As IF Times

Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left – NYTimes.com.

It’s been a long held belief and now, they don’t even deny it.  The article attempts to answer the question of why it is that university professors overwhelmingly lean to the left in their political views.  The answer proposed by the two authors of this study, Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, is that typecasting is to blame (or credit depending on your view).  They posit that the image of the pipe smoking, tweedy jacketed cerebral is somehow appealing to kids thinking about a career.   This must be a function of where you live, because I can recall no person during my time at university for whom that image was the career ideal.  Tweed was about as fashionable as mutton chop sideburns.  Gross and  Fosse go on to say:

“…Typecasting, of course, is not the only cause for the liberal tilt. The characteristics that define one’s political orientation are also at the fore of certain jobs, the sociologists reported. Nearly half of the political lopsidedness in academia can be traced to four characteristics that liberals in general, and professors in particular, share: advanced degrees; a nonconservative religious theology (which includes liberal Protestants and Jews, and the nonreligious); an expressed tolerance for controversial ideas; and a disparity between education and income…”

Some of the reasons cited are somewhat debatable, especially the last one regarding education and income.  The statement implies that people in this category are earning less than they could be given the amount of schooling they have.  This is not the same as a poverty case because remember, these are people who can afford to go to school for advanced degrees.  Few poor people can afford to do this, they go to school for another reason.

How about a more pragmatic reason? People with more conservative views tend to look upon university as a means to an end rather than a possible vocation.  Before the notion that a university or college education was desirable just to be a better human being was the radical idea that being educated would open up career and employment avenues for the eventual graduates.  Indeterminate ongoing academic study was a rather pointless  exercise.

It’s a fair bet that most willing to put themselves through years of engineering school, or to study quantum physics, or endure 7 years of medical education is pretty much looking for  gainful employment at the end of it all.  It’s unlikely that they’d be inclined to pursue academia after school.  It would be interesting to see if educators in such ‘hard’ disciplines exhibited such a marked lean to the left in their politics. Personally, I doubt it.

In the hard sciences, theories are put forth to explain how the real world works, but must be tested against effectiveness in real life.  With the taskmaster of reality to coldly determine the viability of theories, ill conceived ones die and only legitimate solutions are validated.  There aren’t a lot of people left who think the universe revolves around the earth or that companies which lose money constantly can stay in business.  This is the world of is, not if.

In disciplines such as history, economics and certainly psychology and sociology, theories are offered to explain human activity and much of what passes as knowledge or learning is the collective acceptance of these opinions as fact.  In studies concerning the human condition, it’s  natural to observe the shortcomings of people throughout the passage of history.  It is also natural therefore to offer theories on how the human condition could be improved by following various ideologies.  Since students in these disciplines must show some acceptance of the theories in order to pass the class, many social theories become perpetuated as knowledge, not just theory.

The real perplexing issue is, why,  despite a conspicuous lack of any evidence whatsoever throughout history in  support of a benign socialist or collectivist regime, do university professors tilt that way.  There is no society which has ever operated on the socialist beliefs of the left that can be held as an example of one that has worked.  Yet somehow,  this mindset, which is also well entrenched in the law racket, is drawn upon when forming social policies and programs by politicians.

The ongoing problem, as my hero George Orwell points out, is that academics want people to live in the starkness of their theoretical models while they themselves prefer to live in the comforts of the real world.  If this were not true, there would be no such thing as tenure.  Bottom line, we’re better off following the advice of people with a chest full of experience rather than a desk full of theories.

history of useless inventions: chindogu.

In the news recently are increasing  reports of people apparently not knowing how to turn off their cars.  After just a little over a hundred years of having  automobiles become a mainstay of our everyday lives, you would think that aspect of car ownership would be pretty much solved. 

In the very early stages of the automobile, starting a car wasn’t exactly a flick of the wrist.  You were required to throw that scarf around you neck and stoop down at the front of the contraption, pushing mightily on a removable crankshaft until the engine sputtered to life. Soot and greasy hands were always an issue and that’s why driving gloves were required of motorists.  If you didn’t have those and a handlebar moustache, you couldn’t expect to drive.

Some years later, someone invented the ignition key as means of turning on or off the car.  A pretty reasonable invention which all manufacterers adopted and soon the hand crankshaft went the way of driving goggles and handlebar moustaches.  Recently many car makers in the spirit of chindogu as explained in the link above, have moved towards allowing cars to ‘intelligently’ sense that their owners were nearby because of an electronic fob in their pockets.  This fob would automatically unlock the doors and allow starting of the car by pressing a button on the dash or console.  Apparently, clicking a fob and then turning it in an ignition slot to start or stop the car was seen as too onerous a task for most people. 

This has created a new set of problems.  Apparently, some people cannot figure out how to turn off their cars in an emergency and in some cases, the cars are left running unknowingly until discovered 7 hours later.  There was a report of a driver who didn’t know how to immobilize his Toyota Avalon.  Apparently, there are procedures that drivers have to become familiar with other than just turning off  a key.  The word ‘chindogu’ referenced in the link specifically refers to inventions that are purely for the sake of ingenuity without necessarily commercial utility and I believe this new method of starting or stopping cars comes perilously close to being the poster item for this definition.

In the old days, watching TV shows such as Star Trek,  it was  amusing that the doors would slide open automatically when someone approached.   It seems cool, but in practice, it’s mostly useless in real life.  If you can’t even be bothered to turn the handle on a door,  that pretty much says you’d better sign up for a personal trainer.

This key fob ignition is somewhat reminiscent of the “New Coke” product some years back.  It was an unmitigated flop and soon the product was retired and the classic Coke was brought back as the mainstay.  Perhaps this fob/ignition thing  is a fad.  Perhaps it will go the way of New Coke, or electric dog polishers, or butter from a roll-on stick.  If it does, then it’s legtimate chindogu.

If   however, more of these kinds of  ” convenience” inventions are brought out to make driving easier and with less input from the operator, I humbly submit that such an  invention already exists.  It’s called  a taxi.