I was surprised that neither this article, nor the BAR pod episode mentioned DEI statements during the hiring process.
These feel to me like they are explicitly political tests that require you to answer correctly on questions like "Who are the marginalized groups that need to be favored?" and "What is the correct attitude to take wrt helping those groups?" (hint: it's not "Fuck the haters. Be so good they can't ignore you") These seem like they would do more than advantage liberals over conservatives. They would advantage progressive liberals over classical liberals.
Yeah, I believe there is probably discrimination against conservatives, but it’s hard to imagine someone even bothering to submit a conservative coded DEI statement. In which case that might be counted as a conservative self selecting out rather than being explicitly discriminated against (even if he would have been explicitly discriminated against had he bothered to apply). I don’t know how common these are, but my media diet also says very common - I know barpod talked about Yoel inbar’s case where he didn’t get a job because he had expressed criticism of DEI statements in the past on his podcast. But even the fact that they have DEI statements makes it clear that this would not be an environment a conservative would likely feel comfortable working in, which makes me think it’s mostly self selection out, but that the self selection is correct and they would be discriminated against explicitly.
By the way, these kinds of DEI allegiance tests also offend me, and have successfully filtered me out and directed me elsewhere. I'm not conservative, but without conservatives, many places rapidly devolve into boring echo chambers or lunatic asylums.
Yes, sometimes having a bunch of conservatives around is just a drag, like when I want to analyze a good film or muse about what Western society would be like if psychedelic use were normalized in early Christianity. But even there, having a few conservatives around still helps to ground and stabilize discussion. It's the same with men and women; a room where almost everybody is the same sex is seriously going to be missing something when it tries to figure things out and make decisions.
Although the explicit oppression of conservatives within academia is A) stupid B) somewhat recent, and C) effective at discouraging conservatives from entering academia, we can find similar disparities elsewhere. For example, are agricultural workers and miners so conservative because they give political tests to winnow out lefties? https://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11?op=1
The simple explanation for career disparities across society is that rightists and leftists have different personalities. When it comes to academia, the introspective, curious, thoughtful, and abstract attitudes typical on the left just do better than the concrete and conventional style of conservative thinking. What's normal in farms and mines doesn't work in the university.
My experience in academia is that people are pretty open about discriminating against conservatives in hiring. People say a candidate is disqualified for favoring merit based hiring or something similar all the time, and if you interview in a red state, there’s a lot of only semi-indirect questions making sure you disapprove of local politics. I did a recent interview where a weirdly large part of one one-on-one meeting was her explaining she left Flordia because of Ron Desantis. Since the interviews take 2 days, you have dinner with faculty, and the conversation is usually pretty political and homogeous.
You wouldn’t have this without self-selection, etc, first but even if you are just a relative centrist on things you have to be really careful about cosplaying as a hard leftist. This is for a hard science too.
> conservatives are — almost by definition — lacking in the psychological characteristics that predict high achievement in academic subjects, such as openness to experience and a willingness to question received understandings.
So are "conservative" and "liberal" literally just synonyms for different clusters of personality traits? If so, then because personality traits feel innate/unchosen (having some similarity to race in this regard), it would make sense for someone to advocate for affirmative action for conservatives with much the same arguments as for race. But I suspect that the reason many academics are comfortable with supporting affirmative action for race but not for conservatism, is precisely that they view the latter as an unprotected class, something less innate and more chosen, not just a cluster of personality traits.
When liberal academics actively discriminate against conservative candidates, they're probably not thinking of their disgust reflex or whatever, but of their (inferred) empirical, moral, and policy claims. The academic considers these to be questions with right and wrong answers, believes that they have the right answers and the conservatives have the wrong answers, and therefore feels justified in discriminating against conservatives as prospective colleagues, because that's just freedom of association.
To the academic, "conservative" just means "having certain wrong opinions," so even if the purpose of affirmative action were purely utilitarian, to improve institutional performance by injecting more diversity of thought, it still wouldn't make sense to inject wrong opinions, right?? Obviously this is an illiberal attitude, since it hinges on failing to entertain one' own fallibility, and apparently doesn't give much weight to Enlightenment arguments that we should value confrontation with wrong opinions because we are made the better by it.
🤣 It's all true. I was the token "conservative" (i.e. lowercase libertarian) in my graduating bachelors of political science cohort. I was invited into the master's of public administration program back in 1995 specifically to be the resident "conservative." My favorite professor just asked during finals, "You're joining us this fall, right?"
Everyone in the graduate faculty was absolutely unashamed about it—I didn't have to apply or interview for the program as an invitee. Somebody in admissions did refuse to process my application until I took the GRE. 🤓 At least back then, they "cared" enough to keep a designated whipping grad student around. Heh. I lasted two semesters before I dropped out of academia for good and started writing software for a living.
Interesting article…I like to like this issue to something like selection bias. If I conduct a snowball sample survey and it ends up being a bunch of similar people who take the survey, I would lack confidence in my findings.
Published research as a whole is like this. If all the people doing the research have similar beliefs and attitudes, it is likely that at the margins they will discard more findings that conflict with their beliefs or alter their research (look at Roland Fryer for an example). For a junior academic publishing controversial research in a conservative direction would likely be career suicide
Basically all the mistakes go in a liberal direction (because conservative findings are challenged more both at peer review and again if published), some conservative findings get round filed because the researchers don’t want deal with the blowback, and conservatives while generally not run out, are made uncomfortable enough that only the really obstinate assholes stay around.
It’s not because anyone is evil and if academia were dominated by conservatives it might be worse. It’s just group think and polarization.
That said, it has reduced my faith in science as a whole.
People find what they are looking for in the sense of "where you point the telescope impacts what your see". Practically speaking, when you design a study in social science, you generally include factors to test your hypothesis. Your hypothesis is generally downsteam of values and culture.
My dissertation was intended to demonstrate how education enables structural transformation-- it doesn't. Me a kid in university thought this was a no brainer, especially with correlations of educated people in services while farmers are relatively uneducated. Furthermore there was a very pro-education human capital literature (wonder why). Armed with cross country census data and DSGE I proved myself wrong, and my peers laughed about my paper in defense of the null hypothesis.
Monocultures are bad for innovation. Off topic, I do find that high performing conservatives want to build something and the peer review game is unfulfilling.
You are punished in Academia if you disagree with your professor. That is the biggest issue. The other is the hostility to Christianity...but really there should be no elitist private college ...lack of conservatives small problem in academia, the fact that scientific work can't be replicated much bigger
The following must rank as one of the all-time most obtuse statements ever made by a conservative academic......"conservatives are — almost by definition — lacking in the psychological characteristics that predict high achievement in academic subjects, such as openness to experience and a willingness to question received understandings." A quite extraordinary statement....would have made a great line on a satirical political comedy sketch. Because of course a lack of openness to experience and an unwillingness to question received understandings is THE defining characteristic of your typical Leftist academic in the humanities and social sciences.
I was surprised that neither this article, nor the BAR pod episode mentioned DEI statements during the hiring process.
These feel to me like they are explicitly political tests that require you to answer correctly on questions like "Who are the marginalized groups that need to be favored?" and "What is the correct attitude to take wrt helping those groups?" (hint: it's not "Fuck the haters. Be so good they can't ignore you") These seem like they would do more than advantage liberals over conservatives. They would advantage progressive liberals over classical liberals.
https://x.com/paulg/status/1794325571767513447?t=_ZRSm_YIQyee99cntXLumQ&s=19
Are these not as prevalent as I think they are from a Twitter heavy media diet? Are they too recent to explain that much of the gap?
Yeah, I believe there is probably discrimination against conservatives, but it’s hard to imagine someone even bothering to submit a conservative coded DEI statement. In which case that might be counted as a conservative self selecting out rather than being explicitly discriminated against (even if he would have been explicitly discriminated against had he bothered to apply). I don’t know how common these are, but my media diet also says very common - I know barpod talked about Yoel inbar’s case where he didn’t get a job because he had expressed criticism of DEI statements in the past on his podcast. But even the fact that they have DEI statements makes it clear that this would not be an environment a conservative would likely feel comfortable working in, which makes me think it’s mostly self selection out, but that the self selection is correct and they would be discriminated against explicitly.
By the way, these kinds of DEI allegiance tests also offend me, and have successfully filtered me out and directed me elsewhere. I'm not conservative, but without conservatives, many places rapidly devolve into boring echo chambers or lunatic asylums.
Yes, sometimes having a bunch of conservatives around is just a drag, like when I want to analyze a good film or muse about what Western society would be like if psychedelic use were normalized in early Christianity. But even there, having a few conservatives around still helps to ground and stabilize discussion. It's the same with men and women; a room where almost everybody is the same sex is seriously going to be missing something when it tries to figure things out and make decisions.
Although the explicit oppression of conservatives within academia is A) stupid B) somewhat recent, and C) effective at discouraging conservatives from entering academia, we can find similar disparities elsewhere. For example, are agricultural workers and miners so conservative because they give political tests to winnow out lefties? https://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11?op=1
The simple explanation for career disparities across society is that rightists and leftists have different personalities. When it comes to academia, the introspective, curious, thoughtful, and abstract attitudes typical on the left just do better than the concrete and conventional style of conservative thinking. What's normal in farms and mines doesn't work in the university.
My experience in academia is that people are pretty open about discriminating against conservatives in hiring. People say a candidate is disqualified for favoring merit based hiring or something similar all the time, and if you interview in a red state, there’s a lot of only semi-indirect questions making sure you disapprove of local politics. I did a recent interview where a weirdly large part of one one-on-one meeting was her explaining she left Flordia because of Ron Desantis. Since the interviews take 2 days, you have dinner with faculty, and the conversation is usually pretty political and homogeous.
You wouldn’t have this without self-selection, etc, first but even if you are just a relative centrist on things you have to be really careful about cosplaying as a hard leftist. This is for a hard science too.
> conservatives are — almost by definition — lacking in the psychological characteristics that predict high achievement in academic subjects, such as openness to experience and a willingness to question received understandings.
So are "conservative" and "liberal" literally just synonyms for different clusters of personality traits? If so, then because personality traits feel innate/unchosen (having some similarity to race in this regard), it would make sense for someone to advocate for affirmative action for conservatives with much the same arguments as for race. But I suspect that the reason many academics are comfortable with supporting affirmative action for race but not for conservatism, is precisely that they view the latter as an unprotected class, something less innate and more chosen, not just a cluster of personality traits.
When liberal academics actively discriminate against conservative candidates, they're probably not thinking of their disgust reflex or whatever, but of their (inferred) empirical, moral, and policy claims. The academic considers these to be questions with right and wrong answers, believes that they have the right answers and the conservatives have the wrong answers, and therefore feels justified in discriminating against conservatives as prospective colleagues, because that's just freedom of association.
To the academic, "conservative" just means "having certain wrong opinions," so even if the purpose of affirmative action were purely utilitarian, to improve institutional performance by injecting more diversity of thought, it still wouldn't make sense to inject wrong opinions, right?? Obviously this is an illiberal attitude, since it hinges on failing to entertain one' own fallibility, and apparently doesn't give much weight to Enlightenment arguments that we should value confrontation with wrong opinions because we are made the better by it.
🤣 It's all true. I was the token "conservative" (i.e. lowercase libertarian) in my graduating bachelors of political science cohort. I was invited into the master's of public administration program back in 1995 specifically to be the resident "conservative." My favorite professor just asked during finals, "You're joining us this fall, right?"
Everyone in the graduate faculty was absolutely unashamed about it—I didn't have to apply or interview for the program as an invitee. Somebody in admissions did refuse to process my application until I took the GRE. 🤓 At least back then, they "cared" enough to keep a designated whipping grad student around. Heh. I lasted two semesters before I dropped out of academia for good and started writing software for a living.
Interesting article…I like to like this issue to something like selection bias. If I conduct a snowball sample survey and it ends up being a bunch of similar people who take the survey, I would lack confidence in my findings.
Published research as a whole is like this. If all the people doing the research have similar beliefs and attitudes, it is likely that at the margins they will discard more findings that conflict with their beliefs or alter their research (look at Roland Fryer for an example). For a junior academic publishing controversial research in a conservative direction would likely be career suicide
Basically all the mistakes go in a liberal direction (because conservative findings are challenged more both at peer review and again if published), some conservative findings get round filed because the researchers don’t want deal with the blowback, and conservatives while generally not run out, are made uncomfortable enough that only the really obstinate assholes stay around.
It’s not because anyone is evil and if academia were dominated by conservatives it might be worse. It’s just group think and polarization.
That said, it has reduced my faith in science as a whole.
People find what they are looking for in the sense of "where you point the telescope impacts what your see". Practically speaking, when you design a study in social science, you generally include factors to test your hypothesis. Your hypothesis is generally downsteam of values and culture.
My dissertation was intended to demonstrate how education enables structural transformation-- it doesn't. Me a kid in university thought this was a no brainer, especially with correlations of educated people in services while farmers are relatively uneducated. Furthermore there was a very pro-education human capital literature (wonder why). Armed with cross country census data and DSGE I proved myself wrong, and my peers laughed about my paper in defense of the null hypothesis.
Monocultures are bad for innovation. Off topic, I do find that high performing conservatives want to build something and the peer review game is unfulfilling.
First of all, is there any evidence conservatives want to be professors? The pay is terrible and they like money.
You are punished in Academia if you disagree with your professor. That is the biggest issue. The other is the hostility to Christianity...but really there should be no elitist private college ...lack of conservatives small problem in academia, the fact that scientific work can't be replicated much bigger
The following must rank as one of the all-time most obtuse statements ever made by a conservative academic......"conservatives are — almost by definition — lacking in the psychological characteristics that predict high achievement in academic subjects, such as openness to experience and a willingness to question received understandings." A quite extraordinary statement....would have made a great line on a satirical political comedy sketch. Because of course a lack of openness to experience and an unwillingness to question received understandings is THE defining characteristic of your typical Leftist academic in the humanities and social sciences.