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Browsing my local (Burke VA) public library recently I found the new books section prominently displaying three books complaining that universities are biased against political conservatives: Indoctrination U., Brainwashed, and Shadow University.
As I have reported before, they do seem to have a valid, if overstated, complaint: academics in top schools who teach politics-related topics are far more Democratic than Republican, and this does visibly influence their teaching and research.
Of course these facts do not imply academics are biased; perhaps their political tendencies mainly result from their expert knowledge. But surely most ordinary people do not have enough evidence to evaluate this claim one way or the other, and most political conservatives are unlikely to grant academics the benefit of the doubt on this.
It is possible that the US public will get upset enough about this apparent bias to insist on some more formal academic political neutrality, similar to the way American colonists were upset enough about European state non-neutrality on religion to insist on a formal "religious freedom" here in the US. Nevertheless, it is far from obvious that much will happen here; most societies tolerate lots of apparent biases without doing much about them.
Added: TGGP points us to some nice tables breaking this down by discipline.
Academic Political Bias
The problem with the idea that there's a hiring bias in the academy that favors liberals is that there would, therefore, have to be lots of unemployed conservative professors (or post docs, or recent graduates).I think Daniel Klein's paper shows the percentage of liberals among economists is higher within academia than outside. I think the same explanation can be used: liberals like academia, conservatives prefer other sectors. It is a self-selecting process and we shouldn't expect equal proportions.
Hmmm. So, if we are going to impose some kind of political neutrality on academics,I think David Horowitz has proposed something like that, but I hope nobody here has!
how about on other professions. Anybody worried about the tendency of military officers to be Republicans (unless they belong to an ethnic minority)?The political orientation of the military can be very important. It has been a force opposing communism in latin america and islamism in the middle east (turkey and pakistan leap to mind). There has not been a coup in the United States and I think the possibility of one happening in the near future is laughable. Ron Paul will serve three Presidential terms before that. While the military does not get to push around our own citizenry much (I'm ignoring foreigners here because I'm not one), domestic law enforcement agencies do. Mencius Moldbug has claimed many of them were once "red government" like the military (especially officer corps) but have been captured by "blue government" sometime after the sixties, and that it was their efforts back then that resulted in victory for the hippies and black power but defeat for klansmen.