After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?
[...]
Second, professors don't particularly want to be Republicans. In recent years, and especially under George W. Bush, Republicans have cultivated anti-intellectualism. Remember how Bush in 2000 ridiculed Al Gore for using all them big numbers?
That's not just a campaign ploy. It's how Republicans govern these days. Last summer, my colleague Frank Foer wrote a cover story in the New Republic detailing the way the Bush administration had disdained the advice of experts. And not liberal experts, either. These were Republican-appointed wonks whose know-how on topics such as global warming, the national debt and occupying Iraq were systematically ignored. Bush prefers to follow his gut.
In the world of academia, that's about the nastiest thing you can say about somebody. Bush's supporters consider it a compliment. [...]
Ellen Goodman nails the constant whingeing on the Right about the Left's dominance of academia:
What next? Quotas for Republican anthropologists?It's just about as constructive (and attractive) as the Left's own never-ending application of diversity metrics in every social setting.
IMHO, what we should be more concerned about is the increasingly narrow and detached focus of academic specialties that professionalization has promoted. These tendencies encourage the self-selection process and reinforce political bias in the very definition of the scope of appropriate academic inquiry. Although George Will's recent op-ed on the Left's domination of academia falls into several of the traps Goodman identifies, he does underline this legitimate area of concern. He quotes a recent article by Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. [From "Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual," Nov 12 2004, sub req'd]
Bauerlein says that various academic fields now have regnant premises that embed political orientations in their very definitions of scholarship:That would require new institutional vehicles and shifts in professional incentives that rewarded truly inter-disciplinary approaches to defining what questions need asking. Too often, fashionable multi-disciplinary centers are spaces for integrative conversations in name only, merely attracting the funding that allows scholars to till their personal little gardens.
"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, because of institutional provincialism, "people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population."