From yesterday’s New York Times:

First paragraph:

The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors.

Last paragraph:

To Mr. Gross, accusations by conservatives of bias and student brainwashing are self-defeating. “The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism,” he said, “the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.”

As someone who’s spent the last 25 years on and around US college campuses, what strikes me about the political views of American professors is not their leftward tilt, but their fundamental unseriousness.  Their opinions are consistent only in their conformity to campus fashions.  So if a shop near the school starts selling Fair Trade coffee, it can count on good business from faculty who want to show their support for the rights of coffee growers in Latin America.  Meanwhile, graduate assistants who want to unionize will get a chilly reception from every quarter, and faculty members who express an interest in organizing their colleagues into unions and demanding the right of collective bargaining will invariably be branded as kooks and malcontents.  It’s simply impossible for me to listen to a left-wing rant from a colleague and not translate it into the right-wing rant that same colleague would be delivering in a setting where the fashions were reversed. 

Depressing as this conformism is, I wouldn’t really expect anything different.  The average tenure-track faculty member in the USA puts in something like 70 hours a week working at a job that involves little or no contact with the political system.  In the years between entering grad school and receiving tenure, an American academic walks a tightrope that might at any point send all of that work down the drain and him or her out to start a new career from scratch.  So it would be strange if a large percentage of US professors found time to form and voice their own, possibly unfashionable, political opinions.  Academics are much likelier to collect the reward of their labors if they reliably voice agreement with the prevailing opinions, perhaps vying with each other to be the one who expresses those opinions in the most memorable words. 

Read the full post »