Left-Leaning Professor Types
Which humans grow up wanting to be professors? Usually not the conservatives. Which humans hope to head for a career in nursing? Usually not the boys. According to their paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?”, Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse say nursing is a “gender typed” career, while being a professor is more “politically typed.”
From the NY Times:
The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors.
A pair of sociologists think they may have an answer: typecasting. Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up.
“…nerdy, long-winded, secular…” Wait! That exactly describes my grandfathers! They were both total science nerd professors, but whatever. They both were liberal, and both saw themselves heading toward careers as tweed-wearing research profs. Coincidence? I think not.
Gross and Fosse’s theory is 100% right according to my family. But it makes sense in the real world as well. Not that my family doesn’t have a foothold in reality…
Posted by Alexa Harrington
I would advance that the question is indeed improper but I am not willing to buy the sociological response since it is fundamentally empiricist. Rather perhaps the increased liberality (liberalism?) of higher academia is more a matter of form following function, in this case the function of the universities dictates the form of the faculty?
Universities may either accommodate a broad diversity of theories, attitudes, concepts, …. or they may adopt a structured doctrine of acceptability. From a standpoint of systems and organizational theory, the latter is the less stable of the two. History seems to indicate that educational institutions of a rigid doctrine or dogma have shorter mean-times-to-failure (extinction or dissolution) than do those of broader diversity of thought and practice.
From this it follows that an environment of broad diversity of thought and practice will necessarily have a population of people similarly inclined and dedicated.