American Academia Is a Corrupt Racket

Posted on | October 31, 2015 | 31 Comments

Arthur Brooks reports the deliberate and systematic prejudice:

This year, a team of scholars from six universities studying ideological diversity in the behavioral sciences published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that details a shocking level of political groupthink in academia. The authors show that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal social psychologists. . . .
In one survey cited, 82 percent of social psychologists admitted they would be less likely to support hiring a conservative colleague than a liberal scholar with equivalent qualifications. . . .
One of the study’s authors, Philip E. Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania, put it to me more bluntly. Expecting trustworthy results on politically charged topics from an “ideologically incestuous community,” he explained, is “downright delusional.”

(Hat-tip: Donald Douglas at American Power.) This has profound repercussions, because every intelligent college student is aware of the political biases of the faculty. Because the left-wing prejudice of professors is so extreme — 14-to-1 — young conservatives know that they have a near-zero chance of ever being employed in academia. Therefore, conservatives simply don’t pursue advanced degrees that would qualify them for such employment. No matter how much interest a conservative student might have in a field like psychology or history, there is no incentive for a conservative to seek a Ph.D., because no university would ever knowingly hire a conservative scholar.

Systematically excluded from employment in academia, conservative students instead get degrees in fields like business management or engineering, which qualify them for private-sector employment with just a bachelor’s degree, or else go to law school. The built-in political prejudices of the arts, humanities and social science faculty thus have a self-replicating effect, discouraging the interest of any student who does not support the radical far-left politics of the professors.

Discrimination against conservatives in academia, in turn, influences the larger culture. An obvious reason for the blatant bias of the mainstream media is that all the university professors who train journalists are Obama voters. Go to Northwestern University or Columbia University and try to find a Republican on the communications, journalism or political science faculty. Think about this: Who is the most successful radio broadcaster of the past 25 years? Rush Limbaugh. Has any university communications department in America ever asked Rush Limbaugh to lecture their students? Don’t be absurd.

Likewise, have any of the more prominent on-air personalities on Fox News — Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly — ever been invited to share their expertise with journalism students? What about the reporters, commentators and editors at National Review and the Weekly Standard? Do they get asked to teach any college journalism seminars?

No, of course they don’t. Our nation’s university campuses are off-limits to conservatives. What colleges now provide students is not education, but political indoctrination by fanatics who see their primary mission as recruiting and training activists for the Democrat Party.

Our nations’s colleges are totalitarian institutions controlled by radicals who hate America almost as much as they hate God.

Damn them all. Damn them all to Hell.

Category: Education

Comments

31 Responses to “American Academia Is a Corrupt Racket”

Evi L. Bloggerlady
October 31st, 2015 @ 8:09 pm

It’s very scary
Mike G.
October 31st, 2015 @ 8:41 pm

We need to do the same thing to the progressives they did to us, but, it will take decades to change, just like it took decades for the progs to undermine higher education.
Fail Burton
October 31st, 2015 @ 8:43 pm

And as you’ve observed, their political orthodoxy is increasingly based on lesbian feminism falsely presenting itself as anti-Jim Crow and for women’s rights. But let’s look at what that gets us. Anyone who’s read Orwell’s 1984 remembers his scuffed up dystopian world of shitty food and awful liquor. That is exactly the vision Adrienne Rich’s famous poem about marriage gives us about the “dystopian” dangers of marriage; a hollow empty world of women unfulfilled. Orwell warns against abnormal tyranny. Lesbians against normalcy. What kooks.
rambler
October 31st, 2015 @ 9:33 pm

Academia is placing the nails in its own coffin. Social “Science” majors are a total joke. Half of what is published as a “study” is dirt obvious and the other half is stupid nonsense. Eventually the house of cards they built will fall.
Dirty Dutch
October 31st, 2015 @ 9:33 pm

Happy Halloween doll.
<3
rambler
October 31st, 2015 @ 9:37 pm

Happy Halloween Sunshine. ;-)))
Dirty Dutch
October 31st, 2015 @ 9:38 pm

(((-:
RS
October 31st, 2015 @ 10:24 pm

As I said a couple of days ago in a comment to your Susanne Venker post:

The the extent that the social sciences have attempted to quantify outcomes of “traditional” v. “progressive,” three things have occurred. First, the data is strongly in favor of the “traditional.” Simply stated, children of stable, traditional, “mom & dad married” homes are better off in any metric worth considering, i.e. psychological, economic, educational, whatever.

Second, Progressives cannot abide such outcomes and as a consequence, those studies are pilloried and suppressed.

This leads to the third result: Academe knows it’s professional suicide to propose or pursue or publish such a study. This is why we’re continually subjected to either studies with horribly flawed methodology or outright fabrications to maintain the Progressive fiction that there is no real benefit to a “traditional” lifestyle, in spite of what our own eyes and experience tells us.
Matt_SE
November 1st, 2015 @ 12:03 am

As a current student, I assure you that everything our host said was true. One-sided doesn’t begin to cover it.
Matt_SE
November 1st, 2015 @ 12:16 am

I don’t think conservatives were originally excluded due to bias. I think they are more achievement-minded and gravitated to the high-performance disciplines.
Conversely, Thomas Sowell said that progressives tend to flock to the jobs where their incompetence won’t hurt them as much.
That’s the social sciences, in a nutshell.

But yeah, the bias has now gone over a tipping point and conservatives are actively excluded.
Clinton
November 1st, 2015 @ 12:19 am

Sort of gives the lie to all their blather about valuing diversity and freedom of expression, no?
Rufus
November 1st, 2015 @ 12:24 am

No, it won’t take decades to change, IF you have the right people in office. Mr Obama has shown the way. Since Washington has a finger in every funding pie, the President can cut federal grants to college humanities, sociology and psychology departments that do not demonstratively have an ideological balance or an affirmative action policy for hiring conservatives. Colleges with an extreme imbalance would be considered as epso facto discriminatory and would have federal funding cut off completely for some period.

I might add that in some blue states, the state will take over the funding of these departments to maintain the imbalance. In that case they will, at least, have learned a lesson in federalism. 🙂
concern00
November 1st, 2015 @ 3:22 am

Hey RSM! You’ve done a superb job drawing attention to the evils of feminism, the paucity of morality on the left and generally some great scenarios that speak directly to the endtimes.

What I’d like to see more of from you, if it’s within your repertoire, is a greater call to action. WTF do WE do with all this information you’re sending our way. Vote Trump? Go survivalist? Preach on the nearest corner? Head between legs and kiss arse goodbye?

Please do not take this as a criticism, but it’s about time we stood up.
gastorgrab
November 1st, 2015 @ 7:18 am

It’s not just jobs in academics.

Every liberal professor is more likely to see potential in those students whom they identify with, and score them better.
robertstacymccain
November 1st, 2015 @ 7:32 am

Well, “knowledge is power.”

My job, as I see it, is to expose these things to public attention, and to trust that people will act on the information provided. As far as a “call to action,” one thing that comes to mind is that people should be doing their own research at the state and local level. For example, are their departments of Women’s Studies at the state university? What are they teaching? Who are the professors? What textbooks and other readings are assigned? Are the state legislators who appropriate taxpayer money for these institutions aware of what is being taught in these programs?

All it would take, I suspect, is for legislators in “red” states (e.g., Texas) to begin a close scrutiny of Women’s Studies programs at state universities in order to create awareness of how radicals are exploiting taxpayer-funded institutions and betraying the public trust.
Whitney
November 1st, 2015 @ 8:27 am

I’m reading God and Man at Yale, 1951, by William F. Buckley. Its shocking and disturbing how firmly in place the liberal bias was then. All university students have been indoctrinated for generations. It looks like this is just going to have to play out. Based on history, it pretty easy to stay that state control will ultimately fail but there is a new and powerful player in the game, technology. It makes things more unpredictable.
rambler
November 1st, 2015 @ 10:28 am

BINGO!
Dana
November 1st, 2015 @ 10:52 am

Plus there’s more opportunity to get in the liberal students’ pants!
Dana
November 1st, 2015 @ 11:02 am

Think about the career path of the academic. First there’s seven years of undergraduate school (see: John Belushi in Animal House), then not having to grow up and leave the university, another two or four years of graduate school, with whatever jobs you have to have being teaching assistants on campus. As you get older, you still get to look at cute coeds in casual, and sometimes skimpy, attire, and go to off-campus parties where the beer and pot flow freely, and maybe score with a coed or three.

The ultimate goal is a professorship, which leaves you still at the university, with a very good salary, and, once you achieve tenure, a guaranteed job for life as long as the coeds with whom you copulate don’t file a complaint.

Is this not the liberal dream job?
robertstacymccain
November 1st, 2015 @ 12:06 pm

Exactly. I well remember the “permanent students” who hung around the Pub when I was in college. Circa 1981 you had a lot of ex-hippie types, guys 25-to-30 years old who had come to campus in the Vietnam era and decided never to leave. They were “working on their master’s,” allegedly, and meanwhile getting high every afternoon, hanging out at the Pub, and screwing whatever college girls happened to cross their paths.

Academia is a lifestyle, and can be quite an enviable lifestyle for those who are successful within it. Book royalties, research grants, expense-paid trips to speak at conferences, etc. While doing research on feminism, I’ve enountered a lesbian couple who teach at a public university in Southern California, collect royalties on the textbook they edit, and spend their holidays at a beachfront vacation home in Florida. Of course, for every “success” story like that, there are dozens of grad students scrambling their way toward that coveted tenure-track slot, and lots of semi-employed Ph.D.’s doing freelance work in between their occasional adjunct teaching gigs. These are all products of the Higher Education Bubble and are we surprised that student loan debt (which helps make the academic lifestyle possible) is considered a major issue by Democrats?
Reader
November 1st, 2015 @ 12:10 pm

Very good advice. And don’t neglect the “Student Life” and “Residence Life” departments — looks those up on the website of your local university. They don’t get as much attention as the professors because they don’t write articles and give speeches, but they are the on-the-ground foot soldiers who implement this stuff on a daily basis. This is the national group they all belong to — study it:

https://www.naspa.org/
badanov
November 1st, 2015 @ 12:55 pm

Seen on Facebook:

Waiter comes over to a table of feminists and asks, “Is anything OK here?”
theBuckWheat
November 1st, 2015 @ 2:30 pm

Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions.coming true. Personnel is policy. Defund the left at every opportunity.
Fail Burton
November 1st, 2015 @ 2:41 pm

Speaking of NW U I think it’s funny you did a piece on Laura Kipnis and then she gets fried by the monsters she created not long afterwards. She actually said she was frightened of them. Well, duh. We’ve been saying they’re retarded Orwellian IngSoc for some years now.
News of the Week (November 1st, 2015) | The Political Hat
November 1st, 2015 @ 4:14 pm

[…] American Academia Is a Corrupt Racket Arthur Brooks reports the deliberate and systematic prejudice […]
Quartermaster
November 1st, 2015 @ 4:35 pm

Law School is problematic these days. I have a friend who graduated Washington and Lee Law School 20 years ago and was forced to resign to get out of a situation that would have brought the bar down on her head, and is having trouble finding work. She hasn’t had full time employment for 2 years now. Law schools are turning out more grads than can be employed.
Quartermaster
November 1st, 2015 @ 4:50 pm

If Fed funds are cut off to most colleges, that college will die within 2 years at the outside. States have their backs to the wall and it is unlikely they would be able to pick up the slack.
Daniel Freeman
November 1st, 2015 @ 5:22 pm

I strongly recommend that every private college strive to be independent of the Feds by keeping administration light and forgoing amenities, let alone luxuries. They should only spend money on academic excellence, because I only see two possibilities:

1. The Feds will get more and more intrusive about imposing politically correct madness, using their funding as a lever to force it.

and/or

2. The taxpayers will get fed up with subsidizing politically correct madness and will yank those funds.
concern00
November 1st, 2015 @ 6:17 pm

By nature, conservatives tend to be less activist than our leftie compatriots. The accumulation of decades of rot,decay and deviances seems to eventually force the hand of conservatives…and then it’s usually the far right that rallies the cause. Good outcomes not necessarily guaranteed.
Robert What?
November 1st, 2015 @ 7:04 pm

I had a discussion with a history professor at s small liberal arts college, and he was challenging my assertion that there is almost no intellectual diversity in academia today. So I asked him how many faculty members were conservative. His answer, and I kid you not, was that they don’t take on faculty members who’s ideas are incorrect. He could not see the extraordinary irony in his views.
Southern Air Pirate
November 2nd, 2015 @ 1:41 pm

If not help tutor your way into the right trysts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2015/11/02/notre-dame-tutor-accused-of-pressuring-students-including-athletes-into-having-sex-with-her-daughter/?tid=sm_fb