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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

I'm not from the US, so it seems to me the argument from the article falls down on "it perpetuates the established political order". Haven't there been both liberal and conservative parties in power in the past?

So you would still have to explain why universities would tend to be liberal.

Anyway, nothing good can come from this discussion here. I hope it'll be flagged to death soon.

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>Haven't there been both liberal and conservative parties in power in the past? So you would still have to explain why universities would tend to be liberal.

Universities in the US aren't run by the federal government, and even if they were, the party in power wouldn't have any effect on the political leanings of campus staff/faculty. We're not China.

The reason university campuses tend to be liberal, I think, is that most of the people there are A) young and inexperienced; or B) a very specific and self-selecting subset of intelligent people (professors) who are not necessarily a representative sample of all intelligent people.

Even the liberal US media is ridiculously conservative by European standards, so it's certainly a US-centric point they're making. Sadly, they won't figure that out and instead believe the US system is the one the world gravitates around.

Just because I, whose experience is limited to America, speak in America-relative terms doesn't mean I am ill-informed about the rest of the world or am exhibiting some kind of politco-centrism.

Coolidge might be the last conservative President. Barry Goldwater might be the last serious conservative presidential candidate. The Republican party has not much been for American conservatism (constitutionalism, states rights, extreme caution in affecting the social order) in practice since Nixon. The Republican party has been in practice very much about the established order.

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