b********n
发帖数: 38600 | 1 http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/forbidden-city_707668.ht
Neil Gross is a sociologist at the University of British Columbia who
previously held posts at the University of Southern California and Harvard,
has a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, and received undergraduate
training at Berkeley. He edits Sociological Theory and has written a book
on the liberal philosopher Richard Rorty.
He has all the markers of an academic on the left, and Gross confesses in
his introduction to this study of faculty politics that he has “very
liberal social attitudes” and that his views on the economy and law are
center-left. Nevertheless, he registers clearly the overwhelming ideological
slant of higher education. Reviewing survey and voter registration data, he
concludes that “the professoriate either contains the highest proportion
of liberals of any occupation in the United States for the period 1996-2010
or is right behind another famously liberal occupational group, authors and
journalists.”
It’s a galling situation for people on the right, and the response by
people on the left only makes it worse. If the underrepresented group were a
favored one, liberal observers would invoke disparate-impact theory, which
holds that any situation that is demographically disproportionate signifies
bias at work and needs public intervention. But in this case, the excluded
group is conservatives, which makes the imbalance the conservatives’ own
fault.
In interviews of professors conducted by Gross and his colleagues, the most
common explanation for the dearth of conservatives on the faculty was that
conservatives lack the “open-mindedness” necessary for academic work (41
percent of interviewees stated this), while the second most popular reason
was that conservatives care too much about making money to become academics
(30 percent noted this). Prejudice or greed, take your pick—but don’t
overlook the self-congratulation in each judgment (“we are here because we
’re broad-minded and we care more about people than about dollars”).
We’ve heard this before, both the charge and the defenses. Gross recounts
the same debate as it occurred in the 1950s, citing William F. Buckley’s
and Russell Kirk’s columns in National Review, and a few liberal
adversaries such as Richard Hofstadter, who anticipated nearly exactly the
exchanges between David Horowitz and the National Association of Scholars (
NAS) on the right and the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Association
of American University Presses (AAUP) on the left. That liberal bias on
campus has been such a longstanding issue in American life and has undergone
so little change in spite of bestselling books such as The Closing of the
American Mind, columns in national periodicals, and cable television
denunciations indicates to Gross that the customary explanations are
shortsighted and misleading. | x******g
发帖数: 33885 | 2 "conservatives lack the “open-mindedness” necessary for academic work"
这句话没说错。 |
|
