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Why are Republicans a Minority at Elite Universities?Posted by Jess Austin Michalik, 4/5/05 at 5:47:59 PM.
Paul Krugman in today's New York Times writes "it's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities." Why should this be the case? Krugman considers this to be a matter of self-selection. According to Krugman, the Republican party is now dominated by those who think that truth should be determined not "by research but by revelation" and that such an attitude hardly goes hand in hand with academic greatness. Furthermore, Krugman notes that conservatives are a minority not only in the humanities, where a "liberal bias" in hiring might explain the lack of conservatives, but also in the hard sciences. This again, according to Krugman, is not surprising given that the Republican party has become the party which rejects climate change as a "giant hoax" and fights against teaching evolution. Having attended Columbia for the past four years, I can certainly affirm that there are fewer conservative professors. It is not that there are no dissenting opinions on most issues. (I recall one neo-con political science professor who explained that the legal system always favors the poor over the rich). And certainly there is a very large and extremely vocal conservative Jewish student body, but nonetheless views which might be called "liberal" preponderate. I myself, when taking classes in Religious Studies, at first felt very threatened by what I perceived to be a liberal, anti-religious bias. To some degree there is such a bias in the field, and many professors seem to have been drawn to the field through a strong desire to "debunk" religion. A stance of disbelief was taken by some scholars (whom we read) as being necessary for a clear view of the object of study. An "insider" was to some degree considered suspect. But nonetheless, I soon found that if I backed up my ideas with strong scholarship and firm reasoning, even the professors who seemed most hostile to my ideas received them well and offered to help me in my studies. In other words, I did not have to change or adjust my religious beliefs; I only had instead, through honest and critical enquiry, to offer demonstrations and hypotheses which were up to current standards. I could not, as it were, merely state that my beliefs were true and take this as a given. If there is one thing that I have found among all of the best professors, it has been this spirit of critical enquiry. Nothing is held sacred and everything can be challenged. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the lack of religious Christian professors at Columbia had little to do with a bias against Christianity, but rather with the fact that the overall climate of Christianity in this country has turned against the spirit of enquiry. For example, I recall certain Christians in my New Testament class who would raise their hands in class to say "Well in Sunday school I learned…." and so on, often espousing views which, given the state of current scholarship, are patently false. So long as these students go on holding up what they learned in Sunday school in place of argument and demonstration, it is clear that they will have no place in the mainstream academic study of religion,--and this can only be a good thing. So too with science: So far there has been no coherent scientific theory which offers a valid and (most importantly) useful theory of intelligent design, while on the contrary the theory of evolution has many uses, and has lead to all sorts of innovations in medicine, agriculture, and so on. Anyone who fails to make use of this theory and instead turns to revelation, again will have no place in the academic scientific world. I say this though I myself am deeply unsatisfied with the theory of evolution. Conservative, Republican, Christian, none of these terms would seem to preclude intelligent academic enquiry. Nonetheless today one finds so many "conservatives," "Republicans" and "Christians" who have placed themselves in opposition to academic discipline. Today's Republicans would rather pass bills to allow students to sue professors who disagree with them, than encourage a free and vigorous debate. It is today thought courageous by so many Christians and conservatives to speak of "core beliefs" and so forth even when these core beliefs cannot stand up to the evidence. Certainly "liberals" can be dogmatic also; they can also be very wrong. But the preponderance of liberals versus conservatives in academia perhaps has much to do with the fact that few of those who are called "liberals" have beliefs which they assert to be a priori true, and which cannot be challenged. I very much hope that the academic world evolves to contain more people who consider religious commitment and practice to be of the highest importance. But this will never happen (nor should it) so long as Christians choose to align themselves with ignorance and stand against the spirit of enquiry and argument. |
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