# Posted 12:58 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

MORE ACADEMIC FASCISM: Yesterday, I discounted David Brooks' concern that the liberal academy persecutes conservative professors and graduate students. The question is, am I being naive?

JG says

I do not quite understand how you can argue that there partisan political ideas do not affect the hiring process. If that is the case, how do you explain the fact that America is divided roughly equally between conservatives, liberals, and independents, and yet the academy is 90% liberal?

I mean that as an honest question, not rhetorically...at my college and among most of my friends, the idea that you could vote for Bush is considered beyond the pale. I had a friend from college (now getting a PhD in physics at Cornell) who said, matter-of-factly, that someone he knew "opposed the war in Iraq - as any reasonable person would." Well, since I supported the war in Iraq, I objected to this. We ended up having a very good conversation about it (he's a very open-minded person), and he concluded that my position was rational and that conservatives weren't as crazy as he thought - and that he simply had been in an environment where no one had ever even bothered to understand conservative views.

So why are 90% of professors liberal? One answer might be self-selection. Given how liberal the academy is, how many conservatives would actually want to spend their entire professional lives there? There's a lot more respect available elsewhere, not to mention financial rewards and job security (after all, tenure is rather hard to come by).

Obviously, I don't have empirical evidence to back up my claim. But I am very skeptical of those who look at the numbers and assume that active prejudice is responsible for the divide.

By way of comparison, think about journalism. Most reporters are left-of-center. But that's because the left valorizes journalism in a way that the right simply does not.

Now what about the evidence of active prejudice that I dismissed as hearsay? Michael Ledeen writes that

Anecdotally, I have spoken to many young academics who are concealing their true political convictions because they know that they will never get tenure as conservatives, but only as liberals.

Adding fuel to the fire, AC describes a strange incident at the University of Michigan in which a Nigerian professor sued the University, charging that the lesbian feminist chair of his department denied him tenure because he wasn't a woman.

Now, what this all reminds me of is a column I wrote for the Yale Daily News a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. (Btw, many thanks to the YDN for continuting to archive all of my old columns online, along with those of my fellow columnists.)

Anyhow, in said column I took issue with student activists who argued that sexism was responsible for the predominance of men on the Yale faculty. While writing the column, I had the chance to sit down with two representatives of the Yale Women's Center who passionately believed that sexism was responsible for the gender imbalance.

I found their arguments unpersuasive, however, precisely because they rested on exactly the same sort of hearsay that Brooks and others rely on to demonstrate the anti-conservative prejudice of the academy. This is not to deny that some of this hearsay evidence reflects actual instances of prejudice.

Rather, I suspect that those who focus on the hearsay tend to ignore much more compelling arguments for the absence of certain sorts of professors, be they female or conservative. (With regard to women, I listed the other relevant arguments in my column.)

While I haven't researched the hiring process as it pertains to conservatives, I think one has address two big points before crying wolf: First is the issue of self-selection, as mentioned above. Has anyone actually documented the political preferences of grad school applicants? By the same token, what explains the decisions of so many conservative Ph.D.s to leave the academy? Was it prejudice or opportunity?

Second is an issue briefly mentioned in yesterday's post, i.e. the influence of esoteric methodological debates on hiring practices. Given the demonstrated importance of such concerns, shouldn't we look at them first before concluding that political concerns drive the hiring process?

I'm not saying that I have the answers to these questions. But I think David Brooks should've made a much more serious effort to address them before deciding that liberals are the one to blame. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion