Phyllis Schlafly: Confronting Campus Radicals

townhall.com ^ | 1/12/04 | Phyllis Schlafly

[blitzgig]

David Horowitz thinks that anybody who cares about the future should confront the fact that U.S. colleges and universities are the fountainhead of financing for the radical movement in America. He has personally taken up the challenge to do something about this.

Horowitz was a left-wing campus activist in the 1960s, but he says that men who were too radical even for him and Ramparts, the magazine he edited in the 1960s, now hold tenure at major universities. During the 1970s, these hardcore leftists achieved critical mass on university faculties, took control of hiring committees, and then saw to it that only leftists were hired.

Now there are literally tens of thousands of "hard-line Marxists" in academic sinecures. They have made universities "a subsidiary of the political left and the Democratic Party."

These hard-core leftists have no shame about using the classroom podium for political speechmaking. They may be teaching a course in biology or Shakespeare, but that doesn't inhibit them from launching into tirades against American policies or in favor of the communists in El Salvador, or assigning students to write a paper on why President George W. Bush is a war criminal.

These radical leftists have redefined the mission of universities. Instead of the pursuit of knowledge and truth, universities today see themselves as agencies for social change. Horowitz says the change they seek is fundamentally anti-American.

The amount of money universities have to carry out their left-wing mission is mind-boggling. Whereas conservative and pro-American intellectual sources, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, and conservative journals may have budgets of a few million dollars, universities have billions of dollars. A great portion is taxpayer money obtained through research grants and student-financed tuition. In addition, the leftists control most student-activity assessments.

Many people have decried the bias of universities, but Horowitz has a plan to turn it around.

First, expose how bad the situation is, and second, challenge them directly by using the liberals' credo of diversity against them by calling for intellectual diversity.

For years, the universities have sanctimoniously proclaimed the value of diversity, but they define diversity to mean only giving space to radical left-wingers and feminists. Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture made a survey of 32 colleges and universities and reported that the overall ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 10:1.

At Cornell University, which is typical, 95 percent of the faculty who are registered to vote are Democrats. Of the faculty in the government department, only 1 of 23 members is a registered Republican.

At almost every American university, conservative professors are drastically outnumbered. Rep Jack Kingston. R-Ga., says, "Most students probably graduate without ever having a class taught by a professor with a conservative viewpoint."

Kingston and Rep. Walter B. Jones, R-N.C., have introduced a bill to promote the most important diversity of all, the diversity of ideas. Their bill calls on colleges to end discrimination against hiring conservative faculty and against students.

Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, held a hearing on the issue of liberal bias on campus. Witnesses testified that colleges intimidate students and faculty, force them to take "diversity training" and condone harassment of students who write conservative columns for campus publications.

Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, was one of the witnesses.

She said, "Rather than fostering intellectual diversity ... our colleges and universities are increasingly bastions of political correctness hostile to free exchange of ideas."

Horowitz's new organization, Students for Academic Freedom, has attracted students on about 90 campuses with the goal of demanding a more balanced point of view among faculty and in campus lecture series. They are promoting an Academic Bill of Rights as a policy statement for colleges to adopt so that students can enjoy intellectual diversity with fairness for conservative viewpoints.

It is refreshing that conservative students are increasingly fighting back against academic intolerance. Some conservative students at the University of Texas have begun compiling a "Professor Watch List" to warn students about professors who use their classes for liberal indoctrination.

Students have sued Shippensburg University, Texas Tech University and a California community college as part of a campaign to abolish the notorious campus speech codes. These students are backed by the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

A recent hearing by the Colorado State Legislature uncovered outrageous examples of classroom indoctrination and faculty retaliation. Students who are willing to come forth and expose some of these classroom outrages are invited to check out the Web site of Students for Academic Freedom at studentsforacademicfreedom.org .

[blitzgig]

AWESOME piece by Schlafly!

[Bernard Marx]

bump

[LiteKeeper]

read in the morning

[ConsistentLibertarian]

"Their bill calls on colleges to end discrimination against hiring conservative faculty"

How would a hiring committee ever know whether a biologist was a conservative or a liberal?

And if they don't know, how can they be discriminating against them?

[Travis McGee]

Visualize traitors hanging from trees.

[T'wit]

Leftists are trough junkies. Wherever they can dip their snouts into tax money, they thrive and breed and multiply. It isn't only university faculty, but leftist think tanks and public policy groups of every description -- all funded by taxes and working for the destruction of America.

You wonder how the "peace" movement has all the money and time to be out "protesting" when others are at work? The demonstrators are generously supported by tax dollars earned by American workers.

[Bonaparte]

They look at his past academic work and talk to his profs and advisors. They can access info on his campaign contributions and use private investigators to find out all sorts of things about him. A skillful interviewer can also get a pretty good idea of a candidate's politics, even when that candidate misrepresents them. At many of these campuses, the untenured faculty who fail to be politically active on the left never see tenure and may even be dismissed eventually.

It's not just a coincidence that of the thousands of people teaching in universities, so few are conservatives.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

Some years ago liberals claimed that Stanford was discriminating against female applicants for graduate school. They based their claim on hard statistical data: The percentage of female applicants who were admitted was much lower than the percentage of male applicants who were admitted.

What do you think? Did they have even a prima facie case?

Some people looked at that evidence and thought there was at least a prima facie reason to think something was wrong with the graduate admissions process.

But then they take a closer look. They did a department by department comparison of the admission rates for women and the admission rates for men and found that in every department, the percentage of female applicants admitted was HIGHER than the percentage of male applicants admitted.

Question: How could that be? How could women have a better chance of getting admitted in every department and yet have a worse chance of getting admitted over all?

Answer: It turns out it's harder to get admitted to some departments than others. And female applicants applied in disproportionate numbers to the most competitive departments.

Moral: Arguments that seem to backed by solid statistics are sometimes really bad arguments.

Now consider the Schlafly-Horowitz case. Schlafly is impressed with Horowitz's statistics showing liberals outnumber conservatives 10:1 on university faculties.

Question #1: What crucial bit of data did Horowitz _fail_ to provide?

Question #2: Can any conclusion, however tentative, be drawn about discrimination against hiring conservative faculty based just on the data Horowitz _does_ provide?


Answers below ...


#1: Horowitz doesn't provide any information about the applicant pool.

#2: Absolutely nothing. If liberals outnumbered conservatives 20:1 in the applicant pool, then Horowitz's statistics suggest that it's liberals, and not conservatives who face discrimination in the hiring process.

This is a well-known fallacy. The information that Horowitz provides is "pseudo-diagnostic" information. It looks like it's telling us something, but really it isn't because there's no comparison with a meaningful contrast class (percentage of conservative faculty hired vs. percentage of conservatives in the applicant pool).

Now notice that even the liberals arguing that women faced discrimination in graduate admissions at Stanford knew enough not to rely on pseudo-diagnostic information. To be as bad as Schlafly and Horowitz they would have had to argue for discrimination on the basis that male graduate students simply outnumbered female graduate students.

Liberals who argued Stanford was discriminating against female graduate applicants got tripped up on a far more subtler point.

You'd think that if a high-profile commentator like Schlafly or Horowitz was going to make an argument based on statistics and they didn't know as much as someone would learn in a decent first course on quantitative methods in the social sciences that they'd tread more softly.

But apparently not.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

"They look at his past academic work"

In biology?

"They can access info on his campaign contributions and use private investigators to find out all sorts of things about him."

Are you kidding me? On who's nickel?

"A skillful interviewer can also get a pretty good idea of a candidate's politics, even when that candidate misrepresents them."

Think of the professor you had for econometrics. You know, the one with the broken glasses with tape who walked funny, had a bit of cleft foot, got nervous when people stood too close to him and always seemed to be wearing the same clothes.

That's your skillful interviewer.

"It's not just a coincidence that of the thousands of people teaching in universities, so few are conservatives."

So we want an explanation. Do you really think the "They hire private investigators to screen all the candidates" theory is a winner?

[Happy2BMe]

She's right - American campuses are seething with socialist and Islamic activists.

Funded by big money too - Saudis, Democrats, etc.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

"American campuses are seething with socialist and Islamic activists [...] Funded by big money"

Yeah. Same goes for white men.

But have you ever noticed there's a SUPER low percentage of hot, young, sexy, horny women on university faculties?

Talk about discrimination ...

From the article "Jack Kingston. R-Ga., says, `Most students probably graduate without ever having a class taught by a professor with a conservative viewpoint.' "

Think of how many graduate without ever having a class taught to by a hot, young, sexy, horny female professor.

[Quix]

THANKS.

This has been true in sociology probably before dirt was made.

. . . wellll, almost.

[Bonaparte]

"In biology?"

Those of us who attended college know that there are course requirements outside of declared major. Papers get written in subjects like history, poli sci, English, etc. Comments are made during class discussion.

"On who's nickel?"

Yours and mine.

"So we want an explanation"

How many of you are there?

[fr_freak]

You'd think that if a high-profile commentator like Schlafly or Horowitz was going to make an argument based on statistics and they didn't know as much as someone would learn in a decent first course on quantitative methods in the social sciences that they'd tread more softly.

But apparently not.

Your statistical analysis seems correct to me (I am not a statistician, however) but it has very little to do with the point of the article. Consider the source: the article is written by a conservative activist summarizing the beliefs and strategy of another conservative activist. The point is not to prove that conservatives are being discriminated against, but that liberals dominate the university system and are using it to further their politics. The question, then, for a couple of conservative activists is: how do we reverse this trend? That the liberals dominate the academic landscape is a foregone conclusion, heavily supported by the statistics provided, which you do not dispute. That there would be in inherent discouraging of conservatives from joining the faculty is assumed; there is no attempt to prove it here. They are planning more for how to get conservatives in now, assuming resistance from liberals, than why there aren't more conservatives in place already. Therefore, you are arguing a somewhat moot point. If these two were launching a lawsuit regarding past discrimination and using this argument as the basis, then your objection might be valid.

[driftless]

You have a point, but then you don't have a point. True, most applicants for positions in liberal arts will tend to be well uh liberal or very, very, liberal. Or very radical as a number of mine were. The thing is there is no reason they have to tell us how liberal they are or what their socio-political views are as many of my college professors unfortunately did. By the way I did have a number of liberal profs who kept their political views to themselves. But too many do not, and that is a real problem. Even under the most optimistic circumstances you'll end up with a majority of liberal profs. But that doesn't mean they have to inflict their noxious political ideas on their students.

[rmh47]

Think of the professor you had for econometrics. You know, the one with the broken glasses with tape who walked funny, had a bit of cleft foot, got nervous when people stood too close to him and always seemed to be wearing the same clothes.

That's your skillful interviewer.

College faculty are not hired all at once. They are hired a bit at a time.

If one is lucky enough to be hired on a tenure track, it normally takes seven years to come up for tenure. They know who and what you are by that time. Conservatives are not usually recommended for tenure. It's an "up or out" kind of thing, similar to the military promotion system for officers. If you are not recommended for tenure, you are expected to leave.

[archy]

Visualize traitors hanging from trees.

It's happened before.

-archy-/-

[Atlas Sneezed]

#1: Horowitz doesn't provide any information about the applicant pool.

#2: Absolutely nothing. If liberals outnumbered conservatives 20:1 in the applicant pool, then Horowitz's statistics suggest that it's liberals, and not conservatives who face discrimination in the hiring process.

This is a well-known fallacy. The information that Horowitz provides is "pseudo-diagnostic" information. It looks like it's telling us something, but really it isn't because there's no comparison with a meaningful contrast class (percentage of conservative faculty hired vs. percentage of conservatives in the applicant pool).

---

You don't think that the applicant pool is disproportionately liberal because the conservatives choose other paths where they will not face hostility and limited prospects?

[Hobsonphile]

Leftism on Campus ping!

If you would like to be added to the Leftism on Campus ping list, please
notify me via FReep-mail.

Warning: During the school year in particular, this can be a high volume ping list.

Regards...

[rmlew]

Now consider the Schlafly-Horowitz case. Schlafly is impressed with Horowitz's statistics showing liberals outnumber conservatives 10:1 on university faculties.
Question #1: What crucial bit of data did Horowitz _fail_ to provide?
As I was tried to do this research for Columbia, perhaps I can be of some help.
a. The number or percentage of of unregistered faculty members. b. The number or percentage of of faculty members registered with Third Parties whose ideology is not identifiable.
c. The number or percentage of of faculty members registered as independents.

#1: Horowitz doesn't provide any information about the applicant pool.
This information is not public.

#2: Absolutely nothing. If liberals outnumbered conservatives 20:1 in the applicant pool, then Horowitz's statistics suggest that it's liberals, and not conservatives who face discrimination in the hiring process.
Not really. If the applicant pool is 95% liberal, that shows that either only liberals are interested in the field, only liberals can get degrees, or that FOR SOME REASON, only leftists bother to apply. The reasons are clear.
If you looked at the original research, David addresses this issue.