[scooobiedooobie]

ramona, your repeated pattern is so typical…first deny that the problem exists, then mock those who claim that it does.

it’s obvious that you see yourself as the poster man/woman for the elite liberal intelligentsia, but in my opinion you are a closed-minded pseudo-intellectual metaphysical nutcase. i don’t usually bother reading your posts anymore, and resent the time out of my life that’s been wasted having to scroll past them.

most of your comments are judgmental to the extreme, and hysterical (in both senses of the word). your example of dealing with someone who disagrees with you is to use words such as lobotomized carp, or anencephalic. you do not debate issues, you choose to insult and mock instead. you readily dismiss any opposing view as motivated by ignorance, and you have zero tolerance for any views other than your own. by doing that, you only manage to expose your own intellectual and human deficiencies.

that said, i’ll leave you with this link regarding academic liberal-bias…not that I expect you to bother reading it.

http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/

Summary of Results

In our examinations of over 150 departments and upper-level administrations at 32 elite colleges and universities, the Center found the following:

The overall ratio of Democrats to Republicans we were able to identify at the 32 schools was more than 10 to 1 (1397 Democrats, 134 Republicans).

Although in the nation at large registered Democrats and Republicans are roughly equal in number, not a single department at a single one of the 32 schools managed to achieve a reasonable parity between the two. The closest any school came to parity was Northwestern University where 80% of the faculty members we identified were registered Democrats who outnumbered registered Republicans by a ratio of 4-1.

At other schools we found these representations of registered faculty Democrats to Republicans:

Brown 30-1
Bowdoin, Wellesley 23-1
Swarthmore 21-1
Amherst, Bates 18-1
Columbia, Yale 14-1
Pennsylvania, Tufts, UCLA and Berkeley 12-1
Smith 11-1

At no less than four elite schools we could not identify a single Republican on the faculty:

Williams 51 Democrats, 0 Republicans
Oberlin 19 Democrats, 0 Republicans
MIT 17 Democrats, 0 Republicans
Haverford 15 Democrats, 0 Republicans

Faculty registration is just as unbalanced at major research universities as it is at small colleges. At Columbia University, the Center could identify only 6 faculty Republicans. The Center could not locate a single Republican in the history, political science, and sociology departments. Cornell University was just as left-leaning: the departments of English and history were entirely devoid of registered Republicans.

Administrators lean just as far to the left: at schools like the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Melon, and Cornell, we could not identify a single Republican administrator. In the entire Ivy League, we identified only 3 Republican administrators.

Conclusion:

These figures suggest that most students probably graduate without ever having a class taught by a professor with a conservative viewpoint. The ratios themselves are impossible to understand in the absence of a political bias in the training and hiring of college instructors. They strongly suggest that the governance of American universities has fallen into the hands of a self-perpetuating political and cultural subset of the general population, which seems intent on perpetuating its control. This is an unhealthy development for the both the educational enterprise and the democracy itself.

Without further investigation it is not possible to establish with any degree of certainty why this state of affairs has come into existence, but there are many obvious factors that may be said to have contributed to it. Among them is the very exclusion of conservatives from faculty and administrative positions itself. This in itself creates a hostile environment for conservative students contemplating an academic career. This core hostility is amplified by practices that have been incorporated into academic life in the last several decades, including campus speech codes and politicized classrooms – both which represent radical departures from the pre-Sixties academic environment.

A comprehensive study by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (available at www.speechcodes.org ) found that over 90 percent of well-known college campuses have speech codes intended to ban and punish politically incorrect, almost always conservative, speech. (Cases available at www.thefire.org.) Student testimonies about in-classroom political indoctrination are available at www.noindoctrination.org.

The impression that conservative values and ideas aren’t welcome on campus is driven home daily to students until it becomes second nature. Professors generally do not grade politically, but a large enough percentage do that students – and not just conservative students – will take the prudent course of concealing what they actually think in order to protect their academic standing. This is obviously at odds with the educational mission of the university but academic authorities have done little to address the abuse.

All these factors exert a negative influence on the choices a conservative student might make about pursuing an intellectual career. But of all these factors the lack of conservative professors is the most significant. It serves to reduce the ability of the best and brightest conservative students to pursue graduate study even when they want to. Nearly all distinguished doctoral programs rely on matching students with professors who have compatible interests.

A student interested in pursuing a Ph.D. based on his or her interest in Austrian school economics, traditionalist literary criticism, conservative historiography or religious poetry will have a difficult time finding a professor who wants to take her on. In the social sciences, Marxists have an infinitely easier time finding good mentors than Hayekians or Straussians. The lack of conservative professors provides a ready-made excuse (professors don’t even think of it that way) for rejecting doctoral program applications for conservative students with stellar grades, recommendations, and standardized test scores.

For those conservatives who earn the doctoral “union card” necessary to teach at a major research university, a second obstacle awaits: hiring and tenure committees, which are stacked with their ideological and political adversaries. A number of high profile cases have occurred recently in which conservative scholars with significant records of publishing have performed according to the book and still ended up out of work.

The entire process of training graduate students, qualifying Ph.D. recipients, hiring junior faculty and granting tenure is hierarchical, arbitrary, closed to public scrutiny and designed to produce intellectual conformity in the best circumstances. Therefore special concern would be required to ensure that there are protections for students’ academic freedom and for intellectual diversity. Unfortunately, in the present institutional framework no such protections exist.

We believe a remedy for this problematic situation would be for universities and state legislatures to adopt an Academic Bill of Rights stressing the importance of intellectual diversity to the goal of academic freedom, and making this goal an integral part of educational policy. We are attaching a copy of our suggested draft for such a Bill of Rights to this report.

When Ezra Cornell founded the institution that bears his name he said: “I would found an institution, where any person can find instruction in any study.” American universities do not fulfill that promise when they cater to only half the population and fail to provide protections and adequate representation for the other. Presently, conservative viewpoints and values are under-represented in the academic curriculum, and conservatives themselves are relegated to second-class citizenship.

While nearly all university administrations devote extraordinary resources to defend the principle of diversity in regard to race and gender, none can be said to have shown interest in the diversity of ideas. This bias has created a situation that is unworthy of the academic enterprise and unhealthy for the democracy that supports it, and in serious need of reform.