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The left took over these institutions because the right couldn't be bothered to defend them. 25 years ago, while there was a clear left-wing bias in academia, you could still be a conservative and get tenure and publish papers without too much controversy. And conservatives were still telling my generation that if we pursued a career in academia, or government, or the nonprofit sector, or whatever, we were idiots, because those jobs were for people who couldn't hack it in the private sector. Hell, just look at their paychecks. Hell, I remember us joking after our first semester in law school that we could relax for a few weeks between the end of finals and discovering that we were all destined for the public defender (never mind that a year later working as a PD seemed like a pretty good deal).
Government jobs were for the mediocre, nonprofit jobs were for the bleeding hearts. But academia was the worst. At the age when your peers are all established in their jobs, have mortgages, and are trying to figure out how to coach a little league baseball team, you're living in a shithole apartment in a college town on a stipend, hoping that you'll get to move to rural Nebraska so you can teach history at a small liberal arts college that's not even offering tenure. And even that's such a long shot that it's pretty much your dream job at this point. The GOP at this time was preaching a civic version of the prosperity gospel: Taxes on the rich only serve to penalize the most productive/talented/innovative citizens. If you make a lot of money it's because you deserve it, and if you don't it's because you simply aren't as good. And God help you if you were on welfare or some other kind of public assistance, which was evidence that you were simply lazy and expected a handout.
This wasn't the case among Democrats. The important thing in Democratic families wasn't maximizing your paycheck, but having a job that made full use of your talents. So if a smart kid wanted to be a taxi driver, that was looked down on, but if he wanted to be a teacher, it was okay, even if they both made the same salary. So there was a period, probably beginning in the 1980s, where the number of conservative PhD candidates began dwindling, year by year, and as conservative professors retired, they were replaced by liberals. By 2015 you had a critical mass of leftist professors and new Republican orthodoxy that was repugnant not just to liberals, but to old guard conservatives, and has no intellectual foundation. At this point, it's hard to imagine what a conservative academic would even look like, since the tenants of conservatism are all dependent on the fickle whim of one man. So even the conservatives who have made it through probably aren't conservative in contemporary terms, since up until fairly recently no self-respecting conservative economist, for example, would ever wright an academic treatise on why 30% tariffs are actually good, and no conservative political scientist would write a treatise on why the US needs to invade Canada. As much as the right complains about this, the wound is entirely self-inflicted.
I think this line of thinking misses where the wound actually is - it isn't that conservatives are absent from the academy (although we do focus on that a lot, in part because it is easier to point at when it comes to data), it is that the academy can't function in their absence.
Gender studies can be a real discipline in the absence of conservatives, in the same way that most theological work can. But it isn't.
The current lack of representation would be unfortunate but otherwise benign, instead it has become an existential threat as most academic institutions can't manage to be anything other than a lobbying arm of the progressive wing of team blue.
Asking the conservatives to be there to intervene is about as dumb as saying "why weren't you there to stop me from shooting myself????"
Maybe they kicked themselves out maybe they got kicked out. That might be a problem but it isn't the root of the issue.
I apologize for my STEM arrogance, but I would claim that if a discipline can not function without having followers of any particular ideological bent, it is probably bullshit.
It's not the lack of followers of conservatism or any particular ideological bent. It's the dominance of followers of a particular ideology that is far more dogmatic than most religions, and does not value objective truth or an impartial search for same.
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It’s not like STEM is immune, or even that resistant: the Hirsch-Dias feud is noteworthy only because we actually got to see the denouement in public, and the fraud was ‘replicated’. Had Hirsch not had such a bee in his bonnet, Dias would have ended up just like the Mxenes guys: maybe embarrassed, but Not Actually Proven.
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I mean Medicine for instance is an example of a STEM field which can't function with the level of ideological mono polarity currently present in it - anything remotely politically controversial is super unreliable.
I would not count medicine as STEM. Also, there are plenty of subfields of medicine which are not very subject to ideology.
I would expect a Nazi obstetrician who wants to help Aryan women to give birth to new soldiers and soldier-makers for the Fuehrer and a minority ethnic radical feminist obstetrician to show a high degree of instrumental convergence in the long run.
The subfields ob medicine which are controversial -- like gender stuff, or perhaps psychiatry -- are generally few and far between. In most stuff which is tangentially related to medicine and controversial, the controversy is orthogonal to the science part: abortion, death penalty, MAID, embryo selection, germline editing, organ donation debates are all not about what is the case, but what we should do. Sure, sometimes activists smuggle in arguments masquerading as science, but mostly there are no open questions of fact there.
Every kernel of medicine has room for controversy, as Nybbler points out below. Where to prioritize resources, how research works (what do you do about males disproportionately signing up to be test dummies? ....a million other things. Some of it is certainly the "social" end of medicine like how to train and teach (is advocacy required?) but the hard science parts of it have plenty of dimensions.
Ethics are also fundamental to medicine and fundamentally on the spectrum of controversy.
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Or kidney function?
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This is a just-so story. It isn't true that conservatives "couldn't be bothered to defend them". It's that they weren't able to. They realized what was happening far too late, and treated the leftists as intellectual opponents at worst, while the left treated the conservatives as enemies to be vanquished or fossils to be re-buried.
I think this is correct, and in areas where conservatives have made a concerted effort (particularly in law) they've been able to do very well.
Something I found a bit funny about the Woodgrains position of "shouldn't you build it up rather than tearing it down" is it seems to be to imply that Trump Et. Al. should redirect all of those funds straight into right-wing institutions. Which I somehow doubt would make people very happy. But if they were run by serious conservatives instead of grifter conservatives I think they would do just fine.
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Your make a good point overall, but it is an overreach to claim that this is entirely the fault of the right. Even when things weren't as bad as they are now in academia, there was still a bias (as you yourself said). I myself saw it when I was an undergrad student: conservatives were shamelessly (if clandestinely) mocked in ways that would never fly if it happened to other groups. I remember people leaving taunting messages on the chalkboard used by the university Christian group, or vandalizing political signs for conservative candidates. Nobody cared. But I strongly believe that if, say, the black student group had someone put derogatory messages on their chalkboard, there would have been a campus outcry and investigation of it.
That is the kind of environment conservatives faced, and even though it wasn't as bad as it has become, it wasn't remotely welcoming either. Would you make your career in an environment that was tacitly hostile to your beliefs and way of life, just to try to fight the good fight? I certainly wouldn't, and I can't really blame those who wouldn't either. I think it's fair to say that the right-wing culture which is suspicious of academia and other "not real work" kind of jobs is their own fault. But there are other factors here which aren't their fault.
Setting aside the word fault. If you have a culture that is suspicious of academia and other not real work, then it is likely the people in those positions are going to react and to be suspicious of you in return. I don't think it is either sides fault. Its the chicken or the egg. I think it is the outcome of the structural and systemic differences in value sets between tribes. Blues mock Reds for being dumb hicks and Reds mock Blues for being effete intellectuals. The result is any space that leans slightly one way or the other is going to cascade. Whether anyone is deliberately planning it or not.
90% of farmers are Republicans and that is ok. It is ok for your values and preferences to determine that some areas will be dominated by one tribe or the other. At scale individual choices are overtaken by systemic differences. There likely isn't any way to have a 50/50 split in academia for Reds and Blues short of changing what Reds want and hence what Reds are. Likewise with farming and Blues.
But the existing farmers don't make prospective farmers write a "why I love Trump and how my work will advance the cause of Trump" document in order to become a farmer. The left wing academia DOES make prospective new academics write DEI impact statements. If conservatives are so uninterested in being academics why did the academy need to put up so many walls and man their gates so firmly?
I can’t speak for farmers, but expressing liberal opinions will make it much harder to get a trades career going.
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They didn't, because 1) They don't in general see a DEI statement as being analagous to supporting Trump or a wall.They see being anti-racist as something any decent person should do. They would see the fact conservatives won't do that as evidence they hold sexist or racist attitudes. They do not see that as being left wing and thus filtering out conservatives. They see it as being decent people and if conservatives aren't decent people that says more about conservatives and not them. That is the of power of "its just the right thing to do" framing.
Now I don't work for an an Ivy League school or indeed any of the top ranked schools so maybe its more common and problematic there. But I think people have skewed ideas about academia as a whole, by looking at say Harvard or Columbia.
As for farmers, they have their own ways of enforcing social pressure. Its just not going to be a written statement. A Catholic farmer back home might find all of his neighbors equipment is mysteriously not available for him to rent come harvest time. Or an ex neighbor of mine in rural PA talked about how they charged hippies more for calves because they didn't know any better and were just going to go under anyway.
All communities enforce behaviors and beliefs, they just do it in different ways.
I don't know about that, I've been attached to X academic institutions in the last X years (sorry, vague, opsec blah blah) and while I've never had to write a diversity statement I also don't know any faculty who are "out" as a Republican and I know of exactly one student (who was widely criticized and socially censured).
I know plenty of students and faculty who hide their affiliation (in fact...it is a lot), and I've seen how both are treated when they are assumed to be Republicans (often by demographics and shallow stuff like owning a truck) and the way they are treated is about even with how old school racists treated Blacks.
In my experience academia is even worse than you'd guess from the stories.
I've never seen anything similar to that at all. Heck when I lived in a small Red town, I had my Blue colleagues over for bbqs alongside my Red neighbors and there was never any kind of problem.
I will say students seem to be more performatively anti-conservative than the faculty by a long way. So while I haven't seen them socially censuring conservative students, that wouldn't exactly surprise me. Our faculty is (or at least appears to be) more politically diverse than our students I would say. But it is a very Blue city.
Actually I think it might be more helpful to emphasize the natural history of a lot of my interactions with students and faculty these days.
On meeting me they assume and worry I'm conservative based off of my physical appearance, demographics, and superficial temperament.
They then express relief (sometimes explicitly) when they find out I'm calm, caring, have a good bedside manner and am overall not an asshole and am a good teacher - because someone with these features couldn't be conservative.
Sometimes, I later reveal heterodox opinions (generally because the person appears right leaning and needs support or because the person is pretty moderate and needs to know that nice heterodox people exist). I frequently hear "I would never believe you were one of those people."
It certainly reminds me of how some people treated minorities back in the day.
What appearance and demographics if you would you mind sharing? I'm a straight white, relatively tall, big blonde/red bearded white man and I've never perceived anything like that. The default assumption is anyone here is Blue as far as I can tell. (Which is an issue but a slightly different one, I think)
Now as soon as I open my mouth its clear I'm British not American and that often surprises people. And when I do talk about my history and my family being essentially rednecks it surprises them more because they seem to have the idea all Europeans are quasi-communists.
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I'm sure what is happening is that high end institutions and certain "other" institutions are particularly bad (I've observed the former uniformly and the latter seems centered around institutions that have been criticized for what is in essence, inadequacy - plenty of places have small dick energy) ...and some others are not.
I'm also coming from the place of medicine which I'm willing to admit might be more vulnerable to these games.
But the reason why I responded is my morning report this morning, in which the Elon Musk/Immigration stuff was talked about, their were zero facts to be had, total spouting of contextless fake news (and that's in the setting of news stories which sound plenty bad enough to many people). Several people were visibly uncomfortable and wanted to correct things but clearly didn't, and their was a noticeable subtext of "obviously nobody here for this would be stupid and evil enough to be Republican, since our job requires caring for people and being intelligent."
In other settings I've seen that evolve into - well if you are Republican you can't be a doctor because you don't care about people. That has a massively chilling effect on conservatives as you'd imagine.
Some departments are better at avoiding this (Periop specialities for instance) but the closer you get to teaching responsibilities the more that goes away.
Republican identifying people can't be trusted with the students is Known To All.
Edit: actually I want to try a difference answer frame to this, will reply to above.
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This just seems like describing the how, rather than contradicting the notion that they metaphorically put up walls and man the gates against conservatives so firmly: they do so by genuinely believing that being anti-racist (by their conception of anti-racism) is something any decent person should do and rejecting the contention that this belief is due to their partisanship rather than due to it being true. It's particularly a severe failure for academia, where one of the ostensible main themes is the inescapability of individual bias and the need to correct for it through multiple contrasting perspectives.
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