February 21, 2008
A dearth of conservatives
It's generally accepted that there are hardly any conservatives in academics.
(OK. In Virginia you've got Liberty University and Regent University and George Mason University and some conservatives in the General Assembly had a hand in forcing the president of William & Mary out of his job last week and Newt Gingrich was a history professor before he got into politics, but bear with me.)
Why, one might wonder, is academia dominated by Birkenstock wearing, tree-hugging vegan Socialists? (That's called hyperbole – exaggeration for effect.)
Someone’s finally done a study to try explain the phenomenon. A conservative professor (See there is one!) has figured out that conservatives generally don’t like that kind of work. It’s too unstructured, it makes too many demands on family life and it doesn’t pay enough.
There’s more to it than that, but you can read the Chronicle of Higher Education article here and a draft version of the paper itself here.
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