<p>
</p>
<p>Those who favor smaller government in all areas (economic/fiscal, social, and military/foreign policy) are generally called libertarians these days, and do not seem to be that hard to find around universities. Outside of universities, the social conservatives are often pretty noisy, and tend to outnumber libertarians by a lot in polls, so social conservatism, rather than libertarianism, tends to be what people think of when the word “conservative” is used.</p>
<p>I think only a couple colleges actually teach creation biology, and fewer still teach it as " science" instead of philosophy.</p>
<p>Im wondering if fewer conservatives go into teaching, or is it that they become more liberal in their views the longer they are in education?</p>
<p>I wonder what the popular majors are at conservative schools, any different than at liberal ones?</p>
<p>@ucb,</p>
<p>Liberals tend to lump libertarians together w conservatives, as in this NYT article:
<a href=“http://www.nytimes/2013/04/21/business/media/koch-brothers-making-play-for-tribunes-newspapers.html?ref=davidhkoch&_r=0[/url]”>http://www.nytimes/2013/04/21/business/media/koch-brothers-making-play-for-tribunes-newspapers.html?ref=davidhkoch&_r=0</a></p>
<p>Just read the 1st sentence of this article. The rest of the article uses ‘libertarian’ & ‘conservative’ interchangably, even though the author states David Koch supports gay marriage.</p>
<p>I think the failure to distinguish between social conservatism and fiscal conservatism makes this conversation go around in circles.</p>
<p>I agree…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>High marginal income tax rates and a lavish welfare state (two years of unemployment benefits, food stamps, housing subsidies) discourage work, and the political parties differ on these issues.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>A few reasons are that</p>
<p>(1) Government heavily subsidizes higher education (through both student financial aid and research grants), so it is natural for professors to favor the party of big government.
(2) Social science academics often publish research seeking to influence government policies. A larger government gives them more to influence.
(3) Some academic resent the financial success of business people who earn more money than they do, even though they are not more intelligent.
(4) Economic conservatives gravitate to the private sector rather than academia.</p>
<p>We understand that it’s a bad idea for the government to subsidize newspapers, because it would inevitably influence the views espoused by those newspapers. Government subsidy of higher education tends to push academia towards a pro-big-government viewpoint.</p>
<p>I respect the expertise of many academics in their disciplines. I hope that through online courses, students will be able to get more education with less indoctrination.</p>
<p>ExhaustedDad and GMT, please. It’s not changing the conversation to ask a question about how a faith-based view of how we came to be here fits into the science curriculum of a university. The discussion has centered around the supposed “liberal bias” of college faculty. It makes sense that those who are guided by religious tenets rather than scientific facts would perhaps not feel comfortable teaching outside of a parochial environment, which thus excludes most colleges and universities.</p>
<p>Both of you also denigrate me by presuming to know how I feel about other policies such as fiscal ones. You don’t. And just FYI it has been a long time since the Republican party put a fiscal conservative in office. GWB spent like a drunken sailor.</p>
<p>I agree that there is a big difference between libertarian and conservative. Too bad Ron Paul couldn’t carry through his “libertarian” agenda thanks to all the social-conservative positions he had to adopt to appeal to a broader audience.</p>
<p>While I agree that there are a number of economic factors leading to a liberal professoriate, including the class struggle mentioned by Beliavsky, there are intellectual reasons as well. Since the 19th century and the rise of the research university, professors are educated to analyze, critique, invent, refute, etc. This makes it highly unlikely that they will accept conservative or traditional values. Even if they accept them, they probably accept them in a reflective, nuanced way that is hard for undergraduates to follow. It is a very difficult undertaking to get most 18 year olds to give up yes/no thinking.</p>
<p>Asking students to question their existing beliefs and the status quo is not liberal or radical; it is teaching students metacognition, reflection, critique, argumentation . . . I guess I am finding the dichotomy proposed here a bit simple minded. College students should be learning new stuff and new methods. They need challenges.</p>
<p>Sally,
You are equating religious views with conservatism. Again, they are not the same. Creationism is a religious view, not a conservative view. </p>
<p>What you are asking is whether a biblical literalist can teach university level science. I do not know the answer to that. </p>
<p>Whether conservatives can teach university level science seems quite clear to me. I am not a scientist and did not take much science in college, but my impression is that in general, conservatives are very interested in the facts, statistics and evidence. (Case in point: isn’t MIT considered one of the more conservative colleges?)</p>
<p>I think mini was on to something a couple pages ago. It’s not as though Eurocentrism or Creationism never got a fair hearing in academia. For a long long time, these teachings were the norm. If a majority of college professors now accept multiculturalism, Darwinism, or the theory of climate change, then presumably it’s because they found these concepts persuasive. </p>
<p>I would expect a good college to expose social science students to concepts like “American Exceptionalism” or Charles Murray’s Bell Curve. I’d expect Edmund Burke to be read in a few classes. What I wouldn’t necessarily expect is equal time for every idea just because some political faction happens to find the idea attractive (or useful in rallying people to a cause).</p>
<p>It may be the case that academic fads and fashions currently favor left-leaning ideas and attitudes. However, as far as I know, there is no truly leftist college or university in America. Not one college or university makes it an institutional mission to indoctrinate students with a leftist ideology and make them missionaries for a revolutionary, leftist cause. The only colleges and universities whose institutional missions overtly align with political and religious causes are right-wing colleges and universities. There are quite a few of those. </p>
<p>Russel Kirk was a college professor. Alan Bloom was a college professor. Milton Friedman was a college professor. Paul Wolfowitz has been a college professor. John Agresto has been a college professor and a college president. So there is room for political conservatives in America’s “elite” colleges and universities. If there aren’t more of them, it may be because they tend to migrate to higher-paying positions in conservative think-tanks.</p>
<p>@sally,
I know geology professors at one of the top ranked geology programs in the country who are religious and have no problems with reconciling their scientific profession with their faith. They read Genesis as a metaphoric description of the creation of the universe and the evolution of species, not as a literal 6 days. In the classroom they teach science, and on Sunday they to church.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Bay’s statement that liberals would like their children only to be taught be liberals is utterly silly. My social circle is overwhelmingly left-liberal, and I do not know a single person who thinks like that. I am sure most of you would consider me a liberal, and my two most important mentor-mentee relationships during my education were with conservative professors.</p></li>
<li><p>I can tell the difference among libertarians, fiscal conservatives, and religious conservatives. But it’s not surprising that the discussion keeps conflating them, because as far as I can tell the first two groups – who are perfectly well represented in academia – would be irrelevant politically in most of the country were they not generally in alliance with religious conservatives, who are far more numerous and far more active. The Republican Party owes what vitality it has to blurring continuously the distinctions among those groups. </p></li>
<li><p>The Republican Party of my youth had as many liberals as the Democrats in my community, if not more. Republicans were the party of limited government and fiscal responsibility, but also the party of civil rights and science. The Democrats generally had the segregationists and the creationists. It was Richard Nixon’s politically brilliant but short-sighted strategy to make the Republican Party the party of Southern resistance, and that has been the case ever since.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think you are claiming that sally is saying that conservatives cannot be professors because their disagreement with science does not allow them to think critically – but you two are talking about two different things. I know a number of science professors who are very conservative politically. They are also people who do not see science and religion as being in conflict; they believe that evolution is the amazing story of how God created life on Earth over time. Conservative and anti-evolution are not synonymous. The problem is when a would-be science professor (whatever his/her political or religious identity) does not accept well-accepted tenets of science. That is completely different.</p>
<p>Labels can be so misleading. “Liberal” and “conservative” are often thrown around like they define a set of specified beliefs, or, on the other hand, one specific position (on abortion or gay marriage, for example). What about the man I know who believes in scaling back government social programs, is pro-death penalty, and who carries a concealed weapon, but who is also pro-choice and pro-gay marriage? Can anyone define him with a label? Humans are much more complicated than simplistic monikers.</p>
<p>I see, though, how people can’t get past them. It started (around the late 70s/early 80s maybe) when the right wing decided to slam the label “liberal” on anyone even slightly less conservative, including members of their own political party. “Liberal” became their curse word. These days they even slam it on anyone with the political positions of Ronald Reagan. Can we just do away with labels?</p>
<p>… circles, just going around in circles …</p>
<p>I have a friend who lives in the heart of the Bible Belt. He’s not Conservative, he’s religious. But he always votes for the most conservative candidate, and that candidate is always Republican. So forgive the weak-minded among us who don’t see the practical difference between religious views and conservative social views.</p>
<p>My very liberal parents sent me to a conservative Catholic school for 9 years. It was partially due to practicality (our public schools sucked) and partly due to the fact that they wanted me exposed to different points of view. I don’t know any liberal parents who care whether or not their kids are taught by liberals or conservatives. Unless, of course, they start teaching something utterly unscientific like creationism in a public school.</p>
<p>Fwiw, I have a very good friend who is from the south and is a devout Christian (he is all over the map on social issues so I won’t even pretend to try to label him) and a chem major. He claims that most chem majors are actually rather religious. Just an interesting observation.</p>
<p><a href=“1”>quote</a> Government heavily subsidizes higher education (through both student financial aid and research grants), so it is natural for professors to favor the party of big government.
(2) Social science academics often publish research seeking to influence government policies. A larger government gives them more to influence.
(3) Some academic resent the financial success of business people who earn more money than they do, even though they are not more intelligent.
(4) Economic conservatives gravitate to the private sector rather than academia.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I agree with Beliavsky on all of these points. I am a tenured professor in a humanities area. I never discuss politics with my colleagues, as it would quickly get very uncomfortable. There is a blanket assumption that we are all liberals, which is not true.</p>
<h1>149
</h1>
<p>Yes. </p>
<h1>153
</h1>
<p>It seems to me there are not only very well known conservative professors but also many conservative students, the rising stars of the conservative power elite of the next generation, at the schools Bay’s daughters attend. I am still hoping for examples of behavior in the classroom or campus culture which Bay and others find upsetting or inappropriate.</p>
<p>alh,
I thought about your request for specific incidents of liberal oppression, and I have to say I cannot remember the details of most of them, as my Ds tended to describe the atmosphere of their class discussions in general terms. One that comes to mind is a soc class that, under the guise of a <em>sexy</em> title and description, turned out to be a semester-long discussion on, surprise!, multiculturalism. My D noted to me that the discussion focussed solely on our obligation to accommodate the cultural differences of immigrants; there was never any discussion on why this was required, or about immigrants’ obligations to accommodate our way of doing things, despite the fact they chose to settle here. Another recent comment D made related to the campus reaction to the recent Boston crisis, and the predictable blaming of America and our society and the victimhood of the perpetrators, without the opposing (conservative) viewpoint being expressed by anyone that she could discern.</p>
<p>This discussion has been more reasonable than I expected, with only a few lapses into extreme conserative persecution fantasy (i.e., “your savior, Barry Obama”, etc.). I think it was useful for Beliavsky to try to list some reasons why university faculty might be so overwhelmingly liberal. I think it is perhaps overly cynical that three of his four reasons impute self-serving motives to the liberals, though. I think it’s a very big factor that liberals and conservatives are likely drawn to different careers. Who wants to go into academia? It may not be the same sort of person who wants to work on Wall Street.</p>
<p>And while I sympathize to some degree with fiscal conservatives who don’t like being lumped in with young-earthers, don’t blame liberals for that–as others have noted, that’s the doing of political leaders who wanted the votes of religious people who were conservative on social issues.</p>
<p>Finally, I wasn’t exactly kidding when I said that the market would take care of this problem, if there is a problem. Why don’t these rich guys who object to Bowdoin give a bunch of money to some of these “RIGHT” colleges? As we know well from CC, people will go there if the scholarships are attractive.</p>