The U.S. map is red but America's campuses are deep blue. I examined Federal Election Commission records and found donations to John Kerry wildly outpaced donations to George W. Bush. My amateur inspection found that Harvard employees gave 32 times more money to Kerry than to Bush. The disparity was 270-1 at Princeton, 32-1 at Cornell, 22-1 at Penn, 11-1 at Yale, 7-1 at Brown, and 5-1 at Columbia. Get this: because I could find no Dartmouth employee that had donated to President Bush's reelection efforts, John Kerry received an infinite amount more from the faculty and administrators at the Hanover, New Hampshire school than his opponent. I detail my findings, and why a politically alienated academia is bad for education, on NewsMax.com.

It's a sad state of affairs (cf. George Will's recent editorial on the same topic - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15606-2004Nov26.html)

I take solace in the fact that politics is more or less irrelevant to a large body of academic disciplines. There's not much room for political ideology in the hard sciences or languages. And while it is certainly detrimental in fields such as literature and history, where it can have an influence without much notice, I am inclined to think it is less so in economics and political philosophy ('science', if you must). In these liberalism is explicit, and therefore, can be considered directly. This, in my mind, reduces the danger.

Of course, I have been educated in conservative institutions, so my view of the impact of liberalism on the universities is probably biased.

Dan,

I do wish that you would direct your considerable talent to the question, "Why are America's campuses deep blue?" (To use your phrase) Are they peopled with "intellectual morons"? Picking blue campuses in blue states doesn't tell me very much.

Guido

Guido: it's not that hard a question. Modern intellectual culture is anti-religious and elitist, geared toward people who think that they could design a much better society than the one we have inherited, with all of its religious and cultural baggage.

The indoctrination to this culture happens in graduate school, a prereq for most academic positions. To go to graduate school is partly to want to be an apprentice to people who are already part of this culture, and to get through graduate school one almost always pick up the intellectualist and elitist, anti-religious and anti-commoner prejudices of the academy.

Liberals tend to think that conservatives and religious people are stu-pid and irrational, and this prejudice is part of the indoctrination that makes you part of main-stream academic culture.

That is why campuses are blue-- Same answer as why they are more likely to favor population control, hate traditional religion, and believe generally that if they were in charge they could restructure our whole society from the bottom up in a much more intelligent way.

Love, Short

I agree with Short but with a couple of caveats. First, at this stage in time institutionalized campus liberalism, particularly in graduate school programs, is much more of a self-replicating virus rather than a conscious process of indoctrination. What I mean is that the grad students themselves are already overwhelmingly liberal before they get there and combined with the teachers there is an echo chamber effect, rather than a determined choice to circle the wagons, or to propagate an ideology.

I am in grad school in history in NYC and just a week ago came to the defense of the Counter-Enlightenment, anti-French Revolution Catholic monarchist Joseph de Maistre. I told the class that since I was basically a "reactionary Catholic" I would take it upon myself to defend Maistre's point of view. For the entire class everyone, including the 2 profs jointly teaching the course, were very deferential to me for my ability to explain the theology of Maistre as well as the philosophical views of the counter-Enlightenment. They were genuinely curious and politely open to it all. Particularly, they were receptive to the criticisms of the excess of the Revolution which Catholics like Maistre was responding to such as the drowning of the hundreds of nuns in the Seine on a barge.

At other times I have basically gotten quizzical looks like "how can you possibly hold these views" but my point is that something else is going on then just a dedicated indoctrination by liberal teachers to forge more liberal teachers. I have found lefty grad students (at least in history/philosophy/poliSci depts) to really be ignorant of non-left ways of thinking but usually genuinely curious when you espouse such views or just plain quizzical and disinterested; but never wildly repressive and belligerent.

They have the campuses locked up, true, but this all developed long before now, probably in the early seventies (maybe before, I am thinking of "the best and the brightest" or Dewey even farther back) and maybe has to do with the nature of the rise of public education in conjunction with prgressivism in general. American education has always reflected the nature of the regime, this is why the communists espoused universal, free, public, and obligatory education. This is also why British liberals like John Stuart Mill emphasized the same, for the effect of public indoctrination in support of the regime. (Heck, Hegel said the same, in fact this is simply the Enlightenment Project itself!). Since the American regime is a liberal democratic one (thank you Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, and the 17th amendment) it is hardly surprising that our education system is designed to create citizens considered "proper" for such a regime.

This was a rambling post, just throwing ideas out.

I would expect Brian's experience to be the usual one. And that's for a discipline in which the political persuasion of the academician has a significant influence.

Again, for the hard sciences, languages, classics, philosophy (at least the interesting parts), and vocational programs (e.g., business), the political ideology of the professor is more or less irrelevant. So while the voting habits of university faculties is an interesting social fact, it is not the cultural danger it has been advertised to be.

By the way: Jackson, Lincoln and the 17th Amendment? What do these have in common? Academia as the creator of 'proper' citizens? Somewhere Bloom is rolling in his grave. I sympathize with Bloom's description of American culture, so I am at least rocking in mine... if I were dead.

Brad: if you don't see the similarity of effect on our regime by Jackson, Lincoln, and the 17th amendment [I would add Clay, the 16th amendment, and the Bank of the US/FedRes], then you are willfully blind to the constitutional problems that have created the political things you dislike.

Also, Brian didn't say that academia should be the creator of proper citizens, he said that is how it functions now and by the nature of public education in general.

I agree, Brian: I meant "indoctrination" in a broader, non-self-aware sense.

Has Short become shorter? You added an "ie."

Yeah sorry for the lack of focus or clarity Brad. Bloom would be rolling in his grave except that his philosophy of education itself leaves much to be desired compared to a scholastic understanding of education. His Straussian blinkers really give the university a narrow elitist function the aim of which IS to produce democratic citizens. He is railing against the academy for failing to do what I am saying it DOES do and he believed it had stopped doing. Just look at the subtitle of his famed book as well as his neocon praisings of the forced spreading of liberal democracy in the same.

Bloom's complaint is that the university had gone extremely far left and no longer inculcates liberal democratism and secular humanism and so fails to create Halberstam's "best and brightest" who will run this democracy. It has been my experience that the radicalism Bloom critiques that sprouted up in the seventies has been mostly relegated to various "victim" studies departments by now and is therefore a relatively isolated phenomenon these days, although their antics make for great press. These departments themselves are looked on with much scorn and derision from "serious" academics and disciplines. They are allowed to exist to placate the radicals but the true nature of the university is still the old homegrown deep-rooted liberalism of the Enlightenment.

So the liberal establishment carries on in their echo chamber with their crazy cousins, the lefty radicals, kept in the attic of the various "studies" departments.

What I am critical of, and I gather from Dan's writings he may be too, is the politicization of higher education in the sense of the educational objective being either to form "democratic" citizens, or to radically critique and reform the general culture/society. The presence of more intellectual diversity in the professoriate (not just in terms of politics but also theology . . . see Thomas Woods article on Lew Rockwell today for instance, or his recent one on the Remnant website) would go a long way towards the end of making higher education "liberal" again in its original sense of free and leisured seeking of knowledge for its own sake.

For what it's worth, I had the misfortune to major in English while in college. I'd say that most, if not all, of my professors were to the left of me.

However, to their credit, they were always interested in my opinions, even if they contradicted cherished pieties of the intellectual left. I think there is an intolerant minority of professors out there (perhaps I was lucky in not having any).

One thing we should remember is that, for better or worse professors are intelligent people, and most (but not all) intelligent people are aware enough to concede points when an opponent makes a good argument.

My guess is that the most ideologically reactionary among the left are the ones who garner the most attention because they are the ones who are the most contentious.

That said, it is clear that colleges are dominated by leftists.

Thanks for the hat tip in the NewsMax article. Keep fighting the good fight.