Professing

There's a nice, little article in the New York Times that talks about why academia is a liberal institution. They note that some current perspectives on this issue revolve around individual differences like intelligence (i.e., liberals tend to have higher IQ's, professors tend to have higher IQ's, therefore liberals are more likely to become professors), but the research here talks about something that's on the selection side of things. In the industrial and occupational (I/O) psychology literature, they talk about two major factors that contribute to employee performance: Selection and Training. Basically, what do you look for before you hire someone, and how you train them once you do hire them. Now, I'll argue that there's relatively little training, once you hire a professor. We get hired, and then we're generally left to our own devices. The biggest thing is adapting to an organization's culture. But there's much less of the formal mentorship than you may figure. So we're largely left with the selection side.

The Grosse and Fosse research looks at aspects of the selection side. If you think about this interaction, as the saying goes, you need two to tango. They probably ask questions like, "What makes people want to enter an academic field?" which would help answer the question of what the pool of applicants looks like. And they probably ask questions like, "What characteristics are most common in professors?" which would help answer the question of the things academics value. Now, with the second question, you start to get a feel of what the ethos of the institution is. But that alone can't really point to bias or intellectual corruption as a characteristic of the institution (which is what the conservative vanguard may have you believe). For that, you need to see something systematic when examining the first question. Now, if you see a whole bunch of equally or overly qualified conservatives who want to enter academia being turned away at the door, then maybe you have a case. But if all you have are liberals who want to enter the doors, then the issue isn't bias as a characteristic of the institution.

This research suggests that there's a self-selection going on. The interesting question here is why. My first instinct here has a lot to do with how people think about the world around them. If you think about placing people on a continuum, ranging from left-wing to right-wing, you probably get a bell curve with a few nuts on the far left and the far right, and the majority of people in the middle. Now, this may not be a clean bell curve. This could be something that people call a bimodal (two modes - modes being the data points that appear most often) curve, or less-refined folks call a two-humped distribution. Sort of like a camel. Or boobies.

A Boobie Distribution. This is why I have the warning page when you first show up here.

What this means is that most people are either moderately conservative or moderately liberal. And this makes sense, given the simple, one-dimensional way of looking at the world. For example, conservatives are ordinarily all for fewer laws, less regulation. Yet, they demand laws that regulate abortion (which in terms of governance, would be a very liberal move). Similarly, liberals are all about the expression of people's beliefs and individuality, and recognizing that every person has a right to believe what they want. However, they are entirely against things like public displays of religious faith, or people expressing that they support something like religion. We also know that a given person is likely to have different ways of looking at the world, as the different domains change. For example, they may think differently about their work than they do about their worship, and differ yet in how they think about their family. We can easily imagine how people who label themselves as the same political philosophy (liberal vs. conservative) will differ on a number of different issues, since these different issues touch on many different domains in our lives.

In fact, read through the characteristics of what a conservative is, on this cool-looking webpage. How many different dimensions do they touch on? Patriotism, individuality, morality, religion, taxation, governance, economics, immigration, etc. Is there a core philosophy underneath all that? Or is there just a label that people like to use to encompass a number of different takes on different issues? If it's the latter, then conservatism is simply a label that's meaningless - just like pondering about the significance of a made-up word, like "Lexus." Now, that isn't to say that liberals have it all figured out. Check out this less cool-looking webpage, and it's take on what it means to be a liberal. Just as jumbled. I guess what I'm saying is that we like to use these different labels as an easy proxy.

While I think that having labels can serve a very practical purpose (having heuristics really does simplify our thinking processes), the labels that we attach (such as conservative or liberal) often end up being these one-size-fits-none when the labels become too broad. This ends up being detrimental to the causes that we push for. If you look at our two-party political system, you see a prime example of where the prototypical conservative or the prototypical liberal truly represents a very small slice of our population, once you break things down into their constituent parts. And you end up with a very unfortunate situation where folks that are generally reasonable are forced into silly behaviors, such as being a single-issue voter, because they value certain issues so much that they end up making their taking the stance that they can overlook anything else, so long as this one issue goes their way. Of course, being a single-issue voter is probably preferable to being a non-issue voter (or just a regular non-voter), like yours truly.

Now with regard to what this whole conservative/liberal thing has to do with me as a academic, it's surprisingly little. I recently spoke with a professor of educational psychology out in California who was a very liberal (Marxist, feminist, etc.) who converted to Christianity about 20 years ago and spent time with Mother Teresa's mission. She mentioned that after she converted, she basically lost all but two of her friends in her professional field. In disciplines that are big on dogma, but not as big on objective fact, your philosophical stance is everything. One thing that she also noted (which I had also observed) was the areas in which you saw the most people who believed in God were in the physical sciences and in business, where there is a much more pluralistic approach to knowledge, with an emphasis on objective facts. And in fact, that's a reasonable description on what I'm trying to accomplish. I don't necessarily have a preconceived notion of how things are, and I'm open to letting the evidence speak.

While I label myself a moderate-conservative, my beliefs vary greatly for each different domain. For example, even though I believe greatly in the hope and power of the individual, I firmly believe that structure needs to be imposed for a more effective society. Similarly, I like the notion of inherent rights, but believe that turning many of those rights into privileges would be a more effective way to run things. I don't know that these things really affect much of what I say from the lectern, but they may have a little bit of influence on the research questions that I'm curious about. But at the end of the day, I still believe enough in the integrity of the research in my field that my research will get published based on the quality of the work, not necessarily the dogma behind the findings. And I believe that's true for fields that readily accept conclusive research based on hypothesis testing. Where things get murky is when you delve into fields where the work is entirely qualitative, and/or "research" is really writing philosophy. I appreciate the existence of that stuff. I may even use some of that stuff in my work (mainly in an effort to be thorough). But I'm glad that I don't really need to get too much into that stuff :-)

-Chairman