onegoodmove

For example, the low wages of university professors don’t deter as many leftists as they do conservatives who may be more likely to seek out positions in the private sector.

Hell I like to think of the reason there are more left oriented professors than conservative ones (assuming of course that is even true which is by no means a fait acompli)is that the more educated you are the more likely you are to be liberal :-)

Sorry for this long post here.

You know this a very interesting question. Notre Dame is more "balanced", having more conservatives. But there are plenty of leftists here as well, indeed among us Christians!

The idea that something nefarious must be afoot because there are a lot more leftists on college campuses has always seemed wrong, but I have been trying to articulate why. Is it because the smarter you are the more likely you are to be left? Well, if you are a leftist and you believe that political issues are amenable to thought, then you have to beleive that in some sense this is true.

But my view is that university life entails a number of habits and perspectives that favor leftism. Of course here you have to explain what leftism is in essence; just naming certain views that leftists usually have (e.g. redistribution) won't do for this discussion because I don't think you can match these up with modes of thought at universities generally.

As my thinking goes right now, the core of leftism is critique of existing power structures and the expansion of the boundaries of politics. The left has always critiqued existing power structures and have always tried to expand the boundaries of the political. These two things actually go hand in hand. In critiquing partriarchy, women also attempted to expand the sphere of the political to include their participation. The labor movement made a critique of capitalism as it struggled to move wages out of the private realm of worker-boss relations and into the realm of politics.

University life seems to foster social and political critique as well as an expansion of the realm of politics. The habit of critique seems self-evident--academic thinking is largel critical thinking. Of course the university as an institution is an existing authority with its own dogmas and so forth and this serves to work against critique. I also think that university life tends toward an expansion of the boundaries of politics. This is less intuitive, but true I think. In the social sciences and humanities, you learn about social relations and forms of discourse. These lessons could contribute to conservative mindsets--the need for tradition, the productivity of the market, etc. But this expansion of horizon more often leads to an increased imaginative capacity--we are able to imagine what it must be like to be a blue-collar worker, a Palestinian refugee, an immigrant. This perspective expands the boundaries of the political because it now takes into account the previously "voiceless".

There are plenty of other walks of life where conservatives outnumber leftists--groups of white men, churches, corporations, most white collar professions. This has to do with the social position of these groups as well as the habits and thought that they foster. It shouldn't be shocking or objectionable that one of our cherished institutions happen to have more lefties than conservatives.

The Dynamic Driveler writes:

Hell I like to think of the reason there are more left oriented professors than conservative ones ... is that the more educated you are the more likely you are to be liberal :-)

Response:

Actually, both liberals and conservatives tend to be better educated than political moderates. On years of education, highest degree attained, score on a vocabulary test, and score on an analogies test, conservative Republicans score the highest of 10 political groups, followed closely by liberal independents, followed closely by liberal Democrats (these differences are seldom statistically significant from each other). At the bottom of the 10 groups on education, degrees, vocabulary, and analogies are moderate Democrats and insignificantly below them, conservative Democrats.

So conservative Republicans are the best educated group and moderate and conservative Democrats are the worst educated groups. These differences are highly statistically significant.

The pattern is more complex than you describe in your tongue-in-cheek comment.

James,

I'm interested, can you provide a link to your source.

The data I reported are from the 1974-2002 NORC General Social Surveys, the most carefully done of the large academic surveys of the general public. The GSS is the most widely used database for sociologists except for the US Census, and is among the most widely used databases in the social sciences. If you are at a university, you can probably download the data from the U. Michigan ICPSR website:

http://www.icpsr.umich.edu:8080/ICPSR-STUDY/03728.xml

The variables I used were POLVIEWS, PARTYID, EDUC, DEGREE, WORDSUM, and a sum of the ALIKE variables. I weighted by ADULTS and OVERSAMP in the method recommended by James Davis, and used a design effect (DEFF) of 1.5.

I expect that you would find generally similar results--both liberals and conservatives well educated--in the ANES (American National Election Studies) data, which are also available from ICPSR--though the ANES's data on liberal-conservative self-identification are less reliable than the GSS's.

I am working on a scholarly article on these issues.

By the way, Republicans are significantly more educated than non-Republicans, with higher degrees and better performance on verbal tests. On the other hand, Democrats do significantly worse on these measures than non-Democrats.

I'm glad you understood it was tongue in cheek James :-)

I am familiar with these data sets and I'll have to take a look at them. The data I have seen is that of all college-educated people, most are conservatives. But if you look at academics (PhDs and others with advanced, non-professional degrees), these are overwhemingly liberal. And of course of those "academics" who are actually teaching in college, these are overewhelmingly liberal. This fits with what you have said, only it is more specific. But it is somewhat misleading to say that "Republicans are more educated" because the most highly educated people (PhDs) are mostly liberal, and make up a large proportion of the far left. Republicans as a group have more degrees, but but any given Republican are more likely to have a bachelor's or professional degree than less than a bachelor's or and advanced degree.

I think that generally, bachelor's degrees and professional degrees in America today are about entrance into a socio-economic class rather than a horizon-widening learning experience. In other words, you get a BA to get a nice job rather than to gain interests and experiences you didn't have before. This recent flap about being oppressed by liberal profs makes this worse, because the solution will invariably be to make everything optional--you won't have to take any class that disturbs your political prejudices or social sensibilities.

Dende Blogger,

I generally agree with your comments.

Liberals usually have more graduate degrees than conservatives, who have more than moderates.

For Republicans v. Democrats, the data are quite variable. In the 2000 GSS, Democrats had more graduate degrees; in the 2002 GSS, Republicans had more graduate degrees (with moderately small numbers, I'm not certain that either of these differences are statistically significant).

James: As I said, I'll have to look at these interesting data sets. Thanks much for referring us to them.