Rebel Girl has a Brand New Blog

The Mark on the Wall is for all you writers and readers out there: check it out by clicking on this link. She describes it as a literary weblog for Orange County and the border regions of Los Angeles and San Diego.

It's no Dissent but it's something. This week she's all a twitter about Janet Fitch reading in Laguna Beach. Last week it was Jack Kerouac and Virginia Woolf.

Academics more moderate than liberal

ATTENTION ALL DEMAGOGUES!

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: The Liberal (and Moderating) Professoriate.

THE GIST: sure, in academia, conservatives are a minority, but moderates, not liberals, dominate. Community college faculty are the least liberal/radical of all.

The article:

Faculty members identify as liberals and vote Democratic in far greater proportions than found in the American public at large. That finding by itself won’t shock many, but the national study released Saturday at a Harvard University symposium may be notable both for its methodology and other, more surprising findings....

...The results of the study find a professoriate that may be less liberal than is widely assumed, even if conservatives are correctly assumed to be in a distinct minority. The authors present evidence that there are more faculty members who identify as moderates than as liberals. The authors of the study also found evidence of a significant decline by age group in faculty radicalism, with younger faculty members less likely than their older counterparts to identify as radical or activist….

Political Orientation of Faculty Members — 7 Categories

Extremely liberal 9.4%
Liberal 34.7%
Slightly liberal 18.1%
Middle of the road 18.0%
Slightly conservative 10.5%
Conservative 8.0%
Very conservative 1.2%

While that breakdown would at first glance back the claim that academe is run by “tenured radicals,” [authors] Gross and Simmons say that is too simplistic. They analyzed the responses to a series of questions on social and political views of the two “slightly” categories and found significant differences between the “slightly” and “extremely” answers for both liberals and conservatives. They also found significant commonalities among the two “slightly” categories and the middle category.

Based on that view, they argue that there are in fact three identifiable political groupings in academe, and liberalism does not come out on top — the moderate group does.

Political Orientation of Faculty Members — 3 Categories

Liberal 44.1%
Moderate 46.1%
Conservative 9.2%

…The sector breakdowns demonstrate the importance of including community colleges, whose faculty members are more likely than any other sectors to identify as conservative. While some previous studies on faculty politics have suggested elite research universities as the places with the most ideological uniformity, liberals appear to be most dominant at liberal arts colleges…. [My emphasis.]