HunterByrd

The flow of liberal bias in American academia

Not so good ... we fear...merely more of the same.

Ah, The Economist. A center of center bastion from across the sea...in Britain. Read this article, which includes generous reference to Tom Wolfe's latest novel.

Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies”. Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities' ability to influence the wider intellectual culture.

This is true, and such shill is regularly disseminated to the larger, consuming culture. Just today, I witness a perfect example of the above statement. I watched the film Igby Falls Down. Igby is a younger, emotional, free-spirited (albeit aimless) sibling to his Ivy-league brother who majors in economics. The older, toe-haired brother is freely and derogatively referred to as a neo-fascist, young Republican.

Evidence of the atypical uniformity of American universities grows by the week. The Centre for Responsive Politics notes that this year two universities—the University of California and Harvard—occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et al. Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as to George Bush. Meanwhile, a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics by Daniel Klein, of Santa Clara University, shows that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. And things are likely to get less balanced, because younger professors are more liberal. For instance, at Berkeley and Stanford, where Democrats overall outnumber Republicans by a mere nine to one, the ratio rises above 30 to one among assistant and associate professors.

Oh, well, keep writing to the contrary. Perhaps tomorrow's students will, to our collective intellectual, idealogical benefit, find words like these to plagiarize.