By:
Nicole Belle on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 2:45 PM - PST
What do you do when there are not enough laissez-fare loving, personal responsibility professing and family values fundies at your university? You make it more socialist:
The research led the Woessners to conclude that if higher education wants to attract more conservatives to the professoriate, it should smooth the way financially, offering subsidized health insurance and housing for graduate students, and adopting family-friendly policies for professors.
Conservatism, when socialism is too good for anyone but yourself!
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52 Responses for “To Recruit Conservatives Into Academia We Need Socialism!”
“Personal responsibility for thee, but not for me.” The conservative credo.
“No Governmental Regulation! Except in my neighbors bedroom.” another good righty credo.
You guys should be more considerate.
Everyone knows that conservatives just aren’t as intelligent or capable as liberals and they need special help with hard stuff like college.
They have special needs.
JasonS @ 3:
Ya unfortunately those needs seem to take the form of taking other people’s liberties away.
“Privatize the gains. Socialize the losses.” –radio talk show host from Orlando, nailing the conservatives in six words
Rusty Shackleford @ 1:
Yes their personal version of the bible has only one commandment “Do as I say… not as I do.”
I don’t see a problem with less conservotards everywhere in life. But it’s good to know there are fewer in teaching positions.
MargeAggedon @ 7:
The funny thing is, there are a lot more of them in teaching positions than they would have you believe. “The liberal academy” is one of their favorite myths, because it’s so useful to get the rabble roused.
BTW @ 5:
To paraphrase Gore Vidal: “free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich.”
What a racket.
Rusty Shackleford @ 8:
To say this you must be pretty disconnected from academia. I imagine you see no liberal bias in the main stream media either? Be fair.
RHM (www.thecandidacy.com)
RHM @ 10:
Please show me some examples of the ‘liberal bias’. I’m interested.
MargeAggedon @ 11:
I’ve no experience in this but for me the meanings of conservative and liberal are that conservatives want things to stay the same, liberals are open to new ideas. Given that, I’d not be surprised to find that the majority of professors are liberal.
This is old news. George Will did a column a couple of years ago bemoaning the undue influence of liberals in universities, pointing to surveys showing more academics identify as democrats than as republicans. He broadly hinted that it might be necessary to address this with hiring practices . Apparently, affiirmative action is only a bad thing when it involves women or colored people.
Strangely, he saw nothing wrong with the fact that the vast majority of CEO’s in the country are republicans.
Really, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a profession that involves the life of the mind combined with salaries that would invite guffaws in the public sector should attract people of a liberal bent. Plus, the smarter and better educated you are, the less likely to buy into the Bush Bullshit.
3 : 20 pst Fox Propaganda sycophant Rosen , was giving report about Obama’s speeches , ” blowing his nose ” was important enough to mention for some bizarre reason , inferring some kind of contrivance , typical of the common smear tactic, but the blatant use of MAO ” would appreciate ” MAO..the Communist leader could appreciate the way Obama delivers speeches, is a smear by association and they never would mention McCain and Mao in the same sentence , so this crap they pass off as ” news” needs to be highlighted .
Rosen from Fox propaganda should apologize to Barrack Obama for smearing him, by associating him with a murderous dictator .
Happened 3:20 Thursday , PST .
MargeAggedon @ 11:
As for me,I’m not so much offended by “bias” one way or another.It’s the insidious dishonesty and vicious “hidden agendas”(and I use that term loosely)that I could definitely do without. FOX anyone? CNN? ABC?
The way the Japanese do it is kids get into to school they look at talents then say okay your going to be a Rocket Scientist your going to be a Plumber etc, etc, and thats it.
L.A. Confidential @ 16:
Here in the U.S. kids say hey screw you don’t tell me what to do dude.
RHM @ 10:
I teach at Tulane in New Orleans, and there are quite a few conservatives on the faculty, particularly in law and medicine. Our latest hire in the music dept. ‘outed’ himself to me as a republican the other day.
I only know of one of these people who voted for Bush, though. All the rest think he and his cohort are idiots and ideologues who’ve hijacked the party away from traditional conservatism and moved it towards the kind of corrupt crony capitalism practised in third world dictatorships.
I’m sorry but as an academic this kind of crap sickens me. Notice the implication that if academia was simply more family friendly, it would recruit more conservatives. So the liberals don’t have families they’re trying to feed while going through graduate school or doing research? Only conservatives care enough about families to no put themselves through the rigors of higher education. Give me a break. It’s such a load of crap it makes me sick.
The real reason there are so few “conservatives” (as defined in terms of neo-conservatives, there are plenty of real conservatives) in the academia is that true education by nature discourages dogma, encourages self-doubt and skepticism, and punishes irrationality. So the self-righteous, tautological, and dogmatic (aka- neo-conservatives) cannot survive in that environment. It’s just that simple.
RHM @ 10:
Ha! Great job of using two cliche myths in one post. Look at the data. NEITHER of these institutions is liberal, unless you choose to redefine the word liberal as “anything that disagrees with any small part of neo-conservative dogma.” Then you’re right… but if you go by the Webster’s Dictionary definition of the term “liberal,” then both the concept of a “liberal media” and a “liberal academia” are false (if not oxymorons, as in media’s case)
For examples see Fox News and Glenn Beck/Kurtz/etc @ CNN and the fact that both Condi Rice, John Woo and several other conservative leaders have held posts at TOP TIER universities like Stanford, Berkeley, and Yale.
pinkobait @ 15:
Agreed.
Everything that passes for ‘information’ is subject to the bias of the human mind. Then you get the less innocent bias’ of those who want to control things.
Look, the thing is, being conservative is a CHOICE. They can be cured, if they want to. I have literature.
john doheny @ 18:
There are–or were I suppose–good things to say about traditional Conservatism.As in actual “conservation”.I’m certain that many of us dirty fucking Hippies occasionally find ourselves espousing maxims and convictions that converge with old school Conservative principles.Its really rather tragic that one whole end of the political spectrum has been decimated by this ruthless and arrogant gang of “Neo-Con” war mongering Imperialists, hiding behind intrinsically good and sound ideals that they have NEVER subscribed to.
Jason @ 3: They have special needs.
An Affirmative Action program that conservatives can get behind! Who’d have thought it?
i work in academia and let me tell you, there are plenty of Cons in here already.
If you have a selfish bias you tend to get a job making as much money as you can, and ignoring all the other parts of being human. I don’t see why ANYONE in the media, government, academia, anywhere should want to “correct” away our ethics, to be more inclusive of the most selfish, conservative pigs. The whole notion is ridiculous. The whole debate is on egregious terms, like a murderer arguing for more murderer appreciation and rights in society.
Look at the advantages of having a Biology department or a Geology department staffed by conservatives. No evolution to worry about and only six thousand odd years of earth history to study. Paleontology would just be a list of animals that missed the boat. You could earn a degree in about two weeks. The savings would be incredible.
john doheny @ 18:
RHM is just trying to muddy the waters. There are, as you correctly note, many conservatives in academia. It varies by department. The hard sciences and engineering are FULL of conservatives, many of them quite hardcore. The liberal arts tend in the other direction. Law is a mix, and is the home to many “movement” conservatives. Administration tends to be highly conservative.
I suspect that RHM knows no more about academia than he knows about the media.
Hypocrit…. I.E. republican..I.E. conservative.. That’s pretty much the real deal.. Any questions???? JD
Rusty Shackleford @ 28:
Doubtless true. But as an engineering student I found politics never entered into it. In my nontechnical electives (history and anthropology) I found that grades were imperiled by not following the party line. The history department was very right wing and the anthro department very left wing. Regurgitation was always the best policy.
Peter G @ 30:
Politics never entered into it, eh? What about the right-hand rule?
Rusty Shackleford @ 31:
You’re right. I guess I’m eating humble pi.
You hit the sweet spot good and proper! Nice shhotin’ ranger!
I guess it’s a mixed blessing that academia still doesn’t pay enough for a conservative.
Rusty Shackleford @ 28:
I teach at a Christian college whose students are quite conservative. Liberal/conservative breaks down by discipline, though I must disagree strongly with Rusty Shackleford. I can name only one conservative in the hard sciences, but only one liberal in engineering. Business is all conservative, but Econ is all liberal. At my college, at least, the lines seemed to be drawn between people who consider themselves “practical” vs. those of us who are imaginative, and you can’t do science w/o an imagination.
As others have noted, you don’t get into academia if you’re motivated to make lots of money. We’re idealistic. And most of us in the hard sciences consider ourselves liberal because we’ve seen the data about the environment, and the conservatives don’t believe in science. There are no anti-evolutionists and no younger earthers in the sciences here.
Rusty Shackleford @ 28:
I am a PhD student in biomedical engineering, and AFAIK just about the who department (students and faculty) are liberal/democrats, as are most of the scientists in biology and medicine I work with. One of the biggest issues is that we depend on federal funding to do our research from the NIH and NSF. During the 90’s the funding rate for grant applications was in the 30% range (ie, 30% of submitted grants were funded to some degree). It is now down below 10%; it is very difficult to get funding now, so researchers spend all of their time putting in 5 grants per funding cycle instead of 1 grant, hoping one gets funded. No work gets done in the meantime, and this delays or prevents getting tenure.
Aside from funding, I know a lot of people trying to do stem cell research, and obviously the current situation is not particularly amenable to that. So, overall, it really seems like any one in the sciences or engineering would be voting against their own self interests to elect someone who will cut funding even more.
A good product just needs to be advertised. A bad product needs a marketing campaign and a public relations department. That’s why conservatives are the special needs group.
One thing I like to do is ask the question, ‘what kind of person would do that job’. The answer is often enlightening. In the case the question is, what kind of conservative would want to be a college professor? The answer not surprisingly is ‘oh right a liberal.’
A conservative exposed to critical thinking would either flunk, or evolve into a liberal.
“Laissez-faire” (or even “laisser faire” as both are correct)…
Nicole, with a beautiful name like yours, you should know your french ….
Amicalement,
La Parisienne
“I knew academia had a liberal bias,” says Mr. Woessner, who earned his Ph.D. in 2001 from Ohio State University. “But it was worth the risk.”
He’s just so brave. In the face of overwhelming odds, he struggled against a system that was biased. Oh my god, this man is my hero. No more MLK, Ghandi or Rosa Parks for me. From now on it’s only Dr. Poesser for me. Just think, if he hadn’t fought the battles he did, we wouldn’t know how biased the system is, and we wouldn’t have a wanker to tell us we need more presidents who will bomb countries.
If I worked at his universit