Why are Professors Liberal?

[Zarquon]

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
Jobs can be typecast in different ways, said Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, who undertook the study.....
Professors and a number of other fields are politically typed. Journalism, art, fashion, social work and therapy are dominated by liberals; while law enforcement, farming, dentistry, medicine and the military attract more conservatives.
These types of occupational reputations affect people’s career aspirations said Mr.Gross..
Mr.Gross and Mr.Fosse’s study is one of the only studies to use data from the General Social Survey of opinions and social behaviors and compare professors with the rest of Americans.
Mr.Gross and Mr.Fosse linked those empirical results to the broader question of why some occupations — just like ethnic groups or religions — have a clear political hue. Using an econometric technique, they were then able to test which of the theories frequently bandied about were supported by evidence and which were not...

The characteristics that define one’s political orientation are also at the fore of certain jobs... Nearly half of the political lopsidedness in academia can be traced to four characteristics that liberals in general, and professors in particular, share:


advanced degrees;
a nonconservative religious theology (which includes liberal Protestants and Jews, and the nonreligious);
an expressed tolerance for controversial ideas; and
a disparity between education and income.


Source (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/arts/18liberal.html?em)
and here's the cake:
Mitchell L. Stevens, a professor of education at Stanford University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/stanford_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) finds the theory promising as choosing an occupation is part of fashioning an identity, noting that people think of themselves as a “corporate type” or a free spirit, which is why you might find highly educated graduates working as bartenders instead of in an office.
He added that the gender-typing of a field like physics might also partly explain the dearth of women in it.
To Mr. Gross, accusations by conservatives of bias and student brainwashing are self-defeating. “The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism,” he said, “the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.”
and here's a graphic (http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/01/18/arts/18liberal-2.html) that goes with the story.

[Michael]

There is the added concept that 'conservative' ideologies don't tend to hold up very well under sustained rational critique - and that's exactly what one is going to find in academia. Same can be said for the religous types. Many conservative/religious 1st year students appear quite dumbfounded when they discover that the vast majority of fellow students and teachers don't share their cultural ideology. Since they believe themselves to be a cultural majority (and have been taught so by parents/church/peers), the university environment thus appears to be foreign or some conspiracy against them. They tend to react to this by claiming to be 'victims'. :ummm:

I well remember that more than a few '1st year' students with conservative ideology abandoning it by the time they get to 4th year. This seems to be very common.

As for the 'self-selecting' that is indeed quite true. Science and engineering studies seem to attract the conservative types probably because of the 'certainty' that they find in these fields.

And as anyone who has any experience in the corporate world can tell you, 'sales' professionals are also about 90% conservative leaning. Probably all that Rand-crap about carving their own destinies. Technical experts seem to skew the other way. :shrug:

[The Drunk Girl]

I just chalked up my older professors as being hippies back in the day! (well some of them acted like or were vocal about it).

This is pretty interesting though. I remember being in grade school-high school and being surprised at how many liberal teachers I had. I even had a teacher in 8th grade tell us about burning her bras and getting high...:erm: Living where I lived, being a liberal always seemed to be frowned upon.

[Michael]

In addition to the 'self-selection' trend identified in the study (see OP), I think there is also a 'liberal bias' in education itself as studies have repeatedly shown that the higher the level of education a person has, the greater the probability of liberal value/views. The converse is also true - conservative values/views does correlate (loosely) to lower levels of achieved education.

That is to say, if the freshman class is 50/50 of liberals and conservatives, the graduating class is quite likely to be 75/25 from this effect. The liberal/conservative skew for Ph.D's is quite striking (in the 90/10 range).

As they say, 'reality has a liberal bias' and that does appear to be part of the effect here.

[Zarquon]

In addition to the 'self-selection' trend identified in the study (see OP), I think there is also a 'liberal bias' in education itself as studies have repeatedly shown that the higher the level of education a person has, the greater the probability of liberal value/views. The converse is also true - conservative values/views does correlate (loosely) to lower levels of achieved education.

That is to say, if the freshman class is 50/50 of liberals and conservatives, the graduating class is quite likely to be 75/25 from this effect. The liberal/conservative skew for Ph.D's is quite striking (in the 90/10 range).

As they say, 'reality has a liberal bias' and that does appear to be part of the effect here.
that's also quite true at the social level, evidenced by woman rights and relative racial equality of today to the 19th century, when bad reasoning and illiteracy were rampant(In this I agree with Amartya Sen who says that prejudice is mostly a result of traditional thinking and contextually bad/uninformed reasoning rather than malignance, and I've often witnessed the same in Indian villages to give just one example).