Diversity of the Mind

If you want another unambiguous case of politically motivated violation of academic freedom look at this case study of Linda S. Gottfredson's experience at the University of Delaware. She had to fight for six years. She's a psychologist in a field that's less homogeneous than social psychology.

Lessons in academic freedom as lived experience Linda S. Gottfredson * School of Education, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009academicfr...

Conservative Professor Fights Smith's Tenure Decision · 31 May 2003

O'REILLY: In the "Personal Story" segment tonight, James Miller, who teaches economics at Smith College in Massachusetts, was up for tenure this year, but he didn't get it.

Miller says the reason is he's a conservative Republican. And the college grievance committee agrees he wasn't treated fairly, saying "the rationale for their votes included consideration of matters that infringed on the candidate's right to academic freedom."

Joining us now from Boston is Professor Miller, who is the author of the book, "Game Theory at Work." All right, so you succeeded in convincing the hierarchy at Smith College that you were, indeed, denied tenure because of your political beliefs, which is supposed to be against every academic tenet in this country. But I find it hard to believe that a college as prestigious as Smith, they would punish you because you were a conservative. Am I naive?

JAMES MILLER, SMITH COLLEGE ASST. PROF.: Well, I think the problem is that there are so few conservatives and Republicans at most American colleges, including Smith, that when, you know, they read something written by a conservative, it just seems crazy to them. So I don't think the people who are punishing me for being a conservative thought they were violating my academic freedom. They thought they were keeping out someone who has this utterly crazy beliefs from teaching and corrupting their students.

In the social sciences and humanities, however, there is a stronger imbalance. For instance, recent surveys find that 58 - 66 percent of social science professors in the United States identify as liberals, while only 5 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 8 to 1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Klein & Stern, 2009; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). A similar situation is found in the humanities where surveys find that 52 - 77 percent of humanities professors identify as liberals, while only 4 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 5:1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). In psychology the imbalance is slightly stronger: 84 percent identify as liberal while only 8 percent identify as conservative (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). That is a ratio of 10.5 to 1. In the United States as a whole, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is roughly 1 to 2 (Gallup, 2010).

I'm not saying his approach is right, just that his ultimate goal is not political diversity as such. I agree that there are other approaches to correcting bias, and the fact that he doesn't even consider those makes me think something else is going on. Liberals tend to believe that morality is a product of reason. Haidt thinks it comes from innate dispositions or intuitions, which I think is closer to a conservative viewpoint.

How does one justify a sweeping generalization about some group of people while totally ignoring diversity within that group? "I don't care what they truly believe, but methinks they believe that three of my six (not five) moral foundations are unimportant." doesn't sound particularly convincing.

> I'm not saying his approach is right, just that his ultimate goal is not political diversity as such.

That's exactly what I was trying to point out in the GGGP comment. This is little more than a conservative political agenda wrapped in the language of diversity. Yes, some people emphasize some of the "foundations" more than others. But unless Haidt can convince us that we ought to take all of them seriously, his views are utterly uninteresting in the context of ethics.

When religious people demand that creationism be taught at school "for balance", most HNers can easily see through their thinly veiled political agenda. But when a conservative and/or libertarian guy makes an argument that has an identical logical structure, anyone who dares to disagree gets downvoted into oblivion. Funny, but I guess that's exactly how political biases work IRL.

If a Socialist site 'republished literature important to classical Socialism and the moral case for social equality' would you not consider it a political entity?

At least in education the academic left has had a complete stranglehold on policy for 50+ years.

Saying that conservatives have a total lockdown on policy is just silly.

The deeper problem that Haidt is found is that people on the left can't actually answer a survey as a conservative would. Libertarians and conservatives can answer surveys as a liberal would when asked to, but liberals are too insular and only have a caricature of conservatives in their mind.

Your statement about economics and banking illustrates that. Wall St has power and influence in DC because it has a lot of money, not because it has ideological support from conservatives.