Gary: Hi. I’m Gary Tobin.
Aryeh: And I’m Aryeh Weinberg. We’re the authors of a new report about political opinion at universities. For the last several years, we’ve been examining the views of university educators. Why? In a word: influence.
Gary: Everyone knows that young people of today idolise middle-aged academics. We would hate for their impressionable minds to be damaged by being exposed to the wrong kinds of opinions, if you know what we mean. And in our research, we found some startling facts.
Aryeh: Did you know that only 17% of faculty identify as conservative, but 46% identify as liberal? And in the 2004 election, 72% of academics voted for the Democrat John Kerry, but only 25% voted for Bush. It’s like some kind of plot!
Gary: Telling figures indeed. And these are just a few of the facts that show us that university educators aren’t representative of the general public. And for some reason we think they should be, just like every other occupation.
Aryeh: Now you could argue that academics are highly educated, and highly educated people tend to be more liberal than the general population. But we look beyond such simplistic explanations. We think ‘liberal groupthink’ is to blame. You see, when liberalism is entrenched in universities, it has a chilling effect on conservatives’ ability to speak their minds for fear of reprisal. As you have probably noticed from talk radio, Fox News, or family members, right-wingers are sometimes afraid to voice their opinions because… they’re shy.
Gary: Painfully shy. But we’re not advocating quotas or purges. We recommend that universities maintain a balance of liberal and conservative views, of left-wing and right-wing, of informed opinion and ignorance, just as we see in society at large. And we can learn a lot about achieving a healthy balance of views from business and management schools, which somehow manage to have a higher proportion of conservatives than elsewhere in universities. Viva la marketplace of ideas!
Aryeh: We also think that hiring and promotion processes should be free of political ideology.
Gary: Unless that means that too many liberals are getting hired or promoted.
Aryeh: Please download Volume One of our series, ‘Political Beliefs and Behavior’. And while you’re at it, check out our book ‘The UnCivil University‘ in which we make the stunning discovery that liberal academics are anti-Semitic because they’re not pro-Israel enough.
Gary: Won’t you help us to make academia safe for conservatism? Thank you.
23 October 2006 at 12:31 pm
*confused*
23 October 2006 at 1:28 pm
My impressionable idolising mind is confused also. April 1st isn’t for… a while.
Anyway, I don’t think Tobin and Aryeh are going far enough. I think like maybe we need a balance of views in parents, too. One gets to be Informed Opinion; the other, Ignorance. Or whatever. Swap it around occasionally.
23 October 2006 at 1:58 pm
haha, nice amy!
23 October 2006 at 3:00 pm
Yeah: “I’m sick of being Strict Parent You be Strict Parent for a while!”
“Whaddaya mean, you’re the Strict Parent?”
For more on this topic, try googling David Horowitz for his list of 100 Most Dangerous Academics. Oh, to be there!
24 October 2006 at 4:05 pm
I’d find this more amuzing if I hadn’t seen the fear of academics in Chile under Pinochet who had all had freinds and family go missing. People will say I am overreacting but to me the right feels only about half a step away from that same behaviour.
14 December 2006 at 8:10 pm
Why can’t everyone just shut up and let the teachers teach. I mean, come on, there is a reason that they are teachers in the first place. They are smarter than everyone else.