A University of Oregon professor labels surveys showing liberal dominance in higher education as "problematic," marred by "amateurish research," and conducted by conservatives with "suspect agendas." Nevertheless, history professor Matthew Dennis argues in The Eugene Register-Guard that liberal control of higher education shouldn't bother fairminded people, since liberals are so fairminded themselves. But isn't this defense of liberal faculty-lounge monopoly a tacit concession that such "amateurish" studies are correct?

Dr. Dennis makes a number of general assertions unsupported by anything save opinion. Perhaps unaware of the recent assaults upon Pat Buchanan, Bill Kristol, Ann Coulter, Richard Perle, and David Horowitz, or the calls by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences to fire school president Lawrence Summers for weighing unpopular theories, Dennis contends: "There is no place where more open discussions of facts and ideas occur than on university campuses." Hopefully, events butress Dennis's belief at my 8 p.m. lecture tonight at his school in Lillis 211. Thus far, activists have torn down and defaced fliers promoting the event, not providing me with much confidence in the historian's contention of campus tolerance. The Oregon professor claims that he and other professors "come by our conclusions honestly and seek to open, not close, minds" and "in academic hiring and promotion there are no political tests."

If there are no political tests, what explains the overwhelming Democrat-Republican ratio among academics? Deep Blue Campuses, the study I authored through the Campus Leadership Program, shows that employee donations swung for John Kerry over George W. Bush 25-1 at Harvard, 29-1 at Carnegie Mellon, 32-1 at Penn, and 302-1 at Princeton. Is it just a huge coincidence that 25 of 25 schools I examined went overwhelmingly for Kerry? At the University of Oregon, where Matthew Dennis teaches, the ratio is infinity. Scouring Federal Election Commission data through PoliticalMoneyLine, I found not a single donation of $200 or more to Bush while I came across 25 donations of $200 or more for Kerry totalling $12,300. If the situation were reversed, would Professor Dennis still maintain his illusion that conformity is consistent with objectivity?

Revealing an unsurprising lack of objectivity about his own profession, the academic continues his look through rose-colored glasses at himself and his peers: "We probe all sorts of claims and dogmas to test them, to determine if they conform to known facts, and to see where they've taken us historically, whether they come from the right, left or the center. Indeed, professors constantly question each others' arguments and conclusions not just to be difficult, but to seek better understanding of the world and better solutions to problems we all face."

Then what explains Michael Bellesiles's fraudulent book, Arming America, winning the prestigious Bancroft Prize? The popularity of I, Rigoberta Menchu as a required text years after its total discrediting? The continued reliance on Alfred Kinsey as a scientific authority on sex? Or one survey's findings that Noam Chomsky, the man who denied the Cambodian genocide and advanced the idea of Cubans enjoying a higher standard of living than Americans, is the most cited living academic?

Blaming the surrounding culture, Dennis holds that societally-bred "cynicism" results in students mistaking sound positions for liberal bias. He writes: "In the classroom, then, students hear forthright conclusions and sometimes misinterpret them as partisan or biased." Maybe this is because the conclusions, like those of Professor Dennis, are often "partisan or biased."

Considering Mr. Dennis mocks all research showing liberal bias, his article would appear a lot more serious if he offered any research or facts at all.

The thing reads like a self-congratulatory sermon on good teaching. No it reads like a speech being given to honor someone with a teaching award. Very queer that he thinks this is an _argument_!

And his liberal bias shows there the way it usually shows up in college profs -- his sense of ethical superiority is so great that he needn't offer arguments. Liberal academics is not a position to be defended; it's a worldview that is ethically superior. Where did you think he picked up these attitudes?

Professor Dennis knows very well that there is no need for an official "political test" in hiring practices. Most observers are able to differentiate between right and left leaners, sometimes based on their writings, but many times just in casual conversations during the interview process, whether it be at dinner or lunch, or in the car on the way to the airport. If I had a nickel for every anti-Bush/anti-conservative joke I have had to listen to during job talks, I could quit here and not worry about getting a Ph.D. Regardless of that, Google searches can turn up whether the individual has written letters to editors of papers, etc. We recently had a woman interview for a position at our school and it took me five minutes to find an editorial letter she had written to her school newspaper arguing that the US should stop supporting the Israeli government, and many times, people will just tell you which way they lean(which might be stupid on the part of conservatives).

Besides that, whether the empirics of the studies are "flawed" as Dr. Dennis would lead you to believe, there is a preponderance of evidence to suggest that their conclusions are true (drawing from CBS and NEWSWEEK for this argument). For the sake of argument, I'll grant him that the empirics are flawed, but can he name me 3 conservative faculty members in his department. I can't name any in mine. I can only name two graduate students. What about my undergrad faculty? I went to Texas A&M, one of the most conservative campuses in the country, I cannot think of one conservative faculty member. But I do remember being made fun of by a liberal professor who took it upon himself to barrage me with his "little pokes and jabs" every class period. I also remember when the Bonfire fell killing 12 A&M students, and sitting in class that morning listening to a professor say how the students deserved to die for cutting down all those trees. I spent two years in junior college and cannot recall one conservative faculty member, but I remember the professor who taught a sex class who came in and wrote the F-word on the board the first day and told us that if we didn't like it we could get out. This was also the professor who argued that the word "lesbian" should be spelled with a capital "L" because it recognized a type of "nationality" like American or Egyptian.

Finally, Professor Dennis should acknowledge the fact that one of the main reasons he has no problem with the liberal "lean" in academia is because he likes it that way. He gets to go to conferences, and meetings, and dinners with all his friends and they can all agree on political matters and feel happy with each other. That's human nature, we all want to hang out and spend time with people who agree with us. (I like pain, that's why I chose to become an academic). Academia is the biggest liberal club in the world, and none of the members want to see it changed, and why would they? They'd lose all the benefits of club membership.

This is no liberal professor. He is a hide-bound, reactionary, status-quo dedicated philistine. His "we have all the answers" attitude bears no resemblance to the self questioning liberal thinker who ought to be in a history department. This is a leftist conservative. What is useful in schools are liberals of all political stripes.

You know, there's very good reason for those involved in education to be against Bush. Just as you might expect cops to be agaisnt a presidential candidate who promised to cut funding for police forces. Bush has instituted huge cuts in NSF funding, leading to alienation among many scientific research communities. His 'No Child Left Behind' act has also put off a huge number of people involved in education, who don't want idiot children taught 'for the test' to be passed on to them. (For starters.) It is possible to be against President Bush on issues without being a Communist agitator.

I quite frankly find the reduction of academic discourse to questions of right and left to be very distasteful, as, I believe, many others in academia do as well. People often act on deeper motivations that party affiliation, and should not be judged (for jobs or otherwise) on that alone.

Hey I don't know if nayone remembers me put I used to post a bit on this site around election time.

Dan, I caught your speech at Oregon tonight. Have to say, I don't agree with your politics but I support your right to speak without being interrupted. I'm a Democrat, but you make a good point that some on the left hate America. What you don't realize is that most of the Left hates Chomsky and Zinn as much as you do. Extremists on both sides man.

Hey I don't know if anyone remembers me put I used to post a bit on this site around election time.

Dan, I caught your speech at Oregon tonight. Have to say, I don't agree with your politics but I support your right to speak without being interrupted. I'm a Democrat, but you make a good point that some on the left hate America. What you don't realize is that most of the Left hates Chomsky and Zinn as much as you do. Extremists on both sides man.

What up DB? I remember you.

DB, from what I remember in WTLHA, I would say that you don't have to be a left-ist to be on the left. Dan also differentiates between leftist and liberal.

Sure there are plenty of definitions of "Left" and WTLHA might go against the definition that you most like. But Dan defines himself quite well in that book.

Diversity being likely in any group, the left probably as well contains those that far prefer Marcuse or Menchu to Chomsky or Zinn. So neither are the place of these authors definitive of Left, at least one would guess.

Kaibutsu,

Your comments make sense, but only in part.

You suggest that there is a sort of singular quality among academics, but your explanation falls very much along the lines of common self-interest. "Of course, the farmers would be against President Blah, he's cutting their subsidies!"

We need to get beyond "left" and "right" and talk about who's cutting our funding!!! We need to be less political and more a pandered political interest group!

"...most of the Left hates Chomsky and Zinn as much as you do."

DB, find me one instance--just one confirming instance--of a liberal expressing unqualified, non-mealy-mouthed contempt for the work of these men and I will send you a check for ten dollars. I mean that very literally. I will grant you that a few leftists who know these two by name will express a generalized disregard for their work. But your remark wildly overstates the extent of that distaste. "Most" leftists don't even know who they are, and of those that do, "most" certainly do not hate their work as much as Mr. Flynn (or me). Of this you can be sure.

Find an anti-Zinn work in any identifiably leftist source, like Salon or even in the NYT, and I'll owe you a ten-spot. My guess is that you'd be hard pressed even to find an unmitigatedly anti-Zinn parenthetical comment. Email it to me.

to kaibatsu, it's fair for liberal profs and other university-based citizens to oppose President Bush's stances out of (perceived) professional self-interest. it's not fair to deny the opposition all legitimacy, however.

I must also mention something i recently came across while reading more of Whittaker Chambers -his Cold Friday (out of print, but worth tracking down, esp. if you value his other works). It's about his undergraduate experience at Columbia University in the early 1920s:

The soon-to-be Communist Party operative arrived as a self-identified conservative, but what he specifically mentions as 'moral relativism' in the liberal arts cirriculum, the climate of ideas for ideas' sake, unsettled his way of perceiving the world and made him intellectually susceptible to becoming converted to communism. Maybe I'm summarizing it a little too neatly, but the pages of campus and lecture-hall reminscences are laid out for the gentle reader to see.