Inductivist

I was curious if college liberalizes students. Common sense tells me it does, but I have seen research that throws doubt on the idea.

Listed below are the mean conservatism scores by year of college for those attending college since 2000 (General Social Survey data).

Mean conservatism

Freshmen  4.04
Sophomores  3.71

Juniors  3.62
Seniors  3.69

Students tend to get more liberal as they move through college. The shift from the freshman to junior year is almost half a standard deviation, which means it is a fairly big change.  So it does look like academics are somewhat successful at their goal of turning our youth into progressives. They seem to have the most luck in the first three years--the seniors are no more liberal than juniors.

The academic conference I'm attending is finishing up today. (My sell-out research paper was well-received). After three days of observing academics, it is clear to me that the social sciences attract precisely the wrong kind of people. They are I-want-to-help-and-thus-look-good people. In terms of personality, they are like sheep. Social science needs curmudgeons, but it gets womanly men and ideological women. I've never seen people so desperate to say the right thing. Cults have nothing on these folks.

Music to my ears:

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three. 

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

I, for one, look forward to the end of "don't ask, don't tell" for conservatives in higher education.

In my experience, universities are populated with manly women and womanly men. I won't claim that academia is a matriarchy, but it might easily reach that point. It seems to attract men who lack the masculinity to compete in other fields. Perhaps aggressive women are drawn to the power vacuum or to the leftist culture.

Many of these women are tough as nails. If they had been running the universities in the Sixties and the student protesters had been, say, neo-Nazis, there would have been a hell of a lot more than four dead at Kent State.  

3,200 professors have signed a pro-Ayers petition. And you wonder why I get so pissed off at liberals? I have to work with these idiots every day. The Steveosphere is one place that takes intelligence seriously, but my work environment reminds me on a daily basis that IQ ain't everything.

And this "Ayers is a leading education scholar" is nonsense. I knew of Ayers years ago, but as a terrorist, not a serious scholar. I've never run across his work on education or juvenile justice in anything I've ever read. That's probably because I stick to serious, quantitative research, not Marxist drivel.

(By the way, "education scholar" is an oxymoron.)

The most amazing thing I have heard in some time: Today, the Dean--a man who has spent much of his career trying to fill the school's faculty vacancies with women and minorities--in a room of six women, two Hispanics, one black, and one white man, said that only a sick racist would believe that white men are the group most discriminated against. (He was referring to comments in class by students that we faculty need to put a stop to.)