[xmca] article on why professors lean to the left

[Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>]

Thought some might be interested.  Below is a NY Times article on a  
recently published paper that proposes reasons why university  
professors have an "overwhelmingly left tilt."

From the article:
"What distinguishes Mr. Gross and Mr. Fosse’s research from so much of  
the hubbub that surrounds this subject is their methodology. Whereas  
most arguments have primarily relied on anecdotes, this is one of the  
only studies to use data from the General Social Survey of opinions  
and social behaviors and compare professors with the rest of Americans."

The article has a link to here where the full paper can be downloaded.
http://www.soci.ubc.ca/index.php?id=11932

- Steve



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January 18, 2010
Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left

By PATRICIA COHEN
The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been  
explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now  
new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong  
question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they  
should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to  
be professors.

A pair of sociologists think they may have an answer: typecasting.  
Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences  
professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket,  
pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may  
be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about  
what they want to be when they grow up.

Jobs can be typecast in different ways, said Neil Gross and Ethan  
Fosse, who undertook the study. For instance, less than 6 percent of  
nurses today are men. Discrimination against male candidates may be a  
factor, but the primary reason for the disparity is that most people  
consider nursing to be a woman’s career, Mr. Gross said. That means  
not many men aspire to become nurses in the first place — a point made  
in the recent Lee Daniels film “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by  
Sapphire.” When John (Lenny Kravitz) asks the 16-year-old Precious  
(Gabourey Sidibe) and her friends whether they’ve ever seen a male  
nurse before, all answer no amid giddy laughter.

Nursing is what sociologists call “gender typed.” Mr. Gross said that  
“professors and a number of other fields are politically typed.”  
Journalism, art, fashion, social work and therapy are dominated by  
liberals; while law enforcement, farming, dentistry, medicine and the  
military attract more conservatives.

“These types of occupational reputations affect people’s career  
aspirations,” he added in a telephone interview from his office at the  
University of British Columbia. Mr. Fosse, his co-author, is a Ph.D.  
candidate at Harvard.

The academic profession “has acquired such a strong reputation for  
liberalism and secularism that over the last 35 years few politically  
or religiously conservative students, but many liberal and secular  
ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors,” they write in  
the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” That is especially true of  
their own field, sociology, which has become associated with “the  
study of race, class and gender inequality — a set of concerns  
especially important to liberals.”

What distinguishes Mr. Gross and Mr. Fosse’s research from so much of  
the hubbub that surrounds this subject is their methodology. Whereas  
most arguments have primarily relied on anecdotes, this is one of the  
only studies to use data from the General Social Survey of opinions  
and social behaviors and compare professors with the rest of Americans.

Mr. Gross and Mr. Fosse linked those empirical results to the broader  
question of why some occupations — just like ethnic groups or  
religions — have a clear political hue. Using an econometric  
technique, they were then able to test which of the theories  
frequently bandied about were supported by evidence and which were not.

Intentional discrimination, one of the most frequent and volatile  
charges made by conservatives, turned out not to play a significant  
role.

To understand how a field gets typecast, one has to look at its  
history. From the early 1950s William F. Buckley Jr. and other  
founders of the modern conservative movement railed against academia’s  
liberal bias. Buckley even published a regular column, “From the  
Academy,” in the magazine he founded, The National Review.

“Conservatives weren’t just expressing outrage,” Mr. Gross said, “they  
were also trying to build a conservative identity.” They defined  
themselves in opposition to the New Deal liberals who occupied the  
establishment’s precincts. Hence Buckley’s quip in the early 1960s:  
“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first  
400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the  
faculty of Harvard University.”

In the 1960s college campuses, swelled by the large baby-boom  
generation, became a staging ground for radical leftist social and  
political movements, further moving the academy away from conservatism.

Typecasting, of course, is not the only cause for the liberal tilt.  
The characteristics that define one’s political orientation are also  
at the fore of certain jobs, the sociologists reported. Nearly half of  
the political lopsidedness in academia can be traced to four  
characteristics that liberals in general, and professors in  
particular, share: advanced degrees; a nonconservative religious  
theology (which includes liberal Protestants and Jews, and the  
nonreligious); an expressed tolerance for controversial ideas; and a  
disparity between education and income.

The mismatch between schooling and salary complements a theory that  
the Harvard professor Louis Menand raises in his new book “The  
Marketplace of Ideas.” He argues that the way higher education was  
structured by progressive reformers in the late 19th century is partly  
responsible for the political uniformity of today. In the view of the  
early reformers, the only way to ensure that quality, rather than  
profit, would be rewarded was to protect the profession from outside  
competition. The tradeoff for lower salaries was control; professors  
decide who gets to enter their profession and who doesn’t.

The tendency of people in any institution or organization to try to  
fit in also reinforces the political one-sidedness. In “The  
Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope and Reforms,” a  
collection of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute, a  
conservative research group, Daniel B. Klein, an economist at George  
Mason University in Virginia, and Charlotta Stern, a sociologist at  
Stockholm University, argue that when it comes to hiring, “the  
majority will tend to support candidates like them in the matter of  
fundamental beliefs, values and commitments.”

Other contributors to the book, Matthew Woessner and April Kelly- 
Woessner, who are husband and wife, also found that conservatives are  
less interested in pursuing advanced degrees than liberals.

Mr. Gross and Mr. Fosse have not yet published their results, but  
experts in the field have vetted their research and methods. Michèle  
Lamont, a Harvard professor and the author of “How Professors Think,”  
said, “I think their paper is very, very sophisticated and quite  
original.” She added that the theory better fits some disciplines,  
like literature and sociology, than others, like business or economics.

Mitchell L. Stevens, a professor of education at Stanford University,  
who also reviewed the research, finds the theory promising. Choosing  
an occupation is part of fashioning an identity, Mr. Stevens said,  
noting that people think of themselves as a “corporate type” or a free  
spirit, which is why you might find highly educated graduates working  
as bartenders instead of in an office.

He added that the gender-typing of a field like physics might also  
partly explain the dearth of women in it, another subject that has  
provoked heated disputes.

To Mr. Gross, accusations by conservatives of bias and student  
brainwashing are self-defeating. “The irony is that the more  
conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism,” he said, “the  
more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.”


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