A while back we had an interesting discussion about the apparent preponderance of leftist views within American academia. We suggested a variety of possible explanations but they all seemed to fall short for lack of concrete evidence. I'm not particularly interested in returning to this debate, but when I saw this article in the Times--The Left-Leaning Tower--I thought it might be interesting to post as a sort of follow up.
In the article, the author reviews the work of several scholars who have actually studied this phenomenon in some detail. Unfortunately, the results are still rather inconclusive. One the one hand are the findings of a sociologist who identifies himself as a democrat and claims to have found that discrimination is not a factor in the low number of conservatives in academia. On the other hand are a few conservative/libertarian scholars who argue that discrimination may be taking place in more subtle ways at later stages in academic careers--in short if you're a conservative don't get your hope up for tenure.
So basically this supposedly neutral review of empirical studies boils down to yet another he said/she said media sleight of hand using "balance" as a pretext to shore up an untenable position. It turns out that the "liberal" study is based on an extensive investigation of actual behavior in the real world, whereas the conservative counterpart employs much more flimsy evidence--a much smaller survey of attitudes based on hypothetical scenarios. But in reviewing the conservative critique, the author succeeds in voicing several quite insidious stereotypes that feed right into the anti-intellectualism so prevalent in American culture. Two particularly stood out--first that being a professor is a cushy job with four months of summer vacation, and secondly that there is some kind of multicultural and feminist veto over hiring and tenure decisions. Ultimately what gets lost in all of this is the real reason why people go into academia--love of research, teaching and of the life of the mind. More often then not when it comes down to what academics actually study, the crude distinction between liberals and conservatives that dominates our media landscape becomes almost irrelevant.
