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Comment by menloparkbum | Hacker News Reader

I guess that is my experience, also. One of the reasons I left Cambridge was because I found the snobbery alien and slightly revolting. People who go to Philips Andover and then onto Harvard may be liberal in their politics but are very neo-con in their classism, even if they didn't start out that way. I don't remember what essay it was, but I vaguely remember PG writing about people in Boston trying to become "Thurston Howell III" and this unfortunately transfered over to much of Cambridge.

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In Disciplined Minds (a book certainly worth reading, but take with a heavy grain of salt), Jeff Schmidt made an observation about highly educated people and their political tendencies that made me stop and rethink my own personal views.

He believes that while highly educated people are usually considered to be liberal, they are, in practice, a lot more conservative than they seem. Most are usually only liberal when it comes to personal viewpoints on social issues, viewpoints which have little social impact. Many professions which are usually seen as left-leaning, like university professors, are in fact very conservative when it comes to beliefs and values that they act upon in the workplace.

That sounds like an interesting book. Does he come at the problem from a left-wing or right-wing perspective?

In my experience, academic leftism is seen as more of a social obligation than a set of deeply-held beliefs. (There are, of course, many exceptions).

This, of course, is one of the reasons that I hate to socialise with my fellow academics.

My dad got an engineering degree from UCD (the Dublin, Ireland working class alternative to the "elite" Trinity College). My degrees (3 of them and an ABD) are generally from working class type schools. I went to a private high school (almost entirely because the public school system failed me miserably) which was classed as a "hockey school" (Loyola High School, Montreal) and the neighborhood rival to a high school that educated Canadian prime ministers (Lower Canada College). Somehow I got a pretty good education - I think that it was at every stage, better than the elitist track. Like the old Hertz commercials - "we're second, so we try harder"

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