America's Left Wing Universities

At Bell Curve's request let's open a discussion of the disproportionately left wing politics of American universities.

I used to thing this was grossly overblown and I still think it's exaggerated. However a few years ago I was involved in an interdisciplinary course on globalization involving an economist, a political scientist, a geographer and a comparative literature professor (sounds like a joke where they all get stranded on a desert island somewhere).

The economist and political scientist clearly had less politicized and more empirical approaches to studying globalization. If a normative political bias could be attributed to them it would be that they were centrist. The geographer was openly Marxist but he tried to use data to support his positions and when data didn't support his predictions he reported it anyway. The comparative literature professor however was beyond the pale. I was shocked at how openly and radically left wing his lectures were. There was complete absence of data of any kind and his lectures never discussed how the world actually is so much as how he thought the world should be.

I looked into the English department and Comparative Literature departments in that university and found that many of their courses were portrayed as courses about politics. As a political scientist I was very uncomfortable about it. Students were taking courses of untrained polemicists and coming out them thinking they actually learned something about political science. I don't have a problem with an English professor having political views. I don't even have that big a problem with them shooting their mouth off in class. But I don't like the false advertising.

Since that experience I've been more open to criticisms from the right that universities are bastions of left wing bias. I now only correct them by saying, "It's not the whole university. It's the humanities, in particular it is post-modernists." There are political scientists who are post-modern but they are (thankfully) becoming fewer and being relegated to those departments that do not train new political scientists.

This isn't to say that people with PhDs in the natural sciences or social sciences aren't more likely to be Democrats. They are (and that so many educated people dislike right wing ideologies should give Republicans pause). But they are less likely to make their political affiliations the foundations of their teaching and research.

A big reason I got involved with this blog (and the main reason I keep my identity obscured), is because as a professional political science educator, I have to keep my personal views separate from my professional research and teaching. I make a great effort to be objective and not preach to my students about my own views (even though I'm often tempted). This blog let's me blow off steam without introducing bias into my teaching. It also allows me to be considerably sloppier in my arguments and evidence than I would be professionally.

OK, that's what I think. What do you all think?