it's all in your mind...

dear netav - your candor is admirable, to say the least. the following article on a study which has received a lot of flack from republicans (...if the shoe fits...) will hopefully give you an idea of WHY people are so resistant to change and to admitting they're wrong. that's if you believe there's mental diseases out there. some people don't. my own sister will tell you that schizophrenia and bipolar disorders are inventions of scholars who want to make themselves look important. judge for yourself.

Diversify colleges' political tilt
By Laura Vanderkam
Are you prone to fear and aggression? Resistant to change? Intolerant of ambiguity? If so, you have the mind-set to be a political conservative, according to a recently published study in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.
Four researchers from Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Maryland sorted through decades of speeches, court opinions and field studies to see what motivates that strange species known as the conservative. They found, according to a release from Berkeley's press office, "Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality."

For example, Berkeley's press release notes, "Hitler, Mussolini and former president Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk show host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way." The authors claimed they had no political agenda.

Topic for talk radio

Talk radio hosts could laugh for days about the researchers' bald bias. But this study made perfect sense in their universe. As freshmen leave the real world for campus, they should know that, except for a few places, universities have become so devoid of political conservatives that researchers now study them like Margaret Mead observed the Samoans. That dearth also pushes the remaining conservative voices toward the extreme — completing the cycle that led the researchers to lump them with Hitler and Mussolini.

Documenting the campus political gap through Federal Election Commission records and voter-registration logs has become a conservative sport in recent years. In an April Wall Street Journal op-ed, John McGinnis and Matthew Schwartz noted that in the past six years, Georgetown law professors gave approximately $180,000 to Democrats, $2,000 to Republicans and $1,500 to the Greens. Last September, the American Enterprise Institute graphed registrations for "parties of the left" (Democratic, Green) and "parties of the right" (Republican, Libertarian) among social Science faculty nationwide. Among political Science departments, AEI reported, Syracuse clocked in with 20 professors on the left to 1 on the right, San Diego State University at 14 to 1, SUNY-Binghamton at 20 to 1, and so on.

This sport is like one-man volleyball, though, because the colleges don't see a problem. None of the political Science department chairs I discussed the AEI study with saw their faculty disparities as a concern. Jeff Stonecash at Syracuse called it a "totally bogus issue." Alan Zuckerman at Brown (AEI: 7-0) sent me a pro-Iraq war op-ed he wrote as evidence that his department wasn't monolithic. Frank Baumgartner at Penn State assured me that "I am always concerned if there are indications that students do not feel that their views can freely be aired," but said few of Penn State's 600 political science majors had complained.

Part of the issue, as some chairs noted, is that young conservatives skip the bleak academic job market, preferring business school or politics to political science.

That said, demand influences supply, and conservatives looking at academic careers know they risk being judged for holding views far outside campus orthodoxy. Mark Henrie at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a right-leaning, educational non-profit, says he advises right-wing graduate students to "keep their heads down" in the social sciences, because opposition to abortion or gay rights "will be looked at with extreme hostility." The result is conservative professors congregate in a few places, such as George Mason University in Virginia and at Hillsdale College in Michigan. Lone luminaries make their marks elsewhere, such as Harvey Mansfield at Harvard and Robert George at Princeton.

Too few conservatives

But a handful of conservative professors don't constitute real diversity. Even if colleges don't see this lack of diversity as a problem, it is — for the young conservatives who populate even radically liberal universities and for the tenor of campus dialogue as a whole. Without conservative professors to guide them in their political development, conservative students see themselves as shut off from campus debate. They learn to offend rather than convince and drift toward stunts designed to shock.

I saw this phenomenon when I was the editor of the Tory, Princeton's conservative magazine. Among the young right-wingers I met at conferences, papers that outraged campus leftists enjoyed a certain fame. People still talk about how, in 1997, Cornell Review writers "translated" the Africana Studies course offerings into Ebonics. Left-wing thugs burned copies of the paper. The students garnered national media attention, but they convinced no one that the right is right. At one conference, a young man said his paper had mocked the AIDS quilt when it came to town. Liberal students can be just as obnoxious. But as part of the majority, with sympathetic professors, they don't feel such a need to vex the masses to win a hearing. Since the lone conservative voices do, researchers looking for "fear and aggression" and "dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity" certainly can find them.

Colleges could foster a richer, less-dogmatic climate by making good-faith efforts to welcome conservatives into their faculties. They could think of such hiring as administrators often describe affirmative action: not as quotas or lowering standards, but as expanding the search to find qualified applicants. For instance, America's think tanks employ many conservative researchers who would make excellent professors. Students do follow their teachers, and students who can debate the recent Texas sodomy case in classrooms where their position isn't a priori "bigoted" are less likely to lash out by mocking the AIDS quilt.

Campus politics won't change overnight. Still, given universities' concern for diversity of every other form, they'd be wise to start thinking about political diversity, too — unless the Psychological Bulletin study is wrong, and it's liberals who are wary of change.

New York-based writer Laura Vanderkam is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
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