Faculty growth on the political left comes at the direct expense of conservatives, who dropped from 22 percent of the academy as recently as 1995 to only 12 percent today. Furthermore, faculty who identify as “far left”—a category that usually includes Marxists, socialists, and derivative ideologies in Critical Theory—provided the main impetus of this shift. Far leftists more than doubled in number during this same period, going from a small minority of only 4 percent to 12 percent today
…Turning to administrative ranks, we quickly find several indicators of a leftward shift that has paralleled the faculty. Although polling data on administrator ideology only recently became available, a 2018 survey of student-facing administrators—typically the lower-level ranks of student affairs and university life personnel—found that 71 percent identified on the political left. Conservatives comprised only 6 percent, indicating that this segment of university administration sits even further to the left than the faculty at large.
Again, this stories is one of a series on the academic hard left.
Reminder: Now would be a good time to pre-order the latest edition of The Three Languages of Politics.
Daisies spring from damned seeds,
And this red fire that here I see
Is a worthless crop of crimson weeds,
Cursed by farmers thriftily.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Te leftwards will uphold and support professor pensions.
Dow and S&P 500 listed companies and tax-exempt businesses such as colleges and universities, in which whose employees work is in Public Relations and lecturing and who tell themselves that they are engaged in a sacred mission, are naturally prone to the outbreaks of the fanatical delusions so abundant in the USA today. Companies whose shares are widely held by index funds, or that will never pay a dividend but whose investors nevertheless believe they will be able to profitably unload shares to suckers, face no market discipline and often times are so huge, or in fields so intensely specialized, that there is no real discipline from any sort of market for corporate control. Berkshire Hathaway can only buy so many mismanaged businesses and Buffett leans left himself. America will not be great again and will face a future of accelerating decline until the structural failures of market discipline are addressed.
The root cause of this problem is the corporate tax system. Taxing profits rather than value added, gives corporations, many of which that will never pay a cent in dividends, every incentive to spend recklessly and wastefully. In the student-loan harvesting industry, tax exemptions produce the dystopian distortions in resource flows that are such a devastating restraint on economic growth. The employees of this industry reap much of the tax exemption benefit in the form of their outlandish salaries and therefore have become a politically active and aggressively hard left force aligned with leftist authoritarianism.
Tax reform is the solution. Eliminate the corporate income tax. Replace with a value added tax. Provide no exemptions for any “non-profit” activity or “charitable” enterprise.
This would restore market discipline by eliminating tax advantages between competitors, de-incentivizing the tendency to fritter away capital rather than pay dividends, and by spreading the tax burden more widely allow tax rates to be reduced somewhat and trigger higher productivity elsewhere in the economy. The stage 4 tumor that is the student-loan harvesting industry would shrink in size and lethality, and resources would flow to more productive uses encouraging peace, prosperity and progress.
There is a lot of talk lately about trying to deal with this issue by making alternatives to leftist-captured educational institutions higher status, or at least as generally accepted alternative signals and credentials.
But the interesting question remains as to how such alternatives would repeal Conquest’s Second Law and resist Gramscian infiltration and inevitable damage. Genuine alternative centers of influence are threats and so by the same mechanisms at work in every other sector of society, will be targeted for neutralization either via intimidation or co-option.
The answer given by the Second Law itself is that they can’t, unless they are specifically and explicitly dedicated to principles opposed to leftists social goals and inherently incompatible with progressivism.
This means that any attempt to form these alternative institutions that purports to be merely neutral or transcend ideological considerations is doomed to futility and failure in the long run. It’s no use trying to run away from a plague of locusts by opening up virgin lands to agriculture. The locusts will just follow you. You’re also going to need screens and pesticide.
Your point is, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”. So, even if the right does pull off a miracle and build some alternative education system not captured by the left, it will inevitably and ultimately be captured by the left anyway.
I don’t agree. Markets for fitness/music/swim/dance/cooking lessons/education aren’t captured by the left, and seem quite sustainable. Math and STEM education can be offered on similar terms. There is cultural and institutional inertia in the way, but that can be overcome.
Right. The reasoning above gives you only two options, right-wing dogma or left-wing dogma. If there is no alternative then I say forget it; I’m uninterested, period.
It’s a miserable point of view that seems to suggest there is no such thing as shaking off dogma at all. Unless this is all a semantics game, and the kind of soft conservatism of the classical liberals is just being recast as not actually conservative by people even further to the right. But if it is, then sure, that’s the kind of “neutral,” nominally and contingently conservative thing I can get behind.
A chain of mechanisms observed in the field:
Link no. 1) Colleges make grandiose promises to transform students into leaders who will change the world. (See Brennan & Magness, chapter on fraudulent advertising in academe.)
Link no. 2) Students come of age, untransformed. They mostly target the credential, adroitly jump through hoops, shape one another through peer influence, but don’t internalize Faculty ideology.
Link no. 3) Failure at self-cloning frustrates ideological Faculty, who then double down, in curriculum and in appointments & promotion, to prevent exposure of students to independent, conservative, and libertarian ideas and research.
Link no. 4) Principles of Faculty governance in curriculum and in appointments & promotion preclude exogenous checks and balances. Think sub-optimal equilibrium.
Link n0. 5) The concatenation of mechanisms occurs in parallel at almost all colleges. Thus competition across colleges for enrollments in admissions cannot provide adequate check or balance.
Link n0. 6) Higher education has intrinsic barriers to disruption by technology or by new entrants. Selective colleges enjoy historical prestige, large endowments, massive donor support, and a central role in elite assortative mating by educational attainment. New entrants and online universities must serve lower-ability students or working students outside the transformation market.
But the credential signal in the labor market is becoming noisier …
This does seem extreme changes here but I always the heavy left of academia was mostly caused by self-selection bias of people choosing career paths. The limit on conservative Professors was caused by conservatives overwhelmingly choose more income in the private sector. Although 12% is exceedingly low though for that to be the only primary cause. (And assume this doubly a problem for the average college student because if 12% of professors would go to specific conservative universities.)
Honestly, I am not sure how to fix this:
1) Again I assume education is not particularly profitable to investors.
2) Go into teaching tends to limit your income potential.
3) I assume that Koch Universities support is mostly focused on the top 10% of earners who are already conservative. It seems long term Koch efforts would be more effective at more basic state schools not the higher end. Or they should focus efforts at making vocational schools more effective for careers.
When thinking about this in the past USA, I assume education probably had more conservatism because:
1) Private schools were more religious based.
2) As Tyler Cowen notes, US Education was a beneficiary of defined sex discrimination in the labor market. So US schools could pay less for teachers but also more conservative women taught local schools to improve the local community. (And I do believe the sex discrimination lasted until 1990 or so because we have to take into account generational flows.)
My response is a flippant “who cares?” along two dimensions:
1. The indoctrination aspects are confined to the humanities so who cares?
2. If you believe Judith Rich Harris and only peers/genes matter, not faculty/parents, so who cares?
You might argue that journalists and/or politicians are important influencers so the humanities matter. Even if this was ever true, I think their influence is waning and still they only matter if Judith Rich Harris is wrong, i.e. faculty actually do shape minds.
If Judith Rich Harris is right about peers, we might want to devise a progressive equivalent of the Net Promoter Score; a simple question that mostly determines a person’s progressive inclinations. Something like:
The question probably needs refinement but hopefully the gist of it is right. If you participate in social activism then self-identity takes over. The causation switches to Handle’s emphasis on social contagion (amongst peers) rather than ideological reasoning.
I think it’d be hard to argue that genes determine one’s political views in an absolute sense; otherwise, why aren’t we all right wing traditionalists like virtually all of our ancestors were until very recently? It’s likely genes influence one’s politics relative to one’s milieu, but the range of politics in a given setting may be modest. Surely there are plenty of ‘genetic conservatives’ going to elite colleges, but this may merely mean relatively less zealously leftist.
Moreover, why shouldn’t we worry just the same about the political peer effects to which people are subjected for the duration of their formative years? Opposing peer effects don’t necessarily cancel each other out across society as a whole; that is, if non-leftists tend to be more apolitical in daily life, there will be less ‘conversion by osmosis’ in non-leftist settings than in leftist ones where politics is all-important. Academics’ and educators’ fomentation of the sentiment that everything is political likely amps up peer effects and intensifies the conversion rate within the institutions in which they’re dominant.
Until I’ve seen a carefully designed study that proves otherwise I’d stick with Judith Rich Harris as the default. As a starting point half genes and half environment but the environment portion is almost all peers, not teachers/parents (i.e. nurture).
I think we should worry about political peer effects for all demographics, not just young people. Understanding that your circle of influence is mostly confined to your peer group is an important first step. Focusing on non-peer influencers is probably counter-productive.
“The indoctrination aspects are confined to the humanities so who cares?”
If only that were so…