. . . asks Greg Mankiw. It's hard to come to the conclusion that the answer is "Yes". Faced with overwhelming evidence that there is a massive, massive underrepresentation of conservatives at the elite level, almost none of them even considers, in passing, that there might be some sort of structural problem. No, clearly the reason that conservatives don't make it into the academy is that . . . they're inferior.
It's not as if we're talking about a severe shortage of fly-fishers either. One would think that a committment to diversity would start with a committment to diversity of thought. But then, having thoughts that disagree with the thoughts that academics have probably means there's something wrong with you, doesn't it?
Don't get me wrong: I don't think there's any sort of conspiracy against conservatives in the academy. I think, rather, that a combination of more subtle factors erects a wall that it's harder for conservatives to climb over. Unless they are really, really brilliant, academics, like everyone else, need personal connections to help them up the academic ladder, from recommendations to mentors to advisors. Those personal connections are always much easier to make with people you agree with. Nor would I discount the possibility that, just as women's work can be subtly dismissed because we know women aren't as bright as men, academics who think that conservatives are stupid would factor that into their assessment of someone's intelligence--and then factor that assessment into their assessment of someone's work. And of course, one's ideas are to some extent socially constructed; simply by virtue of the arguments and information we hear, even if there is no social pressure to conform, being surrounded by a political culture will tend to drag our ideas in their direction.
And the idea that academia exerts no pressures to conform is spectacularly hilarious to anyone who's ever spent any time at all around academics. Perhaps the funniest sight I have ever witnessed is the spectacle of a sociologist cruising straight past the analyses of power relationships and group norms that they apply to every single other facet of human existence, and insisting that the underrepresentation of conservatives in academic could only be explained by the fact that conservatives are a bunch of money-grubbing intellectual lightweights who can't stand rigorous examinations of their ideas, and moreover are too intolerant to fit into the academic community.
The sociologist, you see, is inside academia, and so able to analyze it better than outsiders. Also, the sociologist knows that neither they, nor any of their friends, is biased, so the answer must be that there's something wrong with conservatives.
It's odd, given this lack of bias, that one repeatedly hears from untenured academics who are in the closet. "Passing" is not usually a behavior one finds in a community where there is no prejudice.
Now, I think that affirmative action for conservatives would be an even worse idea than regular affirmative action; conservative intellectual life doesn't need to get any flabbier than it already is. But the Larry Summers speech should certainly give one pause. That it seems to have made so little impression on liberal academics should make the rest of us very worried indeed.
I very much hope that academia is serious about diveristy.
Perhaps one source of the perceived lack of "conservatives" in the upper echelons of academia is that they migrate to more lucrative positions at The Heritage Foundation, where they can think their deep thoughts without having to deal with troubling young liberal whippersnappers.
"spectacle of a sociologist cruising straight past the analyses of power relationships and group norms that they apply to every single other facet of human existence, and insisting that the underrepresentation of conservatives in academic could only be explained by the fact that conservatives are a bunch of money-grubbing intellectual lightweights"
Post-modernist Academics aren't so much opposed to the abuse of power as much as they are opposed to the abuse of power by people who don't agree with their political views.
Not just a massive underrepresentation but a "massive, massive underrepresentation." Wow, sounds serious. Any source for this? And, no, Instarube doesn't count.
Nice analysis. Perhaps we could apply this to other areas suffering from "under-representation". African Americans in the medical and legal professions, perhaps? Or would that be a function of their lack of intellectual fitness? The truth is, as you point out, social networks are the primary determinant of success in academia and society at large. I applaud your, intellectually necessary, future support of affirmative action.
Are conservatives really so absent in academia as a whole, or is it more that they're absent in the humanities? And isn't this largely explained by the fact that conservative attitudes tend to push one into fields of inquiry that are different from where liberals go? When I was doing Russian Studies, there were almost no conservatives working on the topics I was working on, but that's because the conservatives headed towards military history, diplomacy, and a Kremlinological approach to political science. Plenty wound up making their careers in Russian area studies, but not in Russian literature or social history.
That said, I actually agree that the lack of representation of conservatives in the humanities has been bad for the academy, not to mention bad for the liberals in it. It's created a climate where there is little restraint against idiotic lefter-than-thou mau-mauing on the identity-politics side of the field.
However, conservatives who are in the humanities seem determined to shoot themselves spectacularly in the face much of the time. Harvey Mansfield's book wasn't idiotic because it was conservative; it was just idiotic. If promoting academic "diversity" means opening up the faculty to more white men who like to boast of their own manliness, then the issue isn't likely to leap to the top of the agenda.
charles and liberalrob,
There are numerous sources, including the new Gross and Simmons paper that was just unveiled at a conference in its honor at Harvard sociology. Conservatives are a tiny minority (about 5%) in social science departments at good schools. And the issue is not (or at least not entirely) that they are drawn off to think tanks or are more interested in business since as you go down the prestige ladder towards community colleges the numbers of conservatives increases dramatically. I suggest that you read the study before commenting further.
I'm an untenured professor of sociology at a good department and I agree with every word that Megan wrote.
Since I'm usually a huge critic, let me concede this is the best argument in favor of the idea of anti-conservative discrimination in academia I've read.
Never mind. Followed the links.
Certainly is an underrepresentation, but "massive, massive" is still silly, at least in wording.
Plus I think there are all kinds of practical reasons for this. As a commenter on Mankiw's blog notes, I think it is largely self-selection. The conservative friends and colleagues I know who are qualified for university teaching have, to a person, decided to work in industry and make more money. This is especially true in law. They make a lot of money in practice.
brooksfoe,
there are basically no academic fields in which conservatives outnumber liberals, though they do have respectable numbers in economics, the hard sciences, and many professional schools. so basically you have some fields where conservatives basically don't exist, others where they are more or less at parity, and none at all where they dominate. this is not consistent with your idea that they get siphoned off from one department to another.
(fwiw, i agree with your assessment of "manliness")
Untenured,
I don't understand your point about "moving down the prestige ladder." To me, that proves my point--more talented conservatives with teaching credentials don't enter the teaching ranks.
Forgive me for being so blunt, but the more you move down the prestige ladder, the less qualified the teachers become, no? The people I am thinking about went to top-tier undergrad and grad schools and went into industry instead of teach. Had teaching been attractive to them, there would be more conservatives in academia, no?
Perhaps academia tends to be sclerotic and somewhat reactionary (I don't think the terms "liberal" or "conservative" are very useful anymore) because there is comparatively little dynamism in academia compared to, say, the profit-seeking sector of our society. Compare the companies that comprise the DJIA from 50 years ago and today, against the top 30 highly respected universities of 50 years ago to today.
Sure, changes do occur within these universities, just as they do in the companies that manage to remain prominent enough to be on the Dow for 50 years. I'm sure there are some schools which have changed as dramatically as, say, IBM. However, without any waves of destruction completely obliterating some existing institutions, allowing human talent to be completely scattered and reordered, a tendency towards stasis and reactionary thinking inevitably grows.
Of course, Megan isn't arguing for affirmative action for conservatives- only pointing out the intellectual dishonesty of using intellectual diversity as a rationale for affirmative action. Mankiw's point in the article (and Summers' as well) isn't that conservatives should be demanding affirmative action (quite the opposite in fact); it's that liberal academics should, on principle, be demanding affirmative action for conservatives.
As for conservative think-tanks, there are, relatively speaking, not many academics in that field (ie, there are a lot more colleges than think tanks). Remember, the think-tanks emerged precisely because conservatives lacked a voice in academia, not the other way around.
Finally, the "massive, massive" underrepresentation is confirmed by a recent study that has been making the rounds of late. The study purports to claim that the underrepresentation is bad, but not as bad as people think. The thing is that the study ignores the fact that the numbers are most skewed in the social sciences and humanities, being the two arenas where political viewpoints are most relevant. In those areas, self-described conservatives make up less than 5% of academia. In the hard sciences, conservatives still only make up 8%. Only in the health sciences and business are they represented equally to self-described liberals. In no field is there a significant balance in favor of conservatives.
charles,
i can understand why you might expect conservatives to go into business, but i don't quite see why you would expect talented conservatives to go into business and mediocre ones to go into academia. (with the opposite pattern holding for left of center ones). it seems like, to a first approximation, the career choice effects of ideology and talent should be basically additive, not subject to complex interaction effects.
i will readily concede that the prestige ladder effect is consistent with conservatives being less talented than liberals, but you could make the same argument about finding similar disparities for women or blacks. i think this was the basic point megan was trying to make, that there is an inconsistency (on the part of both david horowitz and your typical liberal academic) of using structure and discrimination to explain the failure of groups for whom one has sympathy and micro inferiority to explain the failure of groups for whom one has indifference or hostility.
I'm an untenured professor of sociology at a good department and I agree with every word that Megan wrote.
Including "diveristy?"
Hey, I'm a bored web programmer at a small security company and I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. If you agree with every word that Megan wrote, her apparent thesis is that "conservatives" can't get ahead in academia because the old-boy network at the top is a liberal cabal that won't let them into their clubhouse. Therefore, if you're a "conservative" yourself you'd best start sending resumes to AEI because you're not going to get very far in your good department.
Is Megan wrong? Not necessarily. All groups of long familiarity and similar inclinations tend to throw up barriers to outsiders becoming members; I imagine the representation of liberal scholars at Heritage and AEI is similarly lacking. And yes, I know those are not educational institutions but my point is the phenomenon of clubbiness exists on both sides of the aisle; a conservative-dominated group is going to be just as resistant to penetration by liberals as a liberal one is to conservatives. At least at an academic institute you have the potential of being recognized on scholarly merit; at an explicitly partisan organization like AEI it doesn't matter how thorough your liberal scholarship is, you ain't gettin' in.
Untenured sociologist:
We're going to have to go so far into definitions here that a useful discussion is unlikely without further research. What do we mean by "conservative" and "liberal"? I would be surprised if there were a single tenured Marxist economist (as opposed to economic historian) in the United States; there are plenty of tenured Objectivists. As for the hard sciences, do you actually have data showing a significant bias towards liberals? And what possible mechanism could be responsible for such a bias? The first one that leaps to mind for me is the solidification of an anti-science, anti-reason platform in the GOP over the past 20 years. This would at least explain a pattern of Democratic voting -- even among scientists (biologists, say) whose other political convictions are broadly "conservative".
It's interesting to think, for example, about whether you consider E.O. Wilson "liberal" or "conservative". In the 1980s the answer would have been unambiguously conservative, due to the implications then attached to sociobiology. Today, because of his announced social positions (particularly those on the innateness of homosexuality) and because the GOP has finally embraced anti-Darwinism, he falls on the liberal side of the spectrum. So it's very important to think about the extent to which the academy has become more liberal, versus the extent to which conservatism has become anti-intellectual.
Untenured and Mark:
Here's a piece of research someone could do. Are conservatives inherently more interested in their own economic advancement than liberals? My gut says yes, but that is not worth much. Teaching is hard work, and doesn't pay a lot. For instance, a tenured law professor at Harvard can make, what, 200K a year? A first year associate at a major firm is up to 135K as of last year, according to a NYT article (and that seems low to me). Project that associate out 10 years, and a high percentage of those associates are making a million.
Then you have fields like pharma and biotech, high tech, investment banking, private equity. The smartest, most ambitious people can make insane amounts of money. I know a bio ph.d. who just cashed out of a company for $40 million, and he is 33 years old. I know a chemistry ph.d. who invented a process and sold the intellectual property for $3 million and he is in his 20s.
If I were conservative, I would take the line that we are simply too smart to waste our time teaching.
So for those who think conservatives migrate to business rather than academia, is this a case of "those who can do, those who can't teach"?
Mark,
Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If we are to accept that institutions use social networks to perpetuate unintended patterns of discrimination, which is the primary point of the piece, then a necessary extension is that similar patterns may exist in similar institutions. Large law firms (via internships) and medical teaching hospitals (via residency and fellowship) act as filters for determining success in the legal and medical communities. Even absent specific policies and procedures that direct discrimination, social network effects can, as Megan points out, produce the effect of selection bias toward those who think (or look) the same as the selectors. Ergo affirmative action as a necessary tool for overcoming these subtle biases.
i don't quite see why you would expect talented conservatives to go into business and mediocre ones to go into academia.
Money makes the world go around, the world go around, the world go around
Money makes the world go around, that clinking clanking sound!
Money
It's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stack
Money
It's a hit
Don't give me that do-goody-good bulls--t
And if you ask for a free ride it's no surprise that they're giving none away...
Well, liberalrob, it is also important to note that while the University of Michigan or the University of California at Berkely receive tax revenues, I don't think that is the case with AEI.
I don't know; isn't it possible we're getting it all backwards?
We see that college professors tend to skew to the left. We see that college students also tend to skew to the left. We say "Aha! These liberal professors must be enlightening the students/shoving this crap down their throats" (depending on who you talk to).
Could it just be that college students naturally tend to be more liberal (due to age, idealism, high levels of THC, etc), and that professors simply pick up the political leanings of the students they spend the whole day with?
There are "massive, massive" shortages of "liberals" among prison guards and "coercive interrogators," too, and that's no surprise.
A serious question for untenured professor:
What role does the process of obtaining a Ph.D. play in discouraging (or actively preventing) conservatives, particularly in the social sciences/humanities, from joining the academic realm? My understanding has been that one's ability to successfully defend their doctoral dissertation is highly dependent on whether or not your panel agrees with you (and you don't get to choose your panel).
charles,
interesting idea, but the problem with that is that conservative academics are most common in the fields where there is the greatest opportunity cost of remaining in academia. frankly, a PhD in cultural anthropology or French literature can make more money in academia than the private sector. this sociologist is probably making about 10% more in academia than i could in, say, a private-sector market research job. so given the field specific opportunity costs you would expect academia to especially retain its greedy conservatives in the humanities and social sciences. on the other hand, there is a huge private sector market for PhDs in management science, economics, chemistry, and engineering, yet these are the fields where you see respectable numbers of conservative academics. the only way to salvage your argument is if conservatives don't go to humanities and social science grad school in the first place. i think there's probably something to it, but i think the ratios are just too big to entirely be explained by it.
My gut says yes, but that is not worth much.
Hey, if it's good enough for Stephen Colbert, it's good enough for you and me!
My gut agrees with your gut. My gut also tells me that "conservatives" generally espouse more esoteric and inherently unprovable or scientifically unsupportable positions such as Intelligent Design Creationism or the nonexistence of Global Warming, and therefore are less likely to be able to advance in academia based on scholarly merit. Reality has a well-known liberal bias, as the saying goes.
Well, liberalrob, it is also important to note that while the University of Michigan or the University of California at Berkely receive tax revenues, I don't think that is the case with AEI.
As observant as ever, Will.
Quoting myself:
"And yes, I know those are not educational institutions but my point is the phenomenon of clubbiness exists on both sides of the aisle..."
and that professors simply pick up the political leanings of the students they spend the whole day with?
"Spend the whole day with," Bergamot? You must have gone to a REALLY good college!
Anyway, I know I'm being irrational here, but I just don't accept that only 8% of academics in the hard sciences are conservatives. Unless the distribution is something like 8% conservative, 72% no preference, 20% liberal. And I'd like to see that compared to a similarly worded survey of people of similar educational level in the population at large.
brooksfoe,
the Gross and Simmons paper addresses basically all of the methodological objections in your 11:18AM post.
mark,
i really don't know how the committee plays a role in the leaky pipe. in all of the departments with which i'm familiar, the student gets to choose his/her own committee. generally, this should let a student avoid a committee that is actively hostile (i.e., you can often find people who disagree with you but are open-minded). this sort of thing is more of an issue with peer review, where people (probably without realizing it) will demand unimpeachable evidence for ideas they disagree with but have lax standards for ideas they agree with.
everyone,
i'm hoping to eventually become "tenured professor" so i don't have any more time to actively participate in this thread.
Could it just be that college students naturally tend to be more liberal (due to age, idealism, high levels of THC, etc), and that professors simply pick up the political leanings of the students they spend the whole day with?
Or could it be that some of those pot-smoking hippie kids one day found themselves college professors, regardless of what the previous professors thought or taught them.
liberalrob: Academia is full of liberals who espouse inherently unprovable or scientifically unsupportable positions such as deconstructionism, Marxism, and the belief that men and women have identical distributions of talent (or that it's just plain wrong to talk about the differences, but OK to then assume that all differences in position and income are due to discrimination rather than to different talents).
Charles:
Fair question. I'll admit certainly that a portion of the pro-liberal bias of educational institutions is partially attributable to self-selection- but I don't think it's a money issue. Instead, I think it's a matter of concern about "changing the world"; Progressives by definition want to change the world; conservatives by definition don't (for the moment, we are not considering theocons in this definition). As a result, Progressives are more likely than conservatives to pursue careers where they think they can have the greatest impact on society: journalist, author, lawyer, activist, professor. Theocons who want to change the world will most likely seek to do so through traditional evangelicizing (so they won't be as likely to enter academia).
Your example about law firms actually makes this point pretty well- lawyers (and law students) are as a group quite Progressive; even the conservative lawyers are more likely to have libertarian leanings (hence the popularity of the law and economics movement). I also happen to think that the reason lawyers are one of the most depressed professions is that, because many became lawyers to push for social change, they become depressed when they realize the law is not necessarily a force for good.
All that said, I think self-selection only accounts for a portion of the imbalance (the imbalance amongst law students, I've found, is probably about 3 or 4 to 1, which is a far cry from 11 or 13 to 1).
Brooksfoe: The survey that's in the news now is deeply flawed because it doesn't define "liberal", "moderate", or "conservative", but depends on the respondants self-evaluation - and liberals who live in a liberal echo chamber often think they are "moderate". Earlier surveys have evaluated how professors vote - and that's been consistently 80% Democrat for a couple of decades. Folks, that's overwhelmingly liberal...
Untenured,
You make good points. My information is all anecdotal anyway, so all just gut sense as I mentioned. Plus I disprove my own theory. I am liberal, and abandoned academia 30 or so credits beyond my MA in English to make money.
Well money, plus I hated teaching undergrads. You would have to pay me a fortune to do that.
Mark,
Agreed, self-selection is likely not enough of a reason for the imbalance.
This looks like a ripe area for research.
As one of those conservative academics, (but not one who has witnessed discrimination) what is left out from the standard argument is how difficult it can be emotionally for a conservative in the academy. Every informal discussion you have about policy is 100 to one (and the 100 full of rather shrill opinions). I find it exhausting and frequently unpleasant. You find yourself avoiding significant social contact to avoid the same old fights over and over again. (No one likes to be bullied.) I can't even fathom being an outed conservative in a sociology department, it must be so unpleasant for them to go to work every day. I assume this is why there are so few conservatives in the academy.
That said, I have been lucky to work in environments where cordial disagreement is the norm as is genuine intellectual curiosity into conservative ideas. It is hard to keep your political views to yourself when you are an academic and I am glad that I don't have to do so.
Yes, liberalrob, your ever-observant self has somehow equated "educational institution" with "recipient of tax revenues". Yes, there are a few educational institutions which do not receive tax revenues, and still more for whom tax revenues comprise a minor percentage of total revenues. The point is that clubbiness is far more tolerable when no person is being compelled by law to fund the institution, or the legally compelled funding comprises a very minor amount of the total revenues. When someone is compelled by law to fund an institution, they have the perfectly legitimate right to demand that the clubbiness be curtailed.
How about a non-partisan solution? End all federal grant funding for the humanities and the social sciences (including econ). You can argue about the natural sciences and whether externalities in physics or medicine can justify the funding. But I think that, given the difficulty of finding objective measures of quality in hum/ss, and the importance of informational cascades and political fads, that it's simpler to let these fields sink or swim on their own. Won't make conservative sociologists' lives any easier, but your average Republican taxpayer won't have to pay for political indoctrination either.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure what academics think of this idea...
The obvious problem with this thesis (as in if you were paying any attention to the actual statistics about representation you'd have noticed it) is that the disparities are generally much smaller in the science and applied science (medicine, engineering) disciplines. Perhaps the liberal bias here lies in the observer?
I always figured that no one much cared about diversity, other than that it was the last constitutionally acceptable reason for most affirmative action after Bakke. If affirmative action to explicitly redress past injustices or for frank social engineering purposes were constitutionally permissible, I doubt that interest in diversity for diversity's sake would be even register on the political radar. Instead, we get diversity used as a code word to advance policies indistinguishable from the previously acceptable policies.
As for myself, I always figured academia was the safest place to warehouse surplus hard leftists. There they can be kept out of the affairs of most adults and do relatively little damage.
How about... there are less conservatives in academia because many conservative viewpoints can't hold up to the serious criticism? How many professional academic historians are there that believe in this current wave of Salafist violence is the same as European fascism in the 1930s?
I guess the other difference is that AEI and Heritage (or Brookings or CPS) aren't in charge of "higher education" for the nation's youth.
On the other hand, we do subsidize them, dammit, - as much of their activity is in tax-exempt foundations.
Mindles, as much as I oppose the distortions that tax exemptions impose on our economy, allowing an economic entity to retain more wealth is not the equivalent of sending an economic entity a treasury check.
I regularly recommend to outspokenly conservative students that they look at law or politics. They're not cut out for the closet.
Outspoken left students may or may not be rewarded, but they will seldom be penalized.
Brooksfoe - I have a tenured Marxist economist colleague - of the two years of his term as presiding officer of the faculty he moved the final faculty meeting from May Day to the following Monday so that we could observe 'real' Labor Day.
I can't even fathom being an outed conservative in a sociology department, it must be so unpleasant for them to go to work every day.
For confirmation of this point, see this article: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/ceji/2004/00000015/00000004/art00006
The author, a professor named Edmund Hamann, tells of the politicized reactions that he witnessed to John Ogbu's scholarship (Ogbu, a Nigerian-American sociologist, was famous for having attributed some of the black-white achievement gap in schools to the fact that some black students think of academics as "acting white").
First, Hamann tells of a speech that he witnessed by a noted Duke professor who opposes Ogbu's theory. That professor said:
I'd suggest that if prominent people on the left-wing side in a scholarly debate brag publicly about being "literally" at war, people who take a different view (and who are not even actual conservatives) may be cowed into silence or into pursuing a different line of research altogether.Second, Hamann describes a situation in which he found himself pulled off a federally-funded education research project merely because he had written a draft paper that cited and relied on John Ogbu even while making clear that he had several “caveats” with Ogbu’s scholarship. At a national meeting related to the research project, Hamann’s supervisor got “blasted” for allowing a paper to rely on Ogbu in any way. Hamann concludes that “Ogbu was not just controversial; he was taboo,” and that “citing Ogbu’s ideas is a route to a kneejerk and jarring dismissal.” Id. at 404-05, 407.
Here's another Marxist economics professor:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/
I'm sure I could find more.
It should be noted that a Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, was one of the greatest historians of the 20th century, and gave us profound insights into peasant movements and nationalism, among other things. Marxism in the academy is more of a methodology than adherence to doctrines.
It's worth noting that even if the disparity is due entirely to self-selection, the self-selection may itself be due to the fact that the left-wing dominance in academia creates a hostile and unappealing environment for conservatives.
Rickm wrote: How about... there are less conservatives in academia because many conservative viewpoints can't hold up to the serious criticism?
Already attempted in this thread, and already laughed out of town as being the unserious knee-jerk of a biased observer. There are plenty of ideas across the full spectrum that "can't hold up to serious criticism", and plenty of the left-leaning ones are alive and well in the academy, so that explanation won't hold.
anony-mouse,
For example, take Middle East Studies. The population of the far right Bernard Lewis types in academia consists off..... Bernard Lewis. The views of how the Middle East is structured and operates in academia is far different than how the same subject is viewed by the editors of, say, National Review or Commentary. I truly believe that this is not the result of a leftist 'bias' in academia, but rather, right-wing view is generally unsupported by evidence.
Rickm-
It should be noted that a number of free market conservatives have won Nobel prizes in Economics, resulting in a large-scale rejection of Keynesianism. This would put the lie to your claim that conservatives are underrepresented because they're just wrong.
Despite this, free market conservatives and libertarians continue to be vastly under-represented, while Marxists continue to be over-represented even though Marxism is pretty well discredited. In fact, as the Gross and Simmons paper shows, there are quite a few Marxists in the academic social sciences (almost 20% of the professoriate) even though there are almost none outside of it (at least in the USA).
Folks should also consider the examples that I discussed here. http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2006/07/empiricism_31.html Is it likely that these sorts of professors would be fair to actual conservatives even after treating non-conservatives with such hostility for reaching the "wrong" results?
"This would put the lie to your claim that conservatives are underrepresented because they're just wrong."
Except, no. It depends on the subject. Like I said before, I think are there are few conservatives studying the Middle East, because conservative views on the Middle East are wrong.
I agree with Megan, but this is a hard case to make because outside the academy a lot of the people identified as conservative obviously have the brains of trout - these are the creationist, Laffer curve fundamentalist, global warming deniers. Groups like the AEI that should maintain standards are often more interested in power or conformity. Smart, reality based conservatives like Megan are drowned out.
So I don't know what to do about the universities, but if conservatives want to change the situation the first thing they should do is get their own house in order. As long as you must maintain that big tax cuts will lead to big government revenue increases to have any standing as a Republican, and you must recognize that that idea is nuts to have any standing as an economist, there will be a problem.
Peter- I think you misunderstand the Laffer curve. The Laffer curve does not say that tax cuts always lead to increased government revenue. Instead, it says that tax cuts don't always reduce revenue, while tax hikes don't always increase revenue. This is actually intuitively correct- a 100% tax leaves no ability for new wealth to be created, meaning there is nothing left to be taxed; a 0% tax by definition also leaves nothing to be taxed. So somewhere there is a level of taxation that maximizes revenue.
I'm not going to deny the intellectual laziness of creationism or outright global warming denial (though skepticism of its extent and debate over proper solutions are certainly fair game).
Peter wrote: So I don't know what to do about the universities, but if conservatives want to change the situation the first thing they should do is get their own house in order. As long as you must maintain that big tax cuts will lead to big government revenue increases to have any standing as a Republican, and you must recognize that that idea is nuts to have any standing as an economist, there will be a problem.
You have observer bias, plain and simple. You've found a few cases where you disagree with positions that some conservatives support, but you've only cited the narrow charicature as grounds that the whole swath of conservative views can't hold up. How do you know? And how do you know that there aren't mainstream left-wing views, even espoused by many in the academy, that have simply slipped below your radar because you haven't questioned them as rigorously?
You have observer bias, plain and simple.
So when common sense tells you something that makes the mouse dyspeptic, it's not common sense, it's "observer bias." Got it.
Name a couple of these far-out "mainstream left-wing views" "espoused by many in the academy." Or is my failure to be aware of any an example of "observer bias."
"Observer bias" sounds a lot like "Bush hatred:" a convenient accusation to lob against people who disagree with you.
I'm interested to hear that there are still a few Marxist economics professors in the American academy. The guy in Texas was hired in 1976 and has so little to do these days that his graduate courses are offered only when there's sufficient student interest. I think anyone (including that Marxist at Texas) would agree that academic economics shifted dramatically to the right from 1970 through 2000 -- precisely the period when the humanities shifted dramatically to the left. I'm talking about the substantive beliefs of the economics professors, not whether they voted Democratic or Republican; since both the political parties also shifted their economic positions radically rightwards over that period, one could easily continue voting for the same party for 30 years while the economic policies one was endorsing shifted from a guaranteed wage (Nixon) to the privatization of Social Security (GWB). For this reason, I don't think surveying the voting habits of professors is any more objective a measure than their self-reported ideological positions.
Mark, Marxism in the social sciences means something different than Marxism in economics. Marxist economics is not a widely valued field. Marxist sociological analysis -- the view that people's political behavior is tightly wrapped up with their economic interests, that economic classes which share common interests often unite to try and take control of the levers of government, etc. -- is very widely appreciated, because it's, you know, true. Quite a number of conservative commenters on this blog, who allege that increases in progressive taxation are largely advocated by people who pay little or no income tax and that most Democrats pay no income tax, are basically Marxists.
Mark and anony-mouse -
I mostly agree with you. Marxist economics is just as crazy as the typical WSJ editorial on taxes, and yet it is not laughed out of universities. Megan was talking about a real problem, and on the university end I don't have any good ideas about what to do about it.
But in the public arena, there is a huge difference. The president, most Republican candidates for that office, and many Republican members of Congress subscribe to loony ideas, in a way qualitatively different than others. It's not fair or accurate, but as long as "conservative ideas" brings up an image of some crank on a school board fighting for creationism it will be harder to make the case that conservatives deserve a bigger slice of academia. The same goes for the higher quality venues - it's hard for the WSJ editorial page to publish the stuff it does and then ask to be taken seriously. I'd like to see more Milton Friedmans, or course, but I'm worried about getting more Luskins or Victor Davis Hansons.
Is there ever a case where a "conservative" viewpoint can be wrong? Is every rejection of a conservative argument an example of "observer bias?" Is it outside the realm of possibility that one reason there aren't many conservatives in the upper reaches of academe might be that their positions have in fact been scientifically and/or logically disproven? That they in fact have failed peer review not through the old-boy network or liberal exclusionism but actually on the merits?
I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I think it's unlikely. Any liberal worthy of the name is going to give the most radical conservative an opportunity to defend their position; but that should not be extended into a requirement that there be some minimum percentage of wrong-headed ideas that should be allowed to win in the name of egalitarianism. Liberals can be quite conservative in that regard.
What the hell is a conservative view of the middle east relating to research and acadamia? I don't agree with a lot of conservativist thought but generally I'd lump myself under that label and I have no idea why my views as a conservative toward the middle east should be, please enlighten me.
As for why conservatives stay away from acadamia, Rick, your attitude is example #1.
Who the hell would want to tolerate being around someone whose every statement stinks of your snob elitist attitude anyway?
I thought the comment towards the top by Will Allen was the most insightful in the entire thread. Let me repeat it just in case you missed it:
That's something I hadn't thought of before, but it's very true! It was amazing to recently read the Forbes 400 and realize how many of the wealthiest people in the US are "self made". The majority of the most successful companies out there didn't even exist 50 years ago. That's really incredible to think about.
I can't think of any comparable institutions in Academia. Maybe Stanford... but the success it has seen seems more due to location than innovative policies. Where are the innovative, dynamic universities that are shooting up through the rankings?
Liberalrob:
Your argument is something of a straw man and fails to distinguish between intellectual conservatism and what now passes for conservatism in the public arena. I don't think anyone here is arguing that, say, creationists should be given faculty positions in biology or geology, or astronomy as a means of intellectual diversity. But those are areas where the distribution is far more even, anyways (probably because there aren't many serious conservative intellectuals who are creationists)- it is still a somewhat skewed area, but I somewhat doubt that it is a result of bias towards conservatives in those fields.
The problem we have is primarily with the humanities and social sciences, which are two areas where a professor's work is largely unprovable to any degree of reasonable certainty (and, in the case of the humanities, not subject to proof of any sort). The exception within those fields is economics since it is heavily based on mathematics (although it is still not as provable as the hard sciences); perhaps not coincidentally, it also happens to be the one social science with a respectable number of conservatives and libertarians.
Again, part of the problem is certainly a self-selection issue. Posters to this board aside, I don't see many conservatives having an interest in sociology or African American Studies.
But self-selection and "unworthy" ideas don't explain the discrepancy in areas like English, History, Philosophy, and Religion- all of which center on extremely subjective interpretations of source materials. Nor does it explain the discrepancy in Political Science, Psychology, etc., which strongly focus on the way the world "should" work compared to how the world "does" work- in other words, work in the social sciences is closely tied to personal moral beliefs, which are inherently subjective.
Conservatives are underrepresented in US academia for two obvious reasons.
First, the modern US brand of conservatism is obsessed with the market and with the single yardstick of economic efficiency and gain. It's relatively rare for people who believe in this, and who have high general abilities, to eschew business employment (which pays very well) in favor of academic employment (which pays less well, even at the elite level). One might as well lament the lack of 300-pound, solidly-built, rabbit-fast young men with strong interest in football in the academic world--they're playing professional football.
Second, the US, uniquely among advanced and not-so-advanced societies, has an institutionally complex system of higher education that includes many hundreds of confessional schools. For conservatives who lead with the cultural (almost always grounded in religion) rather than the economic, there are places that are very congenial to them, and that they gravitate to by the same dynamic that puts all the black kids at the same lunch table. That dynamic certainly includes the hostility of the mainstream, but it's foolish to understand it solely on those terms. It's also, and maybe in greater measure, the comfort of being among "one's own," which I suspect is greater for conservatives than for liberals. I don't think it's tendentious to say that conservatives place a different, and lower, value on difference than liberals do.
I am surprised to see Megan's relatively poor analysis, by the way.
Peter writes 'It's not fair or accurate, but as long as "conservative ideas" brings up an image of some crank on a school board fighting for creationism it will be harder to make the case that conservatives deserve a bigger slice of academia.' I agree that's a problem, but note that conservatives aren't just outnumbered by liberals. If I understand correctly (from other people quoting the study which I haven't yet read myself) self-identified conservatives are outnumbered (overall, and within some fields, though not in every single field) by self-identified Marxists. I don't always gauge public opinion accurately, but my impression is that crank for crank the image of Marxists is even more extreme than that of conservatives.
Also, it's impressive when even the Marxist given as a shining example above can provoke reactions like this at UC Berkeley
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/09/treason-of-the-.html
and the NY Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04E3D91739F930A1575BC0A9659C8B63
I may not be terribly impressed with the intellectual integrity of people like Luskin and Victor Davis Hanson (particularly since I only dimly recognize the names). Still, I wonder whether it's only the *magnitude* of the political distortion of their judgments that would make them outrageously unsuitable in academia. Might the political *direction* of the distortion be the key obstacle?
I think Stephen and Will Allen are onto something. The problem with a lack of intellectual diversity isn't political, it's intellectual. Consensus is boring.
The rub is that the modern elite university is a status-maximizing institution. Status comes from the hiring of regarded professors, the placement of polished graduates, the peer-review of the like-minded.
One opposite extreme might be something like Black Mountain College -- a short-lived, wildly anarchistic experiment in higher education that could be regarded as a failure, except for the number of talented writers and artists it influenced.
But ironically, the most intellectually stimulating colleges in the modern university aren't the arts, with all their radical posturing, but the hard sciences.
In the hard sciences, ties to business research and development labs provide an input for new ideas. In the arts and social sciences, the loop for new ideas is closed.
"The problem with a lack of intellectual diversity isn't political, it's intellectual. Consensus is boring."
Yes, and no one recognizes this more than GRADUATE STUDENTS! Grad school is like prison--the first thing you do (ok, not the first thing) is take down the biggest name in the place and make them your bitch. If one writes a dissertation that shatters the convention wisdom, and includes impressive research, then one is likely to have a wonderful career.
Where are the innovative, dynamic universities that are shooting up through the rankings?
The University of Phoenix?
I can't offhand think of many new universities that have been established. Not credible ones, anyway. Come to think of it, Falwell's Liberty University is probably one of the most "innovative" and "dynamic" recently-established institutions (in the worst senses of those terms); certainly it's no haven of liberal bias.
When I think "innovative" and "dynamic" I don't usually think "university;" that word usually brings to mind Tom Lehrer's line about "ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls."
In the arts and social sciences, the loop for new ideas is closed.
I don't know, the arts always seem to break out with something new from time to time. Social sciences maybe not so much. We may have exhausted original thinking about political theory; there are only so many ways you can arrange society, and man himself doesn't seem to change much anymore.
J.Wharton:
"Perhaps we could apply this to other areas suffering from "under-representation". African Americans in the medical and legal professions, perhaps? Or would that be a function of their lack of intellectual fitness?"
Read the IQ thread. The African American average IQ lags the white average by one standard deviation; that means that only one out of six African Americans has an IQ as high as the average white American (~100). Given that physicians and attorneys tend to require higher-than-(white) average IQs, that doesn't leave a lot of blacks with the necessary IQs to succeed in those fields. If anything, blacks are over-represented in these fields relative to their ability, due to affirmative action.
Henry wrote "I think Stephen and Will Allen are onto something. The problem with a lack of intellectual diversity isn't political, it's intellectual. Consensus is boring."
That's not the only problem, I think. What about the risk of politically fashionable groupthink? Consider the Sokal hoax, or the reaction to _Arming America_ by the Organization of American Historians, or the recent Duke faculty petition regarding prosecutorial abuse, or the long academic infatuation with _Limits to Growth_ and _The Population Bomb_. Maybe this libertarian is just reading the wrong sources and/or remembering selectively, but it seems to me that when mainstream academia commits such a politically-blindered blunder, it's sadly predictable that it will be a left-oriented blunder, not a right-oriented blunder. Perhaps if mainstream academics were more willing to suffer the annoyance of having nonleftist colleagues, such politically palatable fallacies would be recognized earlier, before they could grow fashionable enough to be embarrassing when they leaked from the hothouse of the university to face the cold hard world of open criticism and/or reality.
"Yes, and no one recognizes this more than GRADUATE STUDENTS! Grad school is like prison--the first thing you do (ok, not the first thing) is take down the biggest name in the place and make them your bitch. If one writes a dissertation that shatters the convention wisdom, and includes impressive research, then one is likely to have a wonderful career."
In the food service industry.
I assume there was a hidden sarcasism tag. And actually this may work in the hard sciences at better schools (outside my experience or the experience of anyone I know, even the guys with science degrees from ivy league schools were not willing to see if it would work).
In truth the opposite, 1st thing is to find the smallest name you can stomach spending time with in department and become thier bitch. Slavishly devote yourself to them and write a dissertation which is basically a rehash of something they wrote 30 years ago before brain fosilization set in. The quality of the research is nowhere near as important as ensuring that you chose sources which are in accordance with the members of the committee reviewing your disertation ( committe members as sources is just too obvious). The most important rule, above all others, is do not challenge the beliefs of the commmittee reviewing you disertation, they have years of professional identity invested in those beliefs. You might, if really clever, challenge a minor belief of thiers which they are not strongly invested especially if it will make one of the people they are feuding with look bad, but it can be disaterous if you misjudge, unless you like spending 10 years as a grad student.
Just like prison, tell the parole board what they want to hear so you can get out in a reasonable ammount of time,OR act up and tell them they are stupid so they will keep you there as long as they possibly can.
liberalrob wrote: So when common sense tells you something that makes the mouse dyspeptic, it's not common sense, it's "observer bias." Got it.
Point of unsolicited advice: Don' be coy, as it just doesn't work when coming from you. The structure of the argument to which I was responding was one where somebody extracts a position of limited breadth and depth from a much larger range of views, charicatures it into a strawman, and then uses it as a scarecrow to fend off the entire argument. "Observer bias" was the charitable response, on the assumption that the poster in question deserved a second chance to reconsider his words as compared to what he actually meant.
Claiming that your opponents are wrong because their arguments are all unsound while yours are gold-gilt truth may be one way to win an argument, but it's also the living definition of partisanship. If you wish to add your John Hancock to a partisan argument, be my guest, but I don't recommend it -- the food is mediocre, the service is awful, and the floorshow is cancelled all week on account of the flu.
liberalrob wrote: Name a couple of these far-out "mainstream left-wing views" "espoused by many in the academy." Or is my failure to be aware of any an example of "observer bias."
Oh, no you don't. The party asserting that his opponents are fundamentally unsound on their major points, now has the onus of showing (1) that what he claims are major points, actually are major points and (2) that they actually are unsound, as opposed to being legitimate viewpoints that he merely disagrees with in an intellectually dishonest manner. A hearty "good luck" to those who think they've got that kind of time and evidence.
Meanwhile, if your question about rightish and leftish viewpoints in the academy was anything other than a snark, I offer you a chance to review the thread again -- several claims of both stripes, and of varying merit, have already been raised and debated.
liberalrob wrote: "Observer bias" sounds a lot like "Bush hatred:" a convenient accusation to lob against people who disagree with you.
Freud on Line 1 and Pavlov on Line 2, and both like to have a word with you. Feel free to take it in your office.
Young women are overwhelmingly liberal. A liberal ethos does plenty to improve a guy’s dating prospects.
I'm still basing my opinion on freedom of association, which allegedly still exists in this country. I happen to believe having a diversity of opinion around me makes life more interesting, but when it gets shrill or a person makes demands that suggests I'm acting immoral or in bad faith when I disagree, then I move away and consciously mark the person Not Really Worthy of Serious Engagement.
The same can be said for ethnic diversity. I like diversity, until it becomes a purpose unto itself. Then I move away from it, much as the discussion on this thread is causing me to do now.
I'm curious as to what, precisley, would be a 'conservative' theory in, say, sociolgy, how rigorously has it been tested, and what is it's predictive power.
I'd also be very interested in a 'conservative' theory that people will generally agree has been proven wrong.
Iow, to be blunt, 'conservative' theories are wrong, and that's why they're not taught. That would, imho, be the most parsimonious explanation. The problem is that the soft sciences give more wiggle room in regards to disproof; you see equal amounts of 'conservative' and 'liberal' (I can't believe anyone really seriously thinks like this) chemists, because if there was ever a 'conservative' theory in the field of chemistry, it's been thoroughly refuted to everyone's satisfaction.
So I ask again - just what are these 'conservative' theories that aren't getting a proper hearing in academia? Something besides some generalized grumbling, please.
When I was a grad student and a postdoc in the hard sciences, it was not uncommon to hear seminars about topics like cell division (which no political party or religious group that I know of questions) begin with a political or anti-religious rant. 'Zinger' comments were inserted into much of the conversation because it never occurred to anybody that those overhearing the comments would disagree. I would never say that I left academic research because of the hostile work environment - I now stay at home with a child and teach part-time. However, having to listen to frequent rants about 'those idiots' who don't believe in various environmental policies from people who daily pick up their coffee and lunch in styrofoam containers is not something that I'll miss.
I went to a lecture a while back on an entirely apolitical literary topic by a distinguished scholar who spent quite a bit of it ranting about how Bush was going to have Cheney resign and replace him with John Ashcroft, who would then run for president in 2008 and 2012 and complete the transformation of the U.S. into a theocratic dictatorship. Since I know and like the guy (as long as he stays off politics), I did not point out that Ashcroft had retired as AG a few months before, which was a very odd thing to do if he was in line for a major promotion. (It's interesting how completely Ashcroft has disappeared from view -- I don't even know what he's doing now. Or is he suspiciously quiet? Hmmmm . . . .)
This post, like lu-lu's post before it, doesn't seem to address the issue. Instead they are, dare I say it, in the all too-typical emoting style of someone who feels aggrieved, knows they've been slighted, but really can't point to any objective evidence that this is the case.
My comment was entirely pertinent to ScentOfViolets' previous comment. The point is not that conservatives want to drag their conservative politics into apolitical subjects like Latin or Chemistry. They want leftists to stop dragging their leftie politics into Latin and Chemistry, so that people of all political viewpoints will feel welcome instead of constantly belittled for things that have nothing whatever to do with the subject being studied.
You don't read very well, do you, Dr. Weevil?
You do realize of course that I am mocking you not because you are some sort of conservative; I am mocking you because what you posted was completely irrelevant and the opposite of what I asked for: instead of hard (nonacedotal) data demonstrating that some particular conservative theory is being dismissed merely because it is conservative, something besides some generalized grumbling, you gave me nothing but (unsubstantiated) (anecdotal) generalized grumbling.
Does anyone have any example of any specific conservative theories that are not getting a fair hearing because they conservative theories? Anything? Anyone? If not, the entire supposition of the original posting is yet another nonspecific insinuation against 'liberals'. It is precisely these sorts of extended shenanigans that have, imho, turned the mainstream against conservatism.
Oh, and btw: I don't work in Women's Studies, dept, the Black Studies department; the Sociology, Lit, or History departments. I am employed by the Mathematics department to teach math. I've also on occasion voted the odd Republican, such as the senior Bush, I'm against gay marriage, for as wide a reading as possible of the Second Amendment, one hundred percent for the development of nuclear power.
So if you even attempt to accuse me of being some sort of 'liberal' with an agenda, I'll know just how out of touch you really are, and just how poor a quality are the arguments you have to offer. Don't even go there.
ScentOfViolets:
I think I can give some on point examples:
1. Sociology- About 10 years ago (and presumably to this day), an extremely common subject of study was based on a screed against "McDonaldization" and, therefore, globalization more generally. So, a conservative viewpoint in sociology would be something along the lines of demonstrating why globalization can be a good thing for foreign cultures.
2. Political Science- Obviously, there are plenty of politically loaded topics in this arena; in the arena of Political Theory, a Progressive professor will be highly unlikely to give, say, Burke a proper hearing.(Contra liberalrob, this is a continually evolving field; it may or may not be that there are no new basic forms of government to discover, but the way in which those forms are organized continues to be the subject of new research and theory). In the area of Internatonal Relations, there is obviously quite a difference between neo-conservative interventionism, pale-conservative non-interventionism, and left wing isolationism, amongst many other viewpoints.
3. Many of the humanities are politically loaded topics- a left-wing versus a right-wing interpretation of, say, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, is easy to see; emphasis on particular philosophers is likely to be deeply affected by a philosophy professor's politics; interpretations of history are almost guaranteed to be deeply affected by political perspectives, etc.
4. While I have almost no understanding of linguistics, I would imagine that a solid, conservative-based refutation of Chomsky would be an important alternative theory.
5. Staying within the social sciences, conservative theory and perspectives in the field of Education would be highly divergent from "Progressive" theory and perspectives.
6. And so on....
My wife is a mid-career tenured professor at a top research university. I was an entrepreneurial businessman for years. So I have deep knowledge of both ends of this.
The faculty on these campuses is OVERWHELMINGLY leftist/left/Democrat/socialist/communist/Drum-Circle/whatever. To argue the contrary is to enter flat-earth-land and embarrass the hell out of yourself. I lived essentially on campus for years and walked around it daily. Whether it's 75% or 80% or 90% lefties is irrelevant; it's overwhelming and pervasive. And my wife's university is definitely to the right of the average of those in its class.
University types tend toward government/state solutions because they have not worked in the real world for the most part. They have never employed anyone, they have never fired anyone, they have never borrowed money to run a business (and had to pay it back with interest), they have rarely had to worry about efficiency or getting a job done on time, they have never had to please or placate a customer or some government bureaucrat, they never deal with "the public", they virtually never have to negotiate, they have never had to make a sale, they have rarely had to produce anything of real value to another person, they have never had to fill out tax form after tax form after tax form, they have never had to weigh economic options, they have never taken risks, etc.
Experience with all these things tends to pull people to the right, to an understanding of how markets function and why they are absolutely necessary for things to work well.
Leftists are also absurdly in love with elaborate theories of how things work or should work. I will never forget when Hillarycare 1.0 came out in 1993-4. Having been in business for a decade, I didn't even have to read the 1300-page monstrosity to know it would never work and could never be altered to work. One-seventh of the US economy is too complex, too full of moving parts, too elaborate, with too many facets and too many competing interests to work under a theoretical construct writtenany a slew of dreamy non-medical-types sitting in a room. It was utterly impossible for this nonsense to fly, so I didn't HAVE to spend any time on it.
Yet of course lefties spent months discussing it, dissecting it, arguing for alternative approaches, etc., until what was OBVIOUS to me in a flash became apparent to most people.
I have known more academics than I can count, and most of them don't have the sense to run a hotdog stand, regardless of how brilliant they may be in their individual fields (and in the humanities it's often not too brilliant indeed).
But you can NEVER NEVER NEVER persuade them of this. You can point this stuff out until you are blue in the face and you may as well be talking Kant to a cat. They take their foundational beliefs on faith as surely as any "Bible-thumper."
Take them out of their cushy, often overpaid positions, send them out to do a real job, and some of them would literally starve to death in two weeks.
Sigh. Do you understand what the words 'specific' and 'substantiated' mean? Or even what you must present to substantiate your claims? Let's look at your first example:
Notice that you have not demonstrated that such a 'viewpoint' ever existed, or that it had merit, ie, had some sort of utility, or that it was cast into disfavor merely because it was 'conservative'. Indeed, you are vague enough that I don't even know what this 'viewpoint' really is; certainly there have been extensive well-publicized arguments that globalization benefits poorer countries, and there is even data that supports this.
Now if you have evidence, hard evidence, I for one would like to hear it. Theories deserve a hearing on their own merits, not because they happen to support a particular ideology. I suspect that if you did have this evidence, a lot of people who were critical of the initial post would be angry, and rightly so, that a useful theory was suppressed for political reasons.
In fact the only place where this seems to happen with any regularity in the soft sciences are in the economics department, and there the tilt is to the right, not the left.
I would note that if anyone was truly serious about redressing a serious injustice done to 'conservative' theories unfairly thrust into obscurity merely because they were 'conservative' and not because they were unsupported by any evidence that they would take the initiative and appropriately chastise Chester White. Failure to do so would indicate to me a certain amount of, shall we say, unseriousness.
I'll lead by example. Chester, your posting is useless in demonstrating any inequities competing theories face in academia. You have offered no specifics, no examples of any of these slights. Nor any corroborative evidence that these events actually happened. Your posting has demonstrated that you are not someone to be taken seriously on the subject.
Of course, Megan isn't arguing for affirmative action for conservatives- only pointing out the intellectual dishonesty of using intellectual diversity as a rationale for affirmative action. Mankiw's point in the article (and Summers' as well) isn't that conservatives should be demanding affirmative action (quite the opposite in fact); it's that liberal academics should, on principle, be demanding affirmative action for conservatives.
That doesn't make sense. It makes sense to have affirmative action to discover different premises and perspectives. It doesn't make sense to have affirmative action to force an even distribution of conclusions. If being more informed doesn't naturally point you to one viewpoint or another, then why don't we just replace academia with fair coin tosses? If we insist that the final distribution of conclusions professors reach must match that of the general population or the undergrad population, then what is the point of thought? Diversity of premises is good, diversity of conclusions is bad--it just turns thought into meaningless noise. The problem is that when you say "we need more conservatives", you've tied premises and conclusions together.
The thing is, I tend to suspect conservatives, at least fiscal conservatives, are correct that they are underrepresented in academia. I wish they would come up with a solution to this problem more reasonable than "let's hire more guys who believe in Intelligent Design".
On another note, one problem is that this study doesn't distinguish kinds of conservatism. There are some points of view that are common in the general population that are completely dependent on revealed, mystical truths that academia is necessarily going to be biased against. That doesn't mean those points of view are necessarily false, but it isn't a lack of diversity that aims the analytically minded away from them.
I suspect, based upon the output of the Chicago School of Economics that 'fiscal conservatives' are most definitely not under-represented in academia, but I agree with your other points. That is why I am asking for a _specific_ theory that is somehow in the province of conservatism. Let's look at that specific theory and see whether it is being dismissed on it's merits, or merely because it is 'conservative'.
No one here has so far been up to what I had thought would be the quite easy challenge of posting such a theory, it's premises, it's pedigree, it's demise. So while I won't dismiss this sort of mean-minded theorizing about the dark implications of slighted conservative thought, I feel quite comfortable in saying that no evidence has been presented to support this proposition.
So I ask again - just what are these 'conservative' theories that aren't getting a proper hearing in academia? Something besides some generalized grumbling, please.
ScentOfViolets: I made two comments upstream on this very thread, and provided about five examples of this phenomenon. Scroll upwards or search for my name.
Let's look at that specific theory and see whether it is being dismissed on it's merits, or merely because it is 'conservative'.
Also, SOV, this is a false dichotomy. Experts consistently fool themselves into thinking that they've rejected a view on its "merits" when they are really just engaged in confirmation bias. Read some Philip Tetlock for experimental confirmation of this.
No Stuart, you most definitely did no. I know you may think so, but really, you've got to provide proof. For example:
In fact, this is regarded as widely debunked. Look at this to get started and go from there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ogbu
This is not to say that the hypothesis cannot be true, merely that there is little, if any, evidence that supports this contention. But you can't base policy, conservative, liberal, pragmatic or otherwise on a theory that has not been proven. Further, just looking down the google search list and reading the headings indicate that Professor Ogbu and his theories were anything but marginalized; assuming for the sake of argument (_just_ for the sake of arguement) that what you say is true, this anecdotal evidence about one professor. Are you saying that if even one professor behaves like this there is a 'liberal conspiracy'? I disagree.
I am of course, willing to be proven wrong. Do you have any evidence that this particular theory is regarded as being proven?
Sigh. Do you really think this is supposed to be considered convincing evidence? While it may be true, you've got to provide the proof. Come now, if this sort of bias is as pervasive as you say, there should be dozens, hundreds of examples to choose from. So find me a specific example of one of these theories that had actual merit but was rejected for 'political' reasons.
Really, this shouldn't be that difficult.
In fact, [Ogbu's theory] is regarded as widely debunked.
To the extent that that's true, it's precisely because of bias. The best and most recent evidence on "acting white" is Roland Fryer's study, which is based on a huge and nationally representative sample, which relies on an objective measure of popularity (i.e., how often a student is named as a friend by other people), and which shows that blacks with a GPA of over 3.5 suffer a penalty in popularity that is not experienced by white students. The conflicting studies are either limited ethnographies (the Darity study; incidentally, Darity is the guy who said he was engaged in "warfare" with Ogbu, and that was before his study was published); or are based on unreliable self-reported information (Cook and Ludwig; Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey).
Do you really think this is supposed to be considered convincing evidence? While it may be true, you've got to provide the proof.
I cited Philip Tetlock's book, but I don't have time to type out his findings here, nor do I feel any responsibility to do so. The book is available here, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7959.html, and a simpler version for the lay reader is here: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205crbo_books1 Also FYI, further evidence that relative experts are good at rationalizing pre-existing beliefs -- rather than fairly evaluating the merits -- is in Taber and Lodge's paper on "Motivated Skepticism."
Chester White:
Your forget to start with "Dear Penthouse Forum." It would greatly increase your credibility.
Does anyone have any example of any specific conservative theories that are not getting a fair hearing because they [sic] conservative theories?
It strikes me that you're setting up a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation here, in which your position can never be falsified. If (as in the case of vouchers) there are numerous social scientists on both sides of an issue, you'll say that the issue is getting a fair hearing after all. But if (as you quite mistakenly think about "acting white") the theory is widely dismissed, you say that this is because it has been given a fair evaluation and debunked.
So let me put it this way: If you wish to ignore the fact that even liberal social scientists (e.g., Douglas Massey) have described a powerful chilling effect on certain areas of research, exactly what sort of evidence would it take to convince you that such a chilling effect could exist? Be specific.
SOV- you are expecting people to give lengthy and irrefutable proofs of why theories are correct in a blog comments section; these are of course proofs that ordinarily require lengthy journal articles and/or books- and even then won't necessarily be accepted. My point with the McDonaldization example was to show that this was a book with very unconservative premises and conclusions that seemed to me to be accepted with relatively little criticism (however, I admit that I could be wrong, as sociology is far from my area of expertise).
Consumatopia: I do not think there is a confusion between premises and conclusions. Intellectual Conservatism (which is what we are mostly arguing about- theoconservatism is not something that belongs in most branches of the academy) and libertarianism are fundamentally "premises"-oriented rather than results oriented. For the libertarian (or classical liberal), for instance, everything flows from a premise that individual freedom is the most important value in society. Progressivism (or modern liberalism) tends to place more emphasis on egalitarianism as its premise. Conservatism's emphasis tends to be on the value of institutions with a respect for (but not blind adherence to) tradition (yes, I know all of these oversimplify three distinct ideologies- but you get the picture).
I don't think anyone here is arguing that we need more professors in the academy who reach conservative results; I think we are mostly arguing that there is a problem with having so few professors who begin with conservative premises.
As many legal scholars have found (see, e.g., Jonathan Turley's recent agreement with an individual rights view of the 2nd Amendment, or Laurence Tribe's criticism of the rationale behind Roe v. Wade), it is possible to reach "conservative" conclusions on an issue while still applying "Progressive" premises, and vice versa. Similarly, both a Progressive and a Conservative could find themselves in agreement about the need for state action on a given issue, and even about the need for the use of force on that issue- but their thought process would be completely different (you probably wouldn't get agreement from a libertarian, though, because of the libertarian's starting premise).
I see. Let's go over this in detail, shall we?
I find this amusing in the light of your accusation that I've set myself up to win either way. I categorically deny that. Otoh, you've just said that if the theory has been debunked, it's because of 'bias'. Project much?
And you know, I think at this point, I'm going to have to demand an apology from you for this accusation. I find it highly offensive.
On to other matters: as I said, the fact that you regard this as some sort of rigorous scholarship is evidence of your lax standards, or at least, just what rigorous scholarship means. Assume for the sake of arguement that all this study is dead-on accurate in it's statistics.
Tell me, just how does that support the hypothesis that 'fear of acting white' is a problem? It seems, quite frankly, that you have a poor idea of the flow of logical causality. If the hypothesis is true, then yes, this would be one plausible consequence. But the _inverse_ does not hold, that reporting differentially fewer friends does not logically imply a fear of acting white.
Do you understand this?
I think that what you are looking for is what is called the contrapositve, with is the negation of the inverse. That is certainly true, given the original statement holds. In this case, specifically: If the 'fear of acting white' is true implies that having fewer friends when having a higher GPA, then the contrapositive is also true, if having fewer friends while having a higher GPA is false, then the fear of acting white as a working hypothesis is also false.
Do you understand the distinction? Let me give an example more relatated to what I do. If a prime number is greater than two, then it is odd. (Ogbu's hypothesis). This study is the equivalent of saying that if a number is odd and greater than two, then it must be prime. Surely you see the absurdity of this line of reasoning. Otoh, the contrapositive in my example is most definitely true - if a number is greater than two and not odd, then it is not prime.
Do you understand my point? If not, please feel free to ask questions.
Mark, your ideas seem sensible to me, but the data in question seems to be comparing the party affiliation and voting records of professors with that of other groups--students, the general public, or different subsets of universities. That's definitely a matter of conclusions rather than of premises. Maybe future studies could fix that, though.
The more serious objection I'd have is that to declare progressivism vs. classical liberalism a matter of premises--well, I'm not sure that all progressives or classical liberals would agree. Adherents to these philosophies tend to have arguments in favor of their premises. Usually those arguments are based on other premises and intuitions, which can in turn be defended or attacked with other arguments, premises and intuitions, etc, turtles all the way down.
Indeed, if the studies show that the most skew is in the social sciences, and social sciences are the ones most likely to be debating which set of premises is most reasonable, then the premises vs. conclusions distinction seems fuzziest precisely where the phenomenon is most noticeable.
I'm not sure the causal direction doesn't lie the other way, in fact--traditionalists, libertarians, and progressives all frequently make arguments that their system is the one that maximizes happiness by some measure.
So while in principle what you're saying makes sense, in practice teasing out the distinction between someone's premises and their conclusions seems like a highly individual and idiosyncratic effort. Not too mention one easily gamed--I am definitely capable of finding arguments from any of those three premises to conclusions from any of the associated policy frameworks. One sees arguments all the time that tradition is good for liberty, liberty is good for equality, equality is good for tradition--as well as all three reversed--all the time. So it's not so much that you're confused about this--I don't think you are--it's that matters are inherently confusing here.
And this seems like a whole range of concerns that have little parallel in typical affirmative action based on race, class, origin, etc.
As I said, I think you owe me an apology. And I've already stated my criteria: find a theory that was unfairly dismissed for 'political' reasons that was shown later to be true. Come now, if I can do it for the harder sciences, I think you could do the same, actually back up an accusation rather than merely insinuate it. Continental Drift was unfairly dismissed as one popular example, only later to be proven right. Or how about the more recent research that indicates that low levels of copper and high levels of manganese is associated with Mad Cow Disease? Which goes directly to prion research - at the time it was proposed, the general reaction was "A complex protein molecule able to replicate itself without nucleic acids? Hasn't the poor fellow heard of Watson and Crick?" And so on and so forth.
These are examples off the top of my head. If I can come up with them so easily, why can't you?
No Mark, I'm not asking for anything elaborate or detailed, just something that can be unambiguously confirmed. If there is all this 'bias' there should be some hard evidence of it. Arguing backwards from the fact that there are fewer 'consevative' scientists to the conclusion that there must be bias is, er, unscientific.
I'm rather disconcerted to find such confused notions of what constitutes proof or disproof, btw. In fact, I detect a distinct note of resentment from some people that the burden of proof rests with them and is for me to judge, not vice versa.
Do you agree with this, that this is an extremely basic rule of evidence? That the people making the assertions bear the burden of proof?
And I've already stated my criteria: find a theory that was unfairly dismissed for 'political' reasons that was shown later to be true.
I already did that here, in a post that you seem not to have read: http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2006/07/empiricism_31.html
To wit, the eminent sociologist James Coleman showed in the early 1970s that white flight was occurring in response to desegregation. Some people thought that this conclusion should have been verboten -- whether or not it was true -- because it would undermine political support for desegregation plans. The head of the American Sociological Association even proposed to censure James Coleman for this research. Now, of course, everyone knows that white flight did occur.
you've just said that if the theory has been debunked, it's because of 'bias'.
In this particular instance, yes. No one who reads all the literature on "acting white" -- and I have read every article and book on that subject back to the 1970s (not for this blog post, but for pre-existing reasons) -- could come to the conclusion that it has been "debunked," as you claimed. The only reason someone would say that is bias or perhaps sheer ignorance -- i.e., you'd have to treat limited ethnographies as having debunked a study that was better constructed and that was based on objective friendship data from a nationally representative dataset. I suggest you read the Fryer/Torelli study for yourself rather than speculating about it in the abstract. http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/papers/fryer_torelli.pdf What they show is that black students do have a popularity penalty if their gradepoint rises above 3.5 GPA, and that's after controlling for all sorts of socioeconomic variables as well as participation in school activities. From there, it's logical to infer that some black kids may be motivated to avoid incurring that popularity penalty.
Do you agree with this, that this is an extremely basic rule of evidence? That the people making the assertions bear the burden of proof?
Very well, then. I have quoted an article by the liberal sociologist Douglas Massey, who discussed the works of Oscar Lewis and Pat Moynihan, and then concluded:
Again, Douglas Massey is a very well-respected sociologist from Princeton, and he's making an admission against interest -- he's admitting something that is not at all comfortable for liberals to admit. Chances are very high that he knows what he's talking about, and that he's right.So do you assert that, contra Douglas Massey, there was no such "chilling effect"? If so, you bear the burden of proof.
SOV:
I've said above in this post that a certain amount of the discrepancy is clearly the result of self-selection. I would put this at as much as 50% in many fields, and maybe even as much as 90%-100% in other fields (this is pure speculation, I'll admit). For instance, I can't imagine many conservatives or libertarians in Gender Studies, and I can't imagine any neo-conservatives in Peace Studies (though it would be an attractive area for hardcore libertarians).
Also, I'm not arguing that particular conservative theories are being actively suppressed; my concern is more that the conservative theories that do exist and have gained a modicum of respect lack an appropriate number of proponents.
As for where the burden of proof lies, if this were a discrimination case in a court of law (my area of expertise), once the disparate numbers of Progressives and conservatives in the academy were proven, the burden of proof actually would shift to the academy to show that the disparate impact has a legitimate basis. If the academy can do that, then the burden would shift back to conservatives/liberatarians to show that the academy's argument is a pretext. This system of burdens actually makes a lot of sense (unlike other areas of the law), since it places the burdens of proof on those with the greatest control of the relevant information.
So, under this test, the disparate impact being clear, the burden would shift to you to show that there is a legitimate basis for the disparate impact. A blanket statement that conservative/libertarian ideals are just wrong begs the question unless you can give some specific examples yourself of a case where those ideals were completely wrong (please don't give us the creationism example, as creationists/Biblical literalists make up only a tiny fraction of conservative intellectuals.
Consumatopia- I appreciate your thoughtful response. Obviously you are correct that almost all premises are ultimately built on other premises. I am not going to try to speak for others. I can, however, say that for most libertarians (and true Burkean conservatives like Andrew Sullivan), if you really pressed them, you would likely find that their base premise for everything boils down to: the only thing we can be certain of is that we exist and that the universe is so vast that absolute certainty cannot exist.
Pardon me, Stuart, but - how shall I say this? You have lost credibility with me. A lot. If you want me to treat you seriously, you're going to have to admit that the study you quoted that 'proved' that 'fear of acting white' was ridicuous, that in point of fact, the only thing that it could possibly do was disprove it. An apology would also be nice, but I see that you're not going to give me one, which again goes to credibility. In fact, I've resisted saying this, but the inability to admit error when blatantly caught out is something approaching the sin qua non of the stereotypical right winger.
Well? Are you interested in being reasonable? Your call.
Well, Mark, I'll give you one for chutzpah, but, no, you are quite, quite wrong. _You_ and yours are alleging it's because of 'liberal bias'. The burden of proof is upon you. I'm sorry, but whatever you may think as a lawyer (and perhaps, trying to get the other side to assume the burden of proof is considered just a good lawyerly tactic), this is the province of science.
And again, this is very strange;I've given examples in the harder sciences to show that yes, bias will sometimes cause good theories to unfairly dismissed(though of course, this is not the type of bias we are discussing here.) Why is it so hard for you to come up with the same type of evidence? Stuart has tried to foist off a 'study' as definitive (and incidentally, showing that he really isn't qualified to judge these sorts of matters.) I'll ask you the same questions I asked him: do you see why this study is worthless, etc?
I'm sensing a general pattern here, and it seems that a good portion of those participating don't really seem to understand how science is done, what it consists of, types and levels of evidence, falsifiability vs provability and so on and so forth. Maybe that's the problem instead of 'liberal bias'.
If you want me to treat you seriously, you're going to have to admit that the study you quoted that 'proved' that 'fear of acting white' was ridicuous [sic], that in point of fact, the only thing that it could possibly do was disprove it.
You're the first person in the world ever to suggest such an implication from Fryer's study, so perhaps you might want to think again (or perhaps even read the study for yourself).
As a quick background, the earlier studies that purported to disprove "acting white" looked at self-reported popularity (this is Cook/Ludwig and Ainsworth-Darnell/Downey), and purported to show that high-achieving blacks were indeed popular with their peers. This was taken to disprove "acting white" -- if high-achieving blacks are popular after all, then they must not be suffering any social penalty for being high-achieving, and so we don't have to worry that other black students would be dissuaded by that (non-existent) social penalty.
Along comes Roland Fryer; his study looked at a different national database (AddHealth) that included objective friendship data -- how often someone else identified you as a friend. As I've said before, Fryer/Torelli show that among black students, but not white students, GPAs above 3.5 are accompanied by a drop in popularity. This likely means that there is indeed a social penalty for being high-achieving, and from there it's reasonable to assume that some black kids may be motivated to avoid this social penalty (or what they *believe* to be a social penalty), either by avoiding academic achievement or by pursuing other activities instead.
You_ and yours are alleging it's because of 'liberal bias'. The burden of proof is upon you.
I've given you several examples, which you either 1) completely ignore, 2) treat as a mere anecdote (albeit without specifying how anyone is supposed to gather more rigorous evidence here), or 3) pretend to have refuted without betraying any sign of having read the literature.
You just don't get it, do you? Let me quote back at you your own words:
This likely means . . . and it's reasonable to assume . . .
So if other studies come to a different conclusion it's because:
So your 'likely' and 'reasonable' trumps 'unreliable self-reported information'. You don't have to consider other alternatives in the causal chain, because it 'just makes sense' that those who report fewer friends actually do have fewer friends(totally objective, not unreliable at all!), and that the peers who presumably do shun them do so because they have a high GPA.
Stuart, you would make a very, very poor researcher with these methodologies. In fact, I could easily see you engaging in these same types of abuses and then claiming that your research was 'suppressed by liberals'. And you'd know this for a fact, even if they pointed out your errors in reasoning, that would just be a cover.
I've been very patient with you, I've pointed out your errors, I've even continued talking with you after you've gratuitously insulted me. Now, this is your last chance: you either admit that the 'study' you just posted is full of holes in its resoning, or I dismiss you as a kook. I'm not going to waste any more time on you. Note that if what you say is true, you should be able to find plenty of other, presumably more reliable efforts that actually backs you up, so you're not really losing anything here accept an acknowledgement that you were -gasp! the horror!- not giving a very good example about 'liberal bias' stomping a theory.
Because one thing is very clear - while I don't dismiss out of hand the theory of 'liberal bias', this study certainly doesn't do anything to prove it.
Forgive me for not addressing this earlier. I do tend to become a bit upset when people have no idea what evidentiary requirements are, what it takes to prove or disprove a hypothesis etc., or worse, when informed of this, treat these painfully evolved practices as if they were some arbitrary set of rules other people were using to get over on them. Not only am I disturbed, but I suspect that people who do not grasp the necessity of these rules - and that includes people here alleging bias, just would not be happy in academia in the first place, let alone perform adequately. Indeed, this might explain that 'liberal bias'.
Anyway, yes, what you wrote up there is very true, and an excellent point. The idea of a lone scientist operating in a vaccuum and arriving at bold new theories is mostly a myth (there are a few standouts, of course.) Science, at least as I am familiar with it, is a collective enterprise, and most ideas, no matter how good or insightful they are will be destined for obscurity until a relatively large group of people determinedly campaign for it. It's not that scientists are hidebound conservatives, it's just that there are a lot of good ideas out there, too many to give all of them the attention they deserve.
Oh, one last thought. I have asked for theories that remained undeservedly obscure merely because of ideological concerns, and, as most people can see, have not been offered up any plausible candidates. But what about the converse? Are there any nominations for theories that are just plain wrong, but get people and funds just because they are politically correct? I'll avoid the obvious gaffes in economics for the moment and name one most people should know, and that is Lysenkoism in the Soviet union, the red alternative to the theory of evolution. Anything in the social sciences that is especially cringeworthy in retrospect?
Poor ScentOfViolets thinks she's been "gratuitously insulted" and demands apologies. She doesn't seem to have any problem with gratuitously insulting others (e.g. "You don't read very well do you?"), demanding that everyone else answer her question when some of us want to discuss other questions related to Megan's post, and generally acting like the queen bee of a site that is not her own.
She also seems to expect mathematical rigor in sociological arguments. As Aristotle wrote (paraphrased from memory), in some fields (e.g. mathematics) things are only true if they are always and everywhere true, while in others (e.g. politics) things are true if they are usually and for the most part true. In the latter fields, it's very difficult to 'prove' anything at all: we can only argue probabilities, and in many cases can only argue indirectly.
As a Latinist, I don't worry so much about whether conservative ideas are represented in my field, because very few things in Latin can be politicized even by people who are trying to do so. I do worry whether conservative people are excluded from academia, particularly when they keep their politics strictly out of the classroom. It seems wrong that a first-rate scholar and teacher of Latin (or Botany or Chemistry) should be forced to conceal his opinions just because he votes Republican, or to teach high school because his political opinions make him a pariah in academe. (That's one of the problems with the argument that Republicans choose to go into private industry so they can make more money. For some fields there is no private industry, and few would choose the longer hours and lower pay of high school teaching over college teaching. Yet college Classics departments have as severe a skew towards the left as most other humanities.)
SOV:
We are not talking about hard science here at all; we are talking about whether there is discrimination/bias in the social (or "soft")sciences and the humanities. In the soft sciences, it is for the most part very difficult (and in some cases, impossible) to create a truly scientific argument for or against something- most arguments in most of the social sciences have normative rather than quantitative issues at their core; at the very least, they almost always center on a very subjective evaluation. Of course, in the humanitites, almost all argumentation involves extraordinarily subjective issues. So, whether a conservative idea is scientifically accurate or not is irrelevant since the idea itself is not in the realm of the hard sciences, and no ideas outside of that realm can typically be scientifically proven or disproven.
For instance, in political science, you can argue until you are blue in the face as to whether a strong or weak central government is preferable for the well-being of society. The problem is, you may never come to a satisfactory conclusion, because a conservative and a Progressive are likely to have two very different concepts of what entails the well-being of society to begin with. And you can never scientifically prove or disprove what the "well-being of society" entails, because different people have different values systems. So a lack of conservatives/libertarians doesn't mean a lack of conservative/libertarian science- it means an underrepresentation of particular values systems.
As for my argument about burden shifting, it is not some lawyers' trick of argumentation, as you suggest. Instead, it is particularly relevant to the topic because, at it's core, we are talking about employment discrimination; ie, whether the academy systemically (or systematically) discriminates against conservatives/libertarians in the humanities and soft sciences. The burden-shifting system I explained is not "just a good lawyerly tactic" but is instead quite settled law beginning with McDonnell Douglas v. Green (a unanimous 1973 SCOTUS decision). If you were ever involved in an employment discrimination claim based on disparate impact or disparate treatment, your entire case would be governed by this burden-shifting framework.
So, the first step places the burden on the plaintiffs (in this case, conservative/libertarian social scientist and humanities professors) to show a prima facie case of discrimination. The prima facie case burden would be deemed to have been met just by showing that self-described conservatives are outnumber 11-1 and 13-1 in the social sciences and humanities, respectively, as compared to a roughly equal distribution in the rest of society and even in other academic disciplines.
This prima facie case then creates a rebuttable presumption of discrimination; to overcome this rebuttable presumption, the academy would only need to provide evidence of a legitimate non-discriminatory reason for the disparate impact. Since you have apparently chosen to represent the academy in this case, the burden is on you to show that, as you claim, conservative professor are lacking because conservative professors have faulty ideas. At a minimum, I would suggest that you provide one example of a conservative idea being proven conclusively wrong in the social sciences or humanities.
If you can do that, then that leaves the most difficult step to the conservatives/libertarian professors- proving that the reason you gave is flawed or a pretext for discrimination. But first, you have to give some evidence that the terribly disparate percentages in the social sciences and humanities have a non-discriminatory basis.
Idiotic leftist theories treated with respect are a dime a dozen. For one small example, Susan McClary wrote this about Beethoven's 9th Symphony in 1987:
"The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release."
Equating Beethoven with a murderous and (apparently) impotent rapist made McClary a laughing-stock in some sections of the intellectual world, but some have defended the comparison, and it did not prevent her from winning a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995, or holding down a job at UCLA.
So your 'likely' and 'reasonable' trumps 'unreliable self-reported information'. You don't have to consider other alternatives in the causal chain, because it 'just makes sense' that those who report fewer friends actually do have fewer friends(totally objective, not unreliable at all!), and that the peers who presumably do shun them do so because they have a high GPA.
The studies purportedly disproving "acting white" (I'm talking about Ludwig/Cook and Ainsworth-Darnell/Downey) are the ones that rely on self-reported information. To be specific, they find that students who claim to have high grades also claim to have lots of friends. From this they deduce that there's no social penalty for having high grades.
Fryer/Torelli do NOT look at self-reported information Instead, their dataset asked students to identify several of their friends at school. So if 12 people put down that Janie was their friend, and only 2 people put down that Josh was their friend, Janie must be more popular than Josh. This isn't a perfect measure (and Fryer/Torelli discuss its possible faults), but it's far, far better than just asking kids, "Do you have lots of friends?"
Anyway, all of this is a side issue. The point is that the sorts of incidents I described in my Oct. 12 1:34 comment are problematic; it's quite reasonable to assume that such politicization has an effect on what topics people are willing to research, what conclusions they are going to try to find, and so forth. If you disagree, then you are the one making an "assertion" that flies in the face of common sense, and you bear the burden of proof.
Which you have utterly failed to meet. Your only response to that issue was that "acting white" has been "debunked," which is most certainly not true (and you had no basis for saying so other than having found a very incomplete Wikipedia page that mentions only two of the 15 or so studies on this issue). And by now it's clear that you're not interested in whether "acting white" is true, or you'd have read the Fryer/Torelli study for yourself, and I wouldn't be having to correct such elementary misunderstandings (i.e., thinking that Fryer was the one who relied on self-reported information).
By the way, I note that you continue to ignore the other examples I gave -- i.e., the proposal to censure James Coleman for finding that white flight was occurring, or Douglas Massey's admission that liberal politics had created a "chilling effect" on a generation of sociologists.
LSS: long story short, No, They are not.
see:http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1479297.html
For starters.
No, I said you don't seem to read very well, because, in fact, you don't seem to read very well. Here is what I wrote:
And here is your reply:
When I said that your reply(reproduced above) was irrelevant and had nothing to do with what I wrote, thus giving you a chance to clarify what you meant you said:
At which point I noted that you did not appear to read very well, and which is certainly not an insult, given that you, in point of fact do not appear to read very well. But I'm always willing to admit my errors. So why don't you explain how your post followed from mine. Do that and I'll apologize handsomely. Don't do that and, well, let me just say that I already have a pretty good idea of your measure, which I think I nailed in my very first response to you.
Otoh, yes, I was definitely insulted by Stuart:
I don't take kindly to the notion that I'm trying to make a dishonest argument, or that I'm trying to stack the deck in my favor. And in fact, it looks like Stuart has been doing a good bit of projection here.
So I want my apology; throughout all of this I've been nothing but honest. When asked what I would accept as proof, I've been very forthcoming. I don't think my standard is at all an unreasonable one, and until very recently, no one has thought to challenge it as a standard - and then the person who did so was not the one making that rather nasty insinuation.
Not at all. I suspect you have no idea what mathematical rigor is. But I do expect that any tests of a hypothesis to be well designed, that proper inferences are made from the data and so on and so forth. What has been offered has not even reached that minimal standard. And I've been very patient in explaing why. But apparently, people who evidently think very highly of their own intellectual assets don't even know what a formal argument is, or the types of formal arguments, etc. Stuart for example thinks that if the form of the syllogism is valid, then so is its inverse, and this just isn't so. Yes, if all men are mortal and Socrates is a man then it follows he must be mortal. But Stuart is arguing from this that if something is mortal, it must be a man.
And this is what passes for reasoning amongst people who are charging 'liberal bias' in the sciences?
If you don't see the essential wrongness of this situation then you have no business of having an opinion on this subject.
Do I hear an opening brief? Are you seriously maintaining that whether a theory is true or not is irrelevant, that no ideas in the softer sciences can be proven or disproven? Then why run experiments at all if they can't prove or disprove anything?
That's complete nonsense, of course - to name just one example, most economists now concede that tax cuts don't in general pay for themselves. Or are you classifying econonomics as a hard science now?
No, I think there is something else going on here. I'm curious as to why you waited until now to make your claim that scientific accuracy was irrelevant, when you could have made it much earlier, before it became apparent that no one had any examples of theories being dismissed for any reason other than merit.
So you are seriously maintaining that no conclusions can ever be reached in political science? Because you can't answer some questions, that means you can't answer any? And questions of how a populace fair under a Soviet style communism is just a matter of opinion? There's no widespread consensus that it was not one the better forms of governance invented by man?
You have some extremely odd notions.
Aren't you leaving something out? That this action plays out in a court of law, that such suits are not automatically accepted, and so on and so forth?
Seems to me that you know well that the burden of proof is on your side, that you are trying very hard to shift the burden after having your side make the claim, and then working very hard to make sure that any evidence I can introduce will not be persuasive. How, for example, can you square your claim above that:
"So, whether a conservative idea is scientifically accurate or not is irrelevant since the idea itself is not in the realm of the hard sciences, and no ideas outside of that realm can typically be scientifically proven or disproven."
With your challenge to:
"At a minimum, I would suggest that you provide one example of a conservative idea being proven conclusively wrong in the social sciences or humanities."
You aren't being consistent. Further, it seems as if you are playing the game of "if you can't make me say I'm wrong I win." That's some game; most people win it every time. And that's what you want to finesse, that no matter what theory[1] I put forth as being debunked, you can claim that it hasn't been, really. No thanks, I decline to play.
Instead, you're going to have to play by the usual rules: if you make the statement, you defend it. Something tells me you don't like the rule in this instance. But just to show you that I'm not ungenerous, how about this: you get this alleged discrimination suit accepted by a court, and I'll be happy to show up as a witness, playing by your rules on your turf.
Fair enough?
And another ploy: why is a particular percentage 'terribly disparate' but not another? Just a gut feeling? Or perhaps yet another instance of seeing whether I'll accept the premise?
No, I'm afraid we have to play this one by the usual rules: you made the claim, you back it up. And by your own admission 'terribly disparate' percentages are simply not prima facie evidence of discrimination.
[1] I'd say the myth that women are inferior creatures has been rather effectively exploded. And by inferior, I don't mean a couple of points of difference on one IQ test or another, I mean greatly inferior, so inferior that they really shouldn't be allowed to vote. _That_ has most definitively been setteled, and that was most assuredly a conservative opinion. If you don't admit this is the case, I really will have to dismiss you as a hopeless partisan. Which, given your style of argumentation, I'm perilously close to believing.
Posted by Mark | October 14, 2007 11:03 PM
I'm trying to stack the deck in my favor.
That's the only thing you've done here, besides purporting to have debunked a Harvard economics professor's scholarly article that you fundamentally misunderstand and betray no sign of having read.
Hence all of the hand-waving about burdens of proof. What you seem to mean (as do many Internet interlocutors) is something like this:
My understanding has been that one's ability to successfully defend their doctoral dissertation is highly dependent on whether or not your panel agrees with you (and you don't get to choose your panel).
It's not quite that simple.
1. You do get to choose your panel. Your advisor might want a strong say in who goes on it, and there might be departmental rules about getting an outside committee member, but you generally get pretty wide latitude.
2. It's not so much on whether or not they "agree" with you; if you have a solid methodology and can logically defend your interpretations of your results, most academics will be satisfied with that. Of course, there are always some who might bust your balls on an ideological point; but that's why the vote (at least, in my department) doesn't have to be unanimous.
In the hard sciences, ties to business research and development labs provide an input for new ideas. In the arts and social sciences, the loop for new ideas is closed.
I think there is a lot of truth to this, though the loop is not *quite* closed for all social sciences.
Stuart, you owe me an apology. And no, it's quite simple: if you make a claim, you defend it. I am under exactly zero obligation to take an opposing viewpoint (note that I haven't), nor am I under the remotest duress to provide any proof of any sort. That's all on you. That's the way science works. If that's 'stacking the deck', then - according to you - science has a liberal bias.
_That_ I will agree with wholeheartedly.
I don't think you realize just how ignorant you have shown yourself to be. You have quite clearly demonstrated that you know no formal logic, that you can't tell an inverse from a syllogism or a contrapositve to a converse. You have attempted to argue that if all men are mortal and Socrates is man, and so mortal necessarily implies that therefore if something is mortal it must be a man. That if all primes greater than two are odd, that if a number is greater than two and odd it must be prime. So, I don't think you are in a position to tell whether a theory has been proven or disproven.
You are also dishonest. You had no intention of ever admitting you were wrong. And you have the gall to accuse me of 'stacking the deck'. As I said, projection.
Note that I have also given you every opportunity to look up just what implications, modus tollens, etc are, and you have not attempted in the slightest to rectify your lack of knowledge. And - after all of this - you still don't know what a contrapositive is, do you? Chuckle. I don't think we need to waste any more of our time with your opinions on this subject.
It appears that the reason ScentOfViolets thinks I can't read is that she asked a question (10/13, 6:15pm) and then assumed that the two subsequent comments were inept attempts to answer it. She even writes "Here is your reply" when quoting mine. If I'd been replying specifically to her comment, I would have said so. In fact, I was addressing the general topic Megan raised, but from a different angle: discrimination against conservative people in apolitical fields, not against conservative ideas. It takes a good deal of arrogance to presume that once you've asked a question in someone else's comment section, all other commenters are required to address it on your terms or keep silent. It takes even more arrogance to write something like this (1/14, 7:03pm, emphasis added):
As in any other public intellectual dispute, it is for anyone to judge, though some are more qualified to do so than others. We are all entitled to draw our own conclusions as to which side the burden of proof is on, and whether the evidence offered is sufficient to meet the challenge. ScentOfViolets is not the Logic Queen, and we need not yield our own judgment to hers.
before it became apparent that no one had any examples of theories being dismissed for any reason other than merit.
It's interesting . . . in no fewer than three comments here, I have referred to the case of James Coleman and his finding of white flight, which was not only dismissed for reasons other than merit, but was used by the head of the American Sociological Association as a basis for trying to have Coleman censured. In other comments, I've pointed to Douglas Massey's admission that many liberal sociologists were stifled for political reasons from inquiring into matters of poverty and culture. I've also pointed out several instances of political bias against John Ogbu's theory of "acting white" and against someone who dared to cite to Ogbu in a critical but still respectful fashion.
SOV's response? Just to move on and pretend that no one has even tried to offer examples. This is the furthest thing from good faith argumentation.
You have quite clearly demonstrated that you know no formal logic, that you can't tell an inverse from a syllogism or a contrapositve [sic] to a converse. You have attempted to argue that if all men are mortal and Socrates is man, and so mortal necessarily implies that therefore if something is mortal it must be a man.
Let's go back to the beginning. I pointed to several incidents wherein scholars acted as though John Ogbu's theory of acting white is so poisonous that you can't even cite Ogbu in a respectful but critical fashion -- not because they have solid evidence against it, but because they don't like the political implications. You claimed that Ogbu's theory was "widely debunked," thus implying that I hadn't shown an example of unfair treatment towards a valid theory.
But you are completely wrong about Ogbu having been "debunked," and you could think so only on the basis of a very non-scientific approach (i.e., thinking that looking at the first page of Google results constitutes research).
As a matter of fact, there have been over a dozen studies on the "acting white" issue since the early 1970s, starting with Frank Petroni's ethnography, and including John Ogbu's several ethnographies, Laurence Steinberg's survey of some 20,000 high school students, and many more. Here's a partial list of citations:
Donna Y. Ford, “An Investigation of the Paradox of Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students,” Roeper Review 16 no. 2 (1993): 78-84; Donna Y. Ford, “Determinants of Underachievement as Perceived by Gifted, Above-Average, and Average Black Students,” Roeper Review 14 no. 3 (1992): 130-136; Jan Collins-Eaglin and Stuart A. Karabenick, “Devaluing of Academic Success by African-American Students: On ‘Acting White’ and ‘Selling Out.’” Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Atlanta, Georgia, 12-16 April 1993; Roslyn Arlin Mickelson and Anne E. Velasco, “Bring it On! Diverse Responses to ‘Acting White’ among Academically Able Black Adolescents,” in Beyond Acting White: Reframing the Debate on Black Student Achievement, Erin McNamara Horvat and Carla O’Connor, eds. (Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2006); Laurence Steinberg, Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need To Do (New York: Touchstone, 1996); Annette Hemmings, “The ‘Hidden’ Corridor,” High School Journal, 83 no. 2 (Dec. 1, 1999): 1; Angela M. Neal-Barnett, “Being Black: New Thoughts on the Old Phenomenon of Acting White,” in Forging Links: African American Children, Clinical Developmental Perspectives, Angela M. Neal-Barnett, Josefina M. Contreras, & Kathryn A. Kerns, eds. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), p. 82; Tarek C. Grantham and Donna Y. Ford, “A Case Study of the Social Needs of Danisha: An Underachieving Gifted African-American Female,” Roeper Review, 21 no. 2 (1998); Grace Kao, “Group Images and Possible Selves Among Adolescents: Linking Stereotypes to Expectations by Race and Ethnicity,” Sociological Forum 15 no. 3 (2000): 407-30; Amanda Datnow and Robert Cooper, “Peer networks of African American students in independent schools: Affirming academic success and racial identity,” Journal of Negro Education 66 no.1 (1997): 56-72.
Against this backdrop of research, two studies came out that purported to show that "acting white" can't be a national problem, because one dataset (NELS) showed that high-achieving black kids also claimed to be popular. These studies are:
James W. Ainsworth-Darnell and Douglas B. Downey, “Assessing the Oppositional Culture Explanation for Racial/Ethnic Differences in School Performance,” American Sociological Review 63, no. 4 (1998): 536-53; Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, “The Burden of ‘Acting White’: Do Black Adolescents Disparage Academic Achievement?,” in The Black-White Test Score Gap (Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds., 1998).
Then Roland Fryer responded last year with a much better study based on objective data from AddHealth, and showed that high-achieving black kids do indeed experience a sharp drop in popularity. So this is consistent with what the rest of the evidence showed, and refuted the skeptics such as Cook/Ludwig and Ainsworth-Darnell/Downey.
Now your comment about logical implications -- because you evidently knew nothing about this issue before now, you seem to have thought that Fryer merely showed that "high-achieving black kids have a drop in popularity," and that this doesn't prove that it's because of "acting white" -- it might be because of some other extraneous reason that Fryer attempted to control for but failed. This is not the right way to look at the literature here.
In other words, to use your example:
Valid syllogism:
1. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates is mortal.
What you ignorantly thought Fryer said:
2. Socrates is mortal; therefore Socrates is a man.
What really is going on:
3. There are dozens of studies indicating that Socrates is a man. Some skeptics (Cook/Ludwig, e.g.) have attempted to prove that Socrates cannot possibly be a man, because in fact he is immortal, and men can't be immortal. Fryer/Torelli have now proven, however, that Socrates is definitely mortal, which is consistent with all the other evidence that he's a man.
Now isn't this a bit tiresome? In the future, I'd suggest doing a little research for yourself (especially since you admire the scientific method so much).
SOV:
You have horribly misrepresented what I was saying, and frankly, I resent your implication that I am less than honest about my beliefs and intentions:
1. At no point did I suggest that no ideas in the social sciences could be proven or disproven; what I said was that most ideas are extraordinarily difficult to prove, some ideas are impossible to prove, and, impliedly, some ideas are relatively simple to prove.
2. Your attack on the relationship between tax levels and tax revenues is a straw man, and misrepresents the arguments of conservative intellectuals both in the 1980s and today. Instead, it represents primarily the arguments of politicians, who are hardly reliable voices of political or economic theory. The argument (which is generally accepted, though unhelpful for policy purposes) is primarily that tax revenues do not necessarily go up with higher taxes, while tax revenues do not necessarily go down with lower taxes.
3. At no point did I state or even suggest that scientific accuracy was irrelevant- only that normative assumptions about the way the world ought to be are generally unprovable. For instance, the assumption that protecting individual liberty is the primary purpose of government is largely unprovable; similarly, an assumption that individual equality is the primary purpose of government is unprovable. You may be able to prove ways of maximizing your particular idea about the primary purpose of government, but you will not be able to prove what the primary purpose of government OUGHT to be. And the fact is that the various stripes of Progressives, libertarians, and conservatives each have different normative ideas about the way the world should be. Think of it as competing utopias, if you will; or, better yet, think of it as varying views of the purpose of life.
4. However, if you really wish a specific example that there is an anti-conservative bias amongst faculty, then fine, we will give you some easy ones. How about the relative ignorance in the academy of Hayek (whose influential Road to Serfdom is really best suited for political theory), despite his Nobel laureate? For that matter, what about the relative rarity with which, say, Edmund Burke appears in political theory classes? There are plenty of other examples, as there have been a number of libertarian/conservative political economists who have done significant amounts of generally accepted work in the field of political theory (including Hayek, of course, but also Nobel Laureate Buchanan). Indeed, the very existence of conservative/libertarian think tanks like Cato, AEI, and Heritage is generally due to the difficulty of conservative/libertarian intellectuals finding work and influence within the academy- in other words, they were created because the academy had demonstrated a near-complete unwillingness to give conservative/libertarian voices a hearing at all.
5. Although my above examples will hopefully satisfy your need for proof, the fact is that this whole thread is an argument that conservatives and libertarians are discriminated against in the academy. This is admittedly not a legal claim (indeed, demanding a right to a legal claim would be anathema to both conservatism and libertarianism); however, the legal analysis is, I think, quite useful since it places the burden of proof on the party with the greatest access to information on any given point (this is the whole point of the framework). Nonetheless, your requirement that the burden is on us to show the suppression of valid conservative ideas leaves you as the sole arbiter of whether the conservative ideas were valid- indeed, you seem to suggest that the rejection of the ideas by the academy is a proof of invalidity rather than of the bias itself.
6. Sorry, but an 11:1 and 13:1 ratio of self-described liberals to self-described conservatives is a disparate impact on its face when you consider that such discrepancies do not exist in almost any other area of American life.
7. As for your argument about women's equality, well, I suppose it depends on how you define conservative ideas. Something worth noting, however, is that the "Old Right" (ie, early 1960s Republicans who were, in fact, conservatives) overwhelmingly supported passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (which included nondiscrimination against women), with over 80% support in both houses of Congress; those who opposed passage included conservative (and sometimes libertarian) icon Barry Goldwater- but he famously opposed it on entirely constitutional that had nothing to do with justifying discrimination (he was, after all, an early supporter of the NAACP and desegregation of the armed services, and was hardly a sexist in his personal life- his support of Sandra Day O'Conner against Falwell should prove that). I suppose the old Southern Democrats are now referred to as conservative, but we should probably keep in mind that they were dedicated New Dealers- something which pretty much destroys their conservative credentials from an philosophical perspective. We should also distinguish between the theo-conservatism that now dominates Republican politics and traditional and/or neo-conservatism/libertarianism.
I'm getting very tired of what you think you know about me, my motivations, my background, my education. So let's just clear one thing up once and for all.
I post cites and links because that way people can quickly verify for themselves what the source actually says. In particular, wikipedia is nice in that the links embedded in the articles are useful search pointers. I tend not to post citations to papers or journals because those are much harder to verify online. If someone quotes from something offline, it is hard to verify that the quotes are accurate, let alone in context.
I also happen to know the status of this particular theory - and many others explaining the same phenomenon - because I teach math at a midwestern university. In particular, I am generally obliged to teach a section of introductory math to incoming freshmen in the fall. And to be greatly particular, I also occasionally volunteer to teach the math section of our summer transition program for minorities, which is part of our academic retention services. Oh, btw, here's an online link: http://ars.missouri.edu/summer-transition/
So, yes, despite your accusations, I happen to be acquainted with the literature and more importantly, I work with people who are very familiar with it, most of them who happen to be - wait for it - black. And who also, incidentally, take a very jaundiced view of most of these theories which 'excuse' poor academic performance. Your John Ogbun doesn't look like much of a field man, does he?
So now that we've established that, just what, precisely are your credentials that you presume to make such judgements? Do you teach? Work with black kids on a daily basis in an academic setting? Have you written papers on the subject, are you perhaps known as something of an authority in the field?
Do go on. I'm sure I'll be fascinated by all the details of what you actually do. I can tell by the way you argue, by your quick and ready grasp of the essentials of formal logic, along with the dab way you apply them that you must be a scientist of some sort, right?
Um, I hate to point this out, but rather than engage in fruitless bickering with you over what was actually done in the paper, I chose to go with exactly what you said, which I will cheerfully reproduce again:
Those are your words, and yours alone, are they not? And what did you say just above? Let me bring it on down again:
You really should be sure that what you are currently posting is consistent with what you have already posted. It's one of them liberal science things.
In other words, to use your example:
Valid syllogism:
1. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates is mortal.
What you ignorantly thought Fryer said:
2. Socrates is mortal; therefore Socrates is a man.
What really is going on:
3. There are dozens of studies indicating that Socrates is a man. Some skeptics (Cook/Ludwig, e.g.) have attempted to prove that Socrates cannot possibly be a man, because in fact he is immortal, and men can't be immortal. Fryer/Torelli have now proven, however, that Socrates is definitely mortal, which is consistent with all the other evidence that he's a man.
But you haven't quoted any other material besides this. You are not allowed to say that my objections to what you have written 'have been answered elsewhere', that all other confounding circumstances have been carefully accounted for in the literature . . . and then not produce it. Especially when it's a belated addition, made after I pointed out what you wrote was logically absurd, and after you made very clear that what you posted was not absurd, but a sound proof. Here, I like this game, I'll repost my reply to what you've already quoted as the 'definitive' study:
I think I've made it abundantly clear that, aside from my initial observation that the theory doesn't have any great currency, what I have written is in response to material that you put up to defend your position, nothing more. And that, quite frankly, you've made a pretty poor job of it. But if you think you've got anything else, I'm ready to look at it.
Gee,for somebody whose stamping his feet and insisting that his pet theories do so have merit, that they have passed muster under the scientific method, you don't sure don't seem to have a lot of respedt for it. If your wording above is anything to go by.
I think we can safely conclude that you're one conservative who is definitely not one of those put-upon types working in the social sciences.
I'm a bit baffled that:
1) you consistently adopt such a supercilious tone when discussing a subject that you obviously know nothing about;
2) you have the temerity to denounce me for having cited a dozen research papers that aren't available online, even while you flip on a dime and claim to be familiar with the research literature anyway;
3) you think that teaching introductory math means that you are familiar with sociological literature;
4) even while you are supposedly familiar with the literature, you are incapable of writing anything beyond a "response to material that [I] put up to defend [my] position, nothing more";
5) you claim that your unidentified friends "take a very jaundiced view" of the "acting white" literature, but without explaining any conceivable justification for their view -- which tends to confirm my original point that lots of people dislike this literature.
And to top it all off, you have issued this flurry of words simply as a smokescreen to avoid having to admit that political prejudice against John Ogbu's theory can be problematic, and to distract attention once again from having to discuss any of the examples I mentioned in my Oct. 15, 10:06 comment.
Well, if you're wise, you'll retire the pseudonym "Scent of Violets" after this embarrassing episode of dishonest and ignorant bluster.
As I said, I've read the entire literature on "acting white" going back to the 1970s, as well as hundreds of education papers and books besides. I know as much about this theory as anyone in the world.
You, on the other hand, seem to think that (among other irrelevancies) having taught a math course to minorities qualifies you to speak about this literature, which is as silly and unscientific as saying that going outside into the weather qualifies someone to talk about the global warming literature.
I'm not allowed? Sorry, but I'm not going to scurry around trying to meet your ever-increasing demands. In particular, I'm not going to type out by hand reams of quotations from the literature just because you're too lazy to go to the library (which shouldn't be necessary anyway, given that you elsewhere claim to be familiar with the literature).
Plus, this is all an irrelevant aside, which arose only because you tried to dismiss my example of how John Ogbu is treated in the academy by suggesting that "acting white" had been "widely debunked" -- which simply isn't true.
Look, forget all of the back-and-forth over Fryer's study. If you can't be bothered to do any of your own reading, and insist that you can determine the truth of a sociological theory merely by analyzing what you think are the logical implications of one blog comment by me, it's obviously not going to be productive.
So scrap all of that. Let's go back to the original point: You continue to say that no one has produced any examples of conservative theories that have faced prejudice apart from their actual merit.
The reader will note, however, that I have already produced several examples:
1) My comment at October 12, 2007 1:34 PM: One prominent professor claims to be involved in "warfare" against John Ogbu, and other researchers discriminate against someone who merely cited Ogbu even in a semi-critical fashion.
If you wish to disagree with this example and claim that "acting white" has been "debunked," you have to PROVE that assertion. Claims that you teach math, or that your friends don't like the theory, are quite inadequate.
2) James Coleman found in the 1970s that white flight was occurring in response to desegregation, and the president of the American Sociological Association proposed to censure Coleman -- not for reasons of merit, but for political reasons. I've mentioned this example four times now, but you have yet to acknowledge it, let alone refute it.
3) Douglas Massey, a prominent liberal sociologist, has said that a generation of sociologists experienced a "chilling effect" as to any investigation of poverty and culture, because of the shameful way that the academy reacted to the likes of Moynihan in the 1960s. I've mentioned this example several times now, but you have yet to acknowledge it, let alone refute it.
4) James Coleman also found in the early 1980s that Catholic schools tended to be superior along several dimensions (including the education of racial minorities). The reaction to this research was quite vehement, and when Coleman won a sociology award several years later, he said that younger researchers "had been inhibited by their own discipline from asking these questions," that "academic freedom" had been "constricted by the norms of the discipline," and that he accepted the award "in the name of all those who have braved these norms and have had their reputations warped, twisted, or destroyed by doing so." Again, you have yet to acknowledge this example, let alone refute it.
[Examples 2 through 4 are documented here: http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2006/07/empiricism_31.html ]
Chuckle. I think this one's about done to a perfect turn. Uh, no, I haven't denounced you for citatations at all(feel free to actually provide quotes; it's that research thing again), in fact, this is more projection on your part(and here is where I support my position by providing easily researched cites):
It looks to me that if anyone here is doing any denouncing, it's you. Now, you are free of course to provide a cite where I 'denounced' you for posting cites to articles that are not online. But somehow, I just get the feeling that in this as in so many other accusations you have made that you will not be forthcoming in supporting them.
No, it means I'm conscientious at my job, and the _specific_ sociological literature I am familiar with tends to be topics associated with education. For example, I'm also rather familiar with papers analyzing the performances of public schools vs private schools, gender differences in mathematical performance, etc. Strangley enough, a lot of teachers, english, history, etc seem to be familiar with this as well. But I suspect you knew that, and in fact, don't have any credentials to qualifies you to make the judgements you have made about others. Whereas it is quite clear that I could have mentioned my position and my credentials from the start, and chose not to do so.
Given that the burden of proof is upon you to prove your assertions, I'm critiquing what you chose to post to support them. I'll say it again, given that you were so certain that what you had posted qualified as a clear proof that you were right, all I had to do was point out that what you had thought you had proved was logically absurd, in fact, showed a profound lack of understanding of basic logical constructs. I've also said I would be willing to look at what you claimed would plug up those holes. But you haven't posted that either.
Sigh. Actually, I was wondering why you thought this material was exclusively associated with conservative thought for just this reason. My colleagues (you know, if you had wanted to identify them, all you had to do was _click_the_link_; I don't know how to make it any easier than that) think these sorts of explanations are liberal explanations. They take the blame of poor performance off the student and put it somewhere else, some sort of vague 'black culture' that can't ever be precisely pinned down to identify a specific culprit. "I do badly at math because of what my friends think," is not something that these people are going to accept.
Uh huh.
Given that the burden of proof is upon you to prove your assertions,
Back to the "burden of proof" song-and-dance again. You're the one who asserted that "acting white" was "widely debunked," and you didn't even remotely begin to demonstrate that assertion. Go ahead and try to prove it.
But first, you have to address all of my four examples. You're not allowed to do anything else.
Sigh. Do you ever keep track of what you write, or my replies? Here is the initial exchange and my response:
To which I replied:
Clearly I said that those particular studies had been debunked (and your posting of what was supposed to be the 'definitive' shows exactly why). I also quite clearly said that the it's possible that the hypothesis might be true. Iow, you're confusing the studies being flawed with the claim being proven false. Read for content instead of expectations next time.
Now, I'll let you rant, rave, go on about what an unfair, dishonest, weaseling sort of person I am, but I think our respective actions up to this point says all that needs to be said about the relative merits of our differing positions. So I'm not going to respond anymore unless you actually post something substantive. Like, for example, quotes from those other studies you claim plugs all the holes in your first 'definitive' cite.
The 'definitive' cite that you said proved your case beyond a shadow of a doubt, but which you still can't admit did no such thing.
So it goes, the old story about conservatives and 'accepting personal responsibility' writ large again.
Obviously you cannot address any of my other examples, and so concede that they are good examples of political bias in the academy.
But as to your last post:
What particular studies? Who debunked them? You have to prove your assertion. Burden of proof, remember. Why should I bother? You've claimed to be familiar with the literature. Were you lying? Plus, until and unless you prove that Ogbu has definitively been "debunked," I have no responsibility to try to show otherwise. My original point remains entirely unrebutted: Some people in the academy take a quite unscholarly attitude towards the likes of Ogbu.By the way:
This may be the first time that anyone, anywhere, has described the "acting white" theory as "liberal." Again, if you're actually familiar with the literature, as you claim, you shouldn't need me to explain that liberal educationists and sociologists often despise the "acting white" theory, because (in their view) it blames the individual kid for his own poor academic performance (i.e., by being guilty of a bad attitude) rather than blaming broader forces of societal racism, poverty and socioeconomic hardship, underfunded schools, etc. That's precisely why Darity (quoted above) said that the "acting white" theory is "oppressive." That's why the New York Times wrote in 2004 that "acting white" is a "myth." That's why some academics dislike it when someone cites Ogbu even in a critical fashion -- can't give him any credibility at all.But again, you haven't even tried to support your bogus claim that Ogbu has been "widely debunked," let alone that "there is little, if any, evidence that supports this contention." You've therefore conceded every example that I cite re: academic discrimination against ideas perceived as "conservative."
[By the way, since you claim to be interested in logic: You're right that if all we know is that A leads to B, a finding of B doesn't logically mean A. But most sociology doesn't occur in the world of pure logic. Most social science consists of something like this: "Fire causes smoke. A finding of smoke doesn't logically guarantee that there's fire, but we've found smoke and we've controlled for every other possible explanation of the smoke, and this leads us to think that there is indeed fire." It's fundamentally stupid to reject this kind of research for supposedly failing to meet your pristine standards of pure logic. This is because it's actually not illogical at all to think that smoke is a good sign of fire (esp. when other causes are ruled out). Moreover, virtually nothing in the social sciences rises to the level of a logical necessity.]