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| US Academia Suffers From a "False Consensus Effect" |
| 2004-11-28 |
| From The Washington Post, an opinion article by George F. Will One study of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. .... Another study, of voter registration records, including those of professors in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine Democrats for every Republican at Berkeley and Stanford. Among younger professors, there were 183 Democrats, six Republicans. .... A filtering process, from graduate school admissions through tenure decisions, tends to exclude conservatives from what Mark Bauerlein calls academia's "sheltered habitat." In a dazzling essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, notes that the "first protocol" of academic society is the "common assumption" -- that, at professional gatherings, all the strangers in the room are liberals. .... This gives rise to what Bauerlein calls the "false consensus effect," which occurs when, because of institutional provincialism, "people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population." There also is what Cass Sunstein, professor of political science and jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, calls "the law of group polarization." Bauerlein explains: "When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs." They become tone-deaf to the way they sound to others outside their closed circle of belief. Academics such as the next secretary of state still decorate Washington, but academia is less listened to than it was. It has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies." Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations -- except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more intellectually monochrome. .... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #6 May have posted this once before: my son is a freshman at a mid-West college. First day of class, his Ethic's prof says that anything a Republican says is "bull***t"! As my son is quite conservative, this rankled. The prof has, however, been more than fair in his grading. |
| Posted by: OldeForce 2004-11-28 8:52:03 PM |
| #5 Since they could not have a nanny state, they at least have a nanny academe. It is becoming a microcosmos of the modus operandi/vivendi I so /sarc-on/ nostalgically /sarc-off/ remember from my old country. Liberté is only for über-libs; fraternité too, comrade; egalité -- well we know that some animals are more equal than others. So, if I want a life-like reminder of what I left behind, all I have to do is to immerse myself in some campus and it feels like home. LOL |
| Posted by: Cornîliës 2004-11-28 4:53:35 PM |
| #4 Brilliant strategy followed by the perfessers, eh? New Left academics pushed right-leaning academics and PhDs out of the field begining in the early 1970s. Right-of-center academics skip academe and head en masse to Washington instead. Results? New Left academics thoroughly dominate academe from coast to coast. Right-leaning republican Party dominates executive, legislative and judicial branches of federal government as well as most governorships across the country. "That man must be an intellectual. No one else could be so stupid." --Orwell |
| Posted by: lex 2004-11-28 4:28:24 PM |
| #3 Why are academic disputes so very bitter? Because the stakes are so small! |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2004-11-28 2:03:37 PM |
| #2 AM - W00t! Excellent rant! Apparently, irrelevance is a painful burden for the "sheltered", lol! |
| Posted by: .com 2004-11-28 1:30:51 PM |
| #1 It should also be noted that arguments in academe are especially bitter precisely because they are so unimportant. For though they always insist that they "shape the minds of the youth", statistically, they don't. Children tend to vote just like their parents. Academics also insist that they "shape the public policy debate"; but that is put to the lie by anyone outside of their coffee klatsch, who are oblivious to their entreties. Another of their illusions is of the "inevitability of socialism", which was rattled down to its bone marrow by the collapse of the Soviet Union--and yet still survives. This has resulted in their still advocating issues as dead as whether the President should be limited to two terms. Nobody cares, and look at them oddly as they still act like socialism is relevant. Fortunately, today, many trees are spared being turned into asinine theses because of the Internet, which has spare electrons to burn for all the neglected university department web pages. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2004-11-28 1:23:13 PM |