Jay Greene has compiled a list of political donations from the employees of the top ten U.S. News and World report universities. What did he find?
The most “balanced” university in terms of donations was Duke, where 84% of donations and 81% of the overall dollar value went to Democratic candidates. How about the fabled “conservative” University of Chicago? 96% of overall donations and 96% of the total dollar value to Democratic candidates. The rest vary between this range. This is the moderating professoriate?
Read Greene’s post for additional analysis.
I’m both happy and unhappy with this information.
For me, the central issue is that the University isn’t merely liberal, but is churning out thoughtless, dumb liberals who have no sense of balance whatsoever.
I could care less if this nation goes wholly Progressive. The trouble is that the Progressives we’re seeing have no ability or desire to articulate what the other side thinks properly. Crooked Timber, the academic blog, is a great example of everything wrong with the academy. The only reason why they don’t call Republicans Nazis outright (and heck, knowing them, they might have) is because they have an enormous number of straw-man arguments they think truly representative of positions other than their own. They use lots of facts and data to undermine others’ thought, as opposed to making the best argument possible against their own position and working from there.
Part of the reason why liberal academics just don’t care what conservatives think is the idea that political values must be empirically discussed. To discuss the deeper reasons why people have the opinions they have wouldn’t be objective: the deliberation that is supposed to occur in the Senate for them is not scientific, but rather an outgrowth of rhetoric, which stems from literature, which stems from myth.
I’m rambled enough, you get the idea. When we go to numbers to prove liberal bias, we miss the bigger picture: we’re playing by their rules, which allows them to say “correlation isn’t causality,” and voila, lots of liberal academics giving tons of money to the Democratic party means nothing, even as students get dumber and far more hateful. Read any comment thread with pro-Obama supporters knocking Hillary and see where the student population is going, and worse, where they’re taking the rest of us.
Because our modes of argument are limited to only chattering away about data they will perceive as meaningless, we have to wonder. Perhaps those of us who are conservative and see academic bias might have to be far more radical than merely documenting the situation: it is clear the vast majority of Americans don’t care what happens in academia, the scandals have been clear ever since God and Man at Yale. It could be time to get every professor and administrator we can fired for no good reason, just because injuring the academy in any way possible is better for civic life than anything happening there now. Is there anyone who would seriously contend that the academy produces anything that couldn’t be done in a more private capacity?