Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12, 2004 Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual By MARK BAUERLEIN
Conservatives on college campuses scored a tactical hit when the American Enterprise Institute's magazine published a survey of voter registration among humanities and social-science faculty members several years ago. More than nine out of 10 professors belonged to the Democratic or Green party, an imbalance that contradicted many liberal academics' protestations that diversity and pluralism abound in higher education. Further investigations by people like David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, coupled with well-publicized cases of discrimination against conservative professors, reinforced the findings and set "intellectual diversity" on the agenda of state legislators and members of Congress.
The public has now picked up the message that "campuses are havens for left-leaning activists," according to a Chronicle poll of 1,000 adult Americans this year. Half of those surveyed -- 68 percent who call themselves "conservative" and even 30 percent who say they are "liberal" -- agreed that colleges improperly introduce a liberal bias into what they teach. The matter, however, is clearly not just one of perception. Indeed, in another recent survey, this one conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles, faculty members themselves chose as their commitment "far left" or "liberal" more than two and a half times as often as "far right" or "conservative." As a Chronicle article last month put it: "On left-leaning campuses around the country, professors on the right feel disenfranchised."
Yet while the lack of conservative minds on college campuses is increasingly indisputable, the question remains: Why?
full: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=56a4b06e77oshwaiq5psszuc2gti5neb
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Columbia Spectator, Nov. 10, 2004
Opinion
STAFF EDITORIAL: A Call for Conservatism
Columbia professors are overwhelmingly liberal—that should come as no surprise to any student.
Although the business school, economics department, and political science department have a conservative presence, conservative professors are noticeably absent from history, philosophy, and the rest of the humanities departments. This lack of contrarian voices is harming Columbia’s ability to produce fully educated liberal arts students. By not having a conservative voice hawk its wares in the hue and cry of the academic marketplace, Columbia is failing its students.
While conservatives are minorities in faculties across the country, almost all of Columbia’s peer institutions have some strongly conservative humanities professors. The Hoover Institution at Stanford is a mecca for conservative thinkers of all stripes. Niall Ferguson, a history professor at NYU, Harvey Mansfield, a government professor at Harvard, Donald Kagan, a classics professor at Yale, and Robert P. George, a jurisprudence professor at Princeton, are all right-leaning professors who teach very popular classes at their respective universities. The intellectual iconoclasm that drives these professors manifests itself in their contributions to campus debates. For instance, Mansfield, an outspoken opponent of grade inflation, offers two grades for undergraduates: an official, inflated grade for the registrar, and a private, much lower grade for the student. Who at Columbia would not appreciate a professor so willing to visibly challenge campus orthodoxy?
In all other areas of campus life, students do not hesitate to call for diversity. There is no reason why these same arguments should not apply to conservative professors in the humanities.
full: <http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/11/09/4190416fa19ec?in_archive=1>
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