Political bias in academia?
Ok, time to open up a can of worms here by referring to his recent article at InsideHigherEd.com discussed political biases among academic faculty. This article was linked from the recent addition of Spectra, the newsletter from the National Communication Association, the big academic association I'm a member of.
In academia, I haven't kept my general right-wing inclinations a secret, nor was a spat with a couple of left-wing profs during my undergrad time exactly low-key, which I survived. That incident aside, I've not had a single problem with faculty in my field, at my college as well as other schools and academic associations.
Part of the problem, in my humble opinion, is in how things have become overly-politicized. While I think the political Left deserves much of the blame for this, I feel the Right does much the same thing. A lot of subjects that I deal with don't have a political position, and even when they have, I've never been penalized for speaking out and expressing my point of view, so long as I could qualify my opinion through a well-constructed argument, and do so with respect for those who held differing views.
In school, I've made a lot of friends and associations with a wide range of people, including liberal Democratic students and faculty, and along the way became persona non grata with the campus College Republicans, in spite of my long resume of political work in the GOP. Simply put, political views never got in the way, and to be honest, they were rarely ever relevant to my academic work.
My senior project on Political Communication and the Internet was an analytical work that didn't examine one side of the other of the partisan divide. As part of that project, I had a lot of help from a faculty member who was a past State Democratic Party director, who I have a lot of respect for and whose help was invaluable, as well as the campus College Democrats who provided the manpower to staff the seminar that was the centerpiece of the senior project.
Consistent with the findings of that article, I believe there are a lot of faculty who are on the political left on campus, especially in my department, but also that regardless of where they feel they fit in, a lot of faculty are decidedly free-thinkers who don't entirely fit well into any political mold. Considering my views, which are farily right on a lot of issues, except where I turn moderate on social issues (except for being very much opposed to liberalized abortion), I tend to think pretty freely myself.
So, to summarize, I agree with the findings of the article that in academia, especially in a liberal arts field like mine, a Republican is going to be in the minority. But I've never really found that to be a problem in my world, and I've even found the diversity of opinions very refreshing.
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