George Will makes excuses for uneducated republicans

[Atman]

This article is amazing to me on several levels. At the heart of it is Will's insistence that colleges and universities are staffed by mostly liberals because somehow they are closed clubs for point-headed lefties. He doesn't seem to be willing to make a connection that the more educated and open minded a person tends to be, the more likely they are to be "liberal" democrats. Face it, you don't have much of a career in academics if you are not willing to learn and share knowledge, two traits fundamentally at odds with the Republican party to which Will so proudly panders. I'm sure his position has nothing to do with the huge tax breaks his republican buddies have tossed him in recent years, it is purely academic. But it doesn't sound very well researched.

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Academia, Stuck To the Left

Republicans Outnumbered
In Academia, Studies Find


By George F. Will
Sunday, November 28, 2004


Oh, well, if studies say so. The great secret is out: Liberals dominate campuses. Coming soon: "Moon Implicated in Tides, Studies Find."

One study of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That imbalance, more than double what it was three decades ago, is intensifying because younger professors are more uniformly liberal than the older cohort that is retiring.

Another study, of voter registration records, including those of professors in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine Democrats for every Republican at Berkeley and Stanford. Among younger professors, there were 183 Democrats, six Republicans.

But we essentially knew this even before the American Enterprise magazine reported in 2002 on examinations of voting records in various college communities. Some findings about professors registered with the two major parties or with liberal or conservative minor parties:

Cornell: 166 liberals, 6 conservatives.

Stanford: 151 liberals, 17 conservatives.

Colorado: 116 liberals, 5 conservatives.

UCLA: 141 liberals, 9 conservatives.

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Continued here

[fertilizeonarbusto]

1. Oh, boo hoo hoo

Those poor reactionaries can't get ahead in Academia because those mean liberals are anti-Faith and actually require evidence and proof for your work. Go back to your conflict of interest, you pompous, owl-eyed sissy.:nopity:

[zbird]

2. Follow the money.

Do you suppose that because there is much more money to be made in the private/corporate sector, many of the "conservative" types are there instead of in academia?

[Atman]

3. Funny you should say that...

Will dismisses your theory with a smug brush-off...

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"But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, denies that academic institutions are biased against conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he explains, occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? "Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice. That clears that up."

[madison2000]

4. If anyone should know better its George Will

He's no fool. Universities don't teach people what to think, they teach people HOW to think, and learning HOW to think is what students are supposed to be doing.

There are intellectual Repubs, but very few. It must be so difficult and embarassing.

[enki23]

5. the campuses aren't "moving left." the nation is moving right.

campuses are now, and always have been very conservative institutions--conservative in the sense that they strongly resist any and all kinds of change. unlike the rest of the nation, they are heavily dominated by scientific method and associated ways of thinking, dominated by educated, secular, scientific thinkers. it's no wonder that fewer and fewer of them can find it in themselves to support the rapid, rightward march to a new fundamentalist-christian flavored authoritarianism.

as the republican party retreats from the rational, rational people retreat from the republican party. problem is, rational people are now, and always have been, heavily outnumbered in this nation.

[depakid]

6. George Will is thorougly dishonest

but more than that- he's total fake. he pretends to be an intellectual- but he knows that he has ZERO RESPECT in academia. Zero respect. The man is laughed at.

So, no surpise that he'd aim his divel our direction.

[Cocoa]

7. this is a concerted right-wing effort

there are hundreds of essentially identical columns hammering away at the liberal domination over academia. They're trying to do with colleges what they've done with the media.

The Nazi David Horowitz is the ringleader of all this crap.

[mistertrickster]

8. Hehehe, yeah I thought the same thing--"Liberals have stacked the

deck against the poor conservatives." Of course it couldn't be that conservatives don't want to do the hard intellectual work academic success requires.

You notice he didn't cite how many liberals were at Liberty University (Jerry Falwell) or at Bob Jones University. BTW, their degrees might as well be printed on toilet paper . . .