Time is up for radical professors like Ward Churchill (Joe Scarbough) [sic!!]
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Blog Them Out of the Stone Age: Toward A Broader Vision of Military History and National Security Affairs
Saturday, February 05, 2005
(F) Joe Scarborough: Up Against the Wall, Ultraliberal Profs!
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2 comments:
One wonders if university professors, who are some of the most educated people in the world, tending to liberalism is a coincidence or not. If education leads to liberalism, that wouldn't surprise me at all.
Personally I think people of a liberal bent seem to self-select into academe (at least the humanities) more often than others. Once embarked on graduate study people, whatever their original viewpoint, usually pick up the dominant corporate culture, which tends to be liberal. I use "corporate" in the sense that it's used in studies of professionalism and professionalization; i.e., professions are characterized by 1) expertise in a particular field considered by society to be significant; 2) social responsibility - in return for relative autonomy in choosing and training its membership, the profession acknowledges its obligations to aid the larger society; and 3) corporate behavior - the "insiders' code" of conduct, dress, speech, opinions, etc.
That said, I have yet to see a conservative professor or graduate student marginalized simply because of their political perspectives. Sometimes, however, they themselves manifest an antagonistic view toward the dominant academic culture and refuse to play the game the way the game is played. This can produce adverse consequences, as it would in any profession, which the conservative then tends to attribute to political bias.
To give an example: in academic culture one is expected to publish a monograph with a university press. Failure to do so can result in your book being treated almost as if it doesn't exist. This would be true whether the author was liberal or conservative, but the conservative may prefer to believe that they are the victim of political prejudice rather than their own career misstep. I have noticed that people of all political persuasions reach for the "victimization" rationale whenever they feel under threat. And why not? It's a tactic that tends to work.
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