One little point that might explain the "underestimation" of leftist sympathies among professors by students could be that the students were more leftist themselves. It was the 60's after all. The further left/right you are, the less left/right you will estimate the more moderate to be. To a communist or a national socialist, Democrats and Republicans appear as centrists, not "liberal" or "conservative".
Alvin Gouldner is actually one of the most interesting post-moderns. In his later works, he proclaimed himself a "renegade Marxist" and started to backstab his own leftist academic peers.
I strongly recommend his 1979 book "the future of intellectuals and the rise of the New Class". At times, he goes as far as sounding like some kind of 1979 proto-Moldbug, with the Cathedral and all. I'm not kidding.
It's interesting that nobody knows why there are several fields that are just communist fronts in academia but there are no conservative equivalents. In academia you get to choose between the politics of Obama and Karl Marx. Why? I have two main hypotheses but one needs to be confirmed:
1. Academia selects for mentally ill traits (asceticism, creativity, not caring about money) more than other places and ends up with way more leftists because of it because leftism is correlated with that
2. Professors are a relatively closed off breeding pool per Gregory Clark and they are higher mutational load than the general public due to less selection pressures for a longer time. This would vindicate the idea that academia is where the public will politically be 25 years later.
And if we are to delve deep into the history of why academia is so drenched in Lefties, it is this: the Industrial Revolution that spawned the muck and brass entrepreneur also spawned a resentful leisured intelligentsia (one that wanted to see itself as more sophisticated than thou). And these types made a b-line for the public-funded universities and the rest of our polity was foolish enough to let them entirely colonise them. And the result is the 'woke' mess that the West has got itself into.
And the point that academics are funded by politicians, and ideas that can justify an increase in political power therefore tend to win out. And academics, like everyone else, recruit people like themselves.
The closest we get to some kind of "conservative front" would be business, but that covers only the conservative economic ideas, which are probably the least popular parts of the Republican platform.
> But it seems in reality that if we have no controls on politics, it gets out of hand to the point where fields need to be entirely defunded. What to do here? Is there a way to save a classically liberal, hands off approach to science?
I don't really understand this question. The classically liberal, hands off approach to science is that every field gets entirely defunded.
One could go that far, but seems a bad idea. Assuming that one wants to reap the benefits of science and technology as a public good produced by this special class of people, how can one handle this political aspect of the problem?
Eric Kaufmann has a proposal that universities that want to engage in diversity-maxxing by race, sex, gender identity and such, should also be obliged to diversity-maxx for politics - if you're going to have de facto quotas for blacks or women, you must also have such quotas for conservatives. But a university can opt to avoid having to have quotas for conservatives by declining to have quotas for any demographic groups at all.
One minor quibble. I largely agree with you on the uselessness of ethnic studies, but area studies (Middle East, SE Asia, ...) can be quite useful. I had a boss whose son did Middle Eastern Studies + Arabic + Army ROTC. He commissioned right into Military Intelligence and was off to Bargram. Clearly a number of other area studies may have similar applicability. You are not going to be way into ideology if you are headed into the service.
Yes, for this reason I didn't include these areas. I think there's value in having e.g. Japanese studies, but I guess this could just be moved into the respective other fields (history, psychology, sociology).
Yes, sociology should be defunded, but it also should be funded. The current sociologists and institutions should be defunded. But new institutions should be created to fund sociology and intentionally attract right-wing talent.
Free speech is a means, not an end. Fixing academia requires a value judgment about why we'd want to know the truth in the first place. For example, if the reason is group power, then we would suspend free speech when it is counterproductive to that aim. Or if the reason were the glory of Allah, we'd suspend free speech which diminishes Allah.
Initially, science was an activity of brilliant amateurs (circa 1000 B.C. -1830). Next it became a cottage industry of individuals who worked independently as professionals, but who retained the amateurs' love of the subject (1830-1970). Now it is a full-on factory in which many of the workers and managers are careerists (1970-present) who receive more satisfaction from their salaries, junkets, and vacation time than they do from creating new knowledge. Unsurprisingly, the current sociology of academia attracts people, especially in the social sciences, for whom the salaries and other perks still leave them hungry, so they use their positions to subvert a functional society. I knew one such individual (Ph.D. in sociology and assistant professor) who enjoyed hanging out with down-and-outers. Not doing research, hanging out. He had the romantic view of the underclass typical of a 16 year old who is angry at his bourgeois parents. Sociology needs a house-cleaning that will not come through classical liberal methods.
> College seniors were asked what the politics of their professors were. Putting the two surveys together, we get this amazing plot:
The table caption "Perception of faculty members of their politics 𝗮𝘀 college seniors" does not support this description. I would expect that table to show the opinions of faculty members on what their own politics used to be, when they were college seniors, not to show the opinions of current college seniors on what the politics of their faculty currently are. (To be very explicit: if Peter is a professor and Sam is a student, the caption suggests that, in 1964, we asked Peter about Peter's political opinions in the past, rather than asking Sam about Peter's political opinions in the present.)
This would make a correlation of 0.98 unsurprising: it would indicate that either (1) people tend to impute their current positions to their past selves, or (2) people tend to maintain their positions over time; both are surely true to varying degrees.
Can you confirm that, despite the label on the table, it actually shows the results of a survey of college seniors?
Jan 30·edited Jan 30Liked by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard
OK, I've clicked the link, but it seems to have been a waste of my time - the paper says exactly what the table caption indicates that it should say:
> The Carnegie faculty questionnaire permits a limited test of these assumptions since it asked about the politics of the respondents [that is, the faculty] while they were seniors in college. The results (table 8) seem to generally confirm the "selective ideological recruitment" thesis. Fifty-six percent in the liberal social sciences remember their undergraduate politics as "left" or "liberal," compared with just 28% of the faculty in business, 26% in engineering,and 17% in agriculture.
(page 91)
Why did you present this table as if it made an entirely different claim? This couldn't be more explicit: table 8 shows that fifty-six percent of faculty in the social sciences remember their undergraduate politics as "left" or "liberal". Did you... read the paper?
Thanks, you are right. I misread the table. I've deleted that part of the post. I guess I shouldn't write blogposts at 4 AM and publish them without triple checking!
One little point that might explain the "underestimation" of leftist sympathies among professors by students could be that the students were more leftist themselves. It was the 60's after all. The further left/right you are, the less left/right you will estimate the more moderate to be. To a communist or a national socialist, Democrats and Republicans appear as centrists, not "liberal" or "conservative".
Sociologists make use of the motte and bailey, just like other leftists.
Alvin Gouldner is actually one of the most interesting post-moderns. In his later works, he proclaimed himself a "renegade Marxist" and started to backstab his own leftist academic peers.
I strongly recommend his 1979 book "the future of intellectuals and the rise of the New Class". At times, he goes as far as sounding like some kind of 1979 proto-Moldbug, with the Cathedral and all. I'm not kidding.
Here's a review: https://www.readingliz.com/the-future-of-intellectuals-and-the-rise-of-the-new-class/
(I think this review misses a lot of the leftist/radical vibe of the original text, which is really a wild read.)
I was thinking about reading it when I read this paper. I will add it to my reading list. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8884040-emil-o-w-kirkegaard
It's interesting that nobody knows why there are several fields that are just communist fronts in academia but there are no conservative equivalents. In academia you get to choose between the politics of Obama and Karl Marx. Why? I have two main hypotheses but one needs to be confirmed:
1. Academia selects for mentally ill traits (asceticism, creativity, not caring about money) more than other places and ends up with way more leftists because of it because leftism is correlated with that
2. Professors are a relatively closed off breeding pool per Gregory Clark and they are higher mutational load than the general public due to less selection pressures for a longer time. This would vindicate the idea that academia is where the public will politically be 25 years later.
And if we are to delve deep into the history of why academia is so drenched in Lefties, it is this: the Industrial Revolution that spawned the muck and brass entrepreneur also spawned a resentful leisured intelligentsia (one that wanted to see itself as more sophisticated than thou). And these types made a b-line for the public-funded universities and the rest of our polity was foolish enough to let them entirely colonise them. And the result is the 'woke' mess that the West has got itself into.
And the point that academics are funded by politicians, and ideas that can justify an increase in political power therefore tend to win out. And academics, like everyone else, recruit people like themselves.
The closest we get to some kind of "conservative front" would be business, but that covers only the conservative economic ideas, which are probably the least popular parts of the Republican platform.
That one is more like a classical liberal/libertarian front
> But it seems in reality that if we have no controls on politics, it gets out of hand to the point where fields need to be entirely defunded. What to do here? Is there a way to save a classically liberal, hands off approach to science?
I don't really understand this question. The classically liberal, hands off approach to science is that every field gets entirely defunded.
One could go that far, but seems a bad idea. Assuming that one wants to reap the benefits of science and technology as a public good produced by this special class of people, how can one handle this political aspect of the problem?
Eric Kaufmann has a proposal that universities that want to engage in diversity-maxxing by race, sex, gender identity and such, should also be obliged to diversity-maxx for politics - if you're going to have de facto quotas for blacks or women, you must also have such quotas for conservatives. But a university can opt to avoid having to have quotas for conservatives by declining to have quotas for any demographic groups at all.
It's useful to note that the more likely for failure to have really bad outcomes, the more conservative the professors are likely to be.
The US has ignored that, and not to its credit. (Boeing, the FIU Bridge collapse in Florida, etc, etc., etc.)
One minor quibble. I largely agree with you on the uselessness of ethnic studies, but area studies (Middle East, SE Asia, ...) can be quite useful. I had a boss whose son did Middle Eastern Studies + Arabic + Army ROTC. He commissioned right into Military Intelligence and was off to Bargram. Clearly a number of other area studies may have similar applicability. You are not going to be way into ideology if you are headed into the service.
Yes, for this reason I didn't include these areas. I think there's value in having e.g. Japanese studies, but I guess this could just be moved into the respective other fields (history, psychology, sociology).
Yes, sociology should be defunded, but it also should be funded. The current sociologists and institutions should be defunded. But new institutions should be created to fund sociology and intentionally attract right-wing talent.
Free speech is a means, not an end. Fixing academia requires a value judgment about why we'd want to know the truth in the first place. For example, if the reason is group power, then we would suspend free speech when it is counterproductive to that aim. Or if the reason were the glory of Allah, we'd suspend free speech which diminishes Allah.
If a publicly funded discipline becomes a harmful and dysfunctional endeavor, defunding it is ENTAILED by classical liberalism.
Initially, science was an activity of brilliant amateurs (circa 1000 B.C. -1830). Next it became a cottage industry of individuals who worked independently as professionals, but who retained the amateurs' love of the subject (1830-1970). Now it is a full-on factory in which many of the workers and managers are careerists (1970-present) who receive more satisfaction from their salaries, junkets, and vacation time than they do from creating new knowledge. Unsurprisingly, the current sociology of academia attracts people, especially in the social sciences, for whom the salaries and other perks still leave them hungry, so they use their positions to subvert a functional society. I knew one such individual (Ph.D. in sociology and assistant professor) who enjoyed hanging out with down-and-outers. Not doing research, hanging out. He had the romantic view of the underclass typical of a 16 year old who is angry at his bourgeois parents. Sociology needs a house-cleaning that will not come through classical liberal methods.
> College seniors were asked what the politics of their professors were. Putting the two surveys together, we get this amazing plot:
The table caption "Perception of faculty members of their politics 𝗮𝘀 college seniors" does not support this description. I would expect that table to show the opinions of faculty members on what their own politics used to be, when they were college seniors, not to show the opinions of current college seniors on what the politics of their faculty currently are. (To be very explicit: if Peter is a professor and Sam is a student, the caption suggests that, in 1964, we asked Peter about Peter's political opinions in the past, rather than asking Sam about Peter's political opinions in the present.)
This would make a correlation of 0.98 unsurprising: it would indicate that either (1) people tend to impute their current positions to their past selves, or (2) people tend to maintain their positions over time; both are surely true to varying degrees.
Can you confirm that, despite the label on the table, it actually shows the results of a survey of college seniors?
Just click the link so you don't have to speculate.
OK, I've clicked the link, but it seems to have been a waste of my time - the paper says exactly what the table caption indicates that it should say:
> The Carnegie faculty questionnaire permits a limited test of these assumptions since it asked about the politics of the respondents [that is, the faculty] while they were seniors in college. The results (table 8) seem to generally confirm the "selective ideological recruitment" thesis. Fifty-six percent in the liberal social sciences remember their undergraduate politics as "left" or "liberal," compared with just 28% of the faculty in business, 26% in engineering,and 17% in agriculture.
(page 91)
Why did you present this table as if it made an entirely different claim? This couldn't be more explicit: table 8 shows that fifty-six percent of faculty in the social sciences remember their undergraduate politics as "left" or "liberal". Did you... read the paper?
Thanks, you are right. I misread the table. I've deleted that part of the post. I guess I shouldn't write blogposts at 4 AM and publish them without triple checking!
More like socialistology
You--like Scott to some degree--misstate Chomsky’s view https://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/13106/
I guess I could read the book.
Is there any empirical basis for your belief? Did any country try that and succeed?