9 ms·

A Confession of Liberal Intolerance

50 points by boona 10y ago

curun1r 10y ago
Given that evangelical is synonymous with believing something that is demonstrably false, I don't see why we should be clamoring to include such people among those that will shape the way future generations think. Just because US Republicans are underrepresented or discriminated against does not mean that universities are not doing a good job of maintaining a diverse faculty. It could be argued (and has, many times over) that the spectrum between the Marxist and American Democratic parties is much more representative of the rest of the world's liberal-to-conservative spectrum than would be the US definition of liberal and conservative. Additionally, I would expect libertarians to be much better represented among faculty since their ideology is, at least, logically consistent and doesn't contain the hate/discrimination endemic to the Republican platform. I think Republicans need to face the fact that they just nominated someone who's entire platform lacks even basic critical thought. Even if you put aside how odious and xenophobic what Trump has proposed, it's basically impossible to implement any of it anyways and anyone with an ounce of critical reasoning skills would easily realize that. And the one area where colleges cannot compromise on the faculty is in the area of critical reasoning skills. More than anything else, the purpose of a college education is to learn critical reasoning skills.
- drumdance 10y ago
  Trump is not an evangelical. His popularity is more about frustration with career politicians than policy.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Trump is not an evangelical. GP didn't say (or imply) that Trump is an evangelical; there was an implication in that post that lack of critical reasoning, which is a trait GP also ascribes to evangelicals, among the Republican electorate was a factor in Trump's success, though.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    Reminds me of Arnold, the Governator.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dragontamer 10y ago
  > I think Republicans need to face the fact that they just nominated someone who's entire platform lacks even basic critical thought. While Donald Trump has blown up the entire conservative base this year, this is fundamentally untrue. Read through the Growth and Opportunity project, written by key conservatives in 2012. http://goproject.gop.com/ http://goproject.gop.com/ There is a LOT of depth and understanding here that liberals miss out all the time. True, conservatives have blind spots in their policies. But liberals have blind spots all the same. And when you read good reports like the Growth and Opportunity Project, you start seeing the benefits of conservative thought. Conservatives are very local and have trust in the smallest, closest government to them. (So much so, they wish to remove powers from the Federal government to "give back to the States"). In part, its because local government is where the GOP and conservative values functions best. In particular, I found the chapter on Campaign Finance to be intriguing, because online you normally only see people who are against Citizens United. But you can see that the true conservative argument is far more nuanced and comes from a completely different perspective.
  - curun1r 10y ago
    I didn't say that the Republican platform lacks basic critical thought, I said that Donald Trump's platform lacks basic critical thought. The wall is the best example. He wants to build a massive wall that will cost tens of billions of dollars. That wall ignores the fact that almost all illegal immigration comes from visa overstays rather than people walking across the border. And the wall would still be relatively easy to get over without someone guarding it. Last Week Tonight, a comedy show, did a pretty thorough dismantling [1] of the logic behind building it. Scientists, Engineers and Immigration officials would have an even easier time arguing against it. It's just a really stupid idea that he probably came up with watching Game of Thrones (Mexicans == Wildlings) and yet he's used it to help win the Republican nomination. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuaDG7_FBZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuaDG7_FBZ8
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
I don't live in the USA, could someone briefly explain why an evangelical Christian would fit in less well at a university than a religious person of other faiths? Is it related to their religion, their conservatism, or something else?
- jccalhoun 10y ago
  A variety of groups consider themselves to be evangelical but the group that tends to get the most media coverage tend to be the most conservative and are anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, don't believe in evolution, and think the USA should be a Christian nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism#Recurrent_themes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism#Recurrent_theme...
- headcanon 10y ago
  Currently it is because a large part of the Republican party consists of what we call the "religious right", a group that seeks to make political change based on what they believe to be religious truth, or morality. Ted Cruz was the arbiter of this ideology in the Republican primaries, until he dropped out last week. While this group does not represent the entire party, they are definitely the most vocal, and many liberals conflate that group with the rest of the party as a whole. This belief is not helped by the fact that many "core" republican platforms come from religious conservatives, like outlawing gay marriage and abortion. Many people who belong to the academic community consider these people to be a bunch of uneducated backwater hicks who do not belong in intellectual conversations based on logical thought. So when an intellectual states that they are an evangelical christian, many consider them to be flawed in some capacity, and thus have nothing of substance to contribute. EDIT: to add to that, evangelical christians tend to embrace a literal translation of the bible; in that the world was created in literally seven days, and that every human is descended from Adam and Eve, a story which in its literal translation is of course not supported by science. So when a person who professes to follow science also professes to be a member of this faith, it can seem paradoxical to many.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
fuzzywalrus 10y ago
Some false equivalency in this article: "Francis Collins is an evangelical Christian and famed geneticist who has led the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health. And if you’re saying that conservatives may be tolerable, but evangelical Christians aren’t — well, are you really saying you would have discriminated against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.? " MLK Jr ≠ Francis Collins. Collins argues that DNA is the language of god which there's no empirical evidence to which. Plus, he's respected despite this, in his field. That seems like acceptance. Also the article lists: "But that doesn’t explain why there are conservative math professors but not many right-wing anthropologists." I imagine that say, in the extreme cases of say: evangelical young earth creationists or a evangelical mormon believing that humans are 5000 years old or that Native Americans are the lost tribe of Israel is counterproductive.
- openasocket 10y ago
  That "DNA is the language of God" quote is somewhat taken out of context: Collins was speaking metaphorically. The point of his writing is that Christianity and science are completely compatible.
- incompatible 10y ago
  Religious thinking may be compatible with science to the extent that religion is only used as some kind of motivating factor and doesn't affect the outcome or logic of the resulting science. However religion used instead to push an agenda, influencing the outcome of research, would seem counter-productive, and I can understand the wariness of social social scientists towards those with rigid beliefs.
savanaly 10y ago
You can't choose your skin color or where you were born, but you can choose your political beliefs. For that reason alone, I think statements like "My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination." miss the mark. Excluding people based on their beliefs is completely a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them. The feelings of the author (and me, and a lot of others besides) is that staunch liberals in academia might be flawed in excluding conservatives. But not because it's akin to racism, it's a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  I accept the author's thesis as correct, but this quote still made me laugh: “Why stop there [hiring conservatives]?” asked Steven. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”
  - rbcgerard 10y ago
    what's pretty ironic is that is typically the "conservative" argument against affirmative action...
    - pessimizer 10y ago
      Or rather, that it's the conservative argument against the "encouragement of diversity" defense of affirmative action. edit: Which, IMO, is a weak argument specifically designed to avoid mentioning reparations, which can make some of the nicest white people go feral.
      - GnwbZHiU 10y ago
        Conservatives are not against diversity.
- thesimpsons1022 10y ago
npsimons 10y ago
If you think college faculty are liberal, it’s only because American politics has twisted your perspective: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/05/09/if-you-think-college-faculty-are-liberal-its-only-because-american-politics-has-twisted-your-perspective/ https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/05/09/if-you-th...
- ikeboy 10y ago
  > If you are one of those things, you are much more likely to believe in creationism, or conspiracy theories, or so-called ‘scientific racism’, or any of a number of other destructive and thoroughly debunked ideas I notice no citation, nor what "much more likely" means.
  - npsimons 10y ago
    > I notice no citation, nor what "much more likely" means. The blog post still makes the very important point that no one cares about beliefs when hiring. If one so chooses to be a bad teacher and teach things that are flat out wrong, well, that just makes firing them justified based on incompetence. I think the NYTimes article is begging the question; if you ask why there are fewer conservatives/evangelicals/fundamentalists in the universities, one possible answer is that they are self-selecting, not that they're being discriminated against.
    - ikeboy 10y ago
      How do you know that? Very little evidence is offered. The other side is quoting studies about bias in hiring, and the reply is basically "we would never do that, trust us". Edit: re self-selection, two points: 1. If the self selection occurs at the student levels (i.e. professors are hostile to conservatives which causes them to drop out of academia before they get to the teaching level) this is still bad. 2. Even if it's entirely self selected, it's still a diversity problem.
      - npsimons 10y ago
        > 1. If the self selection occurs at the student levels (i.e. professors are hostile to conservatives which causes them to drop out of academia before they get to the teaching level) this is still bad. Not necessarily; if someone realizes that their basic beliefs are incompatible with the basic tenets of an institution, that saves everyone time in the long run. And I'd like to see some evidence, any evidence of professors being hostile to conservatives. And no, "God's not Dead" doesn't count. That's such a persecution complex strawman. > 2. Even if it's entirely self selected, it's still a diversity problem. There's diversity and there is pandering to vox populi and anti-intellectualism. The first is good, the second is not, and quite frankly, the face of modern conservatism in America has been anti-intellectual for quite some time. And hey, Kristoff seems to have misrepresented the data! https://medium.com/@ginasue/the-lie-of-liberal-intolerance-on-campus-6ba4c67ea8e0#.de9ylal06 https://medium.com/@ginasue/the-lie-of-liberal-intolerance-o... Surprised, I am not.
rbcgerard 10y ago
I think the article is on point, but what makes it a little hard is simply the nomenclature "conservative" vs "progressive" or "liberal" is this just shorthand for republican or democrat, or about actual political belief systems
disbelief 10y ago
The author repeatedly conflates conservatism with Christianity. While there's probably a higher percentage of Christians who identify as conservative, it's not their conservatism that would trouble me in a University setting. I wouldn't want a University science professor to be a creationist for example, but I couldn't care less if they're fiscal conservative who believes in small government.
- jccalhoun 10y ago
  That's a great point. There are tons of liberal Christians but in the media they tend to be overshadowed by conservative Christians.
pessimizer 10y ago
If we didn't discriminate against the type of conservative religious people who believe in using the power of institutions to advance their religious goals, women, homosexuals, and religious minorities would have a tougher time than they already do. Christianity in this article is a red herring, because I'm sure that conservative fundamentalist Muslims face the same discrimination, and so would conservative evangelical astrologers, if you could find any. What religious people seem to be angry about is the lack of symmetry - that they are judged for discriminating against reasonable people. The lack of symmetry is due to the fact that the universities being discussed are intended to be institutions of reason. There are other universities for people who believe in every sort of invisible world, which do not hesitate to discriminate openly, and fight for their right to do so.
- teacup50 10y ago
  As a thought experiment, what happens if your liberal non-religious individuals start advancing goals that result in discrimination, because they do not value intellectual diversity?
drewrv 10y ago
I think there's more to it than "academics are hostile to conservatives". The conservative movement in this country is vehemently anti-intellectual. People love to point to Trump but even George W Bush played dumb to appeal to his base. Add in a strongly capitalistic attitude among the american right, that smart ambitious people should work in industry and not in "ivory towers". Why would a fan of Ayn Rand take a government job for meager pay? Academics are probably biased against conservatives. But a conservative is biased against becoming an academic as well.
brooklyndavs 10y ago
“I am the equivalent of someone who was gay in Mississippi in 1950,” Oh give me a F*ing break. You CHOOSE to be a conservative. You aren't born a conservative and face true harassment, discrimination, and death threats because of it. Oh, right thats what YOU would do to someone who is gay probably now if you could get away with it. You are being passed for jobs in academia partly because academia deals in truths and evangelical Christians usually have a world view lacking in many truths. Personally, yeah I would pass you for an academic job if I found out you were an evangelical christian. How can I trust you to know truths in your profession when you believe in complete nonsense like the earth began 2,000 years ago and that evolution doesn't exist. How can I trust you NOT to evangelize in the classroom? Isn't that the whole point of being an evangelical Christian? Get over it. Religious extremism in ALL FORMS is a cancer and needs to be eliminated from society. Join the rest of the modern world or be further relegated to the edge as you so rightfully deserve to be.
- orasis 10y ago
  Why does choice matter? I could choose to indulge my fabulous side and cross dress, but the social rejection wouldn't be any less painful. Yes, choices do have consequences, but social exclusion based on those choices can still be critiqued.
  - brooklyndavs 10y ago
    >I could choose to indulge my fabulous side and cross dress Well, personally, I would say you are born with a fabulous side so you are just being true to yourself. Congrats and have fun! > Yes, choices do have consequences, but social exclusion based on those choices can still be critiqued. The problem is you are making a choice not only to believe in something completely void of fact (you can be ignorant if you want to be I guess) but you are also making a choice that HARMS society as a whole. When a person's choice guides them to discriminate a whole group of people based on some stories written a few thousands of years ago thats a choice that deserves to be critiqued. If your choice guides the people you vote for to be anti-science yeah, that choice deserves to be ridiculed.
dragonwriter 10y ago
The decline of conservatives in academia in the humanities and social sciences (other than economics) post-dates the conservative movement's dismissal of the value of those fields and is a natural consequence of it: if you are part of a political movement which rejects the value of a field of work, you are less likely to seek to work in that field (and, conversely, if you value work in a particular field, you are more likely to split from a political movement that does not.) If conservatives started painting those fields as valuable fields for scholarship which needed more conservative scholars, the gap would, I suspect, substantially disappear within a generation.
ankushnarula 10y ago
(The actual problem is nicely highlighted in this article's most popular Reader Picks comments) There is a popular narrative about what it means to be conservative, liberal, progressive, etc. This narrative is a small simple band in a vastly complex spectrum of views. Unfortunately, we have come to the point where the narrative is being echoed so much that it's impossible to have a conversation framed outside the popular narrative. We have all been trained and self-trained to pigeonhole each other based on these meaningless labels to either a) dismiss each other or b) rally together to dismiss the "other". The one thing that we can't do is suspend our emotional biases and sincerely listen to alternate narratives.
haberman 10y ago
Before you dismiss this as truth-challenged partisans who want recognition of their unjustifiable views, read this. There is a pretty compelling case to be made that a lot of important questions facing us today are being studied by a relatively politically homogenous group of people, and beliefs not rigorously supported by evidence nonetheless become orthodoxy. A monoculture of thought on questions that are far from settled: http://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/ http://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/
scarface74 10y ago
No. I would not hire anyone in a science department who professed a belief of a 6000 year old earth or that didn't "believe in" evolution. I wouldn't vote for anyone who thought that the U.S. should be run based on the bible. No I'm not an atheist but I am against anti-intellectualism.
- teacup50 10y ago
  And yet, Colleges have no problem hiring individuals that believe some pretty scientifically unfounded things, as long as what they believe falls in line with the orthodoxy.

50 points by boona 10y ago

Given that evangelical is synonymous with believing something that is demonstrably false, I don't see why we should be clamoring to include such people among those that will shape the way future generations think. Just because US Republicans are underrepresented or discriminated against does not mean that universities are not doing a good job of maintaining a diverse faculty. It could be argued (and has, many times over) that the spectrum between the Marxist and American Democratic parties is much more representative of the rest of the world's liberal-to-conservative spectrum than would be the US definition of liberal and conservative. Additionally, I would expect libertarians to be much better represented among faculty since their ideology is, at least, logically consistent and doesn't contain the hate/discrimination endemic to the Republican platform. I think Republicans need to face the fact that they just nominated someone who's entire platform lacks even basic critical thought. Even if you put aside how odious and xenophobic what Trump has proposed, it's basically impossible to implement any of it anyways and anyone with an ounce of critical reasoning skills would easily realize that. And the one area where colleges cannot compromise on the faculty is in the area of critical reasoning skills. More than anything else, the purpose of a college education is to learn critical reasoning skills.

drumdance 10y ago
Trump is not an evangelical. His popularity is more about frustration with career politicians than policy.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Trump is not an evangelical. GP didn't say (or imply) that Trump is an evangelical; there was an implication in that post that lack of critical reasoning, which is a trait GP also ascribes to evangelicals, among the Republican electorate was a factor in Trump's success, though.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  Reminds me of Arnold, the Governator.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dragontamer 10y ago
> I think Republicans need to face the fact that they just nominated someone who's entire platform lacks even basic critical thought. While Donald Trump has blown up the entire conservative base this year, this is fundamentally untrue. Read through the Growth and Opportunity project, written by key conservatives in 2012. http://goproject.gop.com/ http://goproject.gop.com/ There is a LOT of depth and understanding here that liberals miss out all the time. True, conservatives have blind spots in their policies. But liberals have blind spots all the same. And when you read good reports like the Growth and Opportunity Project, you start seeing the benefits of conservative thought. Conservatives are very local and have trust in the smallest, closest government to them. (So much so, they wish to remove powers from the Federal government to "give back to the States"). In part, its because local government is where the GOP and conservative values functions best. In particular, I found the chapter on Campaign Finance to be intriguing, because online you normally only see people who are against Citizens United. But you can see that the true conservative argument is far more nuanced and comes from a completely different perspective.
- curun1r 10y ago
  I didn't say that the Republican platform lacks basic critical thought, I said that Donald Trump's platform lacks basic critical thought. The wall is the best example. He wants to build a massive wall that will cost tens of billions of dollars. That wall ignores the fact that almost all illegal immigration comes from visa overstays rather than people walking across the border. And the wall would still be relatively easy to get over without someone guarding it. Last Week Tonight, a comedy show, did a pretty thorough dismantling [1] of the logic behind building it. Scientists, Engineers and Immigration officials would have an even easier time arguing against it. It's just a really stupid idea that he probably came up with watching Game of Thrones (Mexicans == Wildlings) and yet he's used it to help win the Republican nomination. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuaDG7_FBZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuaDG7_FBZ8

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

I don't live in the USA, could someone briefly explain why an evangelical Christian would fit in less well at a university than a religious person of other faiths? Is it related to their religion, their conservatism, or something else?

jccalhoun 10y ago
A variety of groups consider themselves to be evangelical but the group that tends to get the most media coverage tend to be the most conservative and are anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, don't believe in evolution, and think the USA should be a Christian nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism#Recurrent_themes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism#Recurrent_theme...
headcanon 10y ago
Currently it is because a large part of the Republican party consists of what we call the "religious right", a group that seeks to make political change based on what they believe to be religious truth, or morality. Ted Cruz was the arbiter of this ideology in the Republican primaries, until he dropped out last week. While this group does not represent the entire party, they are definitely the most vocal, and many liberals conflate that group with the rest of the party as a whole. This belief is not helped by the fact that many "core" republican platforms come from religious conservatives, like outlawing gay marriage and abortion. Many people who belong to the academic community consider these people to be a bunch of uneducated backwater hicks who do not belong in intellectual conversations based on logical thought. So when an intellectual states that they are an evangelical christian, many consider them to be flawed in some capacity, and thus have nothing of substance to contribute. EDIT: to add to that, evangelical christians tend to embrace a literal translation of the bible; in that the world was created in literally seven days, and that every human is descended from Adam and Eve, a story which in its literal translation is of course not supported by science. So when a person who professes to follow science also professes to be a member of this faith, it can seem paradoxical to many.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

fuzzywalrus 10y ago

Some false equivalency in this article: "Francis Collins is an evangelical Christian and famed geneticist who has led the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health. And if you’re saying that conservatives may be tolerable, but evangelical Christians aren’t — well, are you really saying you would have discriminated against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.? " MLK Jr ≠ Francis Collins. Collins argues that DNA is the language of god which there's no empirical evidence to which. Plus, he's respected despite this, in his field. That seems like acceptance. Also the article lists: "But that doesn’t explain why there are conservative math professors but not many right-wing anthropologists." I imagine that say, in the extreme cases of say: evangelical young earth creationists or a evangelical mormon believing that humans are 5000 years old or that Native Americans are the lost tribe of Israel is counterproductive.

openasocket 10y ago
That "DNA is the language of God" quote is somewhat taken out of context: Collins was speaking metaphorically. The point of his writing is that Christianity and science are completely compatible.
incompatible 10y ago
Religious thinking may be compatible with science to the extent that religion is only used as some kind of motivating factor and doesn't affect the outcome or logic of the resulting science. However religion used instead to push an agenda, influencing the outcome of research, would seem counter-productive, and I can understand the wariness of social social scientists towards those with rigid beliefs.

savanaly 10y ago

You can't choose your skin color or where you were born, but you can choose your political beliefs. For that reason alone, I think statements like "My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination." miss the mark. Excluding people based on their beliefs is completely a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them. The feelings of the author (and me, and a lot of others besides) is that staunch liberals in academia might be flawed in excluding conservatives. But not because it's akin to racism, it's a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.

ktRolster 10y ago
I accept the author's thesis as correct, but this quote still made me laugh: “Why stop there [hiring conservatives]?” asked Steven. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”
- rbcgerard 10y ago
  what's pretty ironic is that is typically the "conservative" argument against affirmative action...
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    Or rather, that it's the conservative argument against the "encouragement of diversity" defense of affirmative action. edit: Which, IMO, is a weak argument specifically designed to avoid mentioning reparations, which can make some of the nicest white people go feral.
    - GnwbZHiU 10y ago
      Conservatives are not against diversity.
thesimpsons1022 10y ago

npsimons 10y ago

If you think college faculty are liberal, it’s only because American politics has twisted your perspective: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/05/09/if-you-think-college-faculty-are-liberal-its-only-because-american-politics-has-twisted-your-perspective/ https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/05/09/if-you-th...

ikeboy 10y ago
> If you are one of those things, you are much more likely to believe in creationism, or conspiracy theories, or so-called ‘scientific racism’, or any of a number of other destructive and thoroughly debunked ideas I notice no citation, nor what "much more likely" means.
- npsimons 10y ago
  > I notice no citation, nor what "much more likely" means. The blog post still makes the very important point that no one cares about beliefs when hiring. If one so chooses to be a bad teacher and teach things that are flat out wrong, well, that just makes firing them justified based on incompetence. I think the NYTimes article is begging the question; if you ask why there are fewer conservatives/evangelicals/fundamentalists in the universities, one possible answer is that they are self-selecting, not that they're being discriminated against.
  - ikeboy 10y ago
    How do you know that? Very little evidence is offered. The other side is quoting studies about bias in hiring, and the reply is basically "we would never do that, trust us". Edit: re self-selection, two points: 1. If the self selection occurs at the student levels (i.e. professors are hostile to conservatives which causes them to drop out of academia before they get to the teaching level) this is still bad. 2. Even if it's entirely self selected, it's still a diversity problem.
    - npsimons 10y ago
      > 1. If the self selection occurs at the student levels (i.e. professors are hostile to conservatives which causes them to drop out of academia before they get to the teaching level) this is still bad. Not necessarily; if someone realizes that their basic beliefs are incompatible with the basic tenets of an institution, that saves everyone time in the long run. And I'd like to see some evidence, any evidence of professors being hostile to conservatives. And no, "God's not Dead" doesn't count. That's such a persecution complex strawman. > 2. Even if it's entirely self selected, it's still a diversity problem. There's diversity and there is pandering to vox populi and anti-intellectualism. The first is good, the second is not, and quite frankly, the face of modern conservatism in America has been anti-intellectual for quite some time. And hey, Kristoff seems to have misrepresented the data! https://medium.com/@ginasue/the-lie-of-liberal-intolerance-on-campus-6ba4c67ea8e0#.de9ylal06 https://medium.com/@ginasue/the-lie-of-liberal-intolerance-o... Surprised, I am not.

rbcgerard 10y ago

I think the article is on point, but what makes it a little hard is simply the nomenclature "conservative" vs "progressive" or "liberal" is this just shorthand for republican or democrat, or about actual political belief systems

disbelief 10y ago

The author repeatedly conflates conservatism with Christianity. While there's probably a higher percentage of Christians who identify as conservative, it's not their conservatism that would trouble me in a University setting. I wouldn't want a University science professor to be a creationist for example, but I couldn't care less if they're fiscal conservative who believes in small government.

jccalhoun 10y ago
That's a great point. There are tons of liberal Christians but in the media they tend to be overshadowed by conservative Christians.

pessimizer 10y ago

If we didn't discriminate against the type of conservative religious people who believe in using the power of institutions to advance their religious goals, women, homosexuals, and religious minorities would have a tougher time than they already do. Christianity in this article is a red herring, because I'm sure that conservative fundamentalist Muslims face the same discrimination, and so would conservative evangelical astrologers, if you could find any. What religious people seem to be angry about is the lack of symmetry - that they are judged for discriminating against reasonable people. The lack of symmetry is due to the fact that the universities being discussed are intended to be institutions of reason. There are other universities for people who believe in every sort of invisible world, which do not hesitate to discriminate openly, and fight for their right to do so.

teacup50 10y ago
As a thought experiment, what happens if your liberal non-religious individuals start advancing goals that result in discrimination, because they do not value intellectual diversity?

drewrv 10y ago

I think there's more to it than "academics are hostile to conservatives". The conservative movement in this country is vehemently anti-intellectual. People love to point to Trump but even George W Bush played dumb to appeal to his base. Add in a strongly capitalistic attitude among the american right, that smart ambitious people should work in industry and not in "ivory towers". Why would a fan of Ayn Rand take a government job for meager pay? Academics are probably biased against conservatives. But a conservative is biased against becoming an academic as well.

brooklyndavs 10y ago

“I am the equivalent of someone who was gay in Mississippi in 1950,” Oh give me a F*ing break. You CHOOSE to be a conservative. You aren't born a conservative and face true harassment, discrimination, and death threats because of it. Oh, right thats what YOU would do to someone who is gay probably now if you could get away with it. You are being passed for jobs in academia partly because academia deals in truths and evangelical Christians usually have a world view lacking in many truths. Personally, yeah I would pass you for an academic job if I found out you were an evangelical christian. How can I trust you to know truths in your profession when you believe in complete nonsense like the earth began 2,000 years ago and that evolution doesn't exist. How can I trust you NOT to evangelize in the classroom? Isn't that the whole point of being an evangelical Christian? Get over it. Religious extremism in ALL FORMS is a cancer and needs to be eliminated from society. Join the rest of the modern world or be further relegated to the edge as you so rightfully deserve to be.

orasis 10y ago
Why does choice matter? I could choose to indulge my fabulous side and cross dress, but the social rejection wouldn't be any less painful. Yes, choices do have consequences, but social exclusion based on those choices can still be critiqued.
- brooklyndavs 10y ago
  >I could choose to indulge my fabulous side and cross dress Well, personally, I would say you are born with a fabulous side so you are just being true to yourself. Congrats and have fun! > Yes, choices do have consequences, but social exclusion based on those choices can still be critiqued. The problem is you are making a choice not only to believe in something completely void of fact (you can be ignorant if you want to be I guess) but you are also making a choice that HARMS society as a whole. When a person's choice guides them to discriminate a whole group of people based on some stories written a few thousands of years ago thats a choice that deserves to be critiqued. If your choice guides the people you vote for to be anti-science yeah, that choice deserves to be ridiculed.

dragonwriter 10y ago

The decline of conservatives in academia in the humanities and social sciences (other than economics) post-dates the conservative movement's dismissal of the value of those fields and is a natural consequence of it: if you are part of a political movement which rejects the value of a field of work, you are less likely to seek to work in that field (and, conversely, if you value work in a particular field, you are more likely to split from a political movement that does not.) If conservatives started painting those fields as valuable fields for scholarship which needed more conservative scholars, the gap would, I suspect, substantially disappear within a generation.

ankushnarula 10y ago

(The actual problem is nicely highlighted in this article's most popular Reader Picks comments) There is a popular narrative about what it means to be conservative, liberal, progressive, etc. This narrative is a small simple band in a vastly complex spectrum of views. Unfortunately, we have come to the point where the narrative is being echoed so much that it's impossible to have a conversation framed outside the popular narrative. We have all been trained and self-trained to pigeonhole each other based on these meaningless labels to either a) dismiss each other or b) rally together to dismiss the "other". The one thing that we can't do is suspend our emotional biases and sincerely listen to alternate narratives.

haberman 10y ago

Before you dismiss this as truth-challenged partisans who want recognition of their unjustifiable views, read this. There is a pretty compelling case to be made that a lot of important questions facing us today are being studied by a relatively politically homogenous group of people, and beliefs not rigorously supported by evidence nonetheless become orthodoxy. A monoculture of thought on questions that are far from settled: http://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/ http://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/

scarface74 10y ago

No. I would not hire anyone in a science department who professed a belief of a 6000 year old earth or that didn't "believe in" evolution. I wouldn't vote for anyone who thought that the U.S. should be run based on the bible. No I'm not an atheist but I am against anti-intellectualism.

teacup50 10y ago
And yet, Colleges have no problem hiring individuals that believe some pretty scientifically unfounded things, as long as what they believe falls in line with the orthodoxy.