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I think there’s an issue that the right tends to have other priorities. They don’t want to go and become a lecturer at a university simply because there are other, more practical uses of their time and talent. Especially in the humanities, there’s just nothing practical about joining an institution to study things nobody cares about to produce articles and books that will never be read. In the arts, I suppose it’s a bit different as you can make movies or something, but the time between trying to get in and being able to do something of your own is often large and the competition is stiff.
Liberals tend to not be as practical minded and might be content to take a position with no chance of a reward (phd lecturers essentially make the same wage as fast food workers with little hope of tenure, where going into the private sector can net you 100K a year for the right fields).
ok, some books are never read, but say, wikipedia articles, are read a lot and the right already lost this years ago.
My point if that if you told a conservative kid that he could make 100K a year doing computer stuff that millions of people would use and do things with, or they could stay in college, live off scholarship money and spend a decade researching stuff no one cares about and writing a book that no one will ever know exists, this isn’t something that would be appealing to people with the talent and ambition to get things done in the real world. Even the Wikipedia, I think would run down that line. Liberals don’t tend to be ambitious and therefore marching through institutions or editing Wikipedia all the time or publishing critiques of pop culture because they aren’t necessarily doing things other then politics.
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It's pretty well documented that university leftists will aggressively block hires and promotions for purely ideological reasons. They gang up on the farthest right person, get rid of them, then move on to the next farthest right.
Also many on the left, even the more moderate, have a "no enemies to the left" frame of view where they see anyone farther to the left as a harmless idealist who won't be dangerous if you don't aggravate them.
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