Leave it to the Times to provide another unbalanced look at an issue.
This guy comes from the same cesspool as cynthia tucker--not worth reading or talking about.
College faculties are overwhelmingly liberal because conservatives and libertarians keep forking over money to send their kids to these places.
Krugmania.
But look at the bright side. He's now apparently arguing that wildly disparate outcomes are not evidence of discrimination. LOL
Well, this explains a question I've had for a long time:
Why is that most Birkenstock-wearing, pot-smoking, flag-burning, hybrid-driving, gun-fearing, crime-loving, freedom-hating, tax-increasing, atheistic, Darwinistic, pussies register Democrat while real men register Republican?
"Self-selection"
The NY Times fails to register the fact that most scientists, physicists, and biologists are conservative in their political affiliation. Conservative does not mean fundamentalist Christian. He has set up a strawman argument and then argues that the Republicans are trying to establish a theocracy by misrepresenting the views of one Congressman.
This article is unworthy of the title of journalism.
Isn't it the liberals that assert that if a minority group is not proportionally represented in a profession, it's the result of racial discrimination that must be remedied with affirmative action?
But to some extent, there may be a degree of 'self selection' in the field of academics. Liberals are inclined to make life miserable for those who don't rubber stamp their ideology. I couldn't imagine choosing academia where even mentioning that one is Christian results in nonstop hate and villification. I only succeeded in completing college by knowing enough to contain my viewpoints, and I couldn't wait to get out.
There is an old canard, "those who can...do, those who can't...teach". In that manner, the NY Times may be correct. Since the liberals "can't do" they "teach".
Keynes was right once and they crowned him god of economics. Ronald Reagan could show you on a cocktail napkin more about economics than John Maynard Keynes ever knew. Further, they should teach Hayek and von Mises over Keynes because Hayek and von Mises and Friedman and Sowell are the inheritors of Smith and Ferguson, and we are a capitalist nation. Let them teach Keynes and Marx in France.
Those that can, do...those that can't...well, you know.
Wow!!! Talk about incongruity!!
Krugman, NYT and Academic!!!!
Why is this surprising? Look it is also possible that a lower starting pay for college teaching does not match that of starting with corporations or lawyering. After all Republicans have better business heads and money does matter, so why should a smart Republican teach?
In a way we are still reaping the rewards of Vietnam. A large number of those in power today in academia got there by using education deferrals for advanced degrees to avoid the draft. (Others went into the clergy and private foundations.) Now this generation, in their fifties and sixties, is sitting atop the academic power structure. Tenure and promotion decisions in universities are highly subjective and are voted on by the tenured faculty of each particular field so it is, to some extent, a popularity contest. Friends help friends.
Whether the problems now evident in academia and the churches and the foundations will pass with the "Vietnam Generation" is the real question. I suppose it will be self-perpetuating for awhile but then the pendulum will swing back. We owe such a debt of gratitude to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson!
bttt
This from the corner of the 'earthmother gaia' crowd. I find the respect of most scholars irrelevant. They can go away, I and others like me are getting the job done.
Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they're seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses' content.
As if politics has no influence on who gets grant money to do what research, and that if your conclusions (supported by the most stringent data) fly in the face of the politically correct consensus, you will get no more grant money.
Conservatives are not at fault, they did not select the professors.
Krugman is a turd.