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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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crossposted

note: this post, reluctantly, collapses liberals and leftists under the label 'liberal' to follow the conventions of the paper I'm whining about. I'll try not to twitch too much.

Heaven save me from misleading social science papers. I tweeted about this, but hopefully I can whine a bit more coherently in longform. Bear with me; this might get heavy on diving through numbers.

As part of a larger effort to explore DeSantis's claimed New College coup, in which he picked conservatives for the board of a progressive school, I returned to the evergreen question of political background of university professors, which led me to this study. The study is the most recent overall view cited by the Wikipedia page examining the question. Its conclusions are summed up as such:

In 2007, Gross and Simmons concluded in The Social and Political Views of American Professors that the professors were 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative.

If you're the sort to do "pause and play along" exercises in the middle of reading, take a shot at guessing what the underlying data leading to that conclusion looks like.

Here's the underlying spread. 9.4% self-identify as "Extremely liberal", 34.7% as "liberal", 18.1% as "slightly liberal", 18% as "middle of the road", 10.5% as "slightly conservative", 8% as "conservative", and 1.2% as "very conservative. Or, in other words, 62% identify as some form of liberal, 20% as some form of conservative.

So how do they get to the three reported buckets? Not with a direct survey. Prior analyses, notably including Rothman et al 2005, referenced repeatedly throughout this paper, lump "leaners" who express weak preferences in a direction in with others who identify with that direction. This paper elects to lump all "leaners" together as moderates, while noting that "we would not be justified in doing so if it turned out that the “slightlys” were, in terms of their substantive attitudes, no different than their more liberal or conservative counterparts." They use answers to twelve Pew survey questions, where 1 is "most liberal", 5 is "most conservative", and 3 is "moderate" to examine whether substantive attitudes are different enough to justify lumping the groups together.

Here's what their results look like, in full MSPaint glory. Again, if you're playing along at home, consider the most natural groupings, based on these results. The answers of "extremely/liberal" respondents average out to 1.4 on the 5-point scale, close to the furthest left possible. "Slightly liberal" respondents are not far behind, at 1.7 on the scale. Both "middle of the road" and "slightly conservative" respondents remain to the left of center, as measured by the Pew scale, averaging 2.2 and 2.8, respectively. It's only when you look at the "very/conservative" group that you see anyone at all to the right side of the Pew survey, with average scores of 3.7, far from the maximum possible.

From this data, the authors decide the most logical grouping is to lump "slightly liberal" respondents in with middle and slight conservatives as "moderates". That is to say: even though their scores are closest to the other liberals, almost a point closer to other liberals than to the slight conservatives, and more than a full point towards the "liberal" side of Pew's scale—significantly further left by that metric than even the most conservative grouping lands to the right—the authors label them "moderates".

Their justification? "[T]hat there are differences at all provides further reason to think that the slightlys should not be treated as belonging to the extremes." That is: any difference at all between their answers and the answers of those who identify as further left is sufficient justification to categorize them alongside people who they disagree with much more visibly. There is no sense in which this is the most natural or coherent grouping.

If the study went by pure self-identification, it could reasonably label 62% as liberals and 20% as conservatives, then move on. It would lead to a much broader spread for apparent conservatives than for others, but it would work. If it went by placement on their survey answers, it could reasonably label 62% as emphatically liberal, 28% as moderate or center-left, and 10% as conservative, with simple, natural-looking groups. Instead, it took the worst of both worlds, creating a strained and incoherent group of "moderates" who range from emphatically liberal to mildly liberal, in order to reach a tidy headline conclusion that "moderates" in academia outnumber "liberals".

Perhaps I shouldn't be so upset about this. But the study is everywhere, and nobody reads or cares about the underlying data. Wikipedia, as I've mentioned, tosses the headline conclusion in and moves on. Inside Higher Ed reports professors are more likely to categorize themselves as moderate than liberal, based on the study. Headlines like "Study: Moderate professors dominate campuses" abound. The study authors write articles in the New York Times, mentioning that about half of professors identify as liberal. Even conservative sources like AEI take the headline at face value, saying it "yielded interesting data" but "was fielded right before the extreme liberal lurch took off in the mid-2000s".

Look, I'm not breaking new ground here. People know the biases inherent in social science at this point. Expectations have mostly been set accordingly. There's not even a real dispute that professors are overwhelmingly liberal. All that as it may, it drives me mad every time I find a paper like this, dive into the data, and realize the summary everyone takes from it is either negligently or deliberately wholly different from the conclusions a plain reading of the data would provide.

It's not lying! The paper presents the underlying data in full, explains its rationale in full. The headline conclusion is technically supportable from the data they collected. The authors are respectable academics at respectable institutions, performing serious, careful, peer-reviewed work. So far as I have knowledge to ascertain, it contains no overt errors and no overt untruths.

And yet.

I believe much of the issue that the right has in the US and to a lesser extent in the rest of the anglosphere minus the UK is an aesthetic that is difficult for upper middle class people to swallow. The US is a two party system, so right = republican party even though they hardly fill the entire tent of right wing thought. The republicans have a weird mix of strip mall baptist church combined with oligarch wealth vibe to them. Someone who lives in a major city, is educated and well travled probably feels out of place at a Trump rally. Even in the UK but even more so in other European countries there is a brand of pearl necklace wearing urban right wing that likes neoclassical apartments in major European cities and enjoy high culture. The Republicans seem too focused on rural boomers who are opposed to change and want a culture that is fairly alien to the PMC.

I believe wokeness among the left is highly exaggerated in right wing circles. Wokeness is used to brush off the left as deranged, malicious or extremist when the majority of people who voted for Biden are not libs of tiktok-material. A lot of people are rightfully upset with the state of health care in the US, a lot of people do care about environmentalism, a lot of people see the cost of college as bonkers and a lot of people aren't really impressed by televangelist theology. The republicans would be better off looking themselves in the mirror than making the 2342 "feminist on college campus pwned” video on YouTube in which a bipolar woman is turned into a circus act for public humiliation. I am not convinced that the democrats would deliever better health care, cheaper college or a greener planet but they at least lift the issues.