Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left
nytimes.com
Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left
1–8 of 8 posts
Re: Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left
#2Mildly interesting, but not HN material. Flagged.
Re: Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left
#3Mildly interesting, but not HN material. Flagged.
Cute, someone disagrees with me so I get a downvote instead of a response. All in a thread about a dubious off topic submission. Nice, HN, keep it classy.
Re: Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left
#4Mildly interesting, but not HN material. Flagged.
Cute, someone disagrees with me so I get a downvote instead of a response. All in a thread about a dubious off topic submission. Nice, HN, keep it classy.
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
Re: Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left
#5Conservatives don't value intellectualism.
Edit: Okay, blanket statement. How about this: MOST conservatives don't value intellectualism.
Re: Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left
#6Mildly interesting, but not HN material. Flagged.
Cute, someone disagrees with me so I get a downvote instead of a response. All in a thread about a dubious off topic submission. Nice, HN, keep it classy.
Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html <-- for your reference.
Re: Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left
#7Interesting for two reasons:
First, the Times reporter wrote "intentional discrimination, one of the most frequent and volatile charges made by conservatives, turned out not to play a significant role." While the actual paper mentioned this as a potential cause, and cited conservative commentators like D'Souza and Horowitz, it wasn't one of the six hypotheses actually tested by the sociologists - I assume because it's hard to test this in a quantitative manner. In other words, the Times reporter is editorializing.
Second, the ending quote from Neil Gross: "The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism, the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism." If political typecasting is an issue for academia, then gender-based typecasting is almost certainly an issue for certain male-dominated professions. Yet a sociologist who said "The irony is that the more women complain about [profession's] preponderance of males, the more likely it's going to remain a bastion of males" would be widely criticized. There's a double-standard at work here.
Re: Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left
#8Conservative self-selection out of academia is a second-order effect, like women self-selecting themselves off of oil rigs. The first-order effect is that progressives make better academics. This may be due in part to the rather smug assumption that progressives are smarter, but there is also obvious adaptive value to being a progressive in an occupation that both advises and is largely funded by the government.
Academia is a parasite on the State, but it's not just any parasite; it's a brain parasite. Academics tell policy-makers what to think, and policy-makers send academics a river of cash. Conservative and libertarian academics, whose political principles oppose the government cash-river, are swimming upstream.