Mike Finley takes on an ideological hack complaining about faculty partisan identifications
I don’t have a lot more to say other than what I said here.
Stanley Fish wrote an op-ed pointing out that partisan ID doesn’t come up in academic job interviews and described the process. It is a process that is mind-numbingly boring and has little to do with ideology in terms of liberal vs conservative. I can only think of one case where an issue of ideology came up at all and that was in relation to teaching style. The individual played an advocate role in teaching instead of using the Socratic Method. Most of the time if ideology is at stake, that ideology fight is over schools of thought which are theoretical points, not conservative vs liberal.
The assumption made by FrontPage magazine is that hiring decisions are made by ideology. There are several problems with this. PhDs are more liberal than the population as a whole regardless of field. If one examines voting behavior, for a long time there has been a relationship between increasing education and an increase in likelihood of being Republican until one gets to the PhD level and then it turns into an increase in the likelihood of being Democratic. As the parties have realligned, education doesn’t have the same impact on partisan ID anymore, but PhDs are still overwhelmingly Democratic.
The real issue is that as one is socialized into the education, one tends to change their views because of their political context. If you are a business exec you talk to other execs about your political beliefs and, not surprisingly, this affects your views. The same happens amongst PhDs and academics in general. It isn’t a dark conspiracy, it is political context. In the 1960s evangelicals voted for both parties. In 2002, evangelicals vote in high proportions for Republicans because their political context reinforces such choices. For studies on political context see Huckfeldt and Sprague.
The study itself was deeply flawed by not including those within other areas of the university. While I’m guessing the engineering and chemistry professors aren’t as liberal, they are still registered Democratic at much higher numbers than the population as a whole. Knowing this bit of information gives one something to compare the rates while controlling for education’s effect alone.
More troubling is what are we supposed to do about this? The lambasting of liberal faculty that are instilling their left wing agenda is a nice whine (and inaccurate for most classes), but it doesn’t tell us how to solve the problem. I defy anyone to demonstrate de jure discrimination. De facto imbalance may occur, but to solve such a problem, one would need to identify why this imbalance occurs.
From my experience in political science, conseratives don’t last in programs. It isn’t because they aren’t smart, it is because they see graduate education as a way to become advocates and not scientists. This isn’t universal, but for those who enter programs and are conservative, they are far less concerned with determing what is than they are advocating policy. Thus, they have less interest in becoming practicing social scientists. As an example, David Hogberg works for a think tank and hates doing professional conferences. He isn’t dumb, he just has a different interest from his public comments.
Update: Instead of assuming what David thinks I asked him. He said he’d reply later. Also some minor edits have been made above.