Few Conservatives but Many Centrists Found in American Academe

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Conservatives are a small minority within the American professoriate, according to a major study whose results were released on Saturday. The study -- which is arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s -- found that only 9.2 percent of college instructors are conservatives, and that only 20.4 percent voted for George W. Bush in 2004.

But at a symposium on Saturday at Harvard University, the study's authors cast doubt on certain claims made by conservative critics of academe. They emphasized that American faculty members are not uniformly left-wing. On most issues, they said, college instructors' views are better characterized as "centrist" or "center-left." And there is evidence of a convergence toward moderation: Faculty members who are 35 or younger are less likely than their elders to be left-wing (and also less likely to be conservative).

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Among the study's findings:

* Faculty members lean sharply to the left on issues of gender, sexuality, and foreign policy. Three-quarters agree that abortion should be legal "if a woman wants it for any reason." Eighty percent agree with the statement, "President Bush misled the American people about the reasons to go to war in Iraq."

* On issues of race and economic policy, the leftward tilt is much less pronounced. Among those who expressed any opinion, only 50.7 percent support affirmative action in college admissions. Sixty percent agree with the statement that "the government should do more to help needy Americans, even if it means going deeper into debt." That is similar to the general population's belief: In a national survey conducted this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 54 percent of Americans agreed with the same statement. On another item -- "Business corporations make too much profit" -- faculty members appear significantly more conservative than the general public. Slightly less than half of faculty members agreed with that statement, compared to 67 percent of Americans in the Pew survey.

(snip)

The professors I know like to think of themselves as liberal, but they're also rich. So it's not surprising that they might be liberal on social issues but don't quite get the picture economically.

But the finding about affirmative action doesn't quite fit into this theory, so I'm curious to hear explanations for that.

20% were moderate Republicans... 60% were garden variety Democrats....20% were Marxists...

I went to the University Of Central Florida and Florida State University....

It's not surprising that academics are generally not conservative. The numbers are right in line with the general population.

Nobody seems to know what "conservative" means anymore. In practice, self-identified conservatives always take the side of the powerful whenever they have a conflict with the powerless. But there's no coherent ideology there.

This administration isn't conservative ala Goldwater. Huge government expansion, fiscal irresponsibility, constitution shredding. They're fascists and corporatists posing as conservatives.

nor did newspaper consolidation, nor did tv station ownership..

They know how to "boil a frog"..

They have been "after" education for a very LONG time, and they understand that through normal attrition, by carefully placing "acceptable"
people into the various institutions, and through alumni associations, they can eventually, de-liberalize that pesky ole "liberal arts" program..

They are willing to wait..