Elephants on the Quad One philosophy professor keeps her socially conservative husband away from work events because he ‘would be viewed as a fascist.’ By Jonathan Marks
http://www.wsj.com/articles/elephants-on-the-quad-1459721768
Conservatives have good reason to view American universities as hostile territory. The 2006 Politics of the American Professoriate survey, conducted by the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, found that 17.6% of faculty in the social sciences consider themselves Marxists. Only 3.6% consider themselves conservatives. The same survey suggested that if the election of 2004 had been held exclusively in faculty lounges, John Kerry would have won in a historic landslide, 77.6% to 20.4%.
Progressive academics, otherwise so skilled at finding the prejudice behind every disparity, typically shrug this off. According to Mr. Gross, the explanation professors most often give for the scarcity of conservatives among their colleagues is that conservatives are close-minded. The second most popular explanation is that they are too money hungry to settle for a professor’s salary. In other words, if conservative academics are rare, they have their own defects to blame.
In “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University,” Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. are not complaining—conservatives both, they are tenured political scientists at Claremont McKenna College and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. They aim to understand those conservatives who, despite being “widely stigmatized in academia,” have nonetheless made a home in higher education: What are they like, and how do they think they are doing?
Messrs. Shields and Dunn “interviewed and surveyed 153 conservative professors in six disciplines in the social sciences and humanities” at 84 universities. They located a diverse group of conservatives, including libertarians, by gathering names from conservative journals and organizations, and then they asked those professors to identify other conservatives. Messrs. Shields and Dunn do not claim that their sample is representative. But the results of their study, the first of its kind, are intriguing. CONTINUE AT SITE
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