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Is this really presenting a fair picture? Really, if I had two candidates who were identical and the only differentiating factor I had was that one liked Candy

• m-photonic 12y ago
  You're being discriminatory in a sense, but then being discriminatory is normal. It's just what people do, and the large-scale consequences can be trivial or important depending on any number of things. Whether or not it's worth intervening through policy (or simply through culture or collective intent) varies case by case, but I think there's a case to be made here.
  • tomlock 12y ago
    But why? What tangible impact has it had on conservatives?
    • m-photonic 12y ago
      I don't care about the harm done to conservatives, I care about the harm done to liberals. Of course people like to hang out with people who see things their way, and there's nothing wrong with that, but when everyone agrees, the culture turns into a circlejerk prone to groupthink and lower standards of reasoning. When people have to answer to those with different opinions, backgrounds, perspectives, and allegiances, they're forced to develop their viewpoints in a much more robust way. This is just common sense, but studies seem to back it up (as the blog post goes into).
    • wmil 12y ago
      The issue is that theories start with liberal values and assumptions and conservative ideas aren't fairly evaluated. This creates blind spots in the field. There are examples in the draft paper. Moreover it taints policy recommendations and causes Republicans to distrust calls for "evidence based policy". Read the draft paper linked in the article. [http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Du...]
      • TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
        I think considering the massive policy advantages - if not the total lockdown - given to conservative ideas in government, especially in economics and banking, that's not quite the problem it might seem to be. The real problem with left-wing academia is that it has been persuaded to believe that ritualised criticisms of conservative public policy are a substitute for political influence. The academic left has almost exactly no political influence at this time. As for evidence-based policy - when conservatives stop promoting frankly kooky positions like climate change denial or an insistence that raising the minimum wage kills jobs it's going to be easier to accept that conservatives have an interest in evidence-based rational policy.
        • wmil 12y ago
          You can't get a senior job at the DOE without a PhD in Education, and you can't get an PhD Education without publishing a thesis the academic left supports... At least in education the academic left has had a complete stranglehold on policy for 50+ years. Saying that conservatives have a total lockdown on policy is just silly. The deeper problem that Haidt is found is that people on the left can't actually answer a survey as a conservative would. Libertarians and conservatives can answer surveys as a liberal would when asked to, but liberals are too insular and only have a caricature of conservatives in their mind. Your statement about economics and banking illustrates that. Wall St has power and influence in DC because it has a lot of money, not because it has ideological support from conservatives.
• barry-cotter 12y ago
  Below is an excerpt from an interview on James Miller's fight for tenure at Smith College and an excerpt from the paper discussed. Note that Dr. Miller is an economist and as such is much closer to the mainstream of his discipline than a hypothetical conservative social psychologist. If you want another unambiguous case of politically motivated violation of academic freedom look at this case study of Linda S. Gottfredson's experience at the University of Delaware. She had to fight for six years. She's a psychologist in a field that's less homogeneous than social psychology. Lessons in academic freedom as lived experience Linda S. Gottfredson * School of Education, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009academicfreedom.pdf http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009academicfr... Conservative Professor Fights Smith's Tenure Decision · 31 May 2003 O'REILLY: In the "Personal Story" segment tonight, James Miller, who teaches economics at Smith College in Massachusetts, was up for tenure this year, but he didn't get it. Miller says the reason is he's a conservative Republican. And the college grievance committee agrees he wasn't treated fairly, saying "the rationale for their votes included consideration of matters that infringed on the candidate's right to academic freedom." Joining us now from Boston is Professor Miller, who is the author of the book, "Game Theory at Work." All right, so you succeeded in convincing the hierarchy at Smith College that you were, indeed, denied tenure because of your political beliefs, which is supposed to be against every academic tenet in this country. But I find it hard to believe that a college as prestigious as Smith, they would punish you because you were a conservative. Am I naive? JAMES MILLER, SMITH COLLEGE ASST. PROF.: Well, I think the problem is that there are so few conservatives and Republicans at most American colleges, including Smith, that when, you know, they read something written by a conservative, it just seems crazy to them. So I don't think the people who are punishing me for being a conservative thought they were violating my academic freedom. They thought they were keeping out someone who has this utterly crazy beliefs from teaching and corrupting their students. In the social sciences and humanities, however, there is a stronger imbalance. For instance, recent surveys find that 58 - 66 percent of social science professors in the United States identify as liberals, while only 5 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 8 to 1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Klein & Stern, 2009; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). A similar situation is found in the humanities where surveys find that 52 - 77 percent of humanities professors identify as liberals, while only 4 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 5:1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). In psychology the imbalance is slightly stronger: 84 percent identify as liberal while only 8 percent identify as conservative (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). That is a ratio of 10.5 to 1. In the United States as a whole, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is roughly 1 to 2 (Gallup, 2010).