conservatives in the academy: it’s not discrimination, it’s selection – for 103rd time

Many conservative critics of the academy believe that liberals dominate because of anti-conservative discrimination. While there are likely some cases of that, the evidence was always weak for discrimination as a general explanation. For example, liberals dominate in fields that are not political, like math. In technical fields, people are recruited from all over the world. I’d be surprised if the engineering professor knew the politics of the new guy from Kazakhstan, unless he made a big deal out of it.

My view, as I’ve stated before on this blog, is simply that there’s a massive self-selection process at work. Being conservative is probably correlated with certain attitudes toward work, such a desire for high compensation, that are hard to satisfy in the academy. There are also field specific self-selection effects. Sociology for example, studies all kinds of deviant behavior and the faculty tend to skew liberal, not the sort of thing that attracts conservatives.

It turns out that Neil Gross, Jeremy Freese and Ethan Fosse have a series of papers testing the self-selection hypothesis.  And surprise, the evidence points toward self-selection. A working paper called “POLITICAL LIBERALISM AND GRADUATE SCHOOL ATTENDANCE: A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS” reports the following:

This paper analyzes longitudinal data to evaluate three claims that are key
to a recently developed theory of professorial politics. The theory explains the liberalism of the American professoriate as a function of reputation-based self-selection: because academia has a reputation for liberalism, liberals are more likely to pursue graduate degrees and academic careers. We examine whether in fact young Americans who identify as liberal are more likely to enroll in graduate programs with the intention of completing a doctorate; the proposition that such a tendency cannot be explained away by variables unrelated to occupational reputation; and the claim, also made by the theory,
that exposure to many years of higher education is not a major cause of the liberalism of graduate students. We find support for all three claims, with ambiguity only on the question of whether the greater propensity of those on the left to attend graduate school results from personality differences.

This squares with my experience teaching sociology undergraduates. I often reach out to high achieving undergraduates to sign up for the sociology major or senior level courses, regardless of what I think their political attitudes may be. Among students who have exhibited conservative opinions, getting them into upper level sociology is like pulling teeth. Many have already made a choice to major in other topics.

For conservative critics of the academy, I have a simple message based on my reading of this research paper and others. Yes, being on the opposite side of things can be tough, but the evidence shows that conservatives, on the average, aren’t even trying to make careers in the academy. So if you really want the academy to take your ideas seriously, invest the effort at making a difference. My sense is that there’s a large opportunity that’s been passed on.