There's a new Zogby Poll on political bias in academia that should warm whatever it is that David Horowitz uses as a heart:
As legislation is introduced in more than a dozen states across the country to counter political pressure and proselytizing on students in college classrooms, a majority of Americans believe the political bias of college professors is a serious problem, a new Zogby Interactive poll shows.
Nearly six in 10 - 58% - said they see it as a serious problem, with 39% saying it was a "very serious" problem.
That sounds pretty bad, but I suspect it's really a non-story. Why? Look at the poltiical breakdown:
Predictably, whether political bias is a problem depends greatly on the philosophy of the respondents. While 91% of very conservative adults said the bias is a "serious problem," just 3% of liberals agreed.
Roughly 35% of the population self-identifies as conservative, according to poll data from 2005, and 91% of them would be about 32%. Throw in the liberals, and you only need slightly less than half of the moderates to reach 58% of the general population.
Given that the liberal bias of college professors is an article of faith among conservatives, this total really doesn't surprise me. Likewise, the other demographic breakdowns: men are more likely to see bias, but men tend to be more conservative than women. Whites are more likely to see bias, but whites tend to be more conservative.
It's a sad testament to the effectiveness of the conservative noise machine, but I don't think it's much more than that.
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I don't see any breakdown of the respondents according to whether they ever attended college or have any current knowledge of what college is like. In other words, it's a bunch of baseless opinions. DH and friends are very good at getting their ideas into the mainstream - witness the states' considering so-called anti-bias legislation. So a lot of people may think they know something about the issue, when in fact they've only been exposed to DH's inane rantings.
Venture over to your school's political science department and audit a few classes. If you think NPR is non-biased, you'll probably see the classes as equal and balanced, but if you come at it with an open mind, you'll probably see some biases.
Yeah, but facts seem to have a liberal bias too.
Something that might annoy the heart of a physicist, except that it's a physicist doing it, is the discussion Marc Buchanan is doing on his blog The Social Atom. His July 10 post, Winning by Repeating is worth a look in reference to this issue.
Typically, it's social scientists using the concepts of physics metaphorically to illustrate an idea. For Buchanan, it's using physics to explain human behavior; "...human behavior is often simpler than we think, and that understanding the social world is a little like physics -- it means learning to anticipate the patterns that emerge naturally when many "social atoms" interact...".
The social sciences tend to have a bit of "bias". As soon as you point out that society impacts peoples' behavior, (and write social policy arrordingly), you are entering scary liberal territory.
Conservatives don't like evidence that people should not be held completely responsible for their lot in life.
Oops. Perhaps I messed up trying to insert the link. Full URL for The Social Atom is: http://thesocialatom.blogspot.com/
I'm a 'right-wing libertarian' (politicalcompass.org) mostly self-taught tech guy. I'm married to a 'left-wing (slight) libertarian' with a four-year social service degree from the University of Oregon College of Education. As she went through school, she would often mention the rhetoric that made its way in to her classes. I can identify with the tendency of teachers and teacher-educators to push for more education funding - even if I'm fundamentally opposed to government-run, tax-funded schools. Those issues I'm willing to ignore in that context.
However, she had a few teachers who spent a good deal of lecture time in non-political-science-oriented classes talking about the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections and associated topics. It was easy to see her being molded by this exposure in this context.
That being said, as a libertarian, I don't think that it's a good idea to legislate these things. Deciding things based on content is one of the things that governments have proven the worst at.
Even if there is a liberal bias (and snarky correlations we could make aside), there are other publicly funded institutions that hold well-known conservative biases: Police Officers, for instance. Why is it I don't see a Horowitz counterpart arguing for thought police in squad cars?
Stephen has an excellent point, and a sharp one indeed.
Why are there no complaints about the obvious political biases of the IRS? The DHS? And so on and so on and so on, as the Rovian Revolution turns every government agency into a tool of the neocons.
Incidentally, there is an actual liberal bias in the news media. The funny part is the conservatives put it there deliberately. They know, and keep rediscovering, that when they print their unrestricted unrepentant right-wing screed, they lose most of their readers and viewers. So the have to tone down the extreme viciousness of their product, making it a little more liberal sounding to make it palatable. That's the 'liberal' bias that's actually there. (Right-wing publications all need sponsors because they all run in the red: there aren't enough Dittoheads to keep their screed in the black.)
Wait.
91% of conservatives claim X is a problem.
97% of liberals claims X is not a problem.
Are you saying that this is evidence that conservatives are the victims of a conservative propaganda noise-machine? Or are you just saying that the poll and article themselves are a part of a conservative propaganda noise-machine? (Or something else entirely?)
I'm saying that believing that college faculty are a bunch of liberals is practically a defining trait of modern conservativism, like "Tax cuts are good." It's an article of faith, so of course a huge majority of conservatives are going to believe it, in the same way that 90-ish percent of self-identified conservatives will say that Reagan was a great president.
Well, the question wasn't if there's a bias, it's whether or not that bias is a problem. But anyway, from the numbers above, it's even more an article of faith on the liberal side that it (if it exists) isn't a problem.
So, yeah, shock, a survey question of bias turns out to be answered on the case of one's own bias. Works both ways.
It's an article of faith, so of course a huge majority of conservatives are going to believe it,
There is, of course, another interpretation: that many conservatives believe there is a liberal bias in academia because they've experienced discrimination as a result of their conservative views.
Which came first: the belief in a bias, or the perceived evidence of a bias?
Personal observation at the handfull of campuses I've TAd or taught at: there is bias, but it's not simple Left/Right.
Departments schismed into factions of feminist, post-colonialist, gay studies, black studies, white studies, whatever, wearing bias proudly on their sleeves, and thinking it assisted their mission.
At University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where I did grad work in Computer Science (at TAd and RAd) and interdisciplinay Biology (and taught Ecology), I saw a famous Marxist Economics faculty at work, awaiting the immanent overthrow of Capitalism.
At Woodbury University, I ruffled feathers in the Faculty Senate by once mildly questioning an axiom of Left-wing thought regarding exclusion of Right-wing theory.
My Conservative friends are sure that I'm a Conservative, albeit contaminated by a Liberal mother in my youth.
My Liberal friends are sure that I'm a Liberal, albeit contaminated by a Conservative father in my youth.
In theory, shouldn't we faculty be married to skeptical inquiry in our field, and a general search for truth?
Oh, and when I visit Berkeley, I'm always struck by how Conservative the students are compared to the old Lefty 1960's faculty.
Back in my days in Cultural Anthropology, I'd say I saw a moderately leftish tendency among both students and faculty. But they were the kind of people who thought alien cultures were interesting and cool, so what do you expect? The Archaeologists down the hall had no such bias and I knew some quite conservative ones.
I think the left-leaning bias of many universities is pretty well documented, and I don't see what point there is in pretending it's all a bunch of propoganda from evil politial opponents (what, exactly, do conservatives aim to do by, presumably, "lying" about the political affiliations of professors?)
To my mind, this basic fact can lead us to a further question: is this bias a result of institutionalized ideological prejudice (ie, "I won't give you tenure because you vote republican"). If so, it should be discouraged, and I think this sort of thing is definitly going on in some places, but legislation? Making laws isn't the answer to everything, and conservatives who say otherwise betray all the libertarians that voted for them. Instead, if you can prove perfectly qualified people were turned down for less qualified, but ideologicall more palatable candidates, make a fuss. That's usually enough.
If it isn't the case, well then: Get involved. I found an article about how Google and Wikipedia are left-leaning and about how this is a terrible thing. Ok. But Wikipedia is community-based. Log on, and participate. Claiming that the Wikipedia is left-leaning and that this needs to be fixed is like pointing out that bloggers are mostly male and that needs to be fixed. What are you going to do? Force more women to write blogs? Force less registered democrats to correct a wiki article? And are you going to force democrats out of universities? That's as bas as liberals forcing conservatives out of universities: institutalized ideological prejudice. See above.
If it bothers you that most professors vote blue, then become a professor and encourage like-minded people to do the same. Problem solved.