The facts are *only* in dispute.
1. No official records exist about whether profs are liberal or conservative. That's a good thing--in a free society, we don't require such records. Any surveys are small, strictly voluntary, often poor in quality. 1/3 🧵
www.chronicle.com/article/why-...
2. All faculty members are entitled to their private political views. Holding those views tells us nothing about what they teach in class and how. Huge non sequitur.
Law enforcement and armed services all hold private political views, but they're not psychoanalyzed this way. 2/3
3. Reducing university teaching and research to artificial "conservative" and "liberal" categories only presents a parody of what being a professor involves. It misinforms the public about higher education when accurate and constructive information is most needed. 3/3
As always, I suspect projection when the right mentions this. They can't imagine teaching that isn't partisan indoctrination, perhaps because they've never experienced it, and likely because it isn't what they would do.
I took an early American history class with Michael Allen, coauthor of A Patriots History.
He was actually an interesting guy whose politics did NOT come through in class.
Quick to disavow his coauthor (Allen only wrote the first 5 chapters), he was more a bolo tie wearing west coast libertarian.
WTAF? Academia is super conservative by any meaningful definition of conservatism. It’s not reactionary or Conservative (TM) if by that you mean the science-denying brand of Republicanism, but that’s tautological. Most profs are very happy with the traditional order that benefits them.
Of course, part of the issue is the absolutely braindead juxtaposition of conservative and liberal in the US which is the result of a right wing redefinition of the word liberal and invention of libertarianism as (oxy)moronic right wing caricature of liberalism.
