"Megan McArdle wrote something" is pretty much synonymous with "Megan McArdle is on the wrong track". She is essentially a more tendentious concern troll than David Brooks, but often in the same vein. In particular in this case, she's trying to dance away from the fact that not voting GOP is not the same thing as "being liberal", particularly for academics--on some level since the early 1990s, any faculty of any ideology would find it hard to vote Republican because the party became so committed to an anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-university position--even a conservative professor had to see the GOP as acting against his or her self-interest unless that professor was someone on the right-wing talk circuit/gravy train.
I'm late to this argument--but what always struck me about the whole controversy is the assumption that political ideology determines the scope of an academic field and the questions its inhabitants devote their studies to, just as it does everything else (e,g, McArdle's claim that current "scholarship excludes half the available ideas") But what if it isn't true? What if academic fields are organized on principles other than political ideology? What if academics disagree bitterly on everything in their field but politics, and politics is merely a social glue to keep things from getting really uncivil? It's a sign of the politicization of absolutely everything among our intelligentsia (right and left alike) that nobody raises such questions.
As you allude to in the case of conservative economics departments, the effective meaning of the word "conservative" has become a moving target since the emergence of Maga, and perhaps earlier (e.g. since the creation of the Tea Party).
Just last night I heard Paul Ryan praising Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney for refusing to sell their souls to Maga. All of them could be considered as "conservatives" in the way it was understood pre-Maga, but they don't support positions that are now labelled "conservative".
I think this is a good thought experiment, but my experience is that academia has been on the Left side of the spectrum for generations. When I was first dealing with faculty as colleagues about 45 years ago (which was in a social sciences/humanities interdisciplinary context, with some professional school pockets) the principal political tensions were between Center Left and New Left colleagues in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and that held for economists. Conservative colleagues were few, though I presume they were more numerous in the professional schools.
I think we can see an arc of increasing Left dominance in academia that rises from GOP changes dating from 1994 (the Gingrich/Cheney/Tea Party/Trump trajectory), and that balance is likely shifted on the spectrum and heightened in intensity as the transformation of the GOP occurs. But I suspect -- and I'm able to back this up with an airtight absence of evidence -- that a lot has to do with the family/social characteristics of US liberals and conservatives. My guess is that aspirations to become an academic are traditionally more common among children of liberal middle and upper class families, having to do with the occupational choices made by preceding generations. Among less privileged families, it may be that many children who conceive that aspiration have benefited, directly or indirectly, from liberal programs that have tended to shape their politics (the 99 non-Clarence Thomases that appear for every Clarence Thomas). The JD Vances would be rarer. (You may wonder whether I know Thomas and Vance are not academics . . . it's just a manner of speaking.)
Another factor may concern ease of engagement on campus. I think a Chemistry colleague now is more likely to identify with Democrats than Republicans (I had one where I taught who actually made that transition very consciously in the years leading up to 2016), but I think most simply would not have responded to a survey. I believe there is a very large proportion of academics who are put off by politicization in academics, and many more who might self-identify on a liberal/conservative spectrum but would not do so on an ideological or partisan binary. The Progressive Left on campus has become a dominating voice with outsize social influence. Wherever it overlaps center-Left positions it probably represents a true majority. But it is a faction that I'd guess is not much larger than the mostly silent conservative faculty contingent (many of which wouldn't want for one second to be associated with MAGA).
I agree there has been a “left side of the spectrum” for some time. What has shifted (and this was not overnight) was that the anti-intellectualism that has always been a part of the US (and not just the US), and had representation on the fringes of both major parties, became a core principle of the Republicans. The confirmation of RFK Jr was the end point.
The places where we gather all the smartest people trend liberal. There’s a blindingly obvious reason for this, but so many people don’t want to see it.
It's related to the blue state-red state paradox in which pro-business red states are generally poorer than anti-business blue state. One would expect it to be the other way around. It might be counterintuitive, but that doesn't mean we can't learn something from it.
Republicans don’t value education and should have no place in our education system. That’s on them. The world doesn’t need or want more Stephen Millers (i.e. bitter nerds taking their sociopathy out on the rest of humanity).
Since I was an undergrad in the ‘80s, and probably before, conservatives have loudly proclaimed their victimization. The extended quote to which you respond is a mere echo of this garbage. The response is clear: if a university states that it will not discriminate, why is that a threat to you? Do you require discrimination to feel validated or even to compete? The argument could easily be made that conservatives have had a disproportionate amount of consideration for their ideas due to their loudness and rabid support system within “think tanks” and the media. This whiny essay is simply more of the same, now empowered by a president whose lack of intellect and curiosity embarrasses the very low standards of George W Bush and Reagan.
I didn't think that it was a controversial claim that slight-majority progressive faculty had self-selected into extreme-majority progressive faculty over two or three decades, so much so that so-called antiracism programming was being pushed into the hard sciences and faculty were being forced into declaiming their support for diversity programming. The attitudes you're describing lie entirely downstream of the not-entirely-mistaken impression that far more than half of the professoriate regards around half of the country as clinical morons. I'm catching whiffs of it even in this comment section.
"Megan McArdle wrote something" is pretty much synonymous with "Megan McArdle is on the wrong track". She is essentially a more tendentious concern troll than David Brooks, but often in the same vein. In particular in this case, she's trying to dance away from the fact that not voting GOP is not the same thing as "being liberal", particularly for academics--on some level since the early 1990s, any faculty of any ideology would find it hard to vote Republican because the party became so committed to an anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-university position--even a conservative professor had to see the GOP as acting against his or her self-interest unless that professor was someone on the right-wing talk circuit/gravy train.
Agreed. I made many of the same points here
https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/the-not-so-strange-shortage-of-conservative
I'm late to this argument--but what always struck me about the whole controversy is the assumption that political ideology determines the scope of an academic field and the questions its inhabitants devote their studies to, just as it does everything else (e,g, McArdle's claim that current "scholarship excludes half the available ideas") But what if it isn't true? What if academic fields are organized on principles other than political ideology? What if academics disagree bitterly on everything in their field but politics, and politics is merely a social glue to keep things from getting really uncivil? It's a sign of the politicization of absolutely everything among our intelligentsia (right and left alike) that nobody raises such questions.
As you allude to in the case of conservative economics departments, the effective meaning of the word "conservative" has become a moving target since the emergence of Maga, and perhaps earlier (e.g. since the creation of the Tea Party).
Just last night I heard Paul Ryan praising Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney for refusing to sell their souls to Maga. All of them could be considered as "conservatives" in the way it was understood pre-Maga, but they don't support positions that are now labelled "conservative".
I think this is a good thought experiment, but my experience is that academia has been on the Left side of the spectrum for generations. When I was first dealing with faculty as colleagues about 45 years ago (which was in a social sciences/humanities interdisciplinary context, with some professional school pockets) the principal political tensions were between Center Left and New Left colleagues in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and that held for economists. Conservative colleagues were few, though I presume they were more numerous in the professional schools.
I think we can see an arc of increasing Left dominance in academia that rises from GOP changes dating from 1994 (the Gingrich/Cheney/Tea Party/Trump trajectory), and that balance is likely shifted on the spectrum and heightened in intensity as the transformation of the GOP occurs. But I suspect -- and I'm able to back this up with an airtight absence of evidence -- that a lot has to do with the family/social characteristics of US liberals and conservatives. My guess is that aspirations to become an academic are traditionally more common among children of liberal middle and upper class families, having to do with the occupational choices made by preceding generations. Among less privileged families, it may be that many children who conceive that aspiration have benefited, directly or indirectly, from liberal programs that have tended to shape their politics (the 99 non-Clarence Thomases that appear for every Clarence Thomas). The JD Vances would be rarer. (You may wonder whether I know Thomas and Vance are not academics . . . it's just a manner of speaking.)
Another factor may concern ease of engagement on campus. I think a Chemistry colleague now is more likely to identify with Democrats than Republicans (I had one where I taught who actually made that transition very consciously in the years leading up to 2016), but I think most simply would not have responded to a survey. I believe there is a very large proportion of academics who are put off by politicization in academics, and many more who might self-identify on a liberal/conservative spectrum but would not do so on an ideological or partisan binary. The Progressive Left on campus has become a dominating voice with outsize social influence. Wherever it overlaps center-Left positions it probably represents a true majority. But it is a faction that I'd guess is not much larger than the mostly silent conservative faculty contingent (many of which wouldn't want for one second to be associated with MAGA).
I agree there has been a “left side of the spectrum” for some time. What has shifted (and this was not overnight) was that the anti-intellectualism that has always been a part of the US (and not just the US), and had representation on the fringes of both major parties, became a core principle of the Republicans. The confirmation of RFK Jr was the end point.
My father remembers CCNY in the 1930s having a lot of sympathizers and followers of the Communists, at least until Stalin invaded Poland.
The places where we gather all the smartest people trend liberal. There’s a blindingly obvious reason for this, but so many people don’t want to see it.
It's related to the blue state-red state paradox in which pro-business red states are generally poorer than anti-business blue state. One would expect it to be the other way around. It might be counterintuitive, but that doesn't mean we can't learn something from it.
Republicans don’t value education and should have no place in our education system. That’s on them. The world doesn’t need or want more Stephen Millers (i.e. bitter nerds taking their sociopathy out on the rest of humanity).
Since I was an undergrad in the ‘80s, and probably before, conservatives have loudly proclaimed their victimization. The extended quote to which you respond is a mere echo of this garbage. The response is clear: if a university states that it will not discriminate, why is that a threat to you? Do you require discrimination to feel validated or even to compete? The argument could easily be made that conservatives have had a disproportionate amount of consideration for their ideas due to their loudness and rabid support system within “think tanks” and the media. This whiny essay is simply more of the same, now empowered by a president whose lack of intellect and curiosity embarrasses the very low standards of George W Bush and Reagan.
I didn't think that it was a controversial claim that slight-majority progressive faculty had self-selected into extreme-majority progressive faculty over two or three decades, so much so that so-called antiracism programming was being pushed into the hard sciences and faculty were being forced into declaiming their support for diversity programming. The attitudes you're describing lie entirely downstream of the not-entirely-mistaken impression that far more than half of the professoriate regards around half of the country as clinical morons. I'm catching whiffs of it even in this comment section.