Tim Blair

This is news?

No surprise there...Wellesley took a high school girlfriend of mine who was a vivacious and funny young lass and turned her into a humourless lesbian (not that there's anything wrong with that...the lesbian bit, I mean). What a tragedy.

Meanwhile, I just reealized that Australia has turned me into a person who automatically spells "humourless" with two u's!

Stay away from our heterosexual Australian women, Morrow!

Ten percent of academics anywhere identify themselves as Republicans?

I have a hard time believing even in the 1 out of 23.

Well, the proportion of Republicans is a lot higher in engineering and the sciences than it is in the liberal arts. This survey seemed to focus on schools best known for their liberal arts departments (exceptions: MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley) and furthermore apparently only surveyed mostly soft-in-the-head departments that anybody would guess to be heavily liberal-dominated. Given the way this was done, I'm with the last guy: surprised that even 1 in 23 ivy league sociologists is a registered Republican.

A little -- or better, a lot of -- intellectual diversity certainly would be nice, though.

Wow this is news? I bet the lefties are going to hunt down the Republicans and make their life hell, like they did when I was at Colby. And what kind of Republicans, R.I.N.O.s?

my wonderful bride is a wellesley grad. i believed she learned early on to avoid political discussions there.

Given how much you think Private Schools rock what's your point. If anything you should be pleased that the Dems are preemptively following your suggestions on supporting the private school sector. You should be happy about this.

A boring Statistical note- The survey does not say that one in ten academics is a republican, it says that democrats outnumber republicans by 10 to 1. This suggests that when you consider the various Greens, Communists and unregistereds, Republicans make up a lot less than one in ten.

White Bread:
"Private Schools??? Cal-Berkeley? Amherst? Pennsylvania?

These are all publicly-funded universities.

SMG

Hillary went to Wellesley. Her undergraduate thesis was so stupidly left-wing that she has kept hidden under lock and key ever since. Probably with those Whitewater documents.

Guess this is kind of to the point of this blog:

If you watched lateline last night you would have seen the verbal vomit (aka keating) launching into our PM as he launched yet another book to sink Windschuttle.
More to the point you would have seen Windschuttle debate Stuart MacIntyre the author of said book.
In response to Windschuttle's charge that academia is infested with leunig lefties (my words) MacIntyre said that while he did not know the politics of his 30 odd staff members he did know that they encompassed the total political spectrum.

MY question ; How could he know this without knowing the politics of his staff?
Perhaps Adam could field this one.

But his teachings encompass the entire spectrum from far laft to off the edge of the earth.

And Keating described the Howard era as a smudge on history.

Woner how Keating's legacy could be described?

Harry:

Is the proportion of Republicans really higher in the sciences? I could believe it for engineering, but I'm in the hard sciences at one of those schools, and I'm outnumbered at least twenty-to-one.

SteveMG-- Little detail: Amherst is a private college. UMass Amherst is a public university. Sorry to be a pedantic nit-picker, but I do it for a living.

JPS:
Thanks. My error.

I was mulling over Amherst as I included it. Wasn't sure and was too tired to check.

Although I think they may receive - indirectly - public funds? They're not like, say, Hillsdale which refuses to receive ANY government monies - either directly or indirectly. E.g., student w/ government loans?

Wellesley, Bowdoin are also private, I believe. Most of the colleges surveyed are public.

SMG

Actually, I thought economists were usually more conservative than other social scientists:

"Surveys of academics regularly indicate that economists are much more “conservative” on average than academics in the other social sciences. This results in large part from the fact that the public identifies support of market-coordinated economic systems with conservatism and that economists, who have specialized in the study of market systems, tend to have a much more favorable view of them than do other intellectuals. It is unfortunate that this kind of conservatism has also come to be associated in the public mind with an indifference to poverty."

-- Paul Heyne, "A Student's Guide to Economics"

Well. That makes sense. I would be willing to wager that the majority of the best and the brightest of the Republican set are out making serious amounts of money in their choosen field, teaching hold little interest for them. Or it could come down to that idea that Republicans are doers more then dreamers.

Hey, don't knock it. You see, social psychology suggests that when people screw up, they like to blame external rather than internal causes. My underachieving as an undergrad, therefore, was due to the oppression inflicited upon me by my professors, who were generally lefty, rather than my lack of studying, intensive alcohol-consumption, and basketball watching/playing.

Please do not attempt to alter in any way, a fragile psyche depends on it.

Gratefully yours,

Jerry

news item: did you see that the cause of the blackout we recently had here in the us has been traced to a certain wellesley grad?

Great comment by David Brooks in the (latest?) issue of the Atlantic:

It's striking that the institutions that talk the most about diversity often practice it the least. For example, no group of people sings the diversity anthem more frequently and fervently than administrators at just such elite universities. But elite universities are amazingly undiverse in their values, politics, and mores. Professors in particular are drawn from a rather narrow segment of the population. If faculties reflected the general population, 32 percent of professors would be registered Democrats and 31 percent would be registered Republicans. Forty percent would be evangelical Christians. But a recent study of several universities by the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture and the American Enterprise Institute found that roughly 90 percent of those professors in the arts and sciences who had registered with a political party had registered Democratic. Fifty-seven professors at Brown were found on the voter-registration rolls. Of those, fifty-four were Democrats. Of the forty-two professors in the English, history, sociology, and political-science departments, all were Democrats. The results at Harvard, Penn State, Maryland, and the University of California at Santa Barbara were similar to the results at Brown.

I had that one printed out and hung it on the wall. I wonder if any similar Australian studies have been done?

Follow the money. Democratic administrations typically allocate more research money to the arts and soft sciences than conservative administrations, so liberal arts professors support the people who will give them money. 'Hard' science professors can rely on private inductry, so their choice of president isn't based as much on likelyhood of research grants. Also, some of the discoveries that they make can free them from dependance on grants.

Economists are more conservative than other social scientists, because they can make a living outside of acedemia. People who depend upon the government for their living tend to be very fond of increasing taxation; people who pay theirs taxes - and will make a good income without government payments - tend to be a bit more conservitive.