Liberal Professors: A Type-Casted Profession?

18 Jan, 2010 by Melissa Clouthier

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Right out of central casting: Pony-tailed hair, elbow pads, Birkenstocks and nubby socks, spectacles and a general dislike for people, especially, ironically, young people. Seems that there’s a reason:

Nursing is what sociologists call “gender typed.” Mr. Gross said that “professors and a number of other fields are politically typed.” Journalism, art, fashion, social work and therapy are dominated by liberals; while law enforcement, farming, dentistry, medicine and the military attract more conservatives.

“These types of occupational reputations affect people’s career aspirations,” he added in a telephone interview from his office at the University of British Columbia. Mr. Fosse, his co-author, is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard.

The academic profession “has acquired such a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism that over the last 35 years few politically or religiously conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors,” they write in the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” That is especially true of their own field, sociology, which has become associated with “the study of race, class and gender inequality – a set of concerns especially important to liberals.”

So it’s not that a conservative would have to keep his politics to himself lest he be denied tenure or tormented on his path to professorship, it’s that conservatives just don’t want to be a professor because professors are so politically typecast?

I don’t know. You can read the whole article and see for yourself.

It’s true that some professions are more female dominated: teaching, nursing, flight attendant, etc.

Political type-casting? Maybe conservatives want to be involved with something where they actually contribute something concrete to society rather than some airy-fairy intellectual exercise lost in the theoretical.

The problem with conservatives shunning academia, of course, is that there is a complete lack of diverse thought in education from bottom to top. Kids hear Marxist drivel and the ideas are never challenged. And heaven forbid a student challenge them. They’ll pay for their uppity-ness for sure.

It’s a chicken-egg thing, I think. One problem feeds into another. The solution has been for colleges to spring up that support more conservative ideology across the board. The problem is that there are just too few conservative schools.