student for not drinking beer at parties. Really." Precisely how many cases of bad professorial bad behaviour involving politics would be 'disproportionate'? How many cases of employment discrimination would have to occur for it to be disproportionate?"

-- I wasn't sufficiently clear on this. To amplify: a lot of conservative writing on this topic -- e.g., the pernicious effects of the disproportionate (relative to the population at large) number of liberals in academia -- just recites anecdotes and leaps to conclusions. -- Here I had in mind anecdotes about e.g. liberal professors ridiculing conservative views in class, or dismissing them out of hand; this was partly because Fund cites one such example. I did not have in mind cases of employment discrimination. I think both bad behavior in class and employment discrimination are bad, but the latter tends to be worse ('tends' because, being a philosopher and all, no sooner did I start to write this sentence than all sorts of appalling things that one might do in a classroom flashed into my head.) Had I been thinking of employment discrimination, I would not have been written what I did. But I should have been clearer.

For what it's worth, politics have never come up in any interview I've been part of (on either side, applicant or interviewer.) This obviously shows next to nothing, anecdotes being what they are. But my sense is that, in my discipline at least, it's not common for these questions to arise unless something about the applicant's work invites it (e.g., she is writing on the application of some political theory to a policy problem, or something.) Those non-merit-related factors that come into play are far more likely to involve things like: does the candidate look and act like the person you imagined yourself hiring? Has someone on the search committee had a bad experience with people from the candidate's grad program? Etc.

True story: around the time I was applying for my first job, I discovered that I seemed to be coming off to people as hard, somehow; distrustful or angry or something. (This is not how I usually strike people, as far as I know.) On reflection, I thought that it was partly because I was very, very focussed on finishing my dissertation, and partly because of certain experiences in my recent past. Obviously, plan A was to try to do whatever work on my character I needed to do to get over this. But that didn't address the more immediate problem of how I was going to neutralize this aura that I seemed to have before my job interviews. So I decided also to adopt plan B: fluffy hair. I went out and got a perm, and had all my interviews with a sort of golden cloud of hair. To this day I am convinced that this affected how I did on the job market.

Politics, in a broader sense, played a role too: on the one hand, my previously all white, all male department, which had only two years ago hired its first ever Catholic (!), was under pressure to hire a woman; on the other, this was an idea which filled some of my senior colleagues with dread. (On the surface, because they assumed a woman would only be interested in feminist epistemology, since as we all know while men have diverse interests, women are only interested in feminist topics. Deeper down, because several of them seemed to think that if they hired a woman, their actual mothers would suddenly appear in the department. Literally. And these were not guys who got on well with their mothers. I spent years defusing their fears. What fun.) And they seemed to think that I was "a woman they could deal with." Now: I do try to be equable and personable and all, but I did not take this as a compliment. And it would clearly have been helpful had I been more conservative (they were, and in their minds a liberal woman was more disconcerting.)

And I haven't even mentioned, nor will I elaborate on, the completely stupid reason why I was acceptable to the most difficult member of the department, who had a history of objecting to anyone they were thinking of hiring. Suffice it to say that it was completely irrelevant to anything worth considering in a hiring decision.

So: how do you get this sort of stuff out of hiring decisions? I have no idea, other than to try your best to identify it and work against it.

[Bernard Yomtov]

My take on this, in case anyone's interested, is that I'd want to see the data.

Of course. And, as Katherine points out, you have to be careful what population you're comparing to. Probably you should first look at doctoral students. Then you might back up and look at undergraduates applying to doctoral programs. Make sure you adjust for grades and GRE scores. Then you can build a statistical case. Until then it's nonsense.

[radish]

Much hilarity and giggling in the radish household, once I got a chance to do like lj and look into Professor Rothman's checkered and once-respectable past.

My official position: "I got twenty bucks that says Rothman's data will turn out to be unmitigated garbage and his methodology steeply tilted, assuming he ever bothers to explain it." Of course, as Fund so carefully explains, this is surely Big Science In Action, because Rothman used "a statistical analysis." Come to think of it, maybe his data don't matter anyway.

There are thigh-slappers left and right along this trail. I liked this bit from that interview: "And the ideology of liberalism is so self-aggrandizing and selfish, with its emphasis on self-development, self-realization, that it is unsatisfying." Talk about some low self-esteem ;-)

[Anarch]

Finally, in disciplines where political persuasion is utterly irrelevant (the Stefan-Boltzmann constant doesn't care what party you belong to)...

...but my God, can you imagine the applications if it did?

[Katherien]

Interesting note on how difficult it is to get a handle on these things: The law review in my school is overwhelmingly male. I had assumed that this was because the applicant pool was mainly male, but it turns out not to be true. Applicants, like students here in general, are about 50-50.

The next theory was that admitting people on the basis of first year grades favored men--but while they do tend to get somewhat higher grades, most people are now chosen by a writing competition & that selects if anything fewer women. It's completely anonymous, and for the most part there's not even handwriting you could use to guess

So no one can figure it out. I think 1/3 of us secretly suspect girls are just a little dumber or less suited for legal analysis, 1/3 of us secretly suspect there's a certain writing style and tone that are more acceptable, more the way Things Are Done at law review, and people who write that way are more likely to be male, and 1/3 of us have no earthly clue and wish they would release some data so we could figure it out.

I am in the third category, though if forced to choose between the first and second I probably wouldn't choose the first. I also wondered if they were deliberately going for more ideological balance, but that's probably as self serving use of anecdote by data as anything else on this thread--2 of the 4 people I know on it are vocal conservatives. (vocal conservatives at my school are overwhelmingly male, so if half the editorial board is on the federalist society that's definitely part of it, but I really doubt that's the case).

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Apparently you didn't read any of my posts on the matter during our past three conversations. A pity; some of them contained far better exposition than I have time for now. In brief: the underlying analogy you're trying to make assumes that a) conservatives are as likely to want to join academia as liberals and b) ideological differences are functionally isomorphic to biological/genetic differences; and furthermore that c) conservatives have been the victim of a sufficient history of discrimination throughout their lives (irrespective of education, career, etc.) as to require government intervention to rectify the matter. Thus far, you've failed to prove any of these and, if memory serves, you've failed to even address most of them. Fourth time's the charm, I guess.

Anarch, at any given moment I'm involved in at least a dozen conversations on a huge array of topics. I chat on at least 5-10 separate boards every week. Over the course of the three or four years I've since I began talking about politics online I'm certain I've had thousands of discussions with hundreds of people. Please forgive me for not remembering the exact contours of every past discussion with every person I have every exchanged typed words with. (I'm much better at precisely remembering conversations with people I've met.) Furthermore I'm certainly not going to feel bad for addressing the most common complaints first.

In any case,

A) is a problem in all fields of discrimination research. It is notoriously hard to prove, for example, that African-Americans people want to be mathematicians as much as Chinese-Americans. Doesn't change my analogy.

B) is worth exploring if you want, but I certainly believe that discrimination can take place in response to non-biological characteristics. For example the classic discrimination cases are on the basis of religion or nationality. Doesn't change my analogy.

C) completely misrepresents my position. In most cases, I argue against government intervention. I'm not even arguing for government intervention in the case at hand. I'm arguing for public shaming of the worst departments and perhaps donor disapproval as shown by withholding donations. I'm arguing for more transparency in the hiring process to prove or disprove the allegations.

While we are trading anedoctes here are two of mine:

In my first year at UCSD we were subjected to "Dimensions of Culture". DoC was theoretically the basic college writing course, but it was also a hyper-PC indoctrination course. While informal in my internet writing, in my formal essay writing I have always been rather polished. I rarely scored worse than an A- and never worse than a B. We were required to write 'persuasive essay' on a 'controversial topic'. It was a five page essay. I was competeing with people who couldn't string sentences together. I wrote one of the best essays of my life. For three pages I examined why we find child abuse to be a particularly horrible crime. On page four I transitioned to abortion and discussed why many of the same things we find horrible about child abuse (defenceless victim, sense of innocence, etc.) apply to an analysis of abortion. I got a D. The only marks on the paper were that the transitional sentence was circled with a comment to the effect of: "Thesis statements belong at the beginning." Which of course would have been far less persuasive.

Anecdote 2:

Same class. Different semester. The professor spends weeks hammering that morality is cultural, no culture is better than another, and that right and wrong can't be judged across cultures. He was an anthropologist, and I'm not kidding when I say he taught complete relativism.

Late in the quarter, the discussion turned to the horrible institution of apartheid in South Africa. It was explained to us as a horrific example of one culture subjugating another (which it is). I asked the classic anti-relativist question: in the framework of non-judgment across cultures, how was it possible to condemn the Afrikaan culture which embraced the degradation of black people? Didn't that imply that some values were independent of culture? I was viciously attacked for being a racist and publically flayed for quite some time. I made it quite clear that I was not defending apartheid, but that it made no sense to condemn it unless there was some sort of universal principle involved--a concept that went against the previous teachings in our class.

The year-long class had many more subtle instances--it was completely clear that my views were intolerable AND not to be engaged.

[Katherine]

Sorry, there may be something there.

It's just that in other areas, complaints of liberal bias are so dominated by transparent bullying and junk analysis that I find them intrinsically not credible without data.

And there has been not even any attempt to look for the data here, just a lot of complaining. I'm sure comparing entering grad students or grad school applicants is not a perfect instrument, but right now there's the correlation must equal causation fallacy and very little else.

[Urinated State of America (aka Tom)]

"I'm not invested in the 'liberals control the university' argument."

I'll match your anecdote for anecdote. I know one university where the entire economic department is ran by Austrian schoolers who assign as a required text a book advocating the Federal Reserve should be abolished and replaced with multiple competing currencies. Similarly, I ran to endure an economics course where the libertarian professor laid the anti-gubmint rhetoric so thick that I asked out loud "can we have more education and less indoctination please". (Mind you, I scored 99% on the final, though, so evidently he didn't bear a grudge.)

"They do. I don't really care why."

So, I'll trade you Dartmouth, Stanfurd, and all state universities West of the Missippi (except the University of California) for the Whitehouse and the Supreme Court. If you throw in the Senate, you can have the entire MLA convert to Reaganism.

Do we have a deal?

[WillieStyle]

Late in the quarter, the discussion turned to the horrible institution of apartheid in South Africa. It was explained to us as a horrific example of one culture subjugating another (which it is). I asked the classic anti-relativist question: in the framework of non-judgment across cultures, how was it possible to condemn the Afrikaan culture which embraced the degradation of black people? Didn't that imply that some values were independent of culture? I was viciously attacked for being a racist and publically flayed for quite some time. I made it quite clear that I was not defending apartheid, but that it made no sense to condemn it unless there was some sort of universal principle involved--a concept that went against the previous teachings in our class.

I remember this anecdote. You posted it once on Crookedtimber. Pissed me off then too. I must say, that story reflects very poorly on the Prof. Not to get into an anecdote war, but I've been in academia for six years now and, while I've been surrounded by considerably more liberals than conservatives, I've never seen such wanton stupidity. When I was an undergrad I had many class discussions on Affirmative Action, abortion and the death penalty that never devolved into such reactionary nonesense. In short, while predominantly liberal faculty may be ubiquitous in academia, millitant moralizing relativists aren't. Hence I suspect getting rid of such garbage - a goal I fully endorse - won't give you the ideologically balanced academia you want. I suspect that 90% of campaign contributions from MIT professors will still go to Democrats.

[hilzoy]

Sebastian (and USA): what moronic professors. On behalf of the profession, I apologize (I'm serious.) Most of the people I work with bend over backwards not to do this stuff, but jerks are jerks. I don't know when this happened, but there was sort of a wave of this stuff in the early 90s, which has mercifully subsided. (Students were into it too; I ran into a few students who seemed to think that if you said to an argument, 'you were written by a dead white guy!', it would run away screaming in terror.)

[Edward]

Yeah, the "Dead White Guy" thing. Tough one. I approach considering the "canon" from the POV that, in part, we're only now able to see its authors as Dead White Guys because of their leading us to this place. In other words, they wrote their own epitaphs, so to speak.

The thing is, even within their members only club, groups of them went in and out of fashion, so even if the Dead White Guy thing had managed to totally discredit their accomplishments for the world at large, eventually they'd have been "rediscovered" by some future generation. It works like that. The trick is to ensure your thoughts get recorded and passed on.

[liberal japonicus]

My Greek teacher was involved in a project to reintroduce a set of classical works to undergraduate students and published a paper about it. In the same volume was a paper by 2 grad TAs from the Stanford program that acted as a combination diversity (in that it specifically put together students from disparate backgrounds into small colloquium style classes) classics (in that the material was a number of 'classic' works) and was cancelled because it was nothing but "Dead White Guys" (I'm looking for the article, but I can't find it anywhere, so I may be screwing up the details) One point that was made in the paper is that what is often not realized is how radical the Dead White Guys were and how much they were challenging the social order that they were a part of. I think that they suggested that one of the reasons that these were considered classics is not because they reflected the age in which they were produced, but they poked at all the problems that they saw.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Crying "liberal bias" is a brilliant right wing propaganda tactic. It's true that college professors are significantly more liberal than the population at large. It's also true that the Democratic party is the natural home for intelligent, well-educated people.

Ideological preferences aside, academics vote their self-interest when they vote Democrat. We expect steelworkers to support parties that create jobs in their industries. We academics appreciate that reasoning, too.

The Republicans are hostile to post-secondary education and to any kind of research that doesn't involve putting a man on Mars. They just slashed the Pell grants. They oppose the teaching of evolution--much to the chagrin of every life sciences professor in the country. Etc, etc.

Moreover, Republicans are alienating the best and the brightest with their militant anti-intellectualism. They slander us and our work and they expect us to support them. When we don't, they slander us with unsupported charges of bigotry. It's not our problem folks.

[Anarch]

Sebastian: Please forgive me for not remembering the exact contours of every past discussion with every person I have every exchanged typed words with.

Your hyperbolic martyrdom notwithstanding, I'd be less torqued if this weren't the fourth time you've raised this chestnut in my virtual presence, especially since on each of the previous times I gave you a lengthy response which garnered, well, almost nothing in return. At this point my stamina for such encounters is minimal; nonetheless, once more unto the breach...

A) is a problem in all fields of discrimination research. It is notoriously hard to prove, for example, that African-Americans people want to be mathematicians as much as Chinese-Americans. Doesn't change my analogy.

In fact, it does: conservativism is an ideology as is liberalism, and unlike race (to use your example above). There's a clear potential for selection bias correlated with this ideology away from academia; less floridly, fewer conservatives may well choose to put themselves through the agony of grad school than liberals.* Which is pertinent because of part b)...

* If we're swapping anecdotal data, this correlation is nearly 100% in my life: absolutely none of my conservative friends from college chose to go into academia -- law and business school excepted for the obvious reasons -- despite my knowing roughly equal numbers of liberals and conservatives as an undergrad. Of the 100+ grad students I've had serious conversations with, about a dozen could be described as conservative (although I know another dozen or so who'd be described as somewhere between apolitical and libertarian) and most of them dropped out of grad school or academia rather than subject themselves to shite we have to deal with.

[There's a lengthier anecdote along these lines that I find highly illuminating, but I'll spare y'all for the nonce.]

B) is worth exploring if you want, but I certainly believe that discrimination can take place in response to non-biological characteristics. For example the classic discrimination cases are on the basis of religion or nationality. Doesn't change my analogy.

In fact, it does: your remarks are only pertinent in cases where religion and nationality are orthogonal to the disciplines in question. I doubt you'd get far in claiming anti-Amish discrimination in the physical sciences, for example, even though they're woefully underrepresented there. Likewise, a campaign supporting "Animal-haters for veterinarians!" would find itself similarly underwhelming; ditto "Die-hard Marxists for CEO!".

This is the problem with trying to argue "bias" against an ideological group: since membership in that group inherently means one adopts a particular ideology, if that ideology runs counter to the precepts of the discipline in question, you're not going to get much crossover and any under-representation effects would be attributable to purely self-selection biasing. This is not the case with regards to other groupings, e.g. racial or gender, where such biasing would be (as far as we know) significantly reduced if it existed at all. Until you address that point -- which you still haven't -- your arguments here don't hold water.

C) completely misrepresents my position. In most cases, I argue against government intervention.

That's not the point I was addressing. The point that you've made in the past, and which you seem to have been making here, is that liberals should somehow feel ashamed of supporting affirmative action (or AA-like endeavours) in one area and not in another.* My counter is that the two are distinct and that there's therefore no inconsistency.

* You actually referred to "discriminatory hiring practices", which I took as looking at the problem in negative. You also, of course, uttered it as fact when you have not proven it as such; you're begging the question rather fiercely here.

I'm arguing for public shaming of the worst departments and perhaps donor disapproval as shown by withholding donations.

If I had any confidence in what you meant by "worst", I'd agree: I think bad professors (such as those you mentioned) should be shamed and I'd like to see more done to curtail such behaviours. That said, I don't see a systemic remedy as being either warranted or even meaningful absent a systemic problem (see WillieStyle's 1:34am post), which you have thus far failed to establish.

[Slartibartfast]

Crying "liberal bias" is a brilliant right wing propaganda tactic.

It is? So far it's not doing all that well, tactically.

academics vote their self-interest when they vote Democrat

Change "academics" to "voters" and remove "Democrat", and I think you've got a fundamental law of politics.

The Republicans are hostile to post-secondary education and to any kind of research that doesn't involve putting a man on Mars

We are? Perhaps I should go read your blog, so I can learn some more things about myself that are, to be kind, completely counter to any evidence.

Moreover, Republicans are alienating the best and the brightest with their militant anti-intellectualism.

And another one. Oh, goody. No, it's not intellectualism that I have a problem with, it's intellectuals saying stupid things. Like Paul Krugman on NPR last night, calling the United States a "banana republic".

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

What makes you think the "liberal bias" strategy is tactically ineffective? Its goals are to smear liberals as hypocrites and to make Democrats defensive about their presence in the universities. So far, it seems to be working. On a practical level, David Horowitz' academic bill of rights is gaining support in several states.

The fact that Democrats predominate in universities is a feature, not a bug as far as our party is concerned. Our image should be: smart, thoughtful people vote Democrat.

Another compelling Democratic counterattack: Many Republican policies are inconsistent with the best science and social science of our day, so experts from those areas don't vote Republican.

Republicans are hostile to science, research, and public funding for post secondary education. A few examples: evolution, young earth creationist tracts at the Grand Canyon, stem cell research, that embarrassing cloning ban gambit, wasteful and fraudulent Missile Defense, the politicization of the NIH to the point that researchers are specifically advised not to put words like "HIV" and "harm reduction" in the titles of papers on those topics, lest their grant application be denied out of hand by ideologues, slashing Pell grants, etc., etc. Don't forget the hackdom of Bill Bennett and Lynne Cheney as Republican heads of the NEH. Lynne Cheney had millions of publicly funded history teaching guides destroyed because they didn't fit with her ideology (too much Harriet Tubman, not enough Paul Revere).

The rhetoric of the Republican party is anti-intellectual and you know it. Remember how Bush and his minions mocked Kerry for his "nuance." How should that strike someone who practices nuance for a living?

The Republicans are driving away intellectuals and then blaming intellectuals for their own recruiting failures.

Please, join us at Majikthise. You're always welcome.

[Jesurgislac]

Like Paul Krugman on NPR last night, calling the United States a "banana republic".

How is that stupid? You'll have to give context and explain.

RUSSERT: In your book, the introduction, you say, very openly, 'This is not a happy book.'

Prof. KRUGMAN: These are not happy times. You know, I--I'm--I'm a professional economist before I became a columnist. And just looking at the economic things, the budget is--it's actually desperate. I mean, you actually try to figure out how we--how in the long run we pay our bills given this budget deficit, and you can't see it. And, yet, you ask: What's the possibility of us politically doing something reasonable? Given where we are now, you don't see it. You know, you go through a bunch of these things and it really is extremely frightening.

RUSSERT: Our budget deficit for the year is now projected to be close to $500 billion.

Prof. KRUGMAN: Yeah, and that's--of course, that's counting in the surplus that Social Security runs, which it needs to run to pay for the future. So if you take Social Security off the picture, what we've got is a situation where now more than one-third of federal spending is borrowed money. So we would have to have a--roughly a 60 percent increase in revenues to balance the budget in a real sense now, and probably more, if you take other--other liabilities into account. So we're really--this is Banana Republic territory. You know, we--we--we think we're America, but we're looking more and more like Argentina, if you actually look at the numbers. cite

In context, "banana republic" is a good verbal image for the direction Bush & Co are taking the US economy. For you to cite it as "stupid" is absurd on the face of it, unless last night Krugman used it in a context suggesting he actually believed the US's economy is entirely dependent on bananas (rather than simply unstable and heavily dependent on China). Did he?

[Jesurgislac]

Whoops. Fixed the link: cite above.

[Edward]

hmmmm...Jes seems to have you there Slarti. Krugman's metaphor seems not only intelligent but on the mark in context.

[hilzoy]

Lindsay: part of what Slart was getting at is one of our rules, which is: statements involving terms like 'Republicans' or 'Democrats' refer to all Republicans or Democrats, and can be taken this way. Thus, 'many Republicans are hostile to science' would be better, unless you actually mean all of them. (We find that this helps with our attempt to maintain dialogue among both sides. And I find it very useful when someone says e.g. 'Democrats don't care about values'.)

That said, I agree that charges of bias have been somewhat effective, at least in the general public. Not as effective as charges of bias in the media, though, which have had lots of major publications on the defensive for decades.

[Katherine]

the economics grad students I know are 2/3 to 3/4 liberal. the professors are, if anything, a bit more conservative. this is a grad school that has a reputation for being on the liberal side, but I am 99.9% confident they are not choosing grad students based on ideology.

My law school is also disproportionately liberal, though less so than my undergrad and other comparable law schools. It is pretty clear that they choose students almost entirely on a mechanical formula of grades and LSAT scores.

The worry is not that they'll hire more conservatives. I don't think that's something science or econ departments need to be worrying about too much (in econ, I am pretty sure that they're only voting Democratic because the Republican party is currently controlled by a bunch of economic incompetents. Econ professors are, um, not known for their socialistic tendencies.) but there are some departments that might benefit from it--assuming you could FIND conservative anthropologists and sociologists to hire.

No, the main purpose of all this kvetching isn't to increase opportunities for conservatives in academia. It's to dismiss the professional opinions of academics and other experts as liberal bias, whether it's in science or economics or history. It's part of the ongoing war against objective truth. The claim will be that the Heritage Foundation is as credible as Harvard. It's laughable, but so is the idea that Fox News is as credible as the BBC, or that the NY Post is as credible as the NY Times.

[Edward]

It's laughable, but so is the idea that Fox News is as credible as the BBC, or that the NY Post is as credible as the NY Times.

I would agree, but what measure is there to verify this? I would suggest the more "trustworthy" organizations' willingness to re-evaluate and critique themselves, but is that a good enough measure?

[Slartibartfast]

So far, it seems to be working

So, in other words, your contention is that people in general regard liberals as hypocrites. Nice thesis, but let's see the data.

[liberal japonicus]

So, in other words, your contention is that people in general regard liberals as hypocrites. Nice thesis, but let's see the data

It might be seen in a poll like this where the prestige of scientists has dropped steadily since 1977. You could argue that 'teachers' have improved in job prestige, but I have a feeling that this is for elementary and secondary ed rather than tertiary. (I'm also not suggesting that all university teachers are scientists, but this is the closest thing that I can find at the moment)

[Slartibartfast]

Ah, your link led me to yet another example of smart people saying stupid things.

about 60 percent of the deficit is directly attributable to the Bush tax cuts

Of course, the actual figures are quite different.

And if you think that there's any substantial parallel between the US economy and that of Argentina that doesn't involve intellectual double-jointedness, feel free to make it. Krugman didn't in either setting (yours or mine) other than just asserting it to be so.

[Slartibartfast]

From your source, LJ:

With the exception of teachers, no occupation or profession on the list has improved its ratings since 1977.

Are all occupations (excepting teachers) dominated by liberals? Or was there some other point you'd care to make?

[crionna]

So, perhaps Mr. Krugman's remark should better be seen as an insult to Argentina?

When I Google "banana republic" the first two hits are, as expected, the clothing chain. The third discusses the "coup" that occurred in 2000 and the fifth seems to agree with Mr. Krugman (although, I'd guess, or maybe hope, that he wouldn't agree with them).

The fourth discusses in brief the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, the archetypical banana republic where Only 10 percent of the land was available for 90 percent of the population.

Mr. Krugman's comment seems, well, maybe not stupid, but rather ill considered, to me in that many of us understand the term "banana republic" and by using that term he manages to diminish his argument with a poor comparison, link himself to the "stolen-election" people and insult Argentina all with just two words. Very, economical of him ;)

[liberal japonicus]

It's interesting that you bring that up. The fact that _all_ professions deal with rational thought seem to have dropped could be attributed to (if you are a librul like me) the ability to utilize populist rhetoric against any group. Doctors, well, you know how they feel about malpractice. Engineer!? Also note the graph that charts the change since 1977. Military officer wasn't a choice in 1977, but if you look, there is a 25% increase from 1982 (not saying that there's anything wrong with that, just suggesting that there is a zeitgeist thing here)

On the other hand, member of congress has increased by 7% since 92.

[Slartibartfast]

That automatically invalidates the entire poll, as far as I'm concerned.

[liberal japonicus]

I'm not sure how googling phrases and finding out what the top ranked web sites associated with those terms can be taken as indicative of how a phrase is used. Semantics is not a case of winner take all. I recommend that you type into Google 'define: (term)' to give you a better idea rather than use web sites, which has a bit of a Rorschach Inkblot Test.

If you type in 'banana republic' you get
" a small country (especially in Central America) that is politically unstable and whose economy is dominated by foreign companies and depends on one export (such as bananas) "

[liberal japonicus]

That automatically invalidates the entire poll, as far as I'm concerned.

that's why most of us consider you one of the thoughtful members of the right side of the aisle ;^)

[hilzoy]

Slart: I haven't taken the time to do the math, but when I checked your link to figures about the deficit, one possible explanation for the discrepancy occurs to me. The CBO, in its official figures, is legally required not to assume that any changes in existing policy will happen. This is normally smart -- you wouldn't want them skewing the numbers by assuming all sorts of unlikely things that might or might not happen. However, at the moment it means that the CBO must make all sorts of assumptions that more or less everyone thinks are very unlikely, and that Bush is committed to falsifying. In particular, they have to assume that the tax cuts will sunset on schedule, rather than being made permanent. Since the sunset provisions were put in precisely to avoid the appearance that the tax cuts would be horrendously expensive, and since they include such insane features as the estate tax going down to zero one year and being reinstated in full the next (what I think of as the 'kill your rich parents' clause), this seems deeply unlikely.

Moreover, there's the matter of fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax. (You probably know everything I'm saying; I'm just being on the safe side, not trying to be condescending...) The AMT was put in place to ensure that rich people paid some minimum tax rather than being able to shelter everything away, but because the level at which it kicks in is not indexed to inflation, it is beginning to affect all sorts of people it was never designed to affect, and again, there's a broad consensus that this needs to be fixed. But (for the same reason as above) the CBO figures cannot assume that it will be, so they assume instead that the AMT will remain as it is now, and thus that it will generate large revenues for the government.

A lot of the time when people talk about the deficit, and the share of it that's due to the tax cuts, they use CBO numbers modified to assume that the tax cuts are made permanent and that the AMT is fixed (in a fairly obvious, non-controversial way), on the grounds that these assumptions are almost certainly true, and surely more accurate than the assumptions the CBO is required to make.

[Jesurgislac]

Slarti: Krugman didn't in either setting (yours or mine) other than just asserting it to be so.

So you claim, but (as you decline to provide context) I see no facts for you to base your claim on.

In the context I gave, Krugman was clearly using "banana republic" figuratively rather than literally. You refuse to give the context in which you heard him use the term, which suggests that the context would not bear out your claim that it was "stupid".

[Slartibartfast]

Yep, I did it. I linked to a budget projection. Think of a suitably embarrassing punishment, and...well, just imagine imposing it on me. In the meantime, there's some current-year data in there to be found, if you only look hard enough.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Hilzoy, thanks for clarifying the rule, I'll be more precise in the future. It's a good policy. I'm used to saying "Democrats" to refer to the leadership of the Democratic party and conversely for "Republicans." I wasn't talking about voters at large.

I'll restate. Why are so many professors Democrats? Possibly because so many Republican policies interfere with their work and their job security. Also, possibly because scholars feel personally offended by the anti-intellectual rhetoric streaming from the highest levels of the Republican party. Strictly speaking, all I need to show is that many professors believe that Republican policies are against their professional self-interest. This would be sufficient to explain why so many of them self-identify as Democrats.

As it happens, concerns about Republican science and education policy are well-founded.

Anti-intellectual rhetoric was a cornerstone of the Republican party's election strategy in 2004. A prime example is the way President Bush derided Kerry for "nuance" and how legions of Bush surrogates and conservative media commentators repeated the charge.

The current Bush administration has championed many policies that are hostile to science and/or antithetical to the interests of scholars and researchers. Three examples: embryonic stem cell research, extreme and often punitive visa restrictions for foreign graduate students and scholars, and the infamous Pell grant cuts. The administration's willful ignorance about the scientific consensus on global warming should not inspire confidence among empirically-minded voters. At a time when the covers of Science and Nature are blaring "global warming is real" the administration was determined not to acknowledge the scientific consensus on the topic.

At the state and local levels, Republicans are waging visible battles against evolution in the public schools. Sam Brownback, a leading Senate Republican launched is political career by championing creationism in Kansas schools.

[crionna]

I'm not sure how googling phrases and finding out what the top ranked web sites associated with those terms can be taken as indicative of how a phrase is used.

Perhaps (and I'm just guessing here based on the billions of miles of footage Jay Leno has on how, ignorant Americans are about a lot of things) there are people out there that don't know what it meant and figured they'd just google the term to see what pops up. Given what did pop up, was his point made more clear or not? I'd say not.

Then again, maybe Mr. Krugman just assumed that people listening to NPR both knew what the term meant and were predisposed to agree with him about how bad things are getting, wherein "banana republic" would strike a chord. That's what I believe, he was simply pandering to an audience.

[WillieStyle]

Then again, maybe Mr. Krugman just assumed that people listening to NPR both knew what the term meant and were predisposed to agree with him about how bad things are getting, wherein "banana republic" would strike a chord. That's what I believe, he was simply pandering to an audience.

Assuming your audience is well informed is pandering?
What an odd thing to say.

[Jesurgislac]

Crionna, in the context in which I have seen Krugman use "banana republic" with reference to the US economy, it appears to be an appropriate use of figurative language, not a literal attempt to make people think the US has moved to Central America and has an economy dependent on bananas. ;-) Slarti's refused to give the context in which he heard it, so I can only judge by what I know.

I think Krugman's right and the US economy is going down the tubes: Slarti (and you, presumably) disagree. What I object to is Slarti picking two words out of what Krugman said and claiming that they're "stupid". That's stupid.

I have frequently disagreed with what Slarti and Sebastian have said: I rarely think that what they say is stupid. I do think that picking a contextless very short quote from a lengthy interview and claiming that those two words are "stupid" is a stupid way of arguing: if you disagree with what was being said, refute it. Use of contextless quotes is a fun way of hurling abuse, but it's no way to make your point, if you have one.

[radish]

Slart, crionna, Krugman's use of the phrase makes quite a lot of sense in the context of his specialty (int'l trade). In fact I believe he elaborated on the Argentina parallels in a different interview recently.

You don't have to agree with his assessment, but it's clear that he's referring to empirical economic parallels between the US economy and other (national) economies which turned out to be on the cusp of currency problems. Suggesting otherwise is just a cheap rhetorical diversion (not that there's anything wrong with that), the frivolousness of which is revealed several words later when Krugman finishes the sentence with "...if you actually look at the numbers."

These parallel numbers are particular economic indicators, such as (IIRC) trade imbalances, distribution of capital, and ratios between deficits and other indicators, which are exactly the kind of numbers he has studied and written about extensively and long before he joined the order of the shrill.

When he says "banana republic territory" he's talking about a pattern formed by specific economic events in specific banana republics. Any more inflammatory similarities that may or may not exist in other respects aren't relevant here...

[Slartibartfast]

So you claim, but (as you decline to provide context) I see no facts for you to base your claim on.

Unfortunately, NPR doesn't have the transcripts up yet, if they ever will. So either you're going to have to take it as a given or not; your choice.

In the context I gave, Krugman was clearly using "banana republic" figuratively rather than literally.

From now on, I swear to take everything Krugman says figuratively, not literally. Which is probably a smart move, given that his literal mode seems to be permanently disabled.

[Slartibartfast]

Whoops, that first statement was supposed to be blockquoted.

[Jesurgislac]

Slarti: See my comment at 02:06 PM. Or radish's comment at 02:17 PM.

[hilzoy]

I was just surfing around and found another Krugman banana republic reference here:

"Paul Krugman, who actually is an economist, has an even scarier warning: We're turning into Argentina. In an interview, Krugman told Reuters he's most concerned Bush will ignore the advice of economists and push through more tax cuts while also trying to privatize Social Security. 'If you go back and you look at the sources of the blow-up of Argentine debt during the 1990s, one little-appreciated thing is that social security privatization was a important source of that expansion of debt,' said Krugman. 'So if you ask the question do we look like Argentina, the answer is a whole lot more than anyone is quite willing to admit at this point. We've become a banana republic.'""

Which is either figurative, or a warning that the US is about to stretch its north-south axis an awful lot and migrate to the southern hemisphere. We report; you decide.

[Slartibartfast]

I'm guessing figurative. You know why.

[crionna]

Crionna, in the context in which I have seen Krugman use "banana republic" with reference to the US economy, it appears to be an appropriate use of figurative language, not a literal attempt to make people think the US has moved to Central America and has an economy dependent on bananas. ;-)

Fair enough Jes, and I realize that. I just figure if he means Argentina, just say Argentina.

aaaah, No Mas, Buenos Tardes Jes, radish, hilzoy, LJ

Assuming your audience is well informed is pandering?
What an odd thing to say.

Perhaps you missed: "and were predisposed to agree with him about how bad things are getting".

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Anarch,

"There's a clear potential for selection bias correlated with this ideology away from academia; less floridly, fewer conservatives may well choose to put themselves through the agony of grad school than liberals.*"

I can't speak for the whole world, but I intentionally chose to avoid an academic career because I was sick of being treated as a pariah for having conservative views. If (and I do say IF) that is a common reaction, it is selection bias fueled by discrimination and thus it is entirely appropriate to talk about the discrimination as a (I say 'A') cause of the statistical disparity. I know of no easy way to capture that kind of reaction in a statistical picture, but as Godel tells us, that doesn't mean the truth isn't there. Now I'm perfectly happy in a corporate career where the revelation that I'm a Republican doesn't elicit sharp in-drawn breaths and "but you seem like such a nice person" reactions.

This is the problem with trying to argue "bias" against an ideological group: since membership in that group inherently means one adopts a particular ideology, if that ideology runs counter to the precepts of the discipline in question, you're not going to get much crossover and any under-representation effects would be attributable to purely self-selection biasing.

I think you have gone way overboard with the purely self-selection biasing concept, but whatever. The problem is that political science, history, literature, philosophy and the like are not in the same position vis-a-vis conservatives as evolutionary biologcal research is vis-a-vis Christian fundamentalism. To the extent that history department have BECOME opposed to conservative ideological positions, that is a function of the fact that history departments have allowed themselves to become inhabited by Marxist or other ideologically committed historians who work to exclude other practioners. In other words, the professors you defend have made their disciplines highly partisan. There is nothing inherently oppositional in being an American conservative and a historian, but that isn't how it plays out at university BECAUSE professors in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s twisted their disciplines into partisan fields. The cult of Chomsky is an excellent example.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"Crionna, in the context in which I have seen Krugman use "banana republic" with reference to the US economy, it appears to be an appropriate use of figurative language, not a literal attempt to make people think the US has moved to Central America and has an economy dependent on bananas."

Actually I think it is an inappropriate use of "banana republic" since the term is intentionally ironic. Banana republics aren't republics at all, they are despot-run military states. Suggesting that the US is well on its way to 'banana republic' status is to prove one's own ignorance about banana republics. For example, in a real banana republic, Krugman would be shot or imprisoned by now rather than making huge amounts of money as a columnist whose part-time job is criticizing the President. This leads to an interesting irony where an allegedly brilliant partisan's ability to freely act directly undermines the point he is trying to forcefully make.

[Jackmormon]

Sebastian,

I'd like to address your traumatic experience at UCSD. I didn't take that class (I was in Muir, not Marshall, and got exempted out of the writing class), but I have since taught one like it. So while I don't want to excuse what happened to you, I'd like to explain some of the factors that went into it.

Classes of this sort are almost always taught by graduate students. These grad students are simulteneously contemptuous and terrified of their undergrad students. Remember also that these grad students are taking their own classes (whose importance stretches long long past the final grade), writing articles for publication, stressing out about their dissertations, and maybe holding down another job.

More to the point, the class you took may have been one of the first your teacher ever taught. An experienced teacher figures out ways to allow opposing viewpoints to be heard without monopolizing class time. But a younger, less experienced teacher will fear losing control, will fear turning his or her classroom into a debating society (or a blogosphere comments thread), and will tend to control the viewpoint of a classroom overmuch in the name of discipline and authority. Remember: there aren't many good ways to lose an argument with a student in front of all the others. Teachers get over those fears or find out how to concede a point gracefully, but they still have to struggle to get their class between the undesirable poles of the top-down lecture and the bloggy debating society.

The comment on the paper who wrote is of course insufficient, and the grade is of course overharsh, but you've got to understand how difficult it is to pick apart a young thinker's logic. When I first starting teaching, I spent, literally, over an hour on each two-page paper, just to figure out why what was written made so little sense.

My current university (an expensive Ivy League) takes writing classes very seriously; we grad student instructors get training and management-controls ad nauseum, class size is capped at twelve, and the curriculum is designed away from obviously political topics. But even with all that, I've run into trouble of the kind you describe above, less and less now that I'm older and wiser, and always with more attempts at logical commentary than you described. Still, I have to suppose that the situation would have been worse at UCSD, where a lot of the grad students I met were actively resentful of their jobs and where classes of this sort tended to be larger.

The biggest problem, of course, is that once a grad student instructor has settled into a less-defensive pedegogical attitude, he or she is rotated out of the undergraduate writing classes and gets more interesting, subject-related jobs.

In short, I think the incidents you describe had more to do with a bad teacher-training and support system than with ideological bias in the classroom. Or to be more precise, I think that the predominance of liberal instructors of undergraduate education wouldn't be so much of a problem, were introductory undergraduate courses valued by the university.

[Jackmormon]

Sebastian,

I'd like to address your traumatic experience at UCSD. I didn't take that class (I was in Muir, not Marshall, and got exempted out of the writing class), but I have since taught one like it. So while I don't want to excuse what happened to you, I'd like to explain some of the factors that went into it.

Classes of this sort are almost always taught by graduate students. These grad students are simulteneously contemptuous and terrified of their undergrad students. Remember also that these grad students are taking their own classes (whose importance stretches long long past the final grade), writing articles for publication, stressing out about their dissertations, and maybe holding down another job.

More to the point, the class you took may have been one of the first your teacher ever taught. An experienced teacher figures out ways to allow opposing viewpoints to be heard without monopolizing class time. But a younger, less experienced teacher will fear losing control, will fear turning his or her classroom into a debating society (or a blogosphere comments thread), and will tend to control the viewpoint of a classroom overmuch in the name of discipline and authority. Remember: there aren't many good ways to lose an argument with a student in front of all the others. Teachers get over those fears or find out how to concede a point gracefully, but they still have to struggle to get their class between the undesirable poles of the top-down lecture and the bloggy debating society.

The comment on the paper who wrote is of course insufficient, and the grade is of course overharsh, but you've got to understand how difficult it is to pick apart a young thinker's logic. When I first starting teaching, I spent, literally, over an hour on each two-page paper, just to figure out why what was written made so little sense.

My current university (an expensive Ivy League) takes writing classes very seriously; we grad student instructors get training and management-controls ad nauseum, class size is capped at twelve, and the curriculum is designed away from obviously political topics. But even with all that, I've run into trouble of the kind you describe above, less and less now that I'm older and wiser, and always with more attempts at logical commentary than you described. Still, I have to suppose that the situation would have been worse at UCSD, where a lot of the grad students I met were actively resentful of their jobs and where classes of this sort tended to be larger.

The biggest problem, of course, is that once a grad student instructor has settled into a less-defensive pedegogical attitude, he or she is rotated out of the undergraduate writing classes and gets more interesting, subject-related jobs.

In short, I think the incidents you describe had more to do with a bad teacher-training and support system than with ideological bias in the classroom. Or to be more precise, I think that the predominance of liberal instructors of undergraduate education wouldn't be so much of a problem, were introductory undergraduate courses valued by the university.

[Jackmormon]

Oh, hell. Stupid error page. Will somebody erase the redundancy, please? Sorry, everyone.

[liberal japonicus]

There is nothing inherently oppositional in being an American conservative and a historian, but that isn't how it plays out at university BECAUSE professors in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s twisted their disciplines into partisan fields. The cult of Chomsky is an excellent example.

details please? There is a point to be made, but I don't think it is the one you are trying to make.

[liberal japonicus]

I meant about Chomsky, not about a conservative and historian.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Jackmormon, the teacher had been a full time professor for years, though the grader of my paper was a first-time TA so your comments might well apply to her. Liberal Japonicus, I'm off to my sister's house, but I'll revisit if you want. But I'm not at all sure what you want to investigate. The appropriateness of Marxist history ideology becoming ascendant in many history departments? The twisting of English literature analysis into the sick critical theory departments? The crazy relativism of cultural studies departments which allow for no criticism of other cultures because no authoritative moral code exists, while simultaneously slamming Western culture after undercutting their ability to do so?

[liberal japonicus]

But I'm not at all sure what you want to investigate. The appropriateness of Marxist history ideology becoming ascendant in many history departments? The twisting of English literature analysis into the sick critical theory departments? The crazy relativism of cultural studies departments which allow for no criticism of other cultures because no authoritative moral code exists, while simultaneously slamming Western culture after undercutting their ability to do so?

Do you know what Chomsky teaches (as opposed to what his political writings are concerned with)? Chomsky has never taught a Marxist history class, has never been in a cultural studies department and has absolutely nothing to do with english literature. I strongly recommend Randy Harris' _Linguistic Wars_ and Huck and Goldsmith"s _Ideology and Linguistic Theory_ before you revisit this.

[Anarch]

The problem is that political science, history, literature, philosophy and the like are not in the same position vis-a-vis conservatives as evolutionary biologcal research is vis-a-vis Christian fundamentalism.

No, but the pursuit of academia is. The requirements of the discipline -- specifically the truly awful pay, the lack of respect, the general sense that you're not accomplishing anything, all for that magical point in time when you... make only moderately awful pay, aren't particularly respected and not really accomplishing anything anyone cares about -- tend to run counter to most conservative valuations.* That isn't to say that no conservative would ever want to be an academic, which is clearly false, but I think you massively underestimate the barrier between "wanting to be an academic" and "becoming an academic" and, in particular, how directly it runs into things that conservatives tend to value.

* That list, btw, is from a conservative friend of mine who is a grad student in history and, despite being of the wrong ideology for Sodom On The Lake, seems to be thriving. Take that, anecdotal data!

I know of no easy way to capture that kind of reaction in a statistical picture, but as Godel tells us, that doesn't mean the truth isn't there.

Treading on my home turf, eh? ;)

There is nothing inherently oppositional in being an American conservative and a historian...

That depends on whether the conservative historical viewpoint is justified, doesn't it? Which rapidly leads into a quagmire of relative expertises best left to, well, the experts, I guess. Which in turn results in question-begging, approximations to truth, uncertain knowledge and, well, quagmires.

[The same remark holds, incidentally, for liberals and historians; or liberals and CEOs; or liberals/conservatives and sociologists. Any discipline in which there is some qualitative notion of "truth" is always open to the possibility that a particular ideology is "false" relative to that evaluation.]

The appropriateness of Marxist history ideology becoming ascendant in many history departments?

Quoth my father the historian, any "Marxist history ideology" would be laughed out of almost any major history department nowadays.* There are Marxists producing historical work, of course, but they generally leave the died-in-the-wool Marxism out of it.

* It depends on your definition of "Marxist" (and, for that matter, "history ideology") I suppose. If you really want to press the point I can ask him for a more detailed response.

All that said, I'll be happy to bash pomo and deconstructionism with you as long as you want, which I believe addresses your subsequent two points. There's nothing particularly conservative or liberal about that (though liberals are prone to that affliction, I agree); they're just stupid.

[Chris]

In Australia the term "Banana republic" is linked to a historical moment - a seismic shift in our national self-image.
In May 1986 the Treasurer at the time, Paul Keating, warned that Australia risked becoming a 'banana republic'. Keating was referring to a precipitous decline in Australia's terms of trade, but the real content was that a total systemic failure of the economy was a real possibility. This struck a nerve. The immediate response was a collapse of the australian dollar and a sharp recession; the longer-term was a chage of policies that lead to an increase in competitiveness and productivity that pulled us back from the brink, until the present government got in, discarded most of Keating's carrots and sticks, and landed us in an ever worse balance of payments gap.

[Tom Hudson]

I'd like to make another response to Sebastian's UCSD experiences. Although they were bad and shouldn't have happened, they were to some extent his choice.

UCSD is divided up into N colleges (5 when I was there in the early 90s, 6 at the moment). Students choose colleges. Each college explicitly embraces a viewpoint, which shapes their general education requirements. Each college conducts its own writing classes. Assuming Sebastian went there sometime after the mid-80s, he could have chosen:

* Revelle - great books, canon, hard science, lots of classes; five writing classes sequentially covering the canon
* Muir - environmentalist, flexible general education; two writing classes
* Third (now Thurgood Marshall) - internationalist; three writing classes titled "Diversity", "Justice", and "Imagination"
* Warren - libertarian, very few general education classes; writing classes titled "Warren Writing A", "Warren Writing B", and "Ethics"
* Fifth (now Eleanor Roosevelt) - six writing classes titled "Making of the Modern World" that explicitly compare Western and non-Western approaches

Most engineers I knew were at Warren or Muir (because the general education courses were so light that you could actually finish an engineering degree in 4 years. I only took the equivalent of 6 semester-long classes outside my discipline: writing/ethics, japanese language/history, and linguistics.) Anecdote: At least at Warren, my Ethics TAs were pretty tolerant of somebody out on the political fringes.

Even though we didn't have the Web in 1990 we knew all of this while applying.

[McDuff]

As of yet, I haven't seen anyone express concern that the government of the United States is increasingly being run by those who the trained experts in nearly all intellectual fields find it increasingly untenable to vote for, which is, of course, the flip-side of the argument.

I can't prove across-the-board discrimination, or lack of it, in university hiring practices, but I can prove anti-intellectualism in current GOP-brand conservatism. Frankly, common sense would suggest to me that if you have spent the last X years studying biology, you will be less inclined to vote for the guy who says that your life's work is a crock of shit. That the GOP manages to get any of the Biologist vote at all suprises me, but their deliberate courting of the "Man on the street" vote at the rhetorical expense of the "liberal intellectual" vote indicates that, from their point of view, it is a justified sacrifice and all biologists who vote GOP are a bonus. In pure numbers, they are of course correct, because the "man on the street" bloc is casts far more votes than all these pesky "experts," but the trouble with men on the street is that they know significantly less Actual Biology. Similarly, if even economists are shying away from GOP policies (a discipline, we must remember, whose most visible member is Paul Krugman, who is certainly no leftist although he is anti-this-administration's-policies, but which also counts among the ranks of its most favoured some, well, right wing nutbars), shouldn't we be instead saying "we should get a government the economists can stand to vote for" rather than "hire more economists who vote GOP"? To me, that much is certainly, if not obviously the right way, at least an alternative approach to the data that merits serious consideration.

I also find it to be a major semantic distortion that people associate "votes Democrat" with "is on the left." In a situation where the choices are Right and Centre-Right, as they simply are in American Politics, it makes little sense to assume that because someone votes Democrat they are left-wing -- they could be anything on the scale from severely left-wing to centrist. If there were a genuinely leftist party in addition to the current two, I daresay it would steal a sum of the academic votes, and undoubtedly more of these than in the population at large, but those who were left staunchly in the centre would be a non-insignificant number.

Part of the problem, in other words, is the crass division of something as complex as personal politics into two rough-hewn boxes, and the lack of any other reasonable simple indicators than "how did you vote?" It's always going to be a fudge, and with this being necessarily the case, is an imbalance *actually* a problem?

[Sharon]

Nothing any of you have written applies to what is taking place in this country. Universities are corporations run by conservative white males. There is no such thing as academic freedom. You tow the line, write about bourgeois concerns or you are barred from academia. There is no real debate. We may have 35 years left before all ecosystems start to break down. Fluoride in the water and chemtrails in the skies are destroying most people's ability to think at all. Nutrasweet is another source of brain damage, as is mercury. Concentration camps are being built across the U.S. The public schools have been indoctrination camps since the 50's. We are living in a fascist dictatorship and the press is completely controlled by corporations.
The U.S. regime orchestrated 9-11 and then proceeded to murder and torture the people of many nations. The elections were rigged by Diebold. I have never experienced a second of personal freedom in this country. My life has been controlled by the foundations of Rockefeller and Carnegie and now the police state.

[Jesurgislac]

Sharon: tow the line

Toe the line. That always bugs me. cite

I think that's the only point worth responding to: others may differ.

[carpeicthus]

It might be "tow the line" in her world, J.

[Gary Farber]

I'd like to suggest that cutting off comments on a post over, say, three months of age, would be a good idea. But that's just me.

[ral]

I have noticed this a few times now (a long-delayed comment other than comment spam, I mean). I wonder what's going on.

[KCinDC]

Presumably someone stumbles across the thread through a Google search and decides to put in their two cents. I've done it at least once myself, by following a link from a recent post to a post on another blog that I commented on before realizing how old it was.

[Gary Farber]

"Presumably someone stumbles across the thread through a Google search and decides to put in their two cents."

That happens, surely, as did here. More often, though, it's a spam link for a porn or commercial site. That it happens about ten to one or more the latter over the former is why it's a good idea to eliminate the possibility. A real issue can always be referred to in a comment on a post in the current week.

[rilkefan]

Plus we went over this at ObWi recently. Oh, drat, I didn't put in a link to the relevant discussion.

[Jesurgislac]

Rilkefan! What are you doing online? Oh, you've posted on the wedding thread. *goes to check*

[Jay C.]

Must be slow weekend for the blogosphere - I notice that this six-month-old thread has gotten nearly as many recent comments as the newest ObWi discourse. Although Sharon's concise rant does give us all something to pore over: For me, the main point of interest is not so much the "tow the line" malapropism,
risible though it is, but the fact that in a comment of just 176 words, she manaages to work in no less than 13 extremist cliches, two foolish-but-vaguely-debatable ones, one bizarre personal rant ("I have never experienced a second of personal freedom in this country.") - and that these 16 wheezy saws constitute the totality of "her" post.
Personally, I think we have another (very clever) spambot here (a "politbot"?): any way we can get "Sharon" to submit to a Turing Test?

[John Thullen]

Sharon didn't mention whether she or he still had some Thanksgiving turkey left over (you know, from three days before), so we could have some botulism sandwiches.

Maybe it's a message from a sort of parallel cliche universe, six months behind but still mad as hell.

Maybe it's an encoded message of some kind. To someone. About something extraordinarily important. Maybe one of us is answering in code.

Which one?