REAL NEWS DO UNIVERSITIES DISCRIMINATE POLITICALLY? <[email protected]>
(Common sense, politically incorrect newsletter to 14,816 subscribers) DO UNIVERSITIES DISCRIMINATE POLITICALLY? By Darryl Paulson, emeritus professor of government at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg May 01, 2011 Tampa Tribune Do universities discriminate? Yes! Absolutely! Without any doubt! Universities, which portray themselves as bastions of diversity when it comes to race and gender, have fallen far short of achieving even minimal diversity with respect to the ideological leanings of their faculty. Ask yourself, your children or your grandchildren how many conservative faculty they encountered during their university experience. If they are like most students, they will have been exposed to only a few or none at all. This article is not a diatribe against liberals. Most of my best university friends were liberals. Of course, it is not like I had any choice. Discrimination Against Conservatives As we will see, liberals heavily outnumber conservative faculty in American universities, and in massive numbers. You will still find a token conservative who snuck through the gauntlet or had credentials that were too overwhelming to ignore. Even the Ivy Leagues have Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, Robert George at Princeton and Donald Kagan at Yale. How did I manage to get hired and survive 35 years at the University of South Florida if there is such bias against conservatives? I believe it was because when I was hired by USF, I had spent the previous year as a National Teaching Fellow at Florida A&M. Anyone who taught at an all-black institution had to be a liberal. In addition, my dissertation was on black mayors in America. Anyone interested in the politics of African-Americans had to be liberal. Some years after I was hired, one of the local papers identified me as a Republican. When one of my colleagues read that I was a Republican, she came to me and said, "You're one of them!" She said it in a tone that made it apparent that I had leprosy or some fatal disease. When I later became a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, another colleague said he never knew I was a Nazi. Being a conservative on a college campus is like being the Maytag repairman -- it's very lonely. Over the years, I have been interviewed more than 7,000 times by the print and broadcast media. I like to think it is because I have something interesting to say and say it well. I also realize it is because if the media wants a Republican or conservative academic to comment on an issue, they have very few choices. Conservative professors are closer to extinction than the Florida panther. Why are there so few conservatives in academia? Alan Kors, a conservative professor at Penn, says that conservative students face "entering hostile and discriminatory territory." Many conservative students are advised to keep quiet rather than engage liberal faculty. If conservative students manage to get a Ph.D they will have a hard time getting a job and an even harder time of earning tenure. When Harvard's government department recently reviewed the placement of its doctoral students, the only two without jobs were students of conservative professor Harvey Mansfield. George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley and a favorite of Democratic politicians, argues that there is no discrimination against conservative professors. He contends that the disparity is because conservatives are not interested in academic careers. Liberals seek academic careers because, "unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice." Well, that certainly explains everything. As someone who taught Southern politics for 35 years, Lakoff's argument sounds very similar to what white Southerners said when asked why so few blacks were voting in the South. Their usual response was that blacks were simply not that interested in politics. It had nothing to do with discrimination. Neither Lakoff's explanation nor that of white Southerners has much credibility. Liberals and Conservatives Endless studies have demonstrated the lack of conservative professors in higher education and the liberal ideology of the faculty. According to the Georgetown Law Journal, 81 percent of professors at the top 21 law schools gave to Democrats; 15 percent gave to Republicans. At Harvard, Yale and Stanford, the percentages were 91 percent, 92 percent and 94 percent. The American Enterprise examined the political leanings of humanities and social science professors and found that Cornell had 166 liberals and six conservatives; Stanford had 151 liberals and 17 conservatives; Colorado had 116 liberals and five conservatives, and UCLA had 141 liberals and nine conservatives. Daniel Klein, an economics professor at Santa Clara University, studied 1,000 professors around the nation and found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 7 to 1 in the humanities and social sciences. In anthropology and sociology the margin was 30 Democrats for every Republican. The Center for the Study of Popular Culture found Ivy League professors voted 9 to 1 for Gore over Bush in 2000. The results were more Democratic in the 2004 and 2008 elections. The 1999 North American Academic Study Survey (NAASS) sampled 1,643 faculty from 183 universities. The study found a strong leftward tilt of American faculty in the 1980s and 1990s: 72 percent of professors in the survey identified themselves as left or liberals, compared to 15 percent who called themselves right or conservatives. During the same year, the Harris Poll found that only 18 percent of Americans called themselves liberals and 37 percent considered themselves conservatives. The NAASS study found 81 percent of humanities professors and 75 percent of social science faculty were liberals. Even in supposedly traditionally conservative enclaves, liberals outnumbered conservatives by 51 percent to 19 percent in engineering and 49 percent to 39 percent in business. Philosophy, political science, religion, fine arts, psychology, performing arts and English faculty were all 80 percent or more liberal. My discipline, political science, was 80 percent liberal and 2 percent conservative. The case for ideological diversity We need ideological diversity for the same reason that we need racial and gender diversity. Supreme Court Justice Louis Powell argued in a 1978 case that diversity is essential to the mission of the university. The more diverse the faculty and student body, the more robust is the exchange of ideas. Peter Schuck, a Yale law professor and author of "Diversity in America," contends that faculty have "a higher responsibility to our students, ourselves and our disciplines that our preference for ideological homogeneity and faculty-lounge echo chambers betray." Echoing that sentiment, John McGinnis of Northwestern Law School, writes that "liberal ideas might well be strengthened and made more effective if liberals had to run a more conservative gauntlet am ong their own colleagues when developing them." I do not agree with all of the policy ideas of conservatives regarding education, but it should not surprise anyone in Florida or across the nation that much of the attack on education is directly related to what is perceived to be the overwhelming dominance of liberals in higher education. Why would conservatives want to increase funding for an institution that they believe is pushing a liberal/left agenda? Why would any group provide financial support to an organization that is perceived to be the enemy? A little ideological diversity in higher education would go a long way in improving legislators' perception of and financial support for education. Ending Ideological Bias Solutions to the lack of ideological diversity include "conservative coming-out days," such as have been done at Harvard, Penn State, the University of Texas and many other universities. Some state legislators are so upset at the imbalance in faculties that they have adopted or are considering the adoption of "An Academic Bill of Rights." Others, mostly liberals, have suggested that affirmative action be extended to ideology. No thanks. The University of Colorado, affectionately known as "Tofu U" by conservatives, is creating an endowed chair in Conservative Thought and Policy. Once again, no thanks. Who would want to be the monkey in the cage to be looked at as a curiosity by the liberal left? Others have suggested that money talks. Conservative donors, after listening to the wonderful reports about how the university has exceeded its affirmative action goals, should announce they are withholding their financial contributions until the university seriously undertakes as a goal the creation of a more ideologically balanced faculty. Money, or the lack of it, always seems to put the fear of God in university administrators. However, since most of these administrators are liberal and secular, the fear of God may not be sufficient to move them to action. The bottom line is that universities need to seriously undertake a program to correct the ideological imbalance. How can universities have a real clash of ideas if one side is missing in action? How can universities cultivate and promote diversity in race, ethnicity, gender and sexual preference, yet ignore it when it comes to ideology? Ideological diversity will benefit the universities intellectually, as well as financially. It is time to end the ideological homogeneity which is pervasive in higher education and put an end to what George Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies." --Media General Communications Holdings, LLC. A Media General company. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contact Your Govt http://www.usa.gov/Contact.shtml Is the Constitution the Supreme Law of the Land or not? 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