Why Conservative Arguments Are So Worthless

> On other occasions, Sunstein has suggested that it is “disturbing” that academia does not have more Republicans for “viewpoint diversity” (just as chemistry departments need a few more phlogiston theorists).

From https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-disappea... :

> In [1969], about one in four professors were at least moderately conservative, according to survey data collected by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.

> Abrams estimated that the ratio of liberal to conservative professors has increased by about 350% since 1984, even though there was no equivalent change among the American public or college students.

> Notably, the decline of conservative professors has not occurred across all institutions. Conservative professors, for example, do not seem to be less common at elite research universities today than they were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as shown in Table 2 below.

So the Current Affairs article would have us believe elite research institutions are the most likely to peddle outdated misconceptions like phlogiston? And that in 1969, 1 in 4 professors were peddling the equivalent of phlogiston?

The author preferred to fabricate a reason for the conservative deficit in academia, one that affirmed their prejudices, instead of bothering to check research on the topic:

> In Compromising Scholarship, a 2011 book by sociologist George Yancey, some 30% of sociologists acknowledged that they would be less likely to hire a job applicant if they knew he was a Republican. [..] Professors are even less tolerant of evangelicals, whom they associate with social conservatism. Nearly 60% of anthropologists, 50% of literature professors, 39% of political scientists and sociologists, 34% of philosophy professors, and 29% of historians say they would be less inclined to hire evangelicals.

> Other research suggests that liberal professors sometimes act on these biases. Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter found in 2009's The Politically Correct University that socially conservative professors tend to work at lower-ranked institutions than their publication records would suggest.

> A 1985 study in the American Psychologist, for example, assessed the outcomes of research proposals submitted to human subject committees. Some of the proposals were aimed at studying job discrimination against racial minorities, women, short people, and those who are obese. Other proposals set out to study "reverse discrimination" against whites. All of the proposals, however, offered identical research designs. The study found that the proposals on reverse discrimination were the hardest to get approved, often because their research designs were scrutinized more thoroughly. In some cases, though, the reviewers raised explicitly political concerns; as one reviewer argued, "The findings could set affirmative action back 20 years if it came out that women were asked to interview more often for managerial positions than men with a stronger vitae."