Nicholas Kristof is horrified to learn that there aren’t many academic conservatives in some disciplines. Only somewhere between 2% and 11% (depending on the discipline, and the study) of university faculty identify as Republicans.
Yancey, the black sociologist, who now teaches at the University of North Texas, conducted a survey in which up to 30 percent of academics said that they would be less likely to support a job seeker if they knew that the person was a Republican.
The discrimination becomes worse if the applicant is an evangelical Christian. According to Yancey’s study, 59 percent of anthropologists and 53 percent of English professors would be less likely to hire someone they found out was an evangelical.
Well, the thing is, we don’t ask about political or religious affiliation in job interviews, so that’s rather irrelevant. It just doesn’t come up. If a geologist or a biologist, for example, was a fiscal conservative who went to church every Sunday and thought marriage should always be between a man and a woman, I’d still be able to vote for their appointment, as long as they weren’t going to teach that the earth was 6000 years old or that climate change is fake in geology class, or that homosexuality was an abomination unto the Lord in physiology.
But here’s the deal: if I knew someone was a Republican evangelical, I would be less likely to recommend them for hiring. It’s not because of a bias on my part, but a bias on their part. It’s thanks to crank magnetism.
If you are one of those things, you are much more likely to believe in creationism, or conspiracy theories, or so-called ‘scientific racism’, or any of a number of other destructive and thoroughly debunked ideas. If you show up for an interview with sober, sensible attitudes and are able to clearly explain the established ideas in your discipline, no problem. But if you show up and let slip a bunch of babble about your wackadoodle theories, we’re going to prefer another candidate. These loons are self-winnowing, which reduces the frequency of self-professed conservatives in the applicant pool.
What Kristof misses is that faculty tend to be — and he would be shocked to hear it — conservative, in the sense that we’re not interested in bringing in a radical weirdo. We’ve got jobs to do. We’ve got a multi-year curriculum to teach. We really don’t want some wild-eyed nut throwing batty ideas at our students that we’ll have to un-teach in the next semester. (You think I’m some demented atheist fanatic on the blog? My courses are actually very straightforward and conventional.)
Kristof also overlooks something else. Democrat and Republican are not synonyms for liberal goofball and conservative. Quite the opposite: Democrats are the American conservative party, while Republicans have become increasingly fringey and bizarre and extreme over my lifetime. Hillary Clinton is conservative. Donald Trump is a kook. When you use the Democrat and Republican labels as proxies for how staid and mainstream a party is, you’ve got it exactly backwards if you think a shortage of Republican faculty is a measure of how radical a university is.
There’s also the usual stench of a persecution complex in Kristof’s essay.
“I am the equivalent of someone who was gay in Mississippi in 1950,” a conservative professor is quoted as saying in “Passing on the Right,” a new book about right-wing faculty members by Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr.
Jebus. Being gay in Mississippi in 1950 (or 2016) meant you were at risk of abuse and murder. Being a Christian Republican anywhere in the US today means you are part of the dominant culture; you do not ever get to pretend to be a persecuted martyr because you didn’t get a job offer at that liberal arts college. Get in line with all the atheist Democrats who are also struggling to get a job in academia.
When you make that kind of comparison, there’s only one reasonable response: fuck you, privileged douchebag. No wonder people don’t want to hire you.
It’s *illegal* to ask about such things in job interviews! (Assuming the position is not for a political operative nor a priest).
So if you want to hide your political / religious affiliation, marital / familial status, etc. from a prospective employer, or straight-up lie about them, the law has your back.
We don’t ask about them. We also don’t ask about family status. Those are completely irrelevant to doing the job.
Sometimes stuff like being married is volunteered by the applicant, because, for instance, their spouse is also looking for a job. But in 30 years of job interviews, I have never heard an applicant discuss voter registration or church affiliation. I can’t quite imagine how that would be important.
Although, maybe if we had a Muslim applicant, concern about the lack of mosques anywhere near us might be reasonable. An evangelical Christian? They’ve got a choice of like 15 different fine shades of Christianity right here in town.
I looked at Yancey’s profile at the University of North Texas. It has a link to the UNT Institute of Christian Studies. The “Our Values” page of the institute states:
“Solid Academic Research: Christian Studies will promote work that is conducted with acceptable academic methods. We expect the bulk of the writings of researchers afflicted with the center to be peer-reviewed by qualified academics in their area of study.”
Can you spot the Freudian typo?
The reason there are comparatively few conservatives on university faculties is not because they face discrimination. It’s because people who are well informed and trained in critical thinking tend not to agree with much of modern conservatism. As Stephen Colbert put it, reality has a well-known liberal bias. Maybe they should ponder that.
UNT is where I did my doctorate. My discipline had essentially no Republicans in the faculty – part of that is self-selection. This was the Environmental Science faculty, and most Republicans aren’t interested in that (I am aware of only one Republican in the student body, as well, and he was very skeptical that what we were teaching and learning had any basis in reality – one has to ask why he was there?)
But there were plenty of academics who were Republicans (I know, because they DO let you know). They were in the business department, the economics department, and any other department having to do with money. The same at the school where I did my masters.
And I have never had a “liberal” professor who would flunk you for having conservative views. Where I did my undergrad, there was a professor in the Political Science department who informed his students at the beginning of the semester that he required you to be registered to vote, and registered Democrats would not be passing his course. Students routinely changed their registration once they enrolled in his class (I don’t know how many changed back once they were out). The sad thing is that he was teaching Constitutional Law and almost certainly knew that what he was doing was illegal. Since the administration didn’t slap him down, and no one filed a lawsuit, he kept on happily failing students who didn’t toe his ideological line. I just avoided his class. There was another instructor who taught that course who did not ask students about their political beliefs, and did not share his with them. He was only interested in the students doing the hard work required to produce quality work in his class.
I’ve never flunked a student for holding creationist views, either. There is no “I believe the earth is old” requirement in my classes, although some fundamentalist colleges require a bible-believin’ young earth testimonial in their classes.
The rich and powerful have always had a persecution complex: hence Iraq, Grenada, Vietnam can be seen as posing threats to the United States; hence the feeling of persecution from Wall Street executives, who, according to Jane Mayer, complain bitterly because Obama doesn’t praise them enough; hence Charles Murray claiming to have been ostracized for The Bell Curve, despite its receiving rave reviews in the major journals and newspapers, including the New York Times, and despite his being continuously funded by wealthy corporate donors.
And of course the Koch brothers, the heads of the second most profitable corporation in the United States, think they are constantly besieged on all sides.
I can’t remember where I heard this, but I recall someone claiming to be a teacher (no reason not to believe them) say that when biology came up, and especially evolution, if a student voiced concerns they were told they they don’t have to believe in the information, but they do have to know it to pass. I’m curious if you’ve ever had to deal with something similar PZ?
I read that article too. I think that, in most of the disciplines, it probably won’t come up unless the candidate specifically brings it up by listing something like “President of Young Republicans” on their cv. So I doubt that a hiring bias is likely to appear in most of the sciences and humanities.
I do think political bias might be more of a problem in a sociology or political science department, though, since the titles and abstracts of dissertations and publications are likely to reveal a person’s slant. I have a Republican friend in international studies who feels he’s been turned down for interviews and jobs because of his dissertation topic. I don’t see any reason to doubt him, and it’s troubling.
It seems hypocritical to say that we want a faculty that looks like America when it comes to race and gender, but NOT when it comes to politics. Doesn’t that feel hypocritical to you, too? I mean, while of course I agree that any intellectual worthy of the name SHOULD come to political conclusions identical to my own, I also believe that, when there is no debate, there is no progress. Besides, a large part of the anti-intellectualism that has infested the Republican party these days is based on their perception of academia as a Democratic monolith. When the Scott Walkers come to defund us, I’d like our defense to be “No, we really do represent all points of the political spectrum,” not “Sure we’re all a bunch of leftists. What’re you gonna do about it?” We know what the answer to that question will be.
As far as a social stigma is concerned, there are members of our faculty and staff who moonlight as pastors of evangelical churches, and I don’t think anyone thinks less of them for that. But if it came out at a faculty party that someone was a Trump supporter, I do think that person would be shunned — Trump bashing seems to be popular these days whenever two or three faculty are gathered together, and from what I’ve observed, everyone’s agreement that he must be prevented at all costs is generally just assumed.
I read that opinion piece in the dead-tree edition of the International New York Times over lunch today. The restaurant was not too busy, so the hippy-ish looking long-haired bearded gent in the corner practically shouting “Oh for fecks sake!”, “No!”, with the odd “Horsepucky!” and “This is not a curry!” (tasty, but not anywheres near spicy enough) was a bit obvious…
Besides the — illegal, as others have pointed out — presumed / implied interview questions, it was the dubious dummie:thug :: “liberal”:”conservative” equivalence which irritated me. In addition to poopyhead’s points, it is also falsely bi-modal, a presumption you “have” to be one or the other.
Only 2% to 11% of academica admit to being conservatives? Shocking! That menas that 89 % to 98 % of the instructors at Bob Jones, Libderty U. etc must be closet liberals.
“When the Scott Walkers come to defund us, I’d like our defense to be “No, we really do represent all points of the political spectrum,”
I’m afraid I can’t agree with that. There are people who hold views that are inconsistent with verifiable reality. There are also people who hold views that are incompatible with the mission of the university. Creationists, racists, and holocaust deniers, for example, do not have a claim to representation on our faculty, anyway. I don’t know about yours.
If 11% of a given faculty identify as either sociopaths or sociopaths’ lackeys, I for one would advocate its immediate shutting down.
***
See? they got less than fifty shades of churches to choose from: proof that Christians are oppressed!
/snark
***
Or that 89% to 98% aren’t academics.
Some would prefer the term “moderate” to “conservative” but yes, this is basically true.
It’s probably wise to remember that Trump plays a kook. If you think of him as really a kook, you might underestimate him, which is dangerous. Look what’s happening to the GOP. (And isn’t it a joy to behold…)
brucegee1962 @10
I believe that when the debate is settled given further time to debunked ideas is not only a waste of time but dangerous to progress. There may be some points to debate between democrats and republicans, but the vast majority of the republican platform denies reality. Giving a platform to creationism, denials of systemic racism/sexism, trickle down economics, or American exceptionalism doesn’t further knowledge it clouds it with horseshit.
How does that add a privilege? Are they saying they’re less likely to be able to comprehend a paragraph of text if they don’t agree with it? And this is the best example of liberal privilege they could come up with?
Then they jump right into building a strawman about what “some liberals” think about conservatives, then bash the strawman by using the word “poppycock” and giving an example of a smart conservative. Who is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Where he was hired. Likely by liberals.
While I agree that debate is all well and good, I think that argument is often used to justify a lot of bad things.
For example, our own “I’m leaving and never coming back” friend “calling us out” because PZ didn’t want to go and attend a speech with Milo whatever the fuck whining about women and feminism.
Or the whining about campuses cancelling speeches for notorious loons like Germaine Greer, as if you’re stifling debate if you don’t give bigoted kooks a platform and a tasty honorarium.
I’m perfectly willing to agree that it’s probably impossible to be a Trump supporter without also being a racist bigot — after all, that’s the core of his appeal. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that that’s true of all Republicans. Many hold opinions which, although I disagree with them, don’t deserve to be drummed out of the public square. The value of trade agreements, the best level of government regulation (some conservatives do agree that it should be more than “none”), taxation issues — these are all areas where reasonable people can disagree. (Other areas like gay rights or creationism or climate change, I’d say reasonable people can’t disagree. But I do know some Republicans who are reasonable on at least some of these issues — and who are horrified by both Cruz and Trump.)
One question for those of you who support slamming the door on conservative academics: do you actually know any self-identifying Republicans personally? Say, to the point of gladly sitting down to dinner or attending a social event with them? Any friends or family members you can stand who vote R? If not, they I’d respectfully suggest that you’re living in a media bubble, and your image of the party may be a bit distorted.
Yes, I’m in a very republican conclave in a deep blue state. The vast majority of people I know personally are of the “gays whine too much, I want my money and fuck the consequences” sort.
It’s worth pointing out that among one of the departments where it is most important to have a range of views, philosophy, there really is a lot of non-agreement.
Here: http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
~10% Libertarians (I’m guessing mostly of the Right variety)
~34% Egalitarians (High Liberals, Rawls)
~14% Communitarians (Leftist critique of Rawls)
~41% Other, which would include conservative, classical liberal, Marxists etc.
Not to imply that other departments (like Pol. Sci. and Economics) don’t have needful range of views, I just don’t know those departments as well.
@brucegee1962:
I know a few, and it’s tough out there for sane conservatives; they haven’t had a political voice in many years. (E.g. there used to be a nontrivial strain of environmentalism amongst Republicans; they’ve been totally eclipsed by the “drill baby drill” crowd).
The right-wing reality bubble does present a hazard for such people; if you agree with parts of the standard Republican belief package, it’s easy to get sucked into the crazier parts. I’ve seen a couple friends go from “reasonable discussion partner” to “love child of Hannity and Limbaugh” in this way.
At work (programming) there are several conservatives (mostly also religious) and there are areas I have to stay away from – basically anything involving macroeconomics or foreign policy. It’s like trying to discuss paleontology with a young-Earth creationist (something that also has happened to me at work) – the frames of reference are just too different to have any kind of productive discussion.
I read the whole post did you Bruce?
PZ said it does not come up what comes up is the subject that is being applied for not extraneous issues.
I am coming to believe that conservative’s seem to be at war with reality or at least in deep conflict with it. They act like it is some kind of debate and what you think is what is real. If everyone thought the right things all would be good then their ideas would work. It is “liberals” that are to blame for their ideas not working.
it is persecution?
uncle frogy
This line belies the rest of the piece.
No, it doesn’t.
“Less likely” because they might be carrying other baggage that would interfere with doing their job. If they don’t, then not a problem.
That’s not better. You can’t say that people’s political or religious belief doesn’t affect a person’s likelihood of getting a job and then say you would use someone’s religious or political affiliation as a proxy for things that actually matter.
*Disclaimer for what follows – I am not your lawyer and don’t practice in Minnesota*
While you can refuse to hire someone who is not “able to clearly explain the established ideas in your discipline,” you can’t use religion as a proxy for someone’s ability or inability to do that, just like you can’t use race or sex.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/religion.cfm
“Evangelical” is a protected class under US employment discrimination law (although Republican isn’t). You should consider deleting this post, and you should definitely talk to your equal opportunity office about it. You really can’t say things like ‘I’m less likely to hire [members of a certain religion]” if you have any role in hiring/firing at a Title VII covered employer because that’s at the very least an element of a prima facie case for discrimination and is probably direct evidence of intent to discriminate.
@brucegee1962
Sure I know republicans, I even let some use my bathroom. I have coworkers and some happy hour buddies who typically vote R. Last week one of them said he was probably going to have to hold his nose and vote for Trump, because TEAM REPUBLICAN. Fuck that guy. None of the Republicans I know are professors, it’s different to be a R graphic artist or insurance salesperson and to be a R professor.
Wow. I think my irony meter and my bullshit meter both spoinged themselved into oblivion at the exact same moment right there.
You know that thing we hate, where some people pre-judge all the members of a group as being stereotypical members of that group (irrespective of how accurate the stereotype might be), instead of treating them as individuals and trying to look beyond the stereotype? You’re doing it.
I think you guys are misreading PZ.
I read it to mean that he would be less likely to recommend them in the end-result sense, as in less Republican Evangelicals would meet the standards he holds for recommendation, not that he would purposefully select against known Republican Evangelicals.
That being said, fuck Republican Evangelicals. I don’t really feel all that bad about them being denied recommendations. I care only to the extent that such a precedent would hurt decent people.
Like, if my standard for hiring a geologist involves agreeing with the vast majority of scientific evidence pointing to a very, very old Earth, it’s true that I’m less likely to hire a young-earth creationist.
Not because I ask them “are you a young-earth creationist?”, but because they hold a view that disqualifies them from hiring by my standards.
Vivec @31, just like arguing that women really are more likely to take time off work for childcare is a really bad defense in an employment discrimination case (though I have seen people say that), arguing that a particular denomination really is more likely to “let slip a bunch of babble about your wackadoodle theories” is a similarly awful defense. Any plaintiff’s attorney worth anything will close out her case by hammering “if I knew someone was a Republican evangelical, I would be less likely to recommend them for hiring.”
Definitely. There are many things that ring alarm bells during interviews, but unless follow up questions, now legit based on the candidate first bringing up the topic, detect a probable future problems, it won’t matter much for later recommendations.
karellen @29: Agreed. And not just because you’re the Supervisor for Earth.
@32
If my standards are “you must accept the scientific consensus” and a potential hiree reveals that they do not meet that standard, I am wholly justified in not hiring them. That’s literally the point of having standards.
Vivec @30:
That’s a very charitable reading. My most charitable reading is that PZ is confusing “evangelical” with “fundamentalist”. Very common, I’m sure, but not very reassuring to people who identify as non-fundamentalist evangelicals.
Sucks for them. I’ll care about how reassured they are when they stop being christians.
Vivec @37:
O brave new world, that has such people in’t.
There are some times when religion would legitimately disqualify someone from a job, e.g. The Onion’s “Christian Scientist Pharmacist Refuses to Fill Any Prescription.” In university faculty in the USA it seems biology would be a common point of conflict (creationists will have a tough time trying to make all their lessons compatible with baraminology). Being a creationist wouldn’t be a problem (in itself) for comparative literature, structural engineering, or a bunch of other fields.
Sorry, I don’t have deep reserves of care for people that hold to a document that says I should be killed.
This is the same BS that we heard when the “liberal media” myth was propagated. There was one poorly-conducted survey which purported that 60% of journalists were liberal, and therefore there was a definite media bias. First, the survey had all kinds of bias, from who the survey was given to, to who chose to answer the survey (it might have found that liberal journalists responded more often to surveys), and second, it had zero evidence that the cited political leanings had any effect at all on the actual reporting. It also ignored the fact that 66% of editors and publishers are conservative, and have much more sway on message.
Not to mention, why is only liberal leaning a problem? I bet if you surveyed Wall Street firms, you would find a similar disproportion in favor of conservatism, and yet no one ever seems concerned with that, just like no one ever seems to mind conservative political correctness, just liberal versions.
Kristof completely ignores the fact that academic is more of a liberal pursuit, just like business tends to be more of a conservative one: each one draws a certain kind of applicant, and each one has qualities which further encourages the person to move in a certain direction.
Vivec @40: Literal reading of “the document” would require my death as well. Many people don’t read it literally. But they insist on associating themselves with “the document”, so sucks for them, eh? Well, as long as we’re not being dogmatic…
Whether or not they read it literally is nearly irrelevant to me. They’re still looking at a book that repeatedly calls for my death and go “yeah, seems good to me.” That they think it is only metaphorically calling for my death doesn’t make it much better.
Not that I support discriminating against them. As I said earlier, the precedent that sets would lead to people I actually care about facing discrimination too.
“Democrat and Republican are not synonyms for liberal goofball and conservative. Quite the opposite: Democrats are the American conservative party, while Republicans have become increasingly fringey and bizarre and extreme over my lifetime. Hillary Clinton is conservative. Donald Trump is a kook. ”
Thank you PZ for saying that. It’s badly needed saying since Rush Limbaugh started opening his big mouth in the ’90s, whose bloviations demonstrated the obvious hypocrisy and irony of his spiel from day one, yet resonated rapidly across the country (much of it via the radio-listening trucker community). I could never understand why so many people so immediately cleaved into it and their rabid resistance to correction. The history of the demonization of ‘liberalism’ reminds me of the facility with which burning napalm readily ignites almost anyone who equipped with a quenching independence of mind. I’m old enough to remember the tail end of the ‘communist’ witch hunts, and lesser similar attempts to set fire to popular mob opinion, like the lukewarm attempts by George Wallace and others identifying ‘permissiveness’ as a broad-brush handle on all those that didn’t agree with their sense of patriotic American purity who properly ought to observe segregation and a general hatred for ‘others’. (Today’s garbage morality that infests the GOP is nothing more than the further metastasis of a cancer that has lurked in the tissue of political power circles since the beginning, but really reexpressed itself as a dangerous tumor in the fertile post WWII period with the advent of McCarthy. To our shame, we haven’t been able to knock it out.
It wouldn’t hurt to keep pointing out that such foul propagandistic overtures are historically and invariably fostered by the ‘radical kooks’ who label themselves as ‘conservative’, those who keep claiming they represent the ‘center’ of proper mainstream Americanism ideology. Now, just who is suffering from the dreadful conceit of ‘idealism’?
Trouble is, too many of their targets listen to their crap and adopt their bogus metric.
Correction: “…the facility with which burning napalm readily ignites almost anyone who ISN’T equipped with a quenching independence of mind.”
And now I know why its hard to catch problems in preview: the text is like 3x smaller like that in the composing box, which is constricted to seeing only 6 lines at a time in the first place…I see also I lost track of closing a parenthesis in a statement. Oh well. Live and learn.
Sorry, blockquote fail@45, but I think it’s obvious where the quote ends.
Do you want a faculty that looks like America when it comes to belief in a flat Earth, or geocentrism?
I must say, of all the 60+ faculty colleagues I’ve ever had in my department at various universities, I do not know any of the political or reilgious views of one of them. Not a single one. And that goes for all the chemistry faculty I’ve met at different universities, at conferences, etc.
It is unthinkable that that would come up in a hiring decision (what we want to find out is how much grant money you’ll pull in), and rude to bring it up in conversation in the department. Should an applicant or faculty member bring up such topics, they would be politely discouraged, or rather, politely encouraged to STFU. In departments of 35 or so faculty, it’s just too divisive. It’s difficult enough to discuss department policy without coming to blows and/or making eternal enemies.
Should a candidate bring up his/her politics or religion during interviews, it would have to be insistently and over and over again, to disqualify him or her from consideration. And, that would not be because the views are liberal or conservative, it would be because they’re not focused enough on the work and the research and the job.
My own experience doesn’t lend any credence to the idea of the poor persecuted conservative academic.
My two bits on the whole “do you even know Republicans bro” thing: I don’t know any Republicans in academia. But I know people who used to be Republicans in academia. They’ve all shifted to register as independents or Democrats. They point at the same kinds of things as explanations, including the Terry Schiavo case, the committee heads who denounce evolution and global warming as Satanic scams, and also state-level budget games. This last is a big one. Nobody likes to have to worry all the time about whether their job’s just going to get thrown the window (and stress has measurable medical effects on work performance). Democratic state governments reliably vote for stable academic funding that varies in response to real needs and changes, while Republican ones reliably use academic funding as a bludgeon to get their way about things they do care about and jerk the budget around to force ideological compliance on their various enemies, including the cabal of evil liberal professors.
Serious conservatives don’t go for that stuff. They know that all work goes better when there’s a high degree of predictability in funding. But when the allegedly conservative party actively glorifies chaos, instability, and unpredictability, then serious conservatives can and should beat feet right out of there. And that’s what my friends have done, like so many others.
All the measures to push more guns on campus don’t endear Republicans to conservative academics, either, and neither do a lot of the racism, homophobia, etc. One of my professor friends is a theologically very conservative Christian with an adopted lesbian daughter whom he loves and respects and wishes well for, and he and his wife both take attacks on their family very poorly.
When my friend and I were in college together, he was opposed to affirmative action. Now he says that he still thinks there should be better methods involved, but he’s convinced by data + experience that the problems are very real, and since the offered alternatives amount to, in his words, “shut up, darkies, there’s no problem here except your mouth”, he’s a strong booster for affirmative action policies at his university. For him, moving to the Democrats has been, as he tells he, a lot like going ahead and using the lab gear available even though it’d be nice to have better stuff. Some solid work now is better than no work and wishing.
I think he’s pretty representative in those views.
these conservative “pundits” like this fool are simply getting the cart before the horse.