The Politics of Professors - Again

There's a piece at yesterday's Inside Higher Education which examines some new research on the ideological orientation of the professoriate. The authors of the study, Neil Gross and his University of British Columbia graduate assistant, Catherine Cheng, acknowledge that academics are decidedly - although not exclusively - left-liberal in their politics. Based on a sampling of some 66 telephone interviewees, however, Gross and Cheng conclude that professorial attitudes are acquired much earlier in life, and are not chiefly the product of the socialization process to which they're exposed in graduate school or in their college years. I don't think that this will resolve the debate - just check the extended and rather heated comments thread and you'll see what I mean. But for me at least, it's heartening that more parties to this protracted debate are willing to acknowledge that yes, professors lean considerably more to left than virtually any other social sector. As I noted in a review here last April, a highly-touted book - Closed Minds, by Smith, Mayer and Fritschler, argued rather unconvincingly to the contrary. Or to be more precise, while the authors affirmed the liberalism of the academy in general, they accepted the testimony of their survey participants that this had no practical bearing on their classroom teaching or in the hiring of new faculty. As for this latest installment, I don't find it hard to believe that many of us acquire significant attitudinal traits and orientations early in life, whether it's an inclination to support political activism or an intense dislike of Brussels sprouts. I'm still waiting, though, for someone to explain how the unique concentration of like-mindedness and conformity found in the contemporary academy came to be, and continues to perpetuate itself.