Too Many Liberals in Academia?

Conservatives like to complain about how academia is dominated by liberals.  Before getting into why that might be true, let’s get two things out of the way.  First, to the degree to which there is such an imbalance, which The Curmudgeon imagines there may be, it’s probably not anywhere near as great as  conservatives like to complain it is.  And second, let’s be clear that conservatives don’t care whether math professors, geology instructors, or engineering faculty members are registered Democrats.  They’re only interested in a few academic disciplines:  history, political science, sociology, economics, and maybe literature and a few others.

The Curmudgeon believes the liberal majority in the academic areas conservatives complain about are the result of conservative lack of interest in employment in academia.  It’s not that conservatives are getting shut out of all those great history professorships, The Curmudgeon suspects; it’s that they have little interest in them.

But why?

The Curmudgeon has three theories.

First, pay attention to national politics and you’ll notice that Republican candidates frequently belittle highly educated people.  Never mind that George Bush (original recipe) attended Yale, that his son George W. (extra crispy) earned his bachelor’s degree at Yale and his MBA at Harvard, and that last year’s Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, earned an MBA and a law degree at Harvard.  Instead, think about last year’s primary campaign, when Rick Santorum called President Obama’s desire that all children be able to attend college if they wish “elitist snobbery.”  Or think about Newt Gingrich, who himself has a Ph.D., belittling Mitt Romney for the apparently unthinkable crime of being able to speak French (even though Gingrich reportedly is able to speak French himself).  Or think about Herman Cain, who publicly took a sort of perverse pride in not knowing the name of the president of Uzbekistan (not, by the way, that he necessarily should know that person’s name, but why would someone seeking to be taken seriously by voters take pride in not knowing such a thing?).

Why Republicans express such disrespect for educated people is an interesting question (The Curmudgeon hopes to gain some insight into this when he reads Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which is currently on his nightstand), but the point here is that if conservatives can’t be found in what they believe to be appropriate numbers in the academic world, maybe it’s because they don’t believe life as a college professor is a worthwhile calling.  In fact, maybe they even steer clear of academia because they view it as something that would be looked down upon in their social circles.

“What’s that, Bill?  You’re a tenured professor at Columbia?  Sorry to hear that.  We were all so sure you were going to amount to something someday.”

A second possible reason conservatives may be in short supply in certain fields in higher education is that they tend to be, as a group – and with more than a few exceptions – highly, highly focused on making money.  Not just money like most of us, money to live a good and comfortable life, to have a nice home, a nice car, and be able to put their kids through college, but the kind of money they believe proves their moral superiority to those with less.  You know, lots of money.  Academia pays reasonably well by middle-class standards, but no one’s going to get rich teaching political science, economics, or history to nineteen-year-olds.  So maybe conservatives think academia doesn’t pay well enough to be worth their while.

A third possible reason conservatives may not fill as many positions in the academic world is that over the past thirty years or so they’ve pioneered the development of an alternative to academic life:  the conservative think-tank.  The Hudson Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and others like them all employ people who, if such organizations didn’t exist, probably would be very interested in teaching economics, political science, philosophy, history, and other such subjects at colleges and universities.  Working at a think-tank is pretty clearly more glamorous than working in a college – constant conferences all around the country, proximity to politicians, rubbing elbows with rich donors, and more – and it probably pays a lot better, too.  Plus, instead of performing in front of twenty-year-old students, tankers get to perform in front of television viewers, bloviating about the issues of the day with conviction real or feigned on the insatiable television talking head circuit.  So maybe if there aren’t enough conservatives teaching certain subjects in colleges it’s because the kind of people who might otherwise be interested in doing so have been drawn out of the pool of candidates for such positions by their own political movement.

So the next time you hear or read about someone on the right complaining about the lack of conservatives on America’s college campuses, don’t buy into the implicit suggestion that someone’s actively trying to keep them out of the classroom.  Consider, instead, the possibility that the shortage is entirely voluntary.

Tagged: conservatives shut out of college professor jobs, liberals in academia, too many liberals on college campuses, too many liberals teaching in colleges