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.