Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (88631)	11/29/2004 3:25:16 PM
From: aladin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793731

Mary, While dribbling on and on about intellectual superiority maybe you could check your grammar? Double negatives even? :-) While so many liberals are confused over Kerry's defeat and lament that so many people (overwhelming majority of the people in universities all over the world) who earn their living through intellectual pursuits can be so wrong, have you ever considered the counter-point? That being - why the overwhelming majority of those who actually contribute to GDP, invent, produce products and capital could be so right? John

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (88631)	11/29/2004 3:43:15 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793731

Some other factors, stream of consciousness, that would tend to increase the concentration of lefties in academia: Teaching is a helping profession. The helping professions attract nurturing types, not strong-father types. Similarly, academics are introverts. (I have no data on this, only observation.) Introverts tend to be thoughtful and introspective and nuanced. Also not strong-father types. University culture is like government bureaucratic culture. You get ahead by fitting in and networking. Your primary customers are your mentors. Therefore you share their opinions. People who have achieve success through their intellect and who don't have to please an external customer base can get arrogant, which presents itself as intolerance to challenge. Particularly in a political environment. Or defensive, which presents the same way. Universities are ivory towers. You don't have to produce anything tangible. Academics don't have a give and take relationship with business folks and ordinary folks. You also have to be published to get ahead. So you have to advance ideas that are publishable in the journals of your subject area, which means not challenging unless you are utterly brilliant and have your ducks lined up to perfection. Universities are like other big businesses in that they have to have rules that protect them from lawsuits so they have to be politically correct, particularly the public ones. You come to think of that as normal even if you weren't predisposed. Universities are inherently progressive. They are at the cutting edge in whatever field, pushing the envelope just as Hollywood has to be edgy to be successful. In the hard sciences that may mean they discover the next great thing. In the soft science and non-science, it often means politically edgy. It's inevitable. There's no place else to go. You can't move backwards. We as a society have defined "smart" a certain way. Lately, in our great rush for diversity, we've broadened our thinking on what smart means. We read books on "Emotional intelligence," for example. But smart is mostly still defined as what scores well on IQ tests. We value those criteria that we can test whether or not those are the salient criteria. Academics score well on IQ tests. And they value that in others. Smart people tend to not trust democracy or the marketplace. They don't want people not as smart as they are canceling out their votes. They also more inclined to think people as smart as they are are smart enough to centrally manage things, obviating the problems of the public cohort. There are university departments, as mentioned earlier, such as black and women's studies, that exist solely to advance and produce practitioners of an inherently lefty movement. They are inevitably overwhelmingly lefty and skew the already lefty demographics. We will never have a predominantly conservative academia, not in this system. It would be incongruous. That is not to say that the history and social science departments shouldn't make an effort to diversify, only that it doesn't matter if the chemistry department does or doesn't and that, in any case, the result will still be lefty although maybe not so much so.