A Response to the CRepug's Ramblings about Academia

It's not a vast and overbearing left-wing conspiracy - as some Republicans would like to think. Some Republicans, even here at UD, actually believe that universities hire professors with some kind of test of political ideology.

If political ideology can take over a school, then let me tell you about UD and conservative interests. MBNA, the giant corporate credit card company (and new "DuPont" of Delaware) is a huge donor to the University - our business school is formerly known as the "MBNA School of Business and Economics" and our current career services center is named "MBNA Career Services Center."

Follow the money.

Looking up donors to political campaigns from the 2004 election using FundRace.org, you can count the number MBNA bankers and executives and spouses (pay attention to names and addresses to find the spouses) in the 19711 zip code (one of the zip codes which includes UD) who have maxxed out to President Bush's campaign or to the RNC.

Here is another search, including the whole state of Delaware, who donated to Bush's campaign.

MBNA is one of the most red companies and also in the top 3 of University of Delaware's contributors. Ranked by employee donations, MBNA was the largest corporate contributor to the Bush campaign, according to a study by the Center for Responsive Politics, an election research group and Common Dreams. Additionally, MBNA also frequently donates to Delaware Republican Candidates.

For fun, click here and type in the last name "DuPont." DuPont, by the way is also the name for not one, not two, but three of our University's buildings.

In addition, we have a DuPonter in the high ranks of the University Administration, specifically the Vice President and University Secretary, who was a former staff member for former US Senator Bill Roth, not surprisingly, a Republican.

UD has a conservative school administration with a sprinkling of liberal professors in the liberal arts. Is this a conspiracy? No. It's because the State of Delaware is very corporate, hence our sole university in Delaware just mirrors those interests.

Further, the conservative argument against academia is weak. Was it ever a thought that a commonality between people who choose an academic life might exist -- and that the commonality might be that these people are more open minded and therefore may be more inclined to the liberal side?

Let me close by saying that conservatives are quick to pull the trigger against professors and academia. Even our fellow College Republicans at UD feel threatened by some alleged 'liberal leaning' at this university.

I think it's unfounded. I say to them, Stop playing the 'academic minority' game - your party basically runs the world now so you're just looking for something to complain about, and the easiest thing to fight against is "liberal bias in academia" expounded by Ann Coulter and other fascists.

Now college conservatives are launching campaigns for frivolous lawsuits against 'liberal' professors in order to trump first amendment rights at higher education schools. Reminds me of the Soviet era.

Liberals need to keep a watch-dog eye on this movement or else it will quickly turn campuses into anti-thought arenas.

Here is a great op-ed piece from the NY Times about professors and ideology. Here is an abstract:

It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that?

Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new "academic freedom" laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story.

Claims that liberal bias keeps conservatives off college faculties almost always focus on the humanities and social sciences, where judgments about what constitutes good scholarship can seem subjective to an outsider. But studies that find registered Republicans in the minority at elite universities show that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences like physics and in engineering departments as in softer fields. Why?

One answer is self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.

But there's also, crucially, a values issue. In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the "party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the "party of theocracy."

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