Posted on 02/17/2010 6:56:48 AM PST by bs9021
Why Campuses Are Blue
Sheila Archambault, February 17, 2010
A key reason why few conservatives go into the teaching profession is that the job of a professor does not fit the image many conservatives have of themselves, two scholars argued.
“The professoriate, along with a number of other knowledge work fields, has been ‘politically typed’ as appropriate for and welcoming of people with broadly liberal political sensibilities, and as inappropriate for conservatives,” Ethan Fosse and Neil Gross said in a working paper, entitled “Why Are Professors Liberal?”
Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University was in agreement with Fosse’s and Gross’s conclusion and said that this pattern is true in academia more so than in other professions.
“As liberal and leftist values circulate freely from one class to the next, the impression hardens and conservatives steer clear,” Bauerlein said.
Fosse and Gross said, “when it occasionally happens that conservative students do form the aspiration to become professors, they are likely to run up against barriers involving both self-contempt incongruence and negative judgments from peers and occupation members.”
Thomas Bertonneau, a Classical Literatures and Comparative literatures professor at State University of New York at Oswego disagrees with Fosse and Gross that the liberal political character of academia is “explained in part by the fact that scholarly life attracts people who have a ‘high tolerance for controversial ideas.’ ”
“On the contrary: the academy is intellectually conformist and averse to actual controversy. On every subject – from ‘global warming’ to Darwinism to affirmative action to abortion – there is one permissible opinion,” Bertonneau said.
“The professoriate is not merely liberal, it is radically left liberal in its basic assumptions and it is relentless in its determination to make itself homogeneously left liberal, if necessary by driving out difference,” he added....
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
White libs proving once again they are a joke. One day the chair of Islamic studies will sign off on the paperwork eliminating the positions of the last jew and feminist at Harvard, and these clowns will wonder, “Where’s my pension check?”
So, basically, the answer is they don’t want to be stuck with a bunch of libs all their lives.
Not much of a study, really.
Their claim that conservatives don’t become professors because they know most professors are liberals doesn’t address the real question:
How did it get that way to begin with?
The study is rubbish. You asked the right question: How did they get that way? The answer is that once the New Left infilitrated the campuses they gradually took control. Once they had control it was almost impossible for anyone who didn’t share their views to have a career. If by chance you happened to get a teaching position, it was virtually certain they would prevent you from getting tenure.
For almost two generations the primary qualifications for getting a university job have been political.
....draft exemption for teachers in the 60's....now they're in the top positions.
Enough of this misusing the term “blue.”
Most professors — at least outside of engineering, business schools and the hard sciences — are REDS, or at least PINKOs.
Anyone who knows liberals knows that they do not have a high tolerance for controversial ideas. They embrace EVERY controversial idea and do not tolerate dissension.
Interesting point. I hadn’t thought of that.
And unfortunately I can’t think of any equal and opposite stimulus that would turn it back around.
GMTA (see my #6)
They’re REDS. Screw Orwellian media newsspeak.
Time to change that. I can envision retired teachers, professors, any professional, skills of all types and kinds - starting conservative colleges and universities across the US. Have "Tea Party" schools. . . . it's time to take back our country and take back our institutions of higher learning. . .
Eliminate tenure and start firing the (formerly) tenured radicals. Another approach would be to begin by using funding constraints to eliminate all “studies” departments and pare to a minimum the humanities and social science departments. We don’t have to give up the institutions if we elect people with the courage to be called names by unemployed leftists and their friends in the media.
Amen to that. When I first heard of the "studies" departments, I thought it was , okay, take a course in it. When I found out you could Major in this or that "studies" and actually graduate with a degree, I was dumbfounded. I was a Bio major and Chem and Philosophy minors, so didn't feel it was the same, if you get my drift. . .
I think you have two philosophies at work. The conservatives tolerate intellectual dissent, while liberals do not. Therefore over time, the less tolerant will drive out the more tolerant.
Damn college kids shouldn’t be allowed to vote in their college states if they aren’t really from there.
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