Megan Has A Point
Reacting to a new study on academia’s left-leanings, Megan McArdle explains how bias could result:
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.
Ironically, itself illustrates this point nicely. It starts with a long rant complaining that this subject has had too many sloppy studies by ideologically motivated conservatives, such as my colleague Dan Klein, so thank God they can finally offer us an objective analysis. And then they completely confirm Klein’s results. Noteworthy details from the study include that support is nearly equal for Israel and Palestine, and that only one quarter think discrimination is the reason for fewer women scientists.
g, you write "The assumption here is that the *right* point of reference is midway between the Republican and Democratic parties, or the average opinion of all US voters, or something."
Actually, one needn't make that assumption in order to worry about bias in academia. Consider that even if one doesn't believe that the *right* proportion of race or sex or religion or close blood relationship to major financial donors is equal to that of the general population, one can still believe it's bad (pragmatically unwise, morally wrong especially when funded by taxes ostensibly paying for the public good of education and research, or both) to let such considerations trump the more usual notion of merit in academic hiring and promotion.
One can also believe that fields dominated by partisans of one faction are overprone to disastrously silly groupthink in that partisan direction. Mainstream academia today seems to suffer from rather impressive left-slanted goofs which become obvious to all in hindsight, like a journal being respectable right up to the Sokal hoax, or like historians giving an award to _Arming America_, or like a large bloc of faculty cheering on prosecutorial misconduct in a politically charged criminal case. Am I just suffering from selection bias when I have trouble thinking of many such impressive goofs by mainstream academia which are politically charged in other directions? I understand the worry that not checking faculty factional affiliation would make a field susceptible to goofs of other factions. But I hold the hope that the more pronounced effect would be to reduce groupthink, and so to reduce the chance of impressive goofs in any direction.
The only thing funneier than the sociologists who ignores "group norms" in academia setting is the economists who turn a blind eye to goverment subsidies to academia.