Diversity of the Mind

You're being discriminatory in a sense, but then being discriminatory is normal. It's just what people do, and the large-scale consequences can be trivial or important depending on any number of things. Whether or not it's worth intervening through policy (or simply through culture or collective intent) varies case by case, but I think there's a case to be made here.

Below is an excerpt from an interview on James Miller's fight for tenure at Smith College and an excerpt from the paper discussed. Note that Dr. Miller is an economist and as such is much closer to the mainstream of his discipline than a hypothetical conservative social psychologist.

If you want another unambiguous case of politically motivated violation of academic freedom look at this case study of Linda S. Gottfredson's experience at the University of Delaware. She had to fight for six years. She's a psychologist in a field that's less homogeneous than social psychology.

Lessons in academic freedom as lived experience Linda S. Gottfredson * School of Education, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009academicfr...

Conservative Professor Fights Smith's Tenure Decision · 31 May 2003

O'REILLY: In the "Personal Story" segment tonight, James Miller, who teaches economics at Smith College in Massachusetts, was up for tenure this year, but he didn't get it.

Miller says the reason is he's a conservative Republican. And the college grievance committee agrees he wasn't treated fairly, saying "the rationale for their votes included consideration of matters that infringed on the candidate's right to academic freedom."

Joining us now from Boston is Professor Miller, who is the author of the book, "Game Theory at Work." All right, so you succeeded in convincing the hierarchy at Smith College that you were, indeed, denied tenure because of your political beliefs, which is supposed to be against every academic tenet in this country. But I find it hard to believe that a college as prestigious as Smith, they would punish you because you were a conservative. Am I naive?

JAMES MILLER, SMITH COLLEGE ASST. PROF.: Well, I think the problem is that there are so few conservatives and Republicans at most American colleges, including Smith, that when, you know, they read something written by a conservative, it just seems crazy to them. So I don't think the people who are punishing me for being a conservative thought they were violating my academic freedom. They thought they were keeping out someone who has this utterly crazy beliefs from teaching and corrupting their students.

In the social sciences and humanities, however, there is a stronger imbalance. For instance, recent surveys find that 58 - 66 percent of social science professors in the United States identify as liberals, while only 5 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 8 to 1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Klein & Stern, 2009; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). A similar situation is found in the humanities where surveys find that 52 - 77 percent of humanities professors identify as liberals, while only 4 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 5:1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). In psychology the imbalance is slightly stronger: 84 percent identify as liberal while only 8 percent identify as conservative (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). That is a ratio of 10.5 to 1. In the United States as a whole, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is roughly 1 to 2 (Gallup, 2010).

Additionally, it would have been interesting to hear where the respondents fall on the moral matrices, of which Haidt --who is leveling the assertion that conservatives are less common-- is a proponent.

For those who haven't heard of Haidt's ideas, I highly recommend checking out his book The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion.

No, it really wouldn't be more interesting. Does it matter precisely what "liberalism" is when 98% of the current grad students identify themselves as such? Do you really think you're going to be able to slice and dice words until this isn't a problem anymore, in the face of such a percentage? We're not talking 55%/45%, where the question of exactly what the borders are might be an interesting question. We're not even talking the overwhelming dominance of 80/20%. We're talking effective monoculture. It defies belief that this is just the error bars talking. And especially so for social scientists... are they really the people you want to accuse of being unclear on the meanings of the words "liberal" and "conservative" in some context? Betcha they could go on about the distinction for a great deal longer and with a great deal more precision than either of us!

Yeah, there's a lot of variation in those terms, even just within the US.

In the political sphere: conservative = extreme right wing (Republicans); liberal = moderate right wing (Democrats).

In universities, I imagine it's a lot more complicated. A weak rule of thumb might be conservative = obviously pro-capitalist/racist/patriarchy; liberal = professional/managerial class? But it's complicated with von Humboldt conservatives and classical liberals.

(Disclaimer: I tend to ignore most flamewars contrasting conservatives vs. liberals, so I may be uninformed. Because it's like Coke vs. Pepsi. I find critiques of liberals from leftists interesting though.)

If you want the scholarly version, skip the blog post and click through to the original paper (which was discussed on HN previously but I can't find the thread).

Page 26 of the paper does cite a study showing that libertarians have higher SAT scores, but that's probably not the only reason Caplan blogged it.

He's a Professor of Economics at GMU, and is probably one of the top 10 most popular econ bloggers on the web.

The Liberty Fund doesn't engage in political advocacy. They primarily (re)publish literature important to classical liberalism and the moral case for liberty (and history and law, etc). They also put on occasional conferences, and they maintain online libraries.

Since the cultural turn of the 1970s, liberals have focused on cultural change as a way of achieving justice. They assumed that people conform to dominant social norms which they learn about through the media and through others in society. So the operating hypothesis is that, if you create the impression that (for example) racial equality is the dominant social norm through consistent and uniform expression of those views and the suppression of racist norms, then racism will disappear as people start to conform to those new values. (This is in contrast to the prior Marxist-influenced social science which assumed that culture mainly reflects economic realities, and you can't make racism just disappear while keeping the same economic conditions.)

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and one of the co-authors of the paper. His work theorizes five foundations of morality—basically, ways of assessing the moral value of an act: harm, fairness, respect for authority, loyalty to one's group and purity/sanctity. The impact of the cultural turn shows up in his research. He found that conservatives tend to use all five foundations, while liberals only use the first two. Obviously for liberals, the remaining three are associated with patriarchal authority, nationalism and religious oppression.

So, he's not just demanding equal representation of political ideologies. It seems that Haidt believes that the dominance of liberalism among social psychologists is harmful to the field because it is associated with a strategy of cultural change which obliges liberals to avoid lines of research into these other foundations of morality.