Posted without comment G
I have pointed out that universities are the home of gun control. And if
you want to defeat gun control, you have to fight in at the root which is
the universities. Many of you, especially the libertarians, questioned the
fact that universities were leftist oriented. The release of a study that
shows how skewed to the left most American universities are should open your
eyes.
a.. A survey of 1,000 academics shows that there are seven Democrats for
every Republican in the humanities and social sciences. The
Democrat-Republican balance is 30-to-1 in anthropology and even 3-to-1 in
economics.
a.. A study of voter registration records shows that Democrats outnumber
Republicans 9-to-1 on the faculties of Berkeley and Stanford.
a.. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that the biggest donors to
John Kerry's campaign were employees from the University of California and
Harvard.
George Will: The Left's last paradise
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...ill.61cb0.html
06:12 PM CST on Monday, December 6, 2004
By GEORGE WILL
WASHINGTON - Oh, well, if studies say so. The great secret is out: liberals
dominate campuses. Coming soon: "Moon Implicated in Tides, Studies Find."
One study of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at
least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That imbalance,
more than double what it was three decades ago, is intensifying because
younger professors are more uniformly liberal than the older cohort that is
retiring.
Another study, of voter registrations records, including those of professors
in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine Democrats for every
Republican at Berkeley and Stanford. Among younger professors, there were
183 Democrats, six Republicans.
But we essentially knew this even before The American Enterprise magazine
reported in 2002 of examinations of voting records in various college
communities. Some findings about professors registered with the two major
parties or with liberal or conservative minor parties:
Cornell: 166 liberals, 6 conservatives.
Stanford: 151 liberals, 17 conservatives.
Colorado: 116 liberals, 5 conservatives.
UCLA: 141 liberals, 9 conservatives.
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2004, of the
top five institutions in terms of employee per capita contributions to
presidential candidates, the third, fourth and fifth were Time Warner,
Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. The top two were the California university
system and Harvard, both of which gave about 19 times more money to John
Kerry than to George Bush.
But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, denies that academic
institutions are biased against conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he
explains, occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in
academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? "Unlike
conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social
justice." That clears that up.
A filtering process, from graduate school admissions through tenure
decisions, tends to exclude conservatives from what Mark Bauerlein calls
academia's "sheltered habitat." In a dazzling essay in The Chronicle of
Higher Education, Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and
director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts, notes that the
"first protocol" of academic society is the "common assumption" - that, at
professional gatherings, all the strangers in the room are liberals.
It is a reasonable assumption, given that in order to enter the profession,
your work must be deemed, by the criteria of the prevailing culture,
"relevant." Bauerlein says various academic fields now have regnant premises
that embed political orientations in their very definitions of scholarship:
Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning
as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle,
while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who
espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing
a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family
proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies.
This gives rise to what Bauerlein calls the "false consensus effect," which
occurs when, due to institutional provincialism, "people think that the
collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger
population." There also is what Cass Sunstein, professor of political
science and jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, calls "the law of
group polarization." Bauerlein explains: "When like-minded people deliberate
as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of
their common beliefs." They become tone-deaf to the way they sound to others
outside their closed circle of belief.
When John Kennedy brought to Washington such academics as Arthur Schlesinger
Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, McGeorge and William Bundy and Walt Rostow, it
was said that the Charles River was flowing into the Potomac. Actually,
Richard Nixon's administration had an even more distinguished academic
cast - Henry Kissinger, Pat Moynihan, Arthur Burns, James Schlesinger and
others.
Academics, such as the next secretary of state, still decorate Washington,
but academia is less listened to than it was. It has marginalized itself,
partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with
the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called "smelly little
orthodoxies."
Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations - except such
nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their
ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more insistently
proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more
intellectually monochrome.
They do indeed cultivate diversity - in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual
preference. In everything but thought.
George Will writes for The Washington Post. His e-mail address is
.
Professors need to teach non-partisanly
http://www.easternecho.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?3633
Sajak Tweaks Hollywood . . . Again (on gun control)
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=5960
War, tolerance spurred college support for Kerry
http://thedaily.washington.edu/news....=11152&-search
Democrats STILL Don't Get It!
http://www.useless-knowledge.com/123...rticle083.html
Academic Thought Police
By Jeff Jacoby
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Rea...e.asp?ID=16232
Ellen Goodman: Victims of college liberalism?
http://www.indystar.com/articles/7/200063-1717-021.html
What is wrong with Ellen Goodman's views on Colleges being liberal havens
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2...5/114837.shtml
Gunner
"[L]iberals are afraid to state what they truly believe in, for to do
so would result in even less votes than they currently receive. Their
methodology is to lie about their real agenda in the hopes of
regaining power, at which point they will do whatever they damn well
please. The problem is they have concealed and obfuscated for so long
that, as a group, they themselves are no longer sure of their goals.
They are a collection of wild-eyed splinter groups, all holding a
grab-bag of dreams and wishes. Some want a Socialist, secular-humanist
state, others the repeal of the Second Amendment. Some want same
sex/different species marriage, others want voting rights for trees,
fish, coal and bugs. Some want cradle to grave care and complete
subservience to the government nanny state, others want a culture that
walks in lockstep and speaks only with intonations of political
correctness. I view the American liberals in much the same way I view
the competing factions of Islamic fundamentalists. The latter hate
each other to the core, and only join forces to attack the US or
Israel. The former hate themselves to the core, and only join forces
to attack George Bush and conservatives." --Ron Marr