The College Fix

That’s how UVA Professor Jonathan Haidt described the grand total of 3 self-identified conservatives at a 1,000 person social psychology conference. From the NYT article:

“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.”

In his speech, Dr. Haidt also revealed email correspondences from non-liberal graduate students who discussed the pressures and biases they felt from their liberal colleagues. One email read:

“I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work… Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”

The Cornell Review devotes many of its pages to reporting the harmful effects of liberal bias on campus, among students and with professors in the classroom. As any Cornell conservative- or for that matter, open-minded liberal- knows, a liberally-biased professor takes away from an enriching learning environment. Alternative historical perspectives are often not discussed, pro-market arguments are overlooked, and conservative political figures are treated with scorn and ridicule.

But Haidt believes that the negative consequences of a liberal academe extend far beyond the classroom. Take, for example, the tens of millions of dollars that universities spend on research and diversity programs based on the assumption that women face systematic bias and discrimination in the academic workplace. Research contradicting this assumption, like a recent study by Cornell Psychology Profesors Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, is ignored, and universities continue to invest valuable dollars into misguided efforts:

“Thus,” [the Cornell researchers] conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past.” Instead of presuming discrimination in science or expecting the sexes to show equal interest in every discipline, the Cornell researchers say, universities should make it easier for women in any field to combine scholarship with family responsibilities.

Perhaps equally outspoken academics like Dr. Haidt can continue to bring attention to and eventually mend — or at least ameliorate — the problem of underrepresented conservatives in academia.

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