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November 28, 2004

George Will hates the free market

In his column for today, George Will expresses outrage at a study showing liberals outnumber conservatives as instructors on college campuses.

In response, Juan Cole wants to know what the big outrage is really all about:

There are all sorts of social-science problems with this allegation. First, what is the population that is being studied? Is it all tenure-track teachers in all universities in all schools and departments? Are we including two-year colleges? Four-year ones? Are we including Economics Departments, Business Schools, Medical Schools, Engineering schools?

If that were the pool, then academics probably mirror the general American society pretty closely. There are about 1.1 million post-secondary teachers in the United States. A lot of the ones in the Red States are conservatives, and a lot of the ones in the engineering schools everywhere are. So it simply is not true that "universities" are bastions of the political left. Moreover, there are almost no leftists in any major economics department in the United States, in contrast to Europe.

But Juan...are you actually saying that the study didn't look at all aspects of college instructors? Could George Will possibly be attempting to parse this to create outrage where none need exist, in order to push more conservatives into teaching positions on college campuses? I'm stunned.

Juan continues:

There would be no way to stack this process politically. The school executive committee is elected at large from all school departments; ours often has economists or biologists on it. The divisional committee often has political scientists. A substandard historian being hired only because he was a leftist would never get through this gauntlet. Each search committee is ad hoc, staffed according to field, and each differs in composition from the others. All the other committees are constantly rotating personnel, by election. There is no possibility of a centralized cabal that could appoint people of only one political coloration. In fact, David Horowitz wants to find a way to use state legislatures and congress to corrupt this grassroots and professional process by politicizing it and focusing on political outcome rather than academic achievement.

(more under the fold)

Since there's no way to stack the process without some sort of state legislature or congressional intervention...then what's the reality?

The most logical explanation for any political bias in some parts of the professoriate in my view is that the sort of persons with the skills to be in a major academic liberal arts department could also be successful in business, lobbying, law, advertising and other well-paying professions. And it is the corporate world and its lobbying appendages that have the marked bias, to the Right. Someone who has academic skills but is a Republican would just have enormous opportunities and could easily become a multi-millionnaire. In contrast, academics on the Left would not be welcome in corporate boardrooms or at a think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, and wouldn't be comfortable in such a position. (All think tanks hire explicitly by ideology, and 17 of the 19 most influential ones in Washington are deliberately staffed by conservatives, but that doesn't bother Will.)

So if you're living in the reality based community with Juan Cole and me, you can see that it's worked out based on market forces. The market has worked it out so that depending upon successes of the individuals in question, they are hired accordingly for teaching jobs on campuses.

Funny how free market works for conservatives until they think it bites them in the ass. Then all of a sudden they're embracing socialism.

Posted by Carla at November 28, 2004 03:09 PM