Survey shocker: Liberal
profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement‘ Impossible
lack of diversity’ reflects ideological intimidation on campus By Emily
Esfahani Smith - Special to The Washington Times
It’s not every day that
left-leaning academics admit that they would discriminate against a minority. But
that was what they did in a peer-reviewed study of political diversity in the
field of social psychology, which will be published in the September edition of
the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Psychologists Yoel
Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the
Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars
in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to
hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would
discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.”This finding surprised the
researchers.
The survey questions
“were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of
agreement,” Mr. Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to
get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities.”One question,
according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally
qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote
for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).”More than a third
of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative
candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out
who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.” Mr. Inbar, who
volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008, cautions that the finding reflects
only what respondents said they would do — not necessarily what they actually
would do in real life.
Generally speaking, the
more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and,
paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a
hostile climate in the academy. To Massimo Pigliucci, chairman of the
philosophy department at the City University of New York-Lehman College,
the problem is not that conservatives face discrimination; it’s that any hint
of political bias, whether conservative or liberal, necessarily
flouts the standards of objectivity to which
scholarship must adhere.“It is to be expected that people would reject papers
and grant proposals that smacked of clear ideological bias,” he says. Mr.
Inbar and Mr. Lammers, he says, should have examined the extent of bias
against liberal-leaning papers and grant proposals.
If the degree of bias
against liberals and conservatives is similar, maybe the data on discrimination
against conservatives would not be so alarming after all.But Harvey
Mansfield, a conservative professor of government at Harvard University, argues
that the anti-conservative bias is real and pronounced. He says conservatism is
“just not a respectable position to hold” in the academy, where Republicans are
caricatured as Fox News enthusiasts who listen to Rush Limbaugh.
Beyond that,
conservatives represent a distinct minority on college and university campuses.
A 2007 report by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon
Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and
non-elite universities are Democrats. Other studies reveal that 5 percent to 7
percent of faculty openly identify as Republicans. By contrast, about 20
percent of the general population are liberal and 40 percent are conservative. Mr.
Inbar and Mr. Lammers found that conservatives fear that revealing their
political identity will have negative consequences. This is why New York
University-based psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a self-described centrist,
has compared the experience of being a conservative graduate student to being a
closeted gay student in the 1980s.In 2011,
Mr. Haidt addressed
this very issue at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social
Psychology — the same group that Mr. Inbarand Mr. Lammer
surveyed. Mr. Haidt’s talk, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social
Psychology,” caused a stir. The professor, whose new book “The Righteous Mind”
examines the moral roots of our political positions, asked the nearly 1,000
academics and students in the room to raise their hands if they were liberals.
Nearly 80 percent of the hands went up. When he asked whether there were any
conservatives in the house, just three hands — 0.3 percent — went up.
This is “a statistically
impossible lack of diversity,” Mr. Haidt said.Mr. Inbar and Mr.
Lammers, who were at the conference, couldn’t believe that there were really so
few conservatives in their field. A month or two after Mr. Haidt’s talk,
the two researchers were having a few beers and decided to design a survey
examining their colleagues’ political beliefs.Beyond their findings on
discrimination, the pair determined that while conservatives are minorities in
their field, they are not statistically negligible:
About 40 percent of
respondents identified themselves as moderate or conservative on economic
issues, while 30 percent did so on foreign policy issues. The widest divide
occurs on social issues, the contested terrain in the culture wars shaking the
academy. On these contentious issues, 90 percent identified as liberal and only
4 percent as conservative.“As offensive as it may seem to many social
psychologists,” Mr. Inbarand Mr. Lammers write, “believing that abortion
is murder does not mean that one cannot do excellent research.” To think
otherwise, they argue, damages the scientific credibility of psychology — a
field that has been criticized in the press for being a pseudo-science. The
statistical representation of self-reported conservatives in the study may be
largely moot as long as they are intimidated by a hostile, discriminatory
majority. After all, a silent minority can hardly function as the kind of check
on the prevailing assumptions of their liberal colleagues essential for robust
academic debate.“Because of the way the confirmation bias works,” Mr.
Haidt says, referring to the pervasive psychological tendency to seek only
supporting evidence for one’s beliefs, “you need people around who don’t start
with the same bias. You need some non-liberals, and ideally some
conservatives.”
Comments:
I looks like colleges and universities are assessing
their relevance if the pendulum swings back to a series of conservative
administrations after 2012. In the meantime, conservatives are happy to send
their kids to Hillsdale College in Michigan. In the early days of the “academic
freedom” movement, it was clear the liberals were pushing it, so they could
become a majority in academe. I watched the beginnings of this in the 1970s. I
spent 5 happy years, 1971–1975, working at Washington University in St. Louis,
automating processes and chasing unions away (SEU). My background was running Personnel for
manufacturing companies. I knew I was just a visitor at the University and
returned to manufacturing in 1975 after finishing my projects.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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