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Comment by godsinhisheaven | Hacker News Reader

I liked the article, but I feel like this article, and many artices like, only hint or brush at truly one of the largest issues for conservatives: the numbers game. Strong majorities of professors, in pretty much every college in the United States, range from liberal to marxist. There just aren't enough conservative professors to go around! How many conservative professors even exist in the United States? 500? Maybe? Seems high honestly. (And of those, perhaps a dozen are actually honest to goodness God-fearing Conservatives, and not just libertarians.) So to me, it's no wonder that universities are such a target, pretty much everyone who staffs them, everyone who teaches at them, and everyone who attends them, is liberal.

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https://www.univstats.com/staffs/

There’s roughly 1.5 million post-secondary instructors in the United States, roughly half full-time.

Estimates of conservative faculty range between 7-15%. (FIRE, where the 15% figure comes from, probably overestimates due to their conservative bias.)

So approximately 50,000 to 110,000 conservative faculty. You’re off by a couple orders of magnitude.

There’s over 500 faculty working at Liberty University alone, never mind the other, larger Evangelical Christian schools.

Should've added to my comment, aside from the explicitly conservative colleges/unis, and seminaries. Filter those out, and how many do you have left? Still probably more than I was expecting, but still not many in the grand scheme of things.

Bro forgot that Christian universities exist in the deep south. Heck, BYU and TAMU are feeder schools for the CIA.

It's not the fault of universities that education is incongruous with certain values like fear of change and progress.

> incongruous with certain values like fear of change and progress

I essentially agree.

Though “progress” connotes improvement.

Brave New World was extremely “progressive.”

It’s not the fault of the church that faith is incongruous with certain values like sin and blasphemy.

Historically, the Protestant and Catholic churches invested very heavily in liberal arts education in America; initially, more than the state did. The university (and even the liberal arts college) as an institution isn’t fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.

Most of the time it’s the political right that is at odds with Christianity.

Even more so in the case of early European universities.

Certainly it is, as the church defines the terms.

Just like “progress”!

(Seems I was missing a /s)

Just in case: I am saying that the progress being referred to is progress in a particular direction, and that direction is a chosen one, and the choice is made by humans without any actual scientific basis.

Just like blasphemy etc in religion have no actual basis aside from being in a direction other than the direction of the religion.

To one group progress looks a lot different from what it looks like to another group, we can’t just say “progress” any more than we can say “blasphemy”.

If that was true I wouldn't be reluctant to leave my son alone with a priest.

Daughter as well, seems to be more of a protestant thing though

Right and left are two modes of political thought. If you want to get to the real truths of matters, it is necessary to hop between both rather than following either one off into the weeds.

Of course institutions tasked with coming up with new lofty ideas and fleshing out large all-encompassing paradigms are going to be full of people who are biased towards leftist thought! Just as how police officers, who deal with a never ending stream of shitheads every day, are biased towards rightist thought.

The real core problem here is this framing of "liberals" as an outright enemy, rather than as fellow citizens to have a dialog with, as advanced by the right wing media machine over the past several decades.

The appropriate framing is rather how we create checks on these institutions to keep them from running off into the weeds. Both for wider society, and also for the effectiveness of the institutions themselves. And that's certainly not with just outright destruction as the overly simplistic populism has settled into.

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