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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   28590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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The NYT wants you to know that Harvard has "no way out." I'm sure Harvard University with its 53.2 billion dollar endowment is going to start having trouble attracting researchers:

Trump has stripped extensive federal funding from Harvard. Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question?

I suspect they're scaring their readership to rack in the clicks. The article is being embraced by Rightist influencer people eager for confirmation of their "victory." They're COOKED! Back in reality, the Democrats will likely take back the Presidency in 2028, if not then then very likely by 2032. It will eventually dawn on these people that Harvard remains massively prestigious while nobody knows or cares about Fred's Car Wash in Des Moines Iowa.

I hope Harvard stands firm and puts the admin in its place. It's one thing to be against Affirmative Action but a completely different one to oppose academic independence say you want MAGA leaning professors in the physics department.

Fight Fiercely Harvard!

  • -10

What's wrong with having MAGA professors? Their political beliefs don't really change the facts that they have to teach.

While you can probably find conservative professors in most subjects, MAGA is a populist movement which doesn't appeal very much to the educated crowd, so I'm doubting you can find that many of them.

Actually, you can't for most subjects.

I spent the last 20 minutes looking for it and I can't find it but a number of years ago I remember seeing data about the political afflication of professors by party, either Democrat or Republican (I think it was out of Jonathan Haidt's work but not 100% sure).

Anyway, the end result was that the balance (and this was back in the 2016-2018 era) was abysmal. Like really really bad. Most subjects had maybe 10 out of every 100 professors were Republican or Republican leaning. Some even lower. There was one or two subjects (I think was English literature and one other thing maybe) where they could not find a single Republican leaning professor at all, from their survey. The only subjects that had a "reasonable" balance of Democrat and Republicans were I think engineering and economics (unsurprisingly), but even that was like 60-40 D-R.

It means in most colleges, outside of engineering and economics, you might have 1 or 2 Republican professors in the whole college, and the vast majority of disciplines in any given university would not have a single Republican leaning professor.

I know Republican != conservative (honestly it's probably worse), and I might be misremembering the data slightly.

But there are more qualified applicants than professor jobs.

I think this is what you're looking for, and no it's not Jonathan Haidt's work. Here's a prior summary I wrote of the findings while TheMotte was still on Reddit: "It used data from voter registration data for faculty members to determine the Democrat to Republican (D:R) ratio of an array of social science fields, namely economics, history, communications, law and psychology. Out of a sample of 7,243 professors, 2,120 were not registered, 1,145 were not affiliated, 3,623 were Democrat, and only 314 were Republican. That's a D:R ratio of 11.5:1. Of the five fields, economics was the most mixed, with a D:R ratio of 4.5:1 (which fits pretty well with my perception of economics). History was by far the most skewed, with a whopping D:R ratio of 33.5:1." Note 60% of history and journalism departments, 45% of psychology departments, and 20% of economics departments have not even a single registered Republican in them. Granted there were a significant portion of people that were not registered as either Democrat or Republican and it's not beyond the realm of possibility there are some hidden conservatives in there, but still a failure to find even one registered Republican professor in such a large percentage of departments is really bad and rather shocking.

There is, however, also a paper Haidt participated in that reviewed a lot of evidence of bias against conservatives in academia (specifically social psychology) though. The rundown of the findings is basically that in social psychology 82% of people identify as leftist, 9% are moderate, and only 6% are conservative. Only 18% of respondents within academia state they would not discriminate against conservatives; 82% admit they would be at least a little bit biased against a conservative candidate. This is only capturing what they are explicitly willing to state; the actual prevalence of bias against conservatives is probably higher.

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