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George F. Will: College campuses fail on diversity of thought
Minneapolis Star Tribune ^ | November 28, 2004 | George F. Will

Posted on 11/27/2004 10:37:51 PM PST by rhema

Oh, well, if studies say so. The secret is out: Liberals dominate campuses. Coming soon: "Moon Implicated in Tides, Studies Find."

One study of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least 7 to 1 in the humanities and social sciences. That imbalance, more than double what it was three decades ago, is intensifying because younger professors are more uniformly liberal than the older cohort that is retiring.

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.

But we essentially knew this even before the American Enterprise magazine reported in 2002 on examinations of voting records in various college communities. Some findings about professors registered with the two major parties or with liberal or conservative minor parties:

Cornell: 166 liberals, 6 conservatives.

Stanford: 151 liberals, 17 conservatives.

Colorado: 116 liberals, 5 conservatives.

UCLA: 141 liberals, 9 conservatives.

The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2004, of the top five institutions in terms of employee per capita contributions to presidential candidates, the third, fourth and fifth were Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. The top two were the University of California system and Harvard, both of which gave about 19 times more money to John Kerry than to George Bush. . . .

A filtering process, from graduate school admissions through tenure decisions, tends to exclude conservatives from what Mark Bauerlein calls academia's "sheltered habitat." . . . Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and director of research 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.

(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; US: Minnesota
KEYWORDS: academia; diversity; georgefwill; highereducation
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1 posted on 11/27/2004 10:37:51 PM PST by rhema
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To: rhema

Ok George, but what can we do about it...?


2 posted on 11/27/2004 10:40:55 PM PST by konaice
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To: konaice

not much...

so long as these people were making the donations as private citizens, it is their right....

But as for who the university employs, if it is a state institution, there might be some things to do about it, im not sure...


3 posted on 11/27/2004 10:48:32 PM PST by MikefromOhio (42 days until I can leave Iraq for good....)
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To: rhema
The teachers can be as liberal as they want as long as they teach their students how to read and think critically.

It's a shame that the Socratic method isn't used until law school.

4 posted on 11/27/2004 10:49:31 PM PST by bayourod (Don't Mess With West Texas Oil Field Trash)
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To: rhema

In other news, bears sh-t in the woods, Pope John Paul is a Roman Catholic and Kevin Spacey is Gay.


5 posted on 11/27/2004 10:50:00 PM PST by Clemenza (Gabba Gabba Hey!)
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To: konaice

Once these vietnam era nutballs retire, I think you will see a upturn in the number of conservatives on campus. As a college student, I can tell you that most professors look at everything through the premice of the vietnam and civil rights debates of that time.


6 posted on 11/27/2004 10:50:56 PM PST by Montresor
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To: konaice
(a) Get rid of anything with the word "studies" in it.
(b) Get rid of anything with the word "science" in it unless it already has the word "computer".
(c) Forbid the publication of any work involving the word "gender", "class", or "sexual".
(d) Require calculus for any Ph. D.
(e) Eliminate the NEH.
(f) Restrict the NEA to commissioned artwork only.

We have to start dealing with these people harshly.

7 posted on 11/27/2004 11:00:29 PM PST by AmishDude
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To: AmishDude

Oh, and affirmative action for conservatives. They would have absolute fits!


8 posted on 11/27/2004 11:01:14 PM PST by AmishDude
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To: konaice

It just dawned on me - someone (Horowitz?) could write a manual for incoming college freshmen, "How to Deal with Your Leftist College Environment", or whatever.

Just the publishing of it, would cause Lieberals to blow in place.


9 posted on 11/27/2004 11:10:11 PM PST by fire_eye (Socialism is the opiate of academia.)
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To: rhema

This is a huge problem that apparently many here just do not get. One, on an individual level, this is discrmination, and many hopeful and talented conservatives are purged, yes, purged, from the ranks of academia. Believe it or not, some people really like teaching. The college is the last place where liberals have congregated and totally isolted themselves, acting like modern day Baldur von Schirachs, pumping out young minds full of liberal propaganda. This has got to stop.


10 posted on 11/27/2004 11:12:35 PM PST by KC_Conspirator (I am poster #48)
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To: AmishDude

(d) Require calculus for any Ph. D.
____________________________________

I believe this one alone might do it.

Another suggestion might be:

(g) Send your kids to conservative colleges. Now if you kid can get into maybe Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford send them their for the prestige, but pretty quickly Duke, Vandy, Washington U. degrees don't do that much more for your kid. Reward the schools and programs that will hire conservatives.


11 posted on 11/27/2004 11:15:32 PM PST by JLS
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To: AmishDude

>(a) Get rid of anything with the word "studies" in it.
>(b) Get rid of anything with the word "science" in it
>unless it already has the word "computer".
>(c) Forbid the publication of any work involving the word
>"gender", "class", or "sexual".
>(d) Require calculus for any Ph. D.
>(e) Eliminate the NEH.
>(f) Restrict the NEA to commissioned artwork only.

Or:

1) Free tuition for biology, chemistry, math, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, and computer science majors.
2) Full tuition for everything else.

>>(d) Require calculus for any Ph. D.
>I believe this one alone might do it.
Best in Show.



12 posted on 11/27/2004 11:24:44 PM PST by ROTB
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To: rhema

Social Studies and Humanities. The good news is that the libs are too dumb to dominate the hard sciences.


13 posted on 11/27/2004 11:30:03 PM PST by Mogollon
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To: AmishDude



Excellent list.


14 posted on 11/27/2004 11:40:34 PM PST by onyx
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To: rhema
But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, denies that academic institutions are biased against conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he explains, occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? "Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice." That clears that up.

In other words, their ideology is morally right and conservatives are only interested in capitalist greed.

This is a huge lie. Problem is, liberals like this actually believe this crock of crap.

15 posted on 11/27/2004 11:41:22 PM PST by Bullish
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To: Clemenza

Kevin Spacey is gay?!!


16 posted on 11/27/2004 11:45:32 PM PST by Goldwater4ever (Voted early, voted often... for Bush)
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To: Goldwater4ever
Its an "open secret" in Hollywood.

I have a feeling that Kevin may be able to do a Jim Nabors and not be forced to "come out."

17 posted on 11/27/2004 11:47:04 PM PST by Clemenza (Gabba Gabba Hey!)
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To: Clemenza

I think George is a few decades late on this piece....get with the times Mortimer Snerd.


18 posted on 11/27/2004 11:50:37 PM PST by chasio649
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To: MikeinIraq
The good thing is that we don't have to do much about it. Society has a way of sweeping around moribund institutions and leaving them crumbling in its wake. Institutional rigidity is our friend. Change occurs at an ever quickening pace and even the ivied halls are not exempt.

The first indication will be a societal discounting of the product of higher education. The academically credentialed society will give way to a performance based society. Bill Gates was a college dropout. There are any number of Arts majors driving cabs.

In an information overloaded society pedagogy will switch from accumulation of information to an emphasis on parsing available knowledge and a rejection of false theorem. Those universities that can change fast enough will survive. Those that can't will become curious relics.

19 posted on 11/27/2004 11:58:58 PM PST by MARTIAL MONK
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To: rhema

It ever-amazes me that colleges and universities throughout the land teach Keynes economics dogmatically, and don't even mention Friedman -- though the RealWorld gave up Keynes in the 70's in favor of Friedman's monetarist economics.

They just don't want to believe, and so ignore reality, as if it will go away like an unwanted guest.


20 posted on 11/28/2004 1:59:11 AM PST by Mudcat
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