Washington Post on liberal faculty

Kudos to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post for doing such a detailed piece on liberal bias in American academia. Got to love his lead:

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

Beautiful!

The results of the study are explained by one of the researchers, Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University.

"There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It's a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you'd expect to be dominated by liberals."

Unfortunately, this is just more of what conservative students and faculty have known (intimately) for decades: being conservative counts against faculty in the achedemic work world. Some, of course, are still willing to deny that this "homogenous environment" has any significant impact on students.

When asked about the findings, Jonathan Knight, director of academic freedom and tenure for the American Association of University Professors, said... "It's hard to see that these liberal views cut very deeply into the education of students. In fact, a number of studies show the core values that students bring into the university are not very much altered by being in college."

Oh? Perhaps students are rebelling after all when they are told by their professors they need to set personal belief aside if they want to achieve real critical thought. That’s an interesting development!

Besides which, as the piece goes on to cite, "a Harris Poll of the general public last year found that 33 percent describe themselves as conservative and 18 percent as liberal."

With this kind of contrast of academia with the real world, how can anyone expect that students will not be affected in some way. Rare is the moment when a liberal professor is openly critical of conservative view--therefore, I would hypothesize that student's say they haven't changed, without really understanding how their new "knowledge" has been applied to them through an inch-thick blue colored lens.

There’s plenty more to read in the actual piece.