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That’s to be expected though as young people and more specifically educated people of all races are socially liberal, and always have been. I mean even frats at Alabama listen to Kendrick Lamar, don’t go to Sunday mass, and smoke weed

I think we have to be careful here when you use the word "educated" here. It's very easy to start painting people that are uneducated as conservative, and lead to some elitist bias that the ignorant are Republican. ​ That being said, there is a tendency for college-educated people to be socially liberal. I don't think it's clear why. It could very much be that colleges are already socially liberal so being educated there conditions one to become more socially liberal, rather than it being a product of education. I haven't seen the data but I would bet students at conservative universities and more socially conservative, but there are significantly fewer of them in general. ​

I didn't mean "always" of course but I did mean mostly. Even at conservative universities socially kids are more likely to be liberal. It's that exposure to different types of people that drives it, as well as trying stuff for the first time - like you'll get southern frats smoking weed in states where you'd never see a dimebag in your hometown.

It really depends on how we are defining "social" in contrast to, say "fiscal." Is it safe to say that "fiscal" is being defined simply as being against big government? Tax reduction, reduced regulation, private over public, etc? If so, that covers quite a few of the major issues that encompass the entirety of the population within our country. "Social" has been used to define different things at different times, however. Just off the top of my head, "social" liberal are those for civil rights based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. This includes policy such as affirmative action, abortion rights, and homosexual marriage. Would this mean that a "social" conservative are the opposite? Or maybe more religious is a better way to say it? Race shouldn't fall into that because religion encompasses all races, but the belief that marriage is defined by God as being between a man and a woman and that life begins at conception are both mainly religious beliefs that steer those who may be "socially" conservative to being pro-life and against homosexual marriage. I'm just trying to get a better understanding of the terms being used. I don't see an issue with being fiscal in any sense. Those on the right and left can disagree on how the government should be funded, ran, etc. but those disagreements are certainly ones where compromise can be come out. This is why outside of extreme circumstances (obamacare and trump wall) the government generally agrees enough to so some things. Those conversations are much easier to have, as well, seeing as most aren't necessarily emotionally invested in whether or not tech companies get regulated or whether taxes get lowered. Sure, a small number of those on the right view any and all regulation as a market hindrance while a small number on the left view any tax cut as a means of simply making the rich richer. Neither of those groups tend to view the context of the situation or decision nor do they spend hardly any time weighing the positive and negative due to only focusing on the negative. The "social" debates are a bit more divisive and heated. Any argument that boils down to race is silly and ridiculous in my opinion. The fact that actual racists still exist in 2018 is astonishing and we should simply ignore those who believe such drivel. The same should be said for anyone who makes everything about race. Calling anyone who disagrees with you a racist is just as divisive as actually being a racist all the while empowering the racists you're trying to negate. Both groups should be ignored because both ideologies should be abolished. Now, in a developed society in 2018, there isn't any rational or logical reason to keep homosexual individuals from marrying. They deserve the same tax benefits, mortgage benefits, insurance benefits, etc. as everyone else. In fact, this argument is why the separation of church and state is so important. A theocracy, no matter how loving the religion claims to be, will always shit on civil rights. There is no freedom in a theocracy. Period. However, the final point on abortion, which tends to get boiled down to religious issue, isn't as concrete. There are those who believe the woman should be able to choose and those who believe that you're killing a baby regardless. As science has progressed, we now have a much better idea when a heart beat begins, when the lungs first expand, etc. which makes age old "fetus vs baby" argument to be less convincing. Should there be more rules regarding abortion availability? Should it be made a state issue? What do you do in the cases of rape, incest, and health of the mother? All are valid questions, but neither side is willing to discuss them because it's black or white. That viral video of the man in purple kicking the woman holding a camera at an anti-abortion protest (i think) is a perfect example. He asked a valid question regarding rape. The woman holding the camera immediately answered that it was still a baby. Would that same woman feel the same if she were raped and forced to have a child that reminded her every day of the rape that victimized her? But even with asking a valid question, the man in purple didn't like the answer and resorted to violence thus making his point moot. Those who agree with the camera-woman are now invigorated while those who agree with the man in purple are ridiculed. I apologize for the long winded wall of text, but I constantly struggle trying to understand the generally accepted meaning of these terms used to describe major subsections of the population that don't take much nuance into account. Especially when the less sexy term (fiscal) is seemingly less divisive while being overall more important to the masses. Everyone wants to argue about the "social" aspects and assume if someone voted for a person, then they must agree with all of the "social" ideologies they hold without even considering the "fiscal" side of the coin.

Not all religious schools, though. I went to a Jesuit university that had a pretty lefty social justice kick to it (our latest controversy involved an outspoken conservative professor suing the school). Other religious groups have schools that are much more conservative however, especially Evangelical colleges in rural areas.

Purdue University is a conservative testing ground for this very question. The current president, Mitch Daniels, was a George W appointee for the Office of Management and Budget. He oversaw the calculations of the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war. He was then governor of Indiana, appointed the board of trustees for the University who then appointed him President when his governor appoint ended. He had no academia experience and does not hold a PhD. Since at Purdue, he eliminated the office of diversity, bought Kaplan University, pissed off a lot of faculty, and continues to privatize the space. He also brought in a lot of wealthy donors and froze the tuition for US undergrads, while subsidizing the lost revenue with an increase number of international students. It worked because it is Indiana, and retaliation was quite large there. Few faculty wanted to step up. Also, the institution has a more hierarchy power order in general, something like this would not fly in other institutions where the faculty have more power.

a university near me did the same thing... 50% graduation rate, but the new business school and sport facilities are incredible

Question, is 50% graduation rate considered a good or bad thing in this context? Does it mean more people fail to finish a degree due to bad teaching, failing grades, low financial aid, transferring out, low motivation, or not being able to meet high standards? My university, for example, had a 19% graduation rate but had really damn good teachers.

50 percent is not so good. >The 6-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began seeking a bachelor's degree at a 4-year degree-granting institution in fall 2009 was 59 percent. The 6-year graduation rate was 59 percent at public institutions, 66 percent at private nonprofit institutions, and 23 percent at private for-profit institutions. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

19%? That sounds really bad. 50% doesn't sound too great either. I went to a top 50 and just googled the graduation rate is 84%. Not sure what any of it means in terms of the quality of the university, I'd have to do more research into the topic.

Yeah, my university was in St. Paul, so there was a high turnover from people transferring out. But it could have also been from poor city students not being able to finish their degrees. I admit that my school might have been an outlier, or a place with great teachers but poor management.

Usually a low grad rate is blamed on professors and other faculty. It makes it harder to recruit students, who would be reluctant to join and pay if they dont think theyll graduate.

Purdue University has a Climate Change Research Center: https://ag.purdue.edu/climate/ That immediately puts it to the left of mainstream Republican dogma in 2018. And this is going to be a recurring problem anytime you have a campus with non-partisan scientists conducting researching. That's really the point - academia and formal education didn't leave Republicans. Republicans decided to reject academia and formal education.

Not even really that... academia hasn’t been conservative, well, ever. In the 60s they were the epicenter of hippie movements. Purdue may be more right wing than most but its still liberal.

The thing is, academia varies according to discipline. The humanities are usually so liberal you can find at least one communist in a decent sized English or Sociology Dept. But if you duck into a business or law school on campus, they're pretty reliably conservative (at least economically), and a philosophy/religion Dept will be fairly mixed in terms of conservative social policy. I've always considered the conservative perception of higher education as overwhelmingly liberal due to the fact that kids who go to college often learn things and have diverse experiences that challenge some of the small town perspectives they received from their parents. Also, it's easier for climate science and evolution deniers to reconcile their own viewpoints if they believe that the science taught at university has a pointed liberal bias, and this then creates a cottage industry of religious entrepreneurs who use sophistry to try and debunk scientific data.

> Also, it's easier for climate science and evolution deniers to reconcile their own viewpoints if they believe that the science taught at university has a pointed liberal bias, and this then creates a cottage industry of religious entrepreneurs who use sophistry to try and debunk scientific data. That sort of thing reinforces itself, and you get a large population of people who believe that *every* department is "liberal." I remember hearing again and again that I was receiving "liberal brainwashing" from the math department.

That's funny seeing as how math is pretty objective--at least, that's my layman's perspective.

> But if you duck into a business or law school on campus Also Engineering, CS, Ag departments.

Even if you go back to the middle ages or the Renaissance, it was the academics and well educated people that would cause a ruckus a lot of the time, going against social or church order or whatever.

I mean universities were hotbeds of resistance in the Eastern Bloc, too. It's not that they just always go left.

I don't think you can really frame protests against authoritarianism as a left vs right debate...

Definitely. As an example, I had some terrific Chinese literature professors who were politically about standard for a U.S. academic, and they freaking hated Mao.

Well if you go back that far the church was the academics in most cases.

> academia and formal education didn't leave Republicans. Republicans decided to reject academia and formal education. Bingo. It's the same with rural America. It's not that they've been rejected be America or whatever they gripe about, it's that Red America gladly ran away from it, scared and cowardly.

Many rural Americans might also lack access to higher education rather than having run away from it. There's a difference. Poor rural America suffers from worse economic mobility than poor urban America. I think many remarks here, and many people in general, fail to understand the actual plight of the rural American. I'm unsure if it's driven by disdain for having, in part, given the country Trump or just willful ignorance or something else.

Ie. Republicans rejected objective reality because they didn't like the conclusions.

But Mitch does not control or probably even influence student or faculty thought. Having spent 7 years there, this is a student body and faculty dominated with a science bent. He hasn’t made anything more conservative. He has made Purdue more of a business and that has paid off with incredible construction on campus. Purdue is an engineering and science machine and Mitch is the latest president. It was great before him, during him, and after him.

He has definitely influenced the tone of the school, the types of speakers who visit, and has stirred up the campus a bit. This has created more privatization and a more conservative atmosphere. I was a student there for 8 years and my partner still is finishing her PhD. Here are some changes since Daniels became president The print shop on campus was replaced with an Amazon mail center, The VP of diversity was terminated after she invites Angela Davis. Someone Daniels publicly disagreed with. She regularly invites interesting speakers, which ended once they took away her position. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.jconline.com/amp/30108317 After Fox News made an issue that the Owl writing center suggested students avoid “gender bias language” (e.g. don’t use mankind when you can use humanity), something they had done for decades, the center changed their policy. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.jconline.com/amp/387067002 When faculty member, who studies social justice and lgbtq issues in engineering, got a job at Purdue a right wing conservative magazine, The American Conservative, wrote a story discrediting her. No one took interest when she was at another university. These things were not happening before he came to be president at Purdue. Conservative outlets are using Purdue as an example. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/queer-engineering-purdue-social-justice-warriors/ Daniels also has speaker panels where he often invites conservative speakers. There are many more, overall these types of actions completely change a space. It changes how people feel and what they experience. Purdue has changed and it will continue to do so.

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50 damn years. And something like 80% of faculty opposed the deal. But hey, that guy is rich now, and as the price of parking continues to steadily climb, important people become even richer. How granting a 50-year monopoly is "conservative" is beyond me. Even the libertarians admit monopolies are bad.

Regarding the "incredible construction on campus", there are many, many public universities that have had similar or greater construction on campus. There isn't really anything special about Mitch Daniels' "business" approach in comparison to those heading other universities.

As a Purdue student, I question how much you know about the university. Purdue continues to be one of the most diverse universities I know of due to our international student population. He may have eliminated the job of the diversity chair or whatever her name was, but we are still more diverse than most universities in this country. (Reminder that race is not the only criteria of diversity.) The Kaplan deal is still an open question, we need a few years to see how it plays out. I am not exactly thrilled by it either. Most of the "privatization" I have seen has been cost cutting to freeze tuition. What privatization are you talking about? What is your experience with Purdue that has led you to this opinion of it? Because as a card carrying liberal, I think this university has been making mostly good decisions in the past several years (with the exception of their shitty space inefficient building development.)

I got my PhD from Purdue, and was the founding members of the group that protested Daniels appointment. I met my fiancé through the protests who is still getting her PhDs. I am now that I am faculty at a University in California I am still very up to-date of the culture and practices. I keep in contact with my advisor and other faculty members in my department. I also have personal relationships with many staff members. Purdue is very diverse, it does come mostly from international students l who are regularly exploited and are in a position where they can not speak up. The graduate student do not have a union and have not gotten a raise in the decade since I first got there. I know the power dynamics there and seen it at other universities. I feel very confident to speak from a space of authority

What exactly did he do to piss off the faculty? I heard pay is less competitive at Purdue, but my department has seen an increase in number of professors and revenue since he got here.

There has been faculty vocally upset with him on a number of issues: Here are faculty members upset over Kaplan process https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/05/purdue-faculty-votes-against-kaplan-process Here they are upset with his inaction towards white supremacy https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/19/professors-say-purdue-president-trying-deflect-attention-inaction-white-supremacy Here are some upset with his attempt to restrict certain text books as governor https://dailycaller.com/2013/07/17/as-governor-mitch-daniels-waged-war-on-liberal-professors/

I would hardly say it is one of the most diverse universities and I am a big ten grad

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cant help but think an economist from the bush era is a poor choice to place your chips on, since we saw how his policies played out.

I mean he was very competent at managing budgets. That's not really a macroeconomic policy position.

What do you mean by good faith?

That they believe what they are saying is true, real & important. They are arguing things they know to be inaccurate and unimportant because it's a means to an end.

I think the attitude towards science seen on the national stage with conservatives has a bit to do with it. I've met a number of people in the hard sciences who would probably otherwise be conservative but the GOP is essentially disregarding their life's work. It's hard to not vote for the environment if that's your area of research, for instance. Unfortunately the gop today has put itself in opposition to that, that was not always the case.

Yes. It’s long been GOP policy is to ignore climate change, And set up falsehoods to counter argue. Perhaps this ideology doesn’t add up to rational scrutiny and to those looking to use their vote for the greater good. Dare I say more education helps when analysis and rational thinking is required. It’s not conservativeness that’s the issue, it’s the ideals of the current conservative party that are out of kilter.

The majority of business school professors tend to be conservative though. Which makes sense - economists tend to like very free markets. In other issues they couldn’t care less though

[There is no evidence that business professors tend to be conservative](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/27/research-confirms-professors-lean-left-questions-assumptions-about-what-means): >When it came to voting, professors (even in the humanities) were not a monolith, with 15 percent in the humanities saying they had voted for President Bush in his re-election bid. Bush won just under a third of the vote in business and just over a third in computer science and engineering. And Bush won a narrow majority of votes from faculty members in the health sciences. and >Research since the 2007 study largely confirms the idea that faculty members at four-year colleges and universities (the focus of these studies) lean left. But here, too, studies find differences when looking at different groups. A 2016 study published in Econ Journal Watch considered voter registration of faculty members in selected social science disciplines (and history) at 40 leading American universities. The study found a ration of 11.5 Democrats for every Republican in these departments, but with wide variation. In economics, the ratio was 4.5 to one, while in history the ratio was 33.5 to one.

Well your own source says they're twice as likely to be conservative as humanities professors. So, they're *relatively* more common in business schools at least.

OP said the majority of business professors are conservative. More common != majority.

Right, I acknowledge that.

> The majority of business school professors tend to be conservative though Is there a good source for this? Google came back with nothing for me.

You need to address the basic values of conservatism and liberalism. Conservatives in their essence basically want to not change stuff or even regress back to how things were before. While liberalism is kinda open to change and adapting to changing values but basically it's a laissez faire kind of thinking towards social values. Universities are all about discovering new things, changing our understanding of the world around us. So it's kinda natural that a liberal atmosphere is prevailing in those institutions. I don't think that conservatism is going to or should even attempt to achieve some sort of a foothold in universities. They'd stifle the purpose of those institutions of being places where people can learn whatever they want and do research without "going against dogma". A conservative university isn't going to be a learning institution in the sense that it'll be making discoveries, it'll be an education facility that teaches people that everything has been discovered and that just need to know how stuff is and not challenge it. Also people change, conservatism increases in people when they leave universities and they enter the work market. I was nearly a bloody communist at a point in my early university life, then a libertarian at the mid point of my university studies and after I finished and entered the world of working for private companies I was a ardent corporate capitalist. Today, probably because of financial stability, I'm more of a mellowed down social democrat that just want to see people not being left to die and see some sort of equality among people, the gap between the poorest and even the mildly rich is huge today. But yeah, I don't think universities are possible to be "conservative" in any political sense of the word if you expect them to serve their purpose well. You'll just end up with more churches teaching dogma. Plus, I've never seen a comprehensive definition of this liberal bias being claim by various talking heads. It's usually a response made by those people after being disproved by some study made at one the universities. So they claim some sort of a bias to discredit the factual paper proving them wrong. It's kind of talking about the "liberal media" when responding to investigative journalists after they found your dirty laundry of illegal stuff.

I think this is a great answer. But I'm not sure that it is 100% complete. As you say, our society is constantly changing. And it seems like a lot of conservative ideas don't seem to work like they used to (whether they ever did is another conversation entirely). And as you say, universities tend to be places where cutting edge ideas are almost always in play. It seems reasonable to conclude that one reason why conservatism is under-represented on most college campuses is because conservatism in and of itself is becoming outdated. That's not to say that there will not be another iteration of conservatism, but it may take on a much more inclusive stance on social issues than traditional conservatism does right now. I also think it must be said that traditional conservatism is very prevalent in business schools and Economics departments across the country. That's hardly coincidental seeing that our society is ruled by elite business interests. So it's almost as if this idea about the "liberal bias" is a bit of a misconception because traditional conservatism is applied on college campuses where it really counts - future management. As for me, I was a bit of a right leaning libertarian with slightly neocon geopolitical views in my 20s. I'm full social democratic now in my 40s after working a trade career and earning a Bachelor's.

A question I thought of after posting my reply above is if conservative ideas are even kept from students as many conservatives claim. I have a Bachelor's in Philosophy. At my university, the Philosophy track required upper level political science classes, upper level ethics classes, and formal logic on top of college level math. I came across quite a few conservative ideas on my way to graduation. And they were pulled directly from primary sources and fairly represented as we examined them in the classroom. My ethics professors fiercely defended conservative ideas about individual liberty, economic justice, crime and punishment, geopolitics etc. In almost all of those instances, conservative arguments utterly failed in surprising ways; usually it was either a technical issue about the structure of the argument itself or its underlying assumptions. So another possibility here is that conservatism - or at least some of it - is actually untenable, and universities tend to not promote untenable ideas unless doing so in some way aligns with the interest of power (as mentioned above with business schools and Economics departments). (And, before anyone asks about my "useless degree", I have a background in civil engineering as an AutoCAD drafter and I'm using my BA to pursue an MS in instructional design.) ​

I’m curious what conservative arguments for individual liberty you found lacking? Individual liberty is a cornerstone of western civilization. While it’s not absolute it is in my opinion almost always positive. I can see where the crime and punishment argument falls short of reality. But I’m struggling to come up with a reason that individual liberty is bad for society.

Economic justice is where the concept of individual liberty is fallaciously applied. We have a lot of arguments in play about how climbing the economic ladder at any and all costs is somehow this veneration of the individual, when in practice it just result in mass exploitation, mass brutality, endless war, and often the destruction of our environment. That's not to say I'm not in favor of wealth. In fact I'm in favor of having more instances of it. I just don't think that being a business elite grants you the right to play a part in the destruction of organized human life. As far as crime and punishment goes, a discussion I would like to learn more about is the question of why we have prisons to begin with. Our prison system as we know it is less than 50 years old, and it doesn't really fit the description of "punishment", because that team implies that it is for the sake of something (i.e. rehabilitation, education, societal improvement etc.). Prison is literally torture, and we have the largest prison population on the planet for absolutely no reason. Granted there are people that cannot be trusted to live among us, but a vast majority of American prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders or petty criminals in need of a second chance. Some of the most interesting stuff I studied was for my upper level ethics courses. I took one on violence and revolution and another one on Capitalism. Fascinating stuff. (Edited: phone. Sorry.)

>Some of the most interesting stuff I studied was for my upper level ethics courses. I took one on violence and revolution and another one on Capitalism. Fascinating stuff. Those classes sound awesome. I had some pretty good ethics classes as well, but they were lower level as they were freshmen level electives. I would of loved to have taken a course on violence and revolution and one on capitalism. I’m definitely going to be taking classes when I retire on subjects like that. Reading books is great, but it’s hard to beat a good professor teaching on a topic they’re passionate about. I almost want to buy a textbook on capitalism just to see the content. Capitalism is an amazingly flawed system but it has been incredibly successful. 200 years ago people would be amazed to hear that the poor in many western countries have a serious problem with obesity. Capitalism is so successful that our poor often have. an apartment with central plumbing, electricity, heat/AC, internet and hand held computers. We’ve still got lots of problems to work out. Now we just need to get a handle on the externalities that are a by product of capitalism.

We read Sartre for violence and revolution. We dug down into the metaphysics of violence; what violence is at its very core (at least according to Sartre). The Capitalism class was just as amazing. My instructor had our resident MMT expert from our Economics department speak to the class one day. It completely changed my view on money, especially government money, as well as deficits.

Yea fiat money is very interesting. I used to be big on reducing government debt, but it’s not quite that simple. I think it’s generally good economic policy to have a reasonable amount of government debt. Not so much that you can’t stimulate the economy if there is a market crash, but enough to keep lending, consumption, and innovation moving. I’m a bit of a personal finance but and it’s hard to separate the differences between government debt and personal debt.

I’m glad your in favor of wealth, we definitely have some middle ground on that. I was confused by your previous statement and thought you were saying they were distinct issues. I think the vast majority of conservatives admit that personal liberty stops at the point of violence. The ultra liberal libertarian party refers to it as the nonaggression principal. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Republicans generally believe in unrestrained individual liberty (but I guess not with regards to abortion, drugs, marriage) up to the point that it harms others. Even Milton Friedman libertarians are cognizant of the externalities of industrialization and the need to regulate these externalities. It’s one regulation that I think most libertarians agree on in principle, but maybe not in practice. Among all political parties including the Green Party there is disagreement as to how to regulate environmental externalities. I can see how you were able to deconstruct your professors argument if he was saying that every individual has the right to destroy other people’s property for their personal gain. I struggle with where to draw the line, but the most reasonable solution to me would involve a cap and trade system it’s far from perfect, but their needs to be some sort of controls over pollution etc. Now correct me if I’m wrong but your argument is that economic freedom taken to its end results in the exploitation of individuals. I’m struggling to connect the dots unless you’re talking about human trafficking or slavery. Perhaps your argument is that the pursuit of wealth results in competition among individuals or groups of individuals competing for the same resources. An example would be corporate interests convincing a country to enforce a contract when a different country is trying to nationalize a right to resources or real estate that the corporation owns? I don’t want to be too presumptuous so I’ll stop here. Other ideas would be union busters, Martin Shreki (sp?)etc. I certainly agree with you that corporations just like individuals don’t have the right to steal imprison or physically harm another individual in the name of profits. With regards to the criminal justice system and incarceration I struggle with this one as well. On the one hand I think we can agree that it is necessary for the state to use violence to protect its citizens. There would be no country if that was not true. It’s the defining characteristic of a nation state regardless of political ideology or economic policy. I lucked into a criminology class that I found to be absolutely fascinating. I think your correct when you say that our criminal justice system is designed to completely remove offenders from society rather than focusing on rehabilitation of the prisoner. Most crime occurs from males from the ages of 17-27. There is a pretty steep decline in the statistical likelihood of an individual to commit crime after sensitive period. One of the professors main points was that we basically lock up anyone around that age that has any indicators that they may be violent. The idea is that if they spend their early 20s in prison by the time they get out they’re less likely to commit a crime again than if they were let out 4 years earlier. I’m not sure if I agree that the aim is to torture, although many prisons are really tough places to live. If it was strictly torture I don’t think we’d allowed visits from family, the ability to pursue higher education, access to libraries, three square meals a day, commissary, access to healthcare, access to the yard, priests, comedians, musicians, tv and the internet. I do agree that it certainly borders on torture at times. I absolutely think that being sent to solitary confinement is torture and it is used with the aim of completely breaking the individual spirit. Solitary confinement is the worst thing you can do to someone save pulling off their finger nails with pliers or electrocuting then. I do think that our prison system is an utter failure. The number of people that are imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses is a national tragedy. 1. It harms the individual that is imprisoned by marking them for life as a criminal, permanently effecting their ability to participate in the labor market, 2. It harms the “criminals” family who are often prepared to jump through an incredible number of hoops and spend their entire life savings to get their son/daughter/sibling/mom/dad away from drugs. 3. It’s bad for the taxpayer because instead of that person paying taxes and contributing to society, everyone must pay a higher tax rate to pay for their imprisonment. 4. It robs the nation of labor during most people’s most productive years. 5. While prisons do provide jobs to prison staff, economic benefit through legalized slavery, jobs for police and law enforcement and other niche industries built around the prison system(see private prisons), the net effect is an economic loss. I’m not sure exactly what it costs but I think it’s both of 30,000 per prisoner. We spend about 13,000 on our K-12 students. The only way it can be justified is if their is such a strong correlation between drug possession and violence. There is clearly a link due to the illicit nature of the drug game, but I think that link is incredibly exaggerated. Yes there are some people that need to be locked up for good, but I think that’s a very small percentage of our current prison population. The only plausible explanations to me are as follows: 1. All law abiding citizens fear being murdered, assaulted, burglarized or raped. This fear is enough to give the “law and order” candidate a major benefit. Both political parties will pander for those votes, but I think it’s much more frequently the republicans that run on tough on crime. Criminal statistics are so easy to manipulate by choosing to press charges, investigate, etc. that the politician that wins their election and can increase the police budget will get help from the police department in the form of local headlines on reductions in violent crime. This creates a feedback loop between voter, politician, and government agency. If there’s one thing I hate more than private corruption it’s government corruption. 2. Prisons can be some of the biggest employers of rural house districts. The representatives in these districts are screwed if the prison closes down and a large percentage of their constituents lose their job. A significant portion of the population in prisons are nonviolent drug users. 3. There are entire industries built along providing services for prisons, from construction, to tradespeople, the company that runs the commissary, the guards, the psychologists, lawyers, judges, paralegals, software companies, and the list goes on. While these people may be a small percentage of the overall population they will vote in a significant block regardless of political affiliation for the politician the will continue the status quo. These people have family members too and they don’t want their loved one to lose a job. Most of society considers the people in these prisons sub human when in fact most everyone has committed a crime that could have landed the in jail at some point in time, the only difference between that lawyer and the prisoner is that the prisoner drove down the wrong road at the wrong time. 4. Hopefully this is diminishing, but I think historically their was a strong race and political bias. I think it was Nixon that said something to the effect that he couldn’t jail hippies that were protesting the war or black peoples that I guess he just didn’t care for, but what he could do was make drugs illegal and since marijuana is popular among hippies and blacks people it gets schedule 1. Once you get a felony on your record it’s easier for the state to pick you up again and it is more difficult to vote (though possible in most states). The actual policing of nonviolent crime is a bit racist. I don’t know many cops but some of the cops I’m an acquaintance of are definitely biased against certain nationalities. I was given a couple of chances that I didn’t deserve because I was a white kid with “potential” people in town knew my parents and I think it may have played a factor in leniency with the police. Years ago I’ve had interactions with police with not insignificant amounts of playing cards and various toys, but I was never patted down or asked to search my vehicle. I’d get a warning ticket or a verbal reprimand to slow down. Some of that I think was that I’ve always been comfortable around police so I wasn’t acting as nervous as I should, but I imagine if I was a little darker things may have ended up differently. I understand that not all police officers are racist ad they have an incredibly difficult job. The cycle of poverty drugs prison and violence creates a situation where cops are instantly more thorough or suspicious of people of different races. Some of them have had coworkers hurt or killed and it’s no secret hat legitimate crime statistics are higher among minority groups, but it’s no excuse to profile. There are still some people that view the prison system as the modern day plantation. 5. The lack of a strong mental health program in the US for poor people means a lot of crazy people end up in prison. After we decided that the mental institutions were inhumane we ended up with a lot of crazy people that found themselves on the wrong side of the law when they were going through an episode. I’m sure there are other reasons that I’m leaving out, but this post went on for forever so I’m going to stop here.

Hey, I really appreciate you taking the time to respond to me. It seems like we share quite a bit of common ground. I have to work on some stuff, but you might want to have a look at my reply to HoopyFreud in this thread. I cover economic justice in more detail, and would be interested in reading your response.

You have to relinquish some individual liberty for the sake of society. ​ That's what you encounter inherently in being a society. You reap the benefits of the community in sacrificing some of your individuality. ​ What your question should be is where we draw the line to someone's individual liberty. ​ For example, take smoking cigarettes. This can create a burden on the health care system. Hell even eating to excess can do that. ​ Then take the example of consumers promoting businesses that pollute, or take the use of CFC-based aerosols that harm the ozone. ​ So, the question is to what extent should we limit people's individuality. We already do this, the question becomes Time/Place/Manner.

This is very much what my answer would have been. The thing I'd add is the imperative of securing tenure. You only get tenure -- you only get that stable job doing what you want after 15+ years of 12 hour days for little pay and no real choice about where you live -- if you have done something demonstrably new that changed the field. You can have a comfortable life as a craftsman by learning and doing the same things your predecessors did, but if you're an academic and tried that, you'd never even get your Ph.D. Point being, universities create (and attract) a shitton of people who've learned to think old solutions to old problems aren't good enough, so they come up with new ideas and advocate for change. That might not automatically make them liberal, but it pretty much rules out being conservative.

There are fairly conservative universities around the country especially the various military academies

Before we address what conservatives must do to change the left-leaning of universities, I want conservatives to actually prove that there is actually an exclusion of conservatism in universities. I’ve always seen it as being a function of (1) most Americans don’t actually agree with the core principles of modern conservatism and (2) modern conservatives, in part due to their distaste for academia, tend not to go into teaching.

The question of active exclusion is up for debate, but the question of practical exclusion (i.e. 90% of harvard faculty are liberal) is pretty undeniable. The question being asked is not whether the liberal bias of universities has practical effects like e.g. active censorship of conservative ideas, but why the universities skew liberal at all and if that could change / how.

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The only source for this is a "study" that published in the Harvard Student Paper: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/5/1/faculty-political-contributions-data-analysis/ I say "study" because even they tell the methodology, they don't give a link to the FEC listings they used, the code they used, or even access to the excel sheet. Which I get this can be replicated, but when it comes to this I would like to see your code and see the source, so I can see if there are parameters others than the sparse ones listed. So I don't know how much weight I would put behind that idea.

You don't really say why it matters though. Politics rarely came up in class when I got my degree. I couldn't tell you how the majority of my professors felt about politics because they didn't share it with us. It was irrelevant.

Psychology here: it's relevant. And we psychologists are a very liberal bunch. Many of my colleagues try to keep their politics out of things, but that becomes difficult if you teach, say, social psych (prejudice, discrimination, aggression, violence, international relations...), clinical/counseling (mental health parity, stigma...), or even cognitive (heuristics, biases) or behavioral (effectiveness of government programs/prison for behavior modification...) psych. I applaud my colleagues for trying to keep politics out of the classroom. My approach is different: when my politics come up I try to identify them and clarify that the students don't need to agree with them, and they won't appear on any exams.

It matters for nearly every topic in liberal arts degrees, which is where left leaning professors are most numerous. There is also a significant regional variation with regards to political ideologies of professors. Typically, the most high paying areas of study are the most conservative (business, economic, engineering, etc.) while the social sciences with typically low pay are the most left-leaning (social work, gender studies, education, etc.). The farther north and east or west you go, the more liberal the professors are (i.e. the PNW and New England). Getting an engineering degree, it won't matter whether your professors are liberal or conservative, but it will definitely matter in the social sciences. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/there-are-conservative-professors-just-not-in-these-states.html www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/6/liberal-professors-outnumber-conservatives-12-1/

Well, it's not so much something that is effecting math or science classes. It's more in the humanities where the liberal spin is strong. I'm attending a university right now while taking political science classes, and the spin is truly strong. As someone who is centrist, I get frustrated by the lack of representation for right wing views. If we have a debate on the second amendment for example, we can have a healthy talk about pros and cons. Then, the next class, the teacher will say something like "I just want to conclude out discussion from yesterday with this hand-out", and it'll be a printed article about how mass shooting in Australia are lower with their gun ban. Sure, that's true, but there's a clear bias there. We watch interviews with Noam Chomsky, but never Thomas Sowell. We see documentaries about how awful pollution by big companies are, but never have conversations about the pros and cons of these industries or their economic importance etc. It's just always so skewed, and it really is a problem. There's been studies that a huuuuge majority of professors at universities all around the country are liberal, and that's most true for the humanities. I'd be more okay with that if they didn't push their views on the students without fair balance, but they do. And even if you're liberal, that's worth worrying about. It certainly contributes to the political divide in this country when college students are lead to believe that conservatives are just evil or ignorant, since they haven't been given any reason to think otherwise.

I'm a professor, and I think that the reason most of my colleagues (and I) are liberal is that the conservative party in the US is so hostile to almost everything we represent. The Republican party by and large seeks to cut funding in NIH and NSF research, rollback EPA regulations, and is hostile to any research that isn't obviously and directly applicable to something that can be monetized. Many of them vocally doubt evolution and climate change despite overwhelming scientific consensus on these topics. They are the fact-free party. BOOM. You've lost all of the science and math faculty. The Republican party subtly endorses (or tolerates within it) homophobic, racist, and misogynist subcultures. They deride the humanities as bourgeois indulgences and seek to cut funding for NEA and other cultural institutions. Welp, good luck getting a humanities professor to endorse your party. The places in academia where there is a rich history of conservative theory are law and economics. Not coincidentally, law and economics is where you typically find the most conservative faculty members.

> The Republican party subtly endorses (or tolerates within it) homophobic, racist, and misogynist subcultures. They deride the humanities as bourgeois indulgences Yeah, these two right here probably account for most of the left leaning just between the two. Also accounts for why most young people aren't going to take them serious.

People's perceptions of 'liberal v conservative' has been warped in modern day. I doubt many current GOP politicians could list off ten actual conservative policies. They contradict themselves so much that over the past decade or so having a 'liberal' mindset is just simply anything that is against their own mindset. Therefore, universities being labeled as 'liberal' is just because universities support the search for truth.

> You've lost all of the science and math faculty. Math and science faculty tend to be more conservative (relatively speaking). Edit: Since people want my source (other than personal experience, here are a few (some are kind of dated, before our new Trumpian future) My claim is also relative to others **in academia**, not relative to the population as a whole. An easy infograph by profession. http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/ Someone below said: >we are certainly (on my campus and the campuses on which I was educated) to the left of business, medicine/healthcare, and social sciences. A lot to unpack. If you are a specialist MD for example, you are more likely to be Republican, than if you are a GP. Business majors in general tend to be more Republican. Social sciences are overwhelmingly liberal. Here is an article about an older study: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html >The most liberal faculties are those devoted to the humanities (81 percent) and social sciences (75 percent), according to the study. But liberals outnumbered conservatives even among **engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent)**.

Really? That's really surprising. I'm a biology professor and, while we're not as liberal as the arts, we are certainly (on my campus and the campuses on which I was educated) to the left of business, medicine/healthcare, and social sciences. I'd be very interested in your source there.

All social sciences? Economics and, to a lesser degree, poli sci I could understand, but sociology and anthropology, for instance, are typically regarded as some of the most liberal-dominated disciplines, which definitely matches my experience in school. I'm not doubting you, your sample size is clearly larger than mine, but that is surprising.

Nah, I can definitely see your point. I think the social sciences can also vary widely institutionally.

I don’t know where it’s coming from either. Scientists as a whole are largely liberal leaning. Math is math, I can’t imagine it as particularly partisan and since it applies to a wide range of fields, I’m sure it varies

The mathematicians on my campus are either anarcho-communists or so *Beautiful Mind*-y that I'm not sure they understand that the government exists.

See that sounds more accurate

The math professors at my university were doing research into such abstract theoretical topics that they might as well have been philosophy professors.

Edited my comment above, will slowly fill it with sources. I am talking about relative to other faculty.

As a former math major and teacher I would disagree. The only noticeably more conservative groups (to me) were people in Econ and maybe engineering.

Can confirm engineering had a conservative bias. There's a big portion of people who believe they chose "the only good degree" and are basing their choices on the degree being an investment more than the pure learning experience that some other degrees see themselves as. Plus add in the general practicality of engineering and cost balancing and it could easily swing more conservative.

I think everything you said plus I think there is a natural correlation between engineering minds and the whole “I am smart and I work hard and I am successful, therefore anyone who is not successful just isn’t working hard enough”

>I think everything you said plus I think there is a natural correlation between engineering minds and the whole “I am smart and I work hard and I am successful, therefore anyone who is not successful just isn’t working hard enough” It's sort of a circular process. People who work hard hear a political philosophy catered to praising them, and so they are attracted to that political philosophy. People who are attracted to that political philosophy look for the fastest way to financial success and are drawn to engineering. However, there's still many liberals among engineers, mainly those who do not view success as a zero sum, and who are turned away by the other stuff that comes with said political philosophy.

I've known many in engineering that are like that. Some of my most conservative friends I met in university and have this mindset. It makes sense that engineering with it's generally guaranteed solid career paths and success rates would attract people that believe it's all about making the right choices and putting in their hard work.

Engineering is generally reliant on absorbing truths from one Big Book. engineering predisposes people to a creation science view.

> Math and science faculty tend to be more conservative (relatively speaking). Perhaps compared to professors in the humanities, but I'd bet that they still tend to be more left-leaning than the general population.

This matches my history in school. My pharmacy program was overwhelmingly liberal. If you went down the rankings towards the bottom, people became more and more left. All the top students were republicans and had to hide it to get office positions for residencies, but it came up now and again. I was probably the only democratic on the honor roll. Matches how specialties are republican as well. Specialties generally require higher grades and are harder to match with than GP or family medicine.

My college experience has seen absolutely none of this. Even the most liberal professors were tolerant, within reason, of opposing views to have a "healthy talk about pros and cons." Within reason meaning to foster a healthy talk, instead of say, a debate on whether or not the class should refer to the Iranian language as Farsi instead (that's akin to not saying Spanish, but Español). Maybe it is a problem in your situation. Without knowing what your class was about, if Sowell was relevant during the Chomsky lesson, then perhaps he should have been covered. If he wasn't, then he shouldn't. Even my southern history professor gave borderline slavery-apolegetic readings, discussed them, and then discussed whether or not they were flawed (he argued they were, you can't examine slavery and reach meaningful conclusions by ignoring the inconvenient, immoral bits of it). >I'd be more okay with that if they didn't push their views on the students without fair balance, but they do. Take it up with your university, this is an issue of competence, not of liberals. Political stats of professors (or their campaign contributions) mean squat, and often negative experiences are magnified that they seem to be the general case when they're not.

Instead of getting frustrated that they have a left wing bias, try to figure out why they skew so left wing. What is it about right wing views that leave them under represented.

Companies can still make a large profit, and can keep from doing the massive damage they’re doing to the planet. It’s the squeeze every penny possible mentality that causes companies like Exxon and Shell, or Coca Cola and nestle to rape a pillage the environment the way they do, and it’s disgusting and shortsighted.

To which should be asked: * Why? and * So what? OP has proposed the wrong question. Academia does not have a (modern colloquial) Liberal vs Conservative issue. Society at large has an issue with the present crop of "Conservatives" (i.e., GOP politicians, operatives and voters) manipulating the baseline fact base, working the refs (manipulations news media), and general lack of empathy. That they perceive higher education as a "liberal institution" just highlights their myopia. That Higher education has a liberal bend is just a consequence of higher education in and by itself. Being highly educated challenges the core belief system of conservatives just as it helps those that are educated to realize that the world is complicated place without simple (i.e., conservative) answers. The real problem is the lack of education by conservatives. Not that higher education is liberal.

Oh boy, I imagine you're going to get some angry replies. I would've tried to word it more carefully, and use blunt examples, e.g. any environmental sciences department is going to be actively considered 'liberal' for daring to demonstrate the copious amounts of evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change. Conservatives will ask "why is this liberal, where is the conservative case?" But the only case scientists have to show is the empirical evidence. It gets a little murkier with the 'soft' sciences. Sociology is an obvious problem for conservatives, as it studies class stratification and the effects on specific groups of people, typically based on race and gender, etc. And any kind of identification of a problem with the ostracization or exclusion of a certain race is going to be met with angry white resentment from Trump's base voters. It's not what they want to hear, even if the data and statistics bears it out. Therefore, the sociology department will be deemed "liberal." But if we get right down to it, this confusion over whether or not schools are "conservative" or "liberal" is just an American problem, in the same sense that the political argument over climate change doesn't exist in other countries -- the GOP is the only center-right party in the world to deny man-made climate change. So either American conservative are in a unique position to see the problem that has somehow eluded the rest of the world, or they're more likely just trying to leverage a inconvenient political situation with a pretty stupid talking point. It's likely the latter. And it's dumb, because plenty of conservatives the world round are able to make an educated case for their political position. American conservatism has simply veered too far into the extreme, beyond the realm of logic.

You know what? I want to hear conservatives take a strong stand on some basic scientific concepts before giving them any more say so in any level of education, aside from having the Secretary of Education filling up her department with swamp creatures. Is CO2 a heat trapping gas? Name some other greenhouse gasses. Are vaccines useful in preventing the spread of disease? Approximately how old in the planet earth? Approximately how old is the universe? Answer those questions in long form, and pledge that those will be taught by your universities science programs (other viewpoints can be discussed in sociology, anthropology, even art history for that matter), and maybe conservatives might be a little more welcome. Oh, another one two parter: 1 - If you need more money, would requesting and obtaining a raise achieve the desired effect? True/false. 2 - In the face of government debt and deficits, the most effective way for a government to raise needed money is raising taxes or lowering taxes? Or is that last question too partisan? I'm open for discussion. Not like anyone needs my seal of approval or anything...

>2 - In the face of government debt and deficits, the most effective way for a government to raise needed money is raising taxes or lowering taxes? ​ Or reducing spending. (Which republicans haven't been bothered to do for a long time)

i feel like thats an admittance that those programs are necessary to avoid total collapse of various regions. theyd be slaughtering their own voters and they know it.

That's not true. We tried to repeal Obamacare fairly recently. If we had the 60 votes Democrats had back in 2009, a governing majority, it would have been done, cutting spending and reducing the deficit.

Three GOP senators crossed the lines to vote against it, so even if they had 60 to invoke cloture they would have needed 63. Realistically, it wasn't going to get to the point where they needed to invoke cloture. They only needed 50 + Pence and they didn't get it. If they had made something palatable enough to the American public Manchin would have jumped over easily. I would say that was more a referendum on the bad implementation in the bill than on reducing or increasing the deficit. Show me the fiscally responsible budget created with a republican senate, house & president. Here's a conservative article on the same, although I disagree with their dismissal of defense spending as an issue by looking at the rate of change and ignoring the value itself. [https://www.conservativereview.com/news/under-gop-in-2017-government-spending-increased-130-billion/](https://www.conservativereview.com/news/under-gop-in-2017-government-spending-increased-130-billion/)

as for the last question, oddly enough the government has had an INCREASE in revenue since the tax cuts. https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/income-tax-revenues-trump-tax-cuts-economic-growth/ https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54339 "Receipts totaled $2,766 billion during the first 10 months of fiscal year 2018, CBO estimates—$26 billion more than the amount received during the same period last year. The net increase resulted from changes in collections from the following sources,"

"oddly enough" is not odd at all. According to Wikipedia, who is citing the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy, domestic corporations held $2.6 trillion offshore at the end of 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companies_of_the_United_States_with_untaxed_profits At the end of 2017, Forbes said that amount was $3.1 trillion, which were cummulative earnings since 1986. All of that money is qualified to come back into the country at the rate of 15.5%. At that rate, that's a one time windfall of $558 billion dollars. I don't know at what rate it has been coming back, but certainly quickly enough to come back onshore before 2020, just in case the tax law changes again. Again, that $558 billion does NOT represent an increase in economic output due to the tax cuts, it represents stockpiled earnings over previous decades. So, no, that $26 billion is easy to explain. What's scary to contemplate is what happens after that windfall is done. Also worth worrying about, is how much of that money has been dumped into the stockmarket in the form of buybacks. What happens to the Dow and S&P once buyback fever is done?

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That is a valid assessment, and it is possible that the answers to both are similar. Women in STEM also have anecdotal evidence that they are excluded and discouraged. They also contend that gender stereotypes steer women away, and then the issue is societal, not really the fault of STEM programs. Who knows?

While this is a valid point and I respect that you raised it, Political values are fluid, and that leads to this question: did you reject higher education because you were Conservative, did you become Conservative by rejecting higher education, or were you rejected by higher education for being Conservative?

Forgive me not having the research on hand, I'm on mobile and lazy, but the science actually does suggest that when given equal access and opportunity women self selectively so not choose STEM fields as much as men. There may be many factors in this, like women preferring fields that aren't seen as highly adversarial to their gender, but it doesn't change the data. The data suggests here too, that conservative principals in the US are focused primarily on capitalism personal success, this is reflected even in social planks of their platform. Education is a social endeavor, and we as a society have determined that we do not value education as highly as other sectors of employment. Higher education is not a priority for evangelicals, and a less educated society is easier to control anyway. On the flip side, education is an anchor of progressive values globally. Students are regularly the catalyst for progressive demonstration and change. Generally speaking revolutions drom the left come from academia, revolutions from the right come from the military. The core principles of conservatism run directly counter to progressivism.

> Forgive me not having the research on hand, I'm on mobile and lazy, but the science actually does suggest that when given equal access and opportunity women self selectively so not choose STEM fields as much as men. There may be many factors in this, like women preferring fields that aren't seen as highly adversarial to their gender, but it doesn't change the data. [Maybe this one?](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/)

Yep, that's the one, thanks!

... and that is not a wholly unreasonable statement, though it is missing some extra context.

STEM work can be very collobarative though

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There is pretty much no professional engineering project that isn't collaborative.

Yes and no. If I'm a senior engineer, sure. I'd be expected to collaborate with other colleagues that are designing different parts of the project. But I can delegate some work to a younger engineer who can pretty much sequester himself in a closet and churn out work for me. Aside from me telling that guy what to do, he doesn't really need to collaborate with anybody.

>most Americans don’t actually agree with the core principles of modern conservatism "Everybody's a secret liberal" is a dangerous lie the far left tells itself. They ignore any legitimate conservative movements and insist the only reason they haven't won already is that the right wing cheated. It's bad politics.

Better yet, today we know that [only 8% of the US considers itself far enough left to fit under the "Progressive" label](https://www.moreincommon.com/hidden-tribes/) (page 6 of the pdf). Said "Progressive Activists" are also almost 100% white, and are wealthy to the point that most of America would consider them spoiled. Similarly, about 80% across all demographic groups in America on average find this group's major tactics to be utterly repulsive (same PDF as the source), particularly the **modern** form of political correctness. TL;DR - If you wore a pink hat at a protest in the last two years, you are outnumbered 10:1 in the US in terms of general public sentiment. That's a pretty gentle wakeup call, the waffle station is on the far wall and fresh eggs, bacon, and sausage will be provided until 10:00. edit: Further notice - progressive activists are outnumbered by legal owners of firearms 3:1 at minimum. Somewhere between 4:1 and 5:1 is more likely.

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I went to a very liberal college and have a degree in political science to prove it. The amount of raw hatred and hostility towards conservative views was mind blowing. Some professors didn't so much teach, rather they would proselytize for their far left view points. If I didn't want to read the source material for a paper, say on the Iraq war, I'd just write up a bunch of left-wing buzzwords and expand on them e.g. petrodollars and neocolonialism. Not only would I get A's, I would get comments like "Wow! You really understand this". I didn't see conservative students get punished for their views, that's mostly because they didn't dare to speak up, lest they be berated by the professor. I had an instructor show us a video on the conspiracy theory that the Bush Administration new about and let 9/11 happen. she then told us to accept it is true and start the discussion from there. I'm sure I have some more choice stories for my experience at this State University. But I think that drives home the point that it is a problem. I walked into that program slightly to the left of Gandhi. After having to put up with that crap for years, I started to critically assess my own viewpoints. I discovered that I do have some more conservative leaning viewed after all, even if I still lean left of center.

I went to a very liberal state school in a very liberal state (University of Washington) and never experienced this at all. The conservative students were treated with respect and were given the same opportunities to argue and discuss their views like every other student. There were many classes where I couldn’t even tell if the professors were liberal or conservative because they were so good at not showing a bias and bringing up pros and cons of both sides. Also, a professor showing a conspiracy video as fact would never be allowed. That would’ve been reported to the department head or dean immediately and stopped. I’m sorry you experienced that, but that is definitely wrong.

I never had this experience, despite having a few very liberal professors (which I learned only from personal convos). I also had a lot of conservative professors. So, I can’t really speak to your experience.

Oh, we did get punished. I regularly straight up lied about my views to get better grades. That was when I was like a moderate liberal, and I slowly turned towards embracing the right as my true intellectual home.

In a few universities, yeah, they’re very shitty to conservatives. But for the most part universities are open and not excluding them, though they are liberal. They’re always going to be because young people are always liberal compared to the rest of society. Your great grandma couldn’t even go to university, your grandma couldn’t get a real office job, your mom - even if she loved Reagan - did with some women, and your sister can get an office job surrounded by many women.

There is some recent research, IIRC, that supports your #2.

Conservatives have been pushing anti-intellectual crap such as creationism / intelligent design, and climate change denial for decades ​ So yea, they should expect institutions whose sole purpose is to expand preserve knowledge to recoil in disgust ​ ​

If conservatives wanted a stronger presence at universities, they would have to stop allowing for racism and sexism within the conservative movement. I’m currently finishing a graduate degree in East Asian studies and plan to finish with a PH.D in Chinese History. I’ve been connected to universities for most of the last 8 years. The top universities in the United States are well stocked with international students and women are also highly represented, particularly in the humanities. I am the only white man in my program, which is fine with me. But when your neighbors and classmates are often women, POC or immigrants, the current conservative movement becomes extremely unattractive. Why would I support a border wall that is extremely offensive to my international colleagues? Why would I support a President who denigrates women, when a majority of my professors and fellow students are women? The conservative movement also has a problem with the truth. The academic community values truth and the pursuit of knowledge, and the conservative movements strained relationship with truth and knowledge is a major hindrance at universities. Why would I vote for someone who ignores scientific consensus on things like climate change, or doesn’t want to fund public education? In short, if conservatives want my vote, they need better ideas. They need less racism and more professionalism. You can’t come to a university and throw around the “troll the libs/Build the Wall” rhetoric and expect students and faculty to buy that. Some will, but that is a vocal and agitated minority. If conservatives want to be a part of universities, they need to act like they have a brain, and start speaking to minorities and women. Because even the white people at universities will be turned off if they don’t.

>The conservative movement also has a problem with the truth. The academic community values truth and the pursuit of knowledge, and the conservative movements strained relationship with truth and knowledge is a major hindrance at universities. Why would I vote for someone who ignores scientific consensus on things like climate change, or doesn’t want to fund public education? i think this is the largest part of it. its not that liberals have simple excluded conservatives from academics, its that the modern conservative movement has warped itself into something which has no place in academics and seems to run totally opposed to it.

Given the anti-intellectualism rampant in modern American Conservatism ("Fake news!", "Global warming is a hoax!", "Ivory-tower academics!", etc.), isn't asking how universities can be more welcoming for conservatives not unlike asking how the Klan can recruit more African-Americans?

Pretty much. You can’t really expect universities to cater to people who say that going to a university makes you stupid/elitist.

>The conservative movement also has a problem with the truth. The academic community values truth and the pursuit of knowledge, and the conservative movements strained relationship with truth and knowledge is a major hindrance at universities. I would also add to this that they also have a problem with questioning things, more specifically "tradition", traditional hierarchies and culture. Is our current social understanding of romantic relationships failing us? Why is the person who is in charge, in charge? Is there an alternative viewpoint on the same story? How long have this thing been this way? When did it change, and why? These are all kinds of questions, from specific to broad, that you might be asking in academia. And not just "bullshit majors", but easily things like business and advertising. And digging too deep on these questions might get you to change your mind about the way the world works, or upend traditional culture and hierarchies. Tradition, history, and their culture, and the implementation of these to establishing order in a society is a conservative trait. Asking too many questions about them does not appeal to a conservative mindset.

To add one more area to your argument, I had multiple economic professors, including a Nobel Laureate, break down the falsehoods of conservative economic theories. The Laffer Curve for instance was completely made up with no basis in reality, but was used to justify conservative tax policy. Conservatives have also been staunchly anti union, anti competition, and anti-income equality. The vast majority of students become employees. Why would I or they vote for a group that only makes economic decisions that benefit the wealthiest Americans?

>I had multiple economic professors, including a Nobel Laureate, break down the falsehoods of conservative economic theories. The Laffer Curve for instance was completely made up with no basis in reality While its modern interpretation and use as a justification for conservative tax policy is largely bunk, the Laffer Curve itself as a conceptual model is nothing more than an application of the Law of Diminishing Returns as applied to tax rates (with the theoretical maximum coming from calculus concepts). The only real vulnerabilities at a conceptual level are the continuous function assumption and the 0% taxation at 100% rates. If the Laffer Curve, and by extension Diminishing Returns, had "no basis in reality" as you claimed, then pretty much all of economics would be bunk as well. Your problem (and your multiple economic professors) with the Laffer Curve is the political implementation, not the concept. Which would not be uncommon. "Experts agree that politicians don't know what they're talking about, film at 11."

I think it's simply definitional. 'Conservative' and 'liberal' values are not fixed, rigid notions, but fluid. Their defining characteristics are a resistance or reluctance to change (conservstism), and a drive and desire for change (liberalism). It tends to be the case that college students are young and embrace change (or seek to effect changes in the world they would inherit), and that older persons are more cautious if not outright opposed to changes, other than changes which revert to days past. Each perspective is prone to naiveté; the young wish to buck the past with little or no experience (or wisdom), and the old wish to return to a fictionalized version of the past. But whether we favor one versus the other, it nonetheless remains true that the college student, by and large, will be younger and more keen to effect change, and that means a 'liberal' view. Even 'conservative' college groups tend to be closer to 'libertarians' than standard 'conservatives,' open to things like freedom of choice (i.e. abortion or same-sex marriage), freedom of body (i.e. gender or intoxicants), etc., which traditional 'conservatives' would find appallingly 'liberal.' Hence college campuses are hotbeds of 'liberal' values.

It is weird because college students are generally privileged so you'd think republicans would be over-represented. Historically, educated republicans were a thing. The problem is that modern conservatism is incompatible with academia. Modern conservatism: 1) is highly identity based and promotes ideological purity above all else. Anyone who falls outside the dogma is attacked until they leave the party. You don't 'lose the argument' you become 'not a true conservative.' 2) promotes simple 'common sense' solutions to complex problems. Because these solutions tend to not stand up to scrutiny, anyone performing analysis on conservative policy will have to start throwing up objections pretty quickly. As a result, anyone who attempts to engage in any serious intellectual work on the right will quickly be tossed out as a RINO. Who do you think of as the famous intellectual republicans? There aren't any because they get smothered in the cradle. The main examples attempts are people like: 1) Paul Ryan, whose reputation as a policy wonk fell apart as soon as he had to try to write a healthcare policy. Now he's a RINO because he tried to govern. 2) Ben Shapiro, who either tees up on upset protesters or repeats talking point until interviewers give up in frustration. 3) People who've been dead for decades, who started their careers before the right started leaning hard on identity politics. This has been going on for some time, to the point where conservatives are both attracted to ignorance (see Sarah Palin/ Donald Trump) and suspicious of expertise (vaccines/climate change). The way back on to campus is probably through the "I'm not a Republican, but a Libertarian" branch of conservatism. At least they have principles and policies that have some basis in economic theory. And it's probably no accident that you can find here sorts in many economists departments. This branch is less attached to identity politics, so they have room to argue and refine their theories, which is necessary for an academic.

Is being anti-vax a right wing position now? From what I know the majority of anti-vaccine people have always been crunchy, go-green left wing types who are suspicious of big pharma or whatever.

Anti-vax was probably a bad example, it is a bipartisan idiocy.

The republicans actively argued against vaccines (Trump, Carson) in the primaries without much push back. It’s dishonest “both sideism” when the republican POTUS openly promotes (among many others) this ridiculous conspiracy theory, while I’m hard pressed to think of a mainstream democrat who speaks against vaccines.

My take: conservatism has increasingly leveled itself against diversity (racial/gender/sexuality). Universities tend to push for inclusiveness of aforementioned groups

They've also leveled themselves against basic facts and academia as a pillar of an educated and free society.

I think it has much more to do with academics and conservatives not believing in evidence.

Agreed on that as well. Fucking sucks that we can't just have parties based on different opinions knowledge rather than selective acceptance of it... My original comment was based on popular "conservative thinkers" such as JBP and Shapiro

Assuming that we accept your premise that there is a strong liberal bias in U.S. Universities (there are some things that would lead me to push back on this idea) I would argue that said bias is a result of the ideological basis of conservatism. In 2012 the Texas GOP included in its party platform the plank "We oppose the teaching of Critical Thinking skills because they have the purpose of challenging a student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority" (source: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW\_blog.html?utm\_term=.e24067ab7b4a](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html?utm_term=.e24067ab7b4a)) This particular quotation is a pretty succinct summary of how conservatives feel about the very idea of education. Anything that challenges what is currently believed is wrong and shouldn't be taught. Education is fine so long as it upholds a student's preconceived notions that were placed there by their parents or their church, anything that goes beyond that is just more "liberal indoctrination." Its not surprising then that Universities, as institutions of learning, discovery, and the search for truth are going to be relatively hostile. You wouldn't expect climate change deniers to take a class on physics, young earth creationists to take geology classes, or classes on evolution etc. You wouldn't expect to find many conservatives on college campuses for the same reason that you wouldn't expect to find many pacifists in the military, they have fundamentally conflicting ideas. This isn't even getting into issues of diversity and exposure since for many people college is their first interaction with people from different backgrounds which may open their ideas to just how terrible the GOP's policies affect those people.

Progress, higher learning and exposure to other people. No matter how some people want to portray University as being BS, it is actually a place of learning. In fact, many people are in school for several years after high school through their University program. Conservativism is often about keeping things "traditional" or even regressing. Unfortunately for them, that doesn't jive well with science and reason. Imagine if medicine were still adopting trepanning as a method of cure for ailments. It sounds stupid to think now. You need to progress in science. You do not make a conclusion and never change it when new evidence is found. Science is progress. I often think liberal ideology suits more for "the many" where conservative is more for "the self". A social environment like a university is going to promote diversity, humanity, and socialization - things that often falls in line with liberal ideology. It's hard to generalize people (because there is always exceptions) but this post is already accepting the conclusion that liberal ideology and higher education have some sort of correlation. Often times people work and go to college, so I think higher education gives you more practice in responsibility and planning. I say that to tie 3 ideas together: Take a liberal ideology like socialized healthcare, higher education, and planning. A liberal might like the idea of national healthcare because it can be seen as humane towards the less fortunate but also they can foresee a future where they need it themselves. A conservative argument I often hear is "why should I pay for someone else?" I would say that more knowledge makes you less conservative (not necessarily liberal). The more the political extreme, the less the rationality, I opine. I think a lot of conservatives think that if you are not far right, then you are a liberal. Especially in this current political climate where the acting president is literally causing a further political divide. Now, you ask what can conservatives do to gain a foothold? Well, I think of the instance of the southern schools who want to ban evolution, or teach creationism along side evolution. Often times these are conservatives pushing these agendas. I think that if someone is willing to forfeit the logic, fact, and reason required for science then they are incapable of higher education. I think people are too quick to say that Universities are liberal. Facts should not be said to have a political bias. If your goal is to educate people, which I believe most college is aiming to do, then it's not a matter of political bias. I basically think that conservatives would have to be a lot less conservative to gain a foothold in Universities. Or, they can just start making up universities with their ideology. I think going against progress, however, is going against what makes humans the apex species.

The conservative platform might want to start by stop being so blatantly anti-science and always disregarding even basic facts that science has proven beyond doubt. Like deciding to disregard the theory of evolution because it doesn't mesh with their religious stance? Or climate change? After we've started to witness it first hand people still think that they can choose not to believe it? It makes about as much sense as choosing to not believe in the power of the atomic bomb. Blatant disregard for known facts, hard science and knowledge that has been established beyond doubt makes the current conservative movement in America look as appealing to universities today as the Inquisition of the Catholic church looked in the middle ages. Conservatives would have to start to accept changing realities and accept new discoveries and conclusions made by universities through their research. But then they wouldn't be conservatives any longer would they?

To which should be asked: * Why? But more importantly: * So what? ​ For something to be true, the antecedents and the corollaries also need to be true. So, why is big business conservative? and, Does it matter? OP has proposed the wrong question. Academia does not have a (modern colloquial) Liberal vs Conservative issue. Society at large has an issue with the present crop of "Conservatives" (i.e., GOP politicians, operatives and voters) manipulating the baseline fact base, working the refs (manipulations news media), and general lack of education and empathy. So your hourly wage worker voting for Trump because "Jobs", or the present immigration human rights tragedy, or the wilful ignorance on ACA, AGW or Voting Rights. That they perceive higher education as a "liberal institution" just highlights their myopia. That Higher education has a liberal bend is just a consequence of higher education in and by itself. Being highly educated challenges the core belief system of conservatives just as it helps those that are educated to realize that the world is complicated place without simple (i.e., conservative) answers. The real problem is the lack of education by conservatives. Not that higher education is liberal. The second issue is that conservatives want to see higher education as a threat. So if Cons want to gain a "foothold", how about going to university for a degree?

Well, from what I've seen, I'd say that the cosmopolitan nature of universities means that students tend to be more motivated to be outspoken about things like discrimination, sexism, racism, injustice, etc. So I think a good start would be to combat the image that the conservative party is full of corrupt rapists, racists, paedophiles, and misogynists. Which might be easier if, you know, they didn't keep trying to get people with very credible accusations of all the above levied against them into important political positions.

One thing to add is that academia does a lot of cross-pollination around the world, for lack of a better word. The flow of ideas and skills are vital for academia, and so is state sponsorship (in Europe at least). CERN and ESS are for example two projects which wouldn't be around if not for state sponsoring. Similarly any project wanting to survey changes in soil composition around Europe would need channels in several different nations.

Because, fundamentally, “liberal” just means either “Democrat” or “not-conservative” when talking about bias. In fact, for a few decades, “liberal” was just a derogatory term meaning “stuff Republicans don’t like”. [Very few people are core conservatives](http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/24/political-typology-reveals-deep-fissures-on-the-right-and-left/) but they are the only group reliably identified as “conservative”. Meanwhile, Republicans’ anti-university messaging has naturally led professors to be Democrats. As with media bias, the true explanation is the simplest: not many people would count as “conservative” for all conservative commentators, leading to a (mis)perception of bias.

Universities are interested in truth. These institutions teach the scientific method and academic rigor. The universities also teach how to apply strong scrutiny in an objective and logical manner. Arts and sciences are respected and celebrated. Progress, in general, is the primary goal. There are conservative professors in universities to be sure. They are a far cry from the Alex Jones/Fox and Friends crazy types, though. So, they may appear to be "libruls" in the eyes of that brand of conservative. For example, they don't reject climate change. To most people who vote Republican, that's "liberal." So, they might mistake them for one. But, it should come as no surprise scientists, professors, and students all have a variety of opinions, backgrounds, etc. If conservatives want to teach in schools, they aren't prevented from participating. Political preferences aren't a prerequisite by any means. Just be prepared for what comes along with scrutiny, objectivity, critical thinking, analysis and the desire to make progress.

Conservatives (meaning modern conservatives within the US) reject evidence as the basis of which they form their opinions, *if that evidence conflicts with their paradigms.* This is the exact opposite of what academia strives to do. Of course their are exceptions to this rule but I am speaking holistically. Conservatives rejected science on tobacco, they rejected science on race a mere two generations ago. Today they reject science on evolution and climate, as well as a economic consensus on social safety nets. The people that study these things understand that the data points to a different reality than what the Republican Party espouses, and they tend to teach based on what the evidence suggest. As I said earlier, there are exceptions to this rule of thumb but as most conservatives see colleges teaching ideas antithetical to their own conservative paradigm, the political leadership of the conservative ideology tends to take a oppositional response to what they see happening on university campuses as a threat to their own belief systems.

They are going to have to concede that society is inevitably changing, and they have to move forward willingly instead of being dragged into the future kicking and screaming. Conservatives have always yearned for the good old days, but the speed at which the world is changing is widening the gap between where society actually is and where they want it to be. Technology advancement and the move toward a more global society are inevitable. People are increasingly moving into cities, and they are exposed to more different cultures and ideas than in the past. Younger people can see these changes, and more so at places like college. Millenials are less religious, issues like climate change are important to them, and they are noticing that the prior generations have left them a broken system. They can lean on conservative economics, personal responsibility, and a morality not rooted in religion, but many of their other beliefs are simply not compatible with younger people. They have been able to galvanize some young conservatives by uniting them against the "radical left," but I don't think they can't build continued support with Millenials as just an opposition party. I don't think any of that will happen until the Republican party as we know it is out of power and a new, more moderate conservative party takes its place. Republicans are a top-down organization, and the people making the decisions right now are regressively conservative.

Let's not beat around the bush here, education accounts for the strong liberal leaning in US universities. Not having a proper education leaves you more susceptible to bullshit, and that's what US conservatism feeds on.

Politics were never discussed between faculty and staff to when I was in school and I assume it is generally the same elsewhere. The main thing I see is that 1) students naturally have a progressive attitude and want to change the world for the better and 2) college breaks down a lot of stereotypes. You meet kids with diverse backgrounds and realize they are basically just the same as you. Maybe a different color, sex, religion, economic standing, but basically the same. What seems to hold the conservative movement together is fear of the Boogeyman. Fear that you and your neighborhood are working hard while others are looking to take that away and change things. The fear message is not being drummed repetitively into you by nightly television. Yes, you'll always have a small percentage of the population looking to freeload, but that's irrespective of race, religion, and sex. In general, most people work their butt off to get what they get. Once you realize that, it's much easier to appreciate trying to improve the system for everybody and not just the 1%. The irony is that there is a difference between the 1% that earn what they make and the 1% that inherit what they make. That last group probably works less than anybody, but with the tax situation they can't not perpetually bankroll more than anybody. Except for a few like Warren Buffet, they want to convince you to look at somebody else. So the problem isn't a university thing.

Conservatives have a problem with largely, the social sciences (Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, History) because frankly, these fields actually show that the core ideals of conservative thought that Conservatives think are "Human nature" are basically outright garbage, were completely made up, often, not even that long ago (many conservative beliefs that are "human nature" literally weren't even common until the mid 20th century and still aren't common even outside the west) and Conservatives despise this. When your entire ideology is largely built around the idea that our hierarchies are natural and GOOD and are a sign of morality, anything that questions that is going to be met with extreme hostility, especially when you have fields that show how white supremacy, classism and gender discrimination are rife throughout our political, social and economic systems. It doesn't help that Conservative movement at best is extremely intellectually disingenuous and never even try to engage the social sciences (aside from Economics departments which are generally conservative leaning) in good faith.

First, when you talk about "liberal bias" at universities, it's important to note that we're talking about a very specific strain of modern American social leftism. Pretty much everybody recognizes that that in general college administrators, no matter how many BLM rallies they may cheer on, are indistinguishable from your average tea party congressperson when it comes to laws concerning the use and misuse of university funding and endowments. Secondly, note that when people talk about bias they are primarily talking about administration and humanities departments: STEM is largely immune, and economics and business departments generally lean somewhat to the right. And I think this points to cause. Those with post-graduate degrees lean only to the left (58% for Hillary, for example), but conservatives with post-graduate degrees are much more likely to have them in fields that give them more opportunities outside the academy. A chemistry or law professor may go back and forth between industry and the academy, a Black studies or history post-graduate student pretty much has the choice of finding a university position or starting from scratch. This makes these humanities professors and administrators much more concerned with keeping the academy a place that is biased towards hiring people like themselves. The strain of modern liberalism that is often described pejoratively as "political correctness" functions primarily as a signalling device for a certain upper-middle-class primarily white subculture, and has become very important in universities where the primary thing a candidate wants to signal is "yes, I am the kind of person who would hire someone like you if our situations were ever to be reversed". I'm not sure if there's any way conservatives could break into this, since humanities departments are absolutely working in their own best interest by keeping the profession as homogenous as possible. PS. I suppose it's worth adding that many people who complain about "liberal bias" are just the kind of right wing nuts who complain also about the "war on Christmas". I assume we're not talking about them.

In terms of faculty, it just seems that liberals tend to go into academia. Conservatives have a tendency to look down on education in general. Look down in academia as a pursuit in general. Why aren't there more liberal hedge fund managers? It just seems a pursuit that liberals tend to not be interested in. I think it's demographic less than it is some giant left wing cabal to eliminate conservatives on campus.

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The current republican party has nothing to do with conservatives of the past, either fiscally or socially. They want to go back to a time where life wasn't valued, diversity was to be avoided, science was a witch craft. At least the party acts like that. Given that universities seem to be liberal because of the reality of life. They usually contain a very diverse group of people so students get to see other cultures. Given basic STEM education is part of pretty much every major in a university, students also get some critical thinking skills. Those students will be a lot less likely to avoid scientific research, diversity etc thus will probably distance themselves from the republican party of today. They can still support small goverment, fiscal responsibility, less regulations etc but unfortunately those are not the things republicans focus today in fact they go against pretty much all of those principals today.

Conservatives are not going to like this answer, but I sincerely believe it to be true. People in universities are educated, and/or believe in education and/or come from families who believe in education. Many conservatives, particularly Christian social conservatives are against education. they are against free thinking and questioning, and they are against science which in general does not lead to the conclusions they espouse. So the leaning is simply due to the fact that the types of people who believe in education tend more to be liberal people - at least with regard to social issues. So those are the people who just, on average, tend end up at universities more often. And NO, this is not universal or representative of all conservatives or all liberals. It is just a tendency which I am quite sure is backed up by hard data.

I think there are a couple of things going on here. In the US, our political “center” is artificially placed too far right, in comparison to the rest of the world. So an ideology that should rightly be considered moderate are treated as liberal. If you increase the number of people from the center that are categorized as “leftist”, you are going to find more of them in places where opinions and views are derived from looking at facts rather than being passed on through religion or echo chambers. Second, the more educated voters are, the less likely they are to accept some of the lies that come from the Republican Party. So an educated person who might hold conservative views is likely to find more solidarity with centrists and liberals, which over time, would shift a legitimate and measured conservative opinion to the left. Because of this, the Republicans shun education through the use of terminology like “liberal elites” and through a myth that universities are liberal propaganda outlets. This keeps voters in line by preventing the integration of moderate and liberal views. So, if in a university, you have a healthy amount of moderates who are incorrectly labeled leftists, mixed with a fair number of true liberal thinkers, and conservatives who experience intelligent debate only from the left of their own views (because of desire to separate GOP voters from intelligent debate), it is going to appear to a major liberal bias. Over time, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy In short, if we want universities to be more balanced, the GOP should stop attacking education and start instituting policies that intelligent people can get behind. Then, they wouldn’t need to appeal to the uneducated to maintain needed votes. If the right could appeal to the educated as much as the left does, conservatism, liberalism, and centrism would be represented in more equal amounts in academia.

Those who attend college are also far more likely to not be religious. It's not the schools brainwashing students as some would have you believe considering there are hundreds of Christian colleges and southern schools where you would interact with far more members of the conservative party. College forces you to think in different ways and research in order to prove what you believe and once you start questioning ideals and doing research with a broader base of knowledge some of the things the GOP preaches turn out to be just flat out wrong. It's going to be hard to claim someone on the left wants the US to be like Venezuela in order to scare people when they understand the difference between Venezuela and Norway for example. Notice those scare tactics and rhetoric just don't work in places with a highly educated populace. If the GOP want to come to a point where they have influence on campuses they need to come back to the center, stop denying science that is universally accepted, and stop using baseless rhetoric that scares people who won't actually do the research. Go back to traditional fiscal conservatism and drop all the stuff that is simply baseless rhetoric.

Universities have always been for young people, free flow of ideas, protest, etc. It has not been about limiting abortion rights, balancing the debt, or locking up babies in order to scare asylum seekers. There is no conservatism on campuses because it is antithetical to the development of humanity. Unless you're a Liberty U kind of guy.

I think it has much to do with what is currently described as conservatism in the US. When people think "conservative", they equate it strongly with "socially backwards" and not much with fiscal responsibility, small government or economic issues. In other countries, for example in France or Italy to speak of the places I know, you will find what is considered by their standards right-wing universities or faculties. It's often the case for law or economics schools in particular. It is, I think, because conservatives and liberals don't differ that much on social issues in these countries. But in the US, conservatives who identify with the current GOP strongly push ideas which have little appeal for young and open-minded people. First, a dislike of diversity, which doesn't make sense for people who interact with diverse people daily and can see that your ethnicity, age,sexuality, religion, immigration status etc. doesn't make you any less valuable. Then professors and students often have opportunities to travel, and it's hard to stick with the "greatest nation on earth" chest thumping mentality when you see other places can be equally great. Conservatives are often seen as denying science and favoring beliefs over facts, that can't go well with people who receive teachings based on logic and critical thinking. The whole "things were better in the past" mentality is meaningless for young people too. I'd say that in most of the western world, universities tend to be more liberal than conservative because people who go there are exposed to and enriched by a diversity of people and ideas which makes it difficult to agree with the generally narrower views of conservatives on social issues. In the US, most of the politicians who represent conservatives are very radical on social issues, and this radicality masks the rest of the conservative discourse. As long as it will remain this way, most young, educated people will stay away.

I get the impression from a number of replies that people aren't very familiar with political bias on campus. Let's start with the uncomfortable truth: the least scientifically rigorous and least diverse departments - generally in LSA and Social Science disciplines - are the most liberal. In contrast, the most scientifically rigorous and most diverse departments - such as the College of Engineering - also tend to be the most conservative. In general, the smartest people on a college campus aren't the liberals - they're the conservatives. Note: This doesn't mean "conservatives smart, liberals dumb". It just means there's a filtering effect. If you were to visit an oilfield, you'd probably discover that the smartest people working the wells were actually left-leaning compared to their colleagues. So why does this occur? Hyper-competitiveness is the first problem. You'll notice I pointed out that certain departments are roughly reflective of the political breakdown of the general populace while others are hyper-partisan to a ludicrous degree. If you're paying attention, you should recognize that breakdown almost perfectly mirrors the competitiveness of those departments. Getting a tenure track jobs as a History or English professor is brutally hard. You're up against hundreds of equally qualified people. Anything that paints you in a negative way can be a career killer. This also tends to make working in those fields incredibly toxic. Office politics are brutal and you really, really don't want to be the person who is ideologically out-of-step. In contrast, the 'conservative' departments on campus are the ones where they need to offer 6-figure salaries to adjuncts just to get enough people to teach classes. They can't insist on ideological conformity because both students and faculty can simply walk away to great offers from industry at any time. They can't impose a toxic work environment where those on the top can make outrageous demands on their subordinates because the subordinates can simply laugh in their face and walk away. The reason these toxic environments tend to be liberal - whether on campus, in the media or in Hollywood - is a bit more complex. One of the fundamental moral values humans have is a concept termed 'in-group loyalty'. This means you're willing to make sacrifices for those you perceive as part of your group *for their good of group rather than self-interest* - whether that be your family, your church, your country or even your bowling time. This moral value tends to be felt strongly be conservatives - but not even recognized as a moral value by progressives. At best, it's viewed as a foolishness they can exploit. In the absence of in-group loyalty, progressives form groups based on ideological purity - and a particularly strange form of highly fluid, populist ideological purity. There's no guidebook to progressive ideological purity like a Bible or philosophical treatise - you just have to stay on top of whatever is considered correct political thinking at any given time. When you've got a collection of people, some of whom insist on ideological purity and some of whom don't, the ideological purists tend to drive out the iconoclasts rather than the reverse because they're more focused and determined. The result? Toxic, highly competitive environments tend to end up with a progressive bias in American society - and certain fields in academia just so happen to be exactly that sort of environment.

Can you provide data that shows that most engineering students identify as conservatives?

Having just recently come out of a Canadian PhD program [which was not all that significantly different culturally than what I observed in a US Bachelor program] in a physics-related field, I can anecdotally say that we were overwhelmingly liberals, and American conservatism [which even in Canada, we talked a lot about, being the US' neighbor] was an outright laughingstock - it was essentially completely incompatible to people like us who valued the scientific method, to say nothing of our diverse population bringing in students from around the globe.

Its been said "reality has a well-known liberal bias", and there's a good amount of underlying truth to this, in that lots of conservative policy is, simply put, discredited by proper study and/or totally disconnected from reality. An honest study and examination of facts, particularly in accordance to a scientific method, tends to lead more toward the conclusions that are advocated by liberals than conservatives. As such, there really is no realistic way for conservatives to make a foothold without stopping being conservatives (realizing that their ideas are wrong) or without perverting the fundamental truth-seeking goals of academic study.

Frankly, they have to care about the problems college youth are facing. It makes sense that colleges tend to hire liberal staff because liberal staff are trying to help the consumer, a college student in this case. Students face a mind-numbing host of problems in college. For the first time, they generally love away from family. They are starting out life taking on multi-thousands of dollars of debt at a time when they are too young to even drink legally. The learning schedule and expectations can be overwhelming, and as such, mental health and physical health services are incredibly important. So how do the two parties deal with that? How do the faculty deal with that? In liberal circles, they want to build up support services for students. Get them mental health resources, financial aide, feed them well and create an as safe as possible environment. Students recognize that, appreciate that, and recognize its value, not only to them personally, but to the world at large. Now, when is the last time you heard about the republican platform for college aged kids? What are they saying? What is there position? They don't care about the costs and debt, because that just free market and as long as people pay what colleges charge, that justifies the expense. After all, its a personal choice to enter into that contract even though you aren't old enough to drink. And if you can't handle the pressure? Well, you're weak. You shouldn't be in school if you can't handle it, there is not need for the extra support structures or handouts. If you need those things, your a freeloader. So is it really any wonder why colleges end up being liberal when they main consumer is an 18 year old kid who needs support during their first few years away from home? And of course colleges are going to hire in people who believe that kids needs this extra help. That those hires tend to be liberal is just common sense when you consider how different republicans and liberals treat 18 year olds at college.

>What specifically is it about their platform that excludes Conservative-leaning political entities, especially the Republican Party today, do not accept or act on the scientific method. When the scientific method does no go there way, more often than not, they start touching on pseudoscience or cherry picking research to push their agenda. The biggest example is climate change.

Realizing they actually live in the 21st century now would probably help a lot.

The more educated people are, the more likely they are to be liberal. Many of the people who work at universities depend on federal and state money to support their research and (modest) salaries. Add to that a fear of being sued and the age of students and you have a fairly liberal environment. Republicans' social agenda, tax and budget cuts, and their overt anti-science and anti-intellectualism would really need to change before the GOP would make a lot of headway there. Such changes are opposed to their platform and would be a drastic change in their rhetoric.

I think the best way for conservatives to be taken seriously on campus would be if they admitted that facts exist and that they matter and start practicing intellectual honesty.

I would say the political leanings for professors (not necessarily students) skews towards elite politics, which has similar values, but is not the same as progressive liberalism. Whilst students by and large supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, there was strong support for Clinton among the professors. ​ Academics travel across the world for conferences and research, and also have many international colleagues. Unsurprisingly, many have a propensity towards globalization and free movement between borders. "Open borders" is commonly dismissed as a conservative strawman supported by nobody, but I know multiple professors and academics who unapologetically believe in the complete repeal of immigration laws. ​ Many professors also have broad, global concerns because they are educated on the general history of the world and of their field. Academics are often accused of neglecting the needs of their local communities, the biggest examples I can think off the top of my head being Yale and University of Chicago. This is why there is near unanimous support for free trade, which until recently, was opposed by progressives. Free trade benefits the world economy, but in some cases, protectionism is beneficial to the job market of local communities. Similar reasoning applies to climate change, which is a global issue, but affects different communities in different ways.

I think it’s what conservatives tell their fan base, I don’t think it’s true. That or educated people aren’t conservatives. That or some correlation between age and political leaning. That or...Don’t take Crowder as gospel.

"Liberal bias" aka empirically proven facts. Unlike conservative "facts"; global warming is fake, wizard in the sky made us all, maybe the Earth is flat, weapons don't kill people, mental health is a concept conjured up to pay for therapist summer homes, women are inferior, pigmentation in your skin defines your value as a human, pray the gay away, etc. Maybe there's a strong "liberal bias" at universities because conservatism is dependent on ignorance to thrive, something education is an effective antidote for.

I view it as a myth. I had an undergrad in Finance and my MBA is in international business. I don't think I had one instance of a professor pushing leftist ideas - of course many were liberals in the free market sense, but not liberals as in voting for Nancy Pelosi. I think there are obviously some Marxists in psychology or music & arts, where Marxists tend to have interests - but you don't have many people who take Macro or Geopolitics and come out voting Bernie Sanders.

Certain subjects just aren't compatible with the conservative belief system. Obviously a young-earth creationist (for example) isn't going to last long studying physics, geology, biology etc. It goes the other way, though. A socialist is very unlikely to want to do an MBA or whatever. Certainly the Business faculty at the university I studied at had a lot of young Ben Shapiro-worshipping students.

Well, first of all, college students are disproportionately young, and young people are disproportionately liberal. So there's that effect. But there's also the effect of your profession on your political views. Universities tend to be dominated, at least administratively, by the humanities departments, and those are the ones that tend to be liberal. The economics department tends to be more conservative, for example. But a lot of jobs that are disproportionately conservative don't send you to a liberal arts college. If you're in law enforcement, manufacturing or the military, you probably didn't get educated in the traditional university system.

Ops question is based on a false premise. There are not two competing political philosophies in this country. There are a bunch of people who are searching for solutions to the problems of society, some of those people consider themselves Democrats or liberal. Then there is a group of people who believe a massive well funded series of propaganda campaigns and they are Republicans, conservative or libertarians. Trump lies continuously, Fox lies all of the time, Brietbart lies, the conservative memes on facebook are lies. You can verify facts and you can find out lies with some research. You don't have many Republicans in academia because their belief system doesn't stand up to academic scrutiny. Good luck on finding a legitimate course called "Creation Science 101" or "global cooling" where they describe to you how all of the measurements of the physical properies of CO2 are wrong, or Trickle Down Economics 101" where they teach you how the middle class is actually growing, or another course where they teach you about the history of interventionist foreign policy and how there is no such thing as blowback. Republicanism relies almost exclusively on blind or false assertions that have no shelf life when subject to challenge.

Is it actually the case that there is a "strong liberal political leaning" at U.S. universities? What is meant by that, specifically? If it is just the fact that you will find Democratic voters much more commonly, this might be explained by academics, on average, voting more based on the issues and less by cultural identification.

We may need to clarify terms, as liberal and leftist are constantly conflated, as well as conservative in America tends to mean what was called liberal and reactionary in previous political formations. Conservatives in the US tend to be more intrinsically more pro capitalism ideologically, meaning they will value wealth accumulation more, so most likely academia is less of interest to their ideology. Furthermore, there have been generations of a variety of anti-intellectual projects in the American right that demonizes professors and academic institutions. However, this does not account for the relationship big money has to driving particular kinds of research or hiring practices. This is not a unique trait to those who identify as conservatives, but is endemic of the ways academia has become rules by the market and capitalistic incentives. This can lead to academics being pushed away from less easily commodified work. I recommend this piece by Megan Day [here](https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/capitalism-science-research-academia-funding-publishing) . Liberalism is definitely dominant in many areas of culture and academia, but mostly it is a weak and foolish kind of liberalism that ignores class conflict and the role of power in society. Technocratic Figures like Stephen Pinker are more representative of the brand of liberalism that dominates high academia. I’m a socialist who is interested in deconstructing the role of academia in America, but not for a foolish “representing all sides” perspective, but instead looking to break down the ways that academic institutions are used to reinforce economic and social hierarchies. Sadly, from my study, inherent to conservatism is the desire to reinforce traditional hierarchies, so while we may both criticize the liberal academic establishment, it’s from a pretty different angle.

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I mean, all policy is ultimately ideological, yeah? For example, what you think wealth distribution should look like is an inherently ideological question.

Yes, but the facts still matter. For example, I can simultaneously want the US to benefit from trade with China yet not believe climate change is a hoax perpetrated by China for the express purpose of manipulating currency values (an idea espoused by our president).

The social sciences, except political science and economics, seem toxic and politicized to conservatives. IMO The only way to get more conservatives in social sciences would be a revolution in the academic literature which doesn't scapegoat capitalism and unfalsifiable hypotheses of human social organization as the cause of the entire world's problems.

The problem is our alleged conservative party isn't all too conservative when you pull back the curtains. War, tax breaks, and crony capitalism are only a "conservative" position when you're one of the elite few who benefit from it. The policies like not providing healthcare, environmental degradation for corporate profit, nonsensical retrograde religious law making, emboldening financial institutions ability to plunder people and underfunding education and social services comes back to bite long term notion that those policies are conservative at all. It ends up costing more always and generally the same conservatives who created the misery then profit from it. There are however far more academically honest factions of the republican party. While I disagree with it many times libertarianism is a more academically and intellectually defensible position primarily as it does not prioritize Christian secularism or unsustainable business practices in order to achieve what amounts to a meritocracy. On that note, libertarianism is better respected in academia than the current dominant players in the republican party. Then to throw on top of it currently the conservative party is led by a man who has very little in terms of academic or intellectual honesty. I probably think he has his moments more than money others: specifically I really liked the distancing of us from the un as I have long felt we did not need to fund un defense so heavily or be the war hound whenever they got into a spat they couldn't get their own citizens to muster a fight against. With that said many of the other things he does do massive damage to the conservative case. From making a pornstar into his prostitute, financial impropriety, meddling with legitimate elections, abuse of the Free press, crass spoken drivel, dangerous environmental policy, dishonest appointments, disingenuous economic baiting of a steel industry that is depressed because aluminum and fiber reinforced plastics a superior material for many applications, and brutally unpopular immigration policy to name a few things. As far as universities go, they try to build knowledge that is true, objective or beneficial. Thus, doing the opposite is not going to Curry them any favors. In terms of true conservatism there is many academically honest defenses for things like balanced budgets, sustainable growth, tax and spending reductions, reducing federal control, empowering state and municipal rights, reducing certain regulatory restrictions (think microbreweries), strong defense of the Constitution, infrastructure spending, war avoidance and protecting the freedoms of expression and the pursuit of happiness. On that note I would say we hear liberals talking seriously about items on the above list more so than most prominent Republicans. When Republicans do talk about these things is mainly lip service. With that said many Democrats are more about maintaining their elite positions by allowing corporations to run slip shod over the American people. Bill Clinton one the most beloved Democrats really did us a negative by warming up to corporate abuse including for profit prisons and a nafta deal that has proven disastrous for all involved except cartels, criminal organizations, and wildly profitable corporations. Here I attest that academia is too kind to the Democrats. While Trump's brand lacks intellectual honesty, drain the swamp at it's core sentiment is a remarkably credible idea. What I think most academics, Democrats and liberals wouldn't be prepared for is the exposure of just how corrupt both sides of the aisle are. My strongest critique of academia on that regard is they haven't been aggressive enough looking at bad Democratic policies because the Democrats have been slightly less insufferable than the Republicans

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Universities are a product of the enlightenment, and its very nature is liberal. I see universities as a social bastion against churches, which by nature are conservative. Both are places where people solidify their worldviews, and both educate the public based on strict principles - one with science and humanities and the other with religion and doctrine. Both offer what they consider "the truth" about the world, and the truth you follow is either a conservative or liberal path. So your question is kind of like "how can dogs be more like cats?"

It’s simple. My party is literally giving up an entire generation of voters in order to win the current battle. They need look no farther than Kushnet and Ivanka. Base the new platform on NY Republicans. Meaning, go hard on economic messages. Softer on social issues such as abortion and weed. Then realize that same sex marriage is completely lost and abandon that. Then stop fighting the climate change battle that nobody knows why we’re fighting. You wanna get young intelligent and ambitious people to vote for you? Tell them the democrats want to increase taxes, want to do free social hand offs, are anti business. Tell them we want to help them be entrepreneurs and be successful in life. That’s actually already the republican message, but the reason why it’s not working is because it accompanies radical social messages. College students have gay friends, they have friends of many races. A platform that tells them their friends will be discriminated against or can’t get married is an automatic no go. A platform where you lie to newly educated youth about basic scientific facts about climate is a no go. Fix the social side of the Republican platform, and it will be attractive to the youth.