Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Surprising Source, Unsurprising News

An unusual article to be appearing in the Palo Alto Weekly. It's about the huge overrepresentation of the left wing among tenured academics.

excerpt:
The popular vote for president went 48 percent Democrat and 51 percent Republican. This nearly one-to-one national diversity is unlike colleges and universities, where a one-party system prevails.

We have conducted a scholarly study of voter registration and find that among Berkeley faculty the Republicans are outnumbered 10-to-1. At Stanford the ratio is 7.6-to-1. Lumping both together gives 9-to-1. Talk about a lack of diversity! If this were a gender, race or ethnic-background study it would be considered almost [almost?!?] evidence of discrimination.

...

Among the younger ranks, assistant and associate, we find only six Republicans -- five of them are assistant professors, so if they do not make tenure they will be gone. The few Republicans are disproportionately full professors, meaning they are nearer to exiting. That means that in the coming years the skew must become even more extreme. It is no exaggeration to say in these schools, Republicans are an endangered species.

...

It is often argued that a student would not develop fully if faculty were grossly lopsided by race or gender. A 9-to-1 ratio of males over females, for example, would seem to indicate a lack of diversity. Doesn't this apply to political orientation? Yet social democrats (small-d) utterly dominate university teaching and research.

Equal representation is a tenet of democracy, yet academic Republicans are being eradicated by academic Democrats. The university campus is a place where young men and women develop ideas and conclusions on many topics. Thomas Jefferson noted that as people pass through life, few have occasion to revise the opinions they form in college. The Democratic domination of academia affects all Americans.

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