
Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left - karthikv
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/arts/18liberal.html
======
gyardley
Interesting for two reasons:

First, the Times reporter wrote "intentional discrimination, one of the most
frequent and volatile charges made by conservatives, turned out not to play a
significant role." While the actual paper mentioned this as a potential cause,
and cited conservative commentators like D'Souza and Horowitz, it wasn't one
of the six hypotheses actually tested by the sociologists - I assume because
it's hard to test this in a quantitative manner. In other words, the Times
reporter is editorializing.

Second, the ending quote from Neil Gross: "The irony is that the more
conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism, the more likely it’s going
to remain a bastion of liberalism." If political typecasting is an issue for
academia, then gender-based typecasting is almost certainly an issue for
certain male-dominated professions. Yet a sociologist who said "The irony is
that the more women complain about [profession's] preponderance of males, the
more likely it's going to remain a bastion of males" would be widely
criticized. There's a double-standard at work here.

------
mhartl
Conservative self-selection out of academia is a second-order effect, like
women self-selecting themselves off of oil rigs. The first-order effect is
that progressives make better academics. This may be due in part to the rather
smug assumption that progressives are smarter, but there is also obvious
adaptive value to being a progressive in an occupation that both advises and
is largely funded by the government.

Academia is a parasite on the State, but it's not just any parasite; it's a
_brain_ parasite. Academics tell policy-makers what to think, and policy-
makers send academics a river of cash. Conservative and libertarian academics,
whose political principles oppose the government cash-river, are swimming
upstream.

------
nkohari
Conservatives don't value intellectualism.

Edit: Okay, blanket statement. How about this: _MOST_ conservatives don't
value intellectualism.

------
pmichaud
Mildly interesting, but not HN material. Flagged.

~~~
pmichaud
Cute, someone disagrees with me so I get a downvote instead of a response. All
in a thread about a dubious off topic submission. Nice, HN, keep it classy.

~~~
dschobel
_Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate
for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to
its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there
is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that
you did._

