Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
In the New York Times science section today, John Tierney writes a fascinating--and wonderfully subversive-- column.
Reporting from a conference of social scientists, John describes the presentation by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia. Haidt asked for a show of hands, learning that, whereas a good 80 percent of the several hundred social scientists in attendance considered themselves liberal, only a smattering considered themselves centrist or libertarian while exactly one--one--admitted to being conservative.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. Inhis speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”
Haidt told his audience that their monolithic liberalism "both binds and blinds" them. To overcome their bias, he told them--and I wish I could have seen that roomful of faces at this moment--that they ought to subscribe to National Review and read books by Thomas Sowell.
Good for you, Dr. Haidt.
Now if only we could get you to start recommending Ricochet.
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May '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
Gotta admire the single social scientist who confessed his (or her) conservatism. I hope the brave soul has tenure.
May '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
Stories like this confirm the suspicion that the establishment wisdom we've lived under for so long was sustainable only so long as the flow of information was limited and controlled in a top-down manner.
People have been doing what Haidt is doing for decades. No longer is it possible to silence them.
Oct '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
He's right about balance as well. If you never test your own views or claims, they have the potential to be detached, myopic, and sophomoric. It's only through the argument and challenge that your views can evolve and mature, often making them more steadfast after having undergone such beneficiation.
May '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
Haidt could have asked them why they are so ready to comment on the speck in their brother's eye, when there is a great log in their own, but I doubt they would have understood the reference.
The point is that a tendency to see clearly the flaws in others and remain blind to one's own, is a very old phenomena, the subject of ancient scripture. That supposedly intelligent and modern academics could be so prone to such an old-fashioned failing is remarkable, or would be remarkable if we did not have assurance from scripture that this is a very human failing that is not cured with education.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for the social scientists of the world to embrace conservatives. Let's see if Dr. Haidt gets invited back.
Sep '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
It isn't just the psychologists. Even in mathematics, the conservatives are outnumbered by the liberals--in my experience--by a wide margin.
Nov '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
This makes my year.
My son, who is pursuing his PhD in a social science, has told me that whenever conversation with his peers (most of whom come from communist or socialist countries) reveals his conservatism, there is often a real moment of stunned silence, followed by demands that he explain himself. I'm emailing him right now to make certain he reads Dr. Haidt's speech.
Oh, and as a Ricochet member and amatuer Sowell/Reagan/Rand/Limbaugh scholar, he has no problem bringing his critics to their knees.
Dec '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
Liberals only profess belief in evolution. Note that, just as in the social sciences where they attempt to protect their ideas from encroachment by better-adapted competitors, in the natural sciences they advocate for stasis: no changes in species balance, no changes in climate, no change or evolution ever.
Sep '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
What professions have the opposite distribution?
Aug '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
One problem with this issue is that whenever you bring it up to liberal social scientists, they don't think of, for example, the thirty years between the Moynihan report and McLanahan and Sandefur that it took for sociology to develop a consensus around the rather obvious (to a conservative) idea that marriage is a very important social institution. That is, liberal social scientists ignore cases where their own ideological biases created bad science (or postponed good science).
Rather, the six syllables that come to their lips like saliva to Pavlov's dogs are "intelligent design." (If you don't believe me, read the comment threads on academic blogs, most of which are discussing the Tierney piece today). The right has done a very good job of associating itself with unscientific know-nothingism and is reaping the benefits of such an association.
I'm not saying that liberals don't have a lot to answer for in this, but rather I'm taking a position comparable to a black person who objects both to white racism and to the behavior of fellow blacks that provides empirical support for white racist attitudes and practices.
Edited on Feb 8, 2011 at 11:29amSep '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
anon_academic: ... the six syllables that come to their lips like saliva to Pavlov's dogs are "intelligent design." · Feb 8 at 11:25am
Edited on Feb 08 at 11:29 am
Indeed. I just listened to part of Professor Haidt's presentation (linked in the NYT piece and in Peter's quote above). The presentation was quite clever: it started by talking about the idea that allegiance to "sacred objects" blinds people to new ideas and forces them into "bad science," and used fundamentalist Christians and "intelligent design" as the first example. At this point one could imagine all the "good liberal Democrat" social psychologists nodding--oh, those awful fundamentalist Christians! Then the speaker turned the same critique on his own community.
Unfortunately the recording in the link is not of the actual presentation, but was recorded later. I would have loved to have heard the audience reaction.
Jan '11
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
Of course, the reasoning given by most of those referenced (for their liberal bias) would be "we're this way because it's the correct way to be good human being". Sigh
Jan '11
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
Steelworkers?
Dec '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
On campus I would guess that only engineering would have a conservative majority, but it's been a long time since I was in college. Maybe even the engineers have been over run.
Aug '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
Foxman
On campus I would guess that only engineering would have a conservative majority, but it's been a long time since I was in college. Maybe even the engineers have been over run. · Feb 8 at 12:36pm
on campus, the answer is nothing. you can get pretty close to parity in some fields but there is no academic field that is 3:1, let alone 10:1, in favor of Republicans or conservatives.
more broadly, military officers are pretty heavily Republican, though I don't know if the ratio is as skewed as academia.
Nov '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
anon_academic
more broadly, military officers are pretty heavily Republican, though I don't know if the ratio is as skewed as academia. · Feb 8 at 12:53pm
In my experience, younger officers (and ROTC cadets) are about 2:1 conservative if they're from the North, and much more so if they are from the South or Midwest.
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
J. C. Casteel: This makes my year.
My son, who is pursuing his PhD in a social science, has told me that whenever conversation with his peers (most of whom come from communist or socialist countries) reveals his conservatism, there is often a real moment of stunned silence, followed by demands that he explain himself. I'm emailing him right now to make certain he reads Dr. Haidt's speech.
Oh, and as a Ricochet member and amatuer Sowell/Reagan/Rand/Limbaugh scholar, he has no problem bringing his critics to their knees. · Feb 8 at 11:06am
JC, your son is a brave man--and I'd just love to hear his response to John's column. Would you put up a post, letting us all know?
Oct '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
There was an interesting paper that came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) yesterday on discrimination that perhaps shows how our understanding of this is shaped by liberal bias. Essentially the standard explanation for underrepresentation in the Maths and Sciences (discrimination in hiring, grant reviews, publication, etc) is no longer valid. To quote from the paper:
"Explanations for women’s underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring.....Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid......Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women’s participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today’s causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes."
Full paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/02/02/1014871108.full.pdf
Edited on Feb 8, 2011 at 2:01pmSep '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
If conservatives outnumber liberals 2:1 in the general population, then there must be some professions with an equally skewed population as these. We all know about academia and the media being liberal. Is it small business owners who are conservative? The data would be quite revealing about the nature of the two world views.
Oct '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
The military tends to be far more conservative. I have no official data, but that was my personal experience of nearly 8 years.
Aug '10
Re: Nobody Here But Us Liberals, Or, One Brave Soul Takes on Academia
Very interesting. For the last five or ten years, feminists have been rallying to make a big push to use Title IX to push for pretty hardcore gender affirmative action in STEM fields. (Which IMHO would have been a disaster).
Also worth noting that while Larry Summers was made to fall on his sword for making similar speculations, one of the top five journals in the world published this very un-PC paper. But I'm a glass half-full kind of person.