How could anyone have been surprised by Harvard professor Ruth R. Wisse’s graciously written piece on bias in academia in today’s WSJ? Still, Professor Wisse provides us with some interesting statistics. At one point faculty contributions at Harvard were running about $150,00 for Kerry to about $8,000 for Bush. That ratio, Wisse informs us, has been maintained.
Being an Ivy Guy myself in the dim, dark past, I naturally scanned the article for news of my alma maters. I didn’t have far to go (second graph). My graduate school, Yale, came in at 93% contributions for Kerry and my ungraduate college, Dartmouth, came in at a whopping 97% (must have been a lone Bush contributor – who was it?).
I guess if anybody up in Hanover’s been reading this blog, there go my dreams of living out my days cross country skiing across the Dartmouth Green while teaching seminars on early Fellini movies. Speaking of which, it’s ironic that three of the most prominent bloggers on the Bush side of the ledger, the lawyers of Power Line, are Dartmouth alums. I joked with their Hindrocket (John Hinderaker) at the Republican convention that we should form a League of Dartmouth Bloggers. We could add into the mix author and frequent commenter on this blog Catherine Johnson, also an alumna of the college. I doubt if we did form such a league, however, it would be anywhere near so monolithic in its ideology as the view within academia.
At my university the profs wear Bush-as-Satan t-shirts to class!
All of us boomer should donate to our alma maters wisely–after we inquire about the diversity of ideas that are allowed there. I’m not asking for a role reversal; I just would like to see, perhaps, a class or two on the history of anti-Americanism, about the ME as something beyond Israel v. Arafat, and the campus should invite politically conservative speakers to speak.
Roger
I have a fondness for Dartmouth. I was accepted at their medical school, and would have gone (and would have gone on to Harvard for my clinical years) but the spring of 1969 in New Haven convinced me that the sunnier climes of University of California were, so to speak, just what the doctor ordered…
I’m on the ListServe for my Yale class (1969) and there has been an ongoing discussion of the election, mostly a lot of ranting about the horrors of our Yale near contemporary (GWB ’68), but I have opted out of contributing, as I feel my old friends are hopeless (though I still like them).
;-(
Jamie Irons
Roger,
At least you are able to be outside looking in at academia. What about those of us who actually have to live every day in that environment? I was recently at a faculty luncheon where there was not even the pretense that anyone might have a different political position. The speaker assumed that all there believed Bush was an idiot who must be replaced, as did all the participants. I am not usually easily frightened, but when I gently pointed out that not everyone agreed with them, some of my “colleagues” looked like they wanted to lynch me on the spot.
I have been connected or directly involved in academia most of my professional life. This is the first time I remember feeling anything more than amused at the Leftist slant of that world.
Wow. There must have been some deeply buried seam of sanity in the “granite of New Hampshire/ In our muscles and our brains” back then.
Add another (infrequent) commenter to the list. Dartmouth ’72.
dr. sanity,
I’m not an academic. My hunch is that academics to a much more significant extent than the general population feel themselves to be, by virtue of their intellect, entitled to rule, or at least be listened to by the rulers.
Bush’s crime (one of them) in their eyes is his indifference to their advice. I don’t think, for example, that they are really anti the use of force against terrorists. If an administration they favored was in power, an administration that consulted them, they’d be baying for MORE military action, not less. But they’re not being consulted and that enrages them no end.
In short, I think that many if not most academics are secret power mongers much more than they are idealists of one stripe or another.
Roger
I happened to be on my son’s college campus this weekend. He is a student at Birmingham Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. I decided to see if BSC was different than Alabama as a whole or different than my perception of the US as a whole. Now I chose a very unscientific method. I basically trolled the student parking lot and noted the bumper stickers displayed. I think I had W over Kerry in that survey by perhaps 3 to 1. Now BSC is a small college that draws from the South so maybe that was to be expected.
Then I went to a section of campus that has a row houses that are occupied exclusively by professors and staff. I can not report to being stunned by what I saw. Nearly every house had a yard sign. Some had three or more. Every single one was a Kerry sign. I guess I could assume that the ones without signs were closet Bush supporters and had been intimidated into not displaying it. I doubt it, howcver.
It aint Dartmouth but they still think alike.
Roger
I happened to be on my son’s college campus this weekend. He is a student at Birmingham Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. I decided to see if BSC was different than Alabama as a whole or different than my perception of the US as a whole. Now I chose a very unscientific method. I basically trolled the student parking lot and noted the bumper stickers displayed. I think I had W over Kerry in that survey by perhaps 3 to 1. Now BSC is a small college that draws from the South so maybe that was to be expected.
Then I went to a section of campus that has a row houses that are occupied exclusively by professors and staff. I can not report to being stunned by what I saw. Nearly every house had a yard sign. Some had three or more. Every single one was a Kerry sign. I guess I could assume that the ones without signs were closet Bush supporters and had been intimidated into not displaying it. I doubt it, howcver.
It aint Dartmouth but they still think alike.
Sorry for the double post. It said the first one was blocked and asked me to try again in a few. Again sorry, feel free to remove the stutter.
So much for the theory that the weak and disadvantaged are for Kerry and the insulated and wealthy are for Bush.
The sad thing is taxpayers and average Americans help sustain this fantasy land for the left leaning academia.
Makes a trade school look better all the time. The world will always need plumbers and Jr. won’t be brainwashed by some Chomsky wannabe with tenure.
But Roger, they are professors. Thus they are wiser than us. So of course they all chose the intellectual’s choice – Kerry. Having grown up with a father as a professor (Engineering), I got to hear all about it. In 1960, one of our neighbors, the only humanities (English) professor on our block of all faculty families was rabidly left.
That, by the way, is no doubt how they excuse the lack of ideological diversity. But universities have been left wing for a very long time. It is just that the faculty is more and more brazen, as the harder left folks have made it very unwise – career killing – to dissent. So now the colleges, far frojm being places of intellectual exploration, serve as expensive echo chambers.
This normally does not extend to professors in the sciencees, and less so in engineering (which is the most reality focused of all subjects). Physics looks to discover reality, often in very subtle areas like quantum physics. Engineering professors (like my father, still researching at 81) do both basic research (if the physicists haven’t done it already) and how to apply it to real problems.
Not that there aren’t loony leftiest in those faculties also, but it isn’t usually an echo chamber.
One wonders about these contributions from state universities in states with republican government. Personally, if I was governor of such a state, the funding for humanities would take a huge hit (it gets way too much anyway, and produces mostly crap, always left wing crap), and the money would go to science and engineering. How much went to which university in a state would be quietly determined by the political stance of the faculty.
The Supreme Court, in Sandra Day’s stupid (yes, stupid) affirmative action decision about Michigan, has opened the door for intellectual diversity lawsuit, since they built the case that she affirmed on the idea that having a diverse student population provided a better learning experience. Obviously she found a constitutional mandate for that (we are getting way beyond pneumbras here), so she might find one for forced hiring and tenure of professors of varying ideologies (heh heh heh).
I wonder if that could be applied to the news organizations…
Live by the lawsuit, die by the lawsuit.
Alternative media darling Laura Ingraham was also at Dartmouth. Having to constantly lean against the prevailing winds may harden the sinews.
I always thought of left wing politics as part of the hegemony of sociology throughout the curriculum.
I regard the politics of academia much like I do those of my dentist. Ones politics should be well settled prior to being exposed to these folks. Just a rite of passage. It is a shame for faith-based folks who desire a career in academe, tho.
Twenty years ago or so I was a businessman and was too unedurmacated to be a perfesser. Today I is one. I would say that the overwhelming majority (80+%) of humanities profs I know or meet are sort of EU-type Social Democrats-leaning-Marxists (though few will admit the Marxist part) who despise Bush as much for the fact that he is a businessman as anything else. (A _FAILED!_ businessman, they will hiss [I have been privileged, by the way, to actually have had this literally hissed to me by a colleague], who was bailed out and made wealthy by his Daddy’s friends.)
They hate him (hate is _not_ too strong a word) because he embodies success at a thing at which they will not look, the great American Success Machine. Let’s face it. Most of even my very best students will not be academicians. They will go to work in business. Most, if not all, will succeed. They will pair off, raise families, buy houses, do all the things successful types do. But, they will do it by being a part of something most of these people find repulsive — buying and selling stuff. Even worse, many of these students will be (monetarily) _more_ successful than their profs. Horrors! And they will buy into the Capitalist System. Shudder!
Bush typifies this. He was apparently a damned good baseball president. I grew up watching the St Louis Cardinals and now must watch the Detroit Tigers, so I know good from bad and how hard it is to win. Check out the Texas Rangers under Bush. So. He learned How To Make Things Work.
Of course Bush doesn’t listen to (humanities) academicians. They typically know about double squat about how the actual economy works. Why should they? Very few of them have ever had any job as an adult that was unconnected to academia, and even fewer, of course, have actually owned or even managed a business. They live, very well, too, mind you, in a socialist environment in which they’re all but gods. So they hate him. Virulently. Viscerally.
I have one friend who is emeritus at Dartmouth. I respect him and his work in an area of interest to both of us. He treated me with incredible kindness early on for no better reason than his own good nature and his willingness to lend a hand to newish scholars. He is quite unlike most “big names” in the biz. However, he is totally ’round the bend on Bush. He all but froths whenever he speaks of him. He uses invective that I have never even thought of hearing from him otherwise. Sad, truly sad, but I fear quite indicative of the current situation in Academia.
Jorg,
I think you are on to something – what motivates the academy’s hatred of Bush and Republicans is envy of business success. Gee, isn’t that what motivates the terrorists too? envy of U.S. business success? And Europe too?
The biggest problem in the world today seems to be envy of successful people and successful countries, i.e. at the U.S.
Who knows, maybe Donald Trump is doing more to end the war against us than anyone else in the country with his successful TV show, “The Apprentice”, by giving nice little lessons in business success each episode. This will be seen by countless people around the world, and maybe they will learn to: stop complaining, be team players, manage their budgets, set goals, devise strategies, set prices, learn how to delegate, take responsibility, etc. and actually stumble into some business success of their own! (Of course, none of them could admit to watching anything by Trump, but I’ll bet some watch)
Thinking about my own progression through and escape from academia, I think one thing the current system filters for is ease of indoctrination.
I had gone through quite a few years of undergraduate and graduate training in a world where *of course* the very best of the best would want to become professors too, and join the presumed “best of the best” who were teaching us. Those who had an average (like myself) or better ability to think for themselves in contexts outside the subject matter of the field itself looked around at the lives of the post-docs we knew, and said “I don’t think so.”
This was in a technical field. Comparing the academic life in the sciences and engineering to the humanities, the pay is better, the job prospects in academia are better, the job prospects outside academia are far better, and the relative importance of fashion following and butt-kissing compared to real achievement is far less.
So what sort of personality types choose to, get suckered into, or drift into being English professors in the modern academy? For the most part, extremely intelligent sheep.