36% of Americans have confidence in higher education

Probably because economics is not a science!

[runs away…]

 

It was something euphemistic like "Competitive Strategy" where most of the courses were taught by econ faculty.

 

Economics is a lot of beautiful art

 

Indeed. I love economics. Though the inability of its practitioners to come to consensus on so many major issues is remarkable.

 

When I was at UF, the major difference was the biz school required a couple of calculus courses.

 

when I was there all Econ majors had to take 2 calculus classes….intermediate micro was very calc based as it should be.

 

I mostly agree. Although, we generally don't hear the same concern about the lack of liberal viewpoints in law enforcement (for example). But I do think that academia needs to be more deliberate about fostering ideological diversity and respectful towards the views of conservative colleagues. (And in the hiring process, they need to put similar focus on ensuring their biases don't hurt candidates who think differently as they do with candidates who look different, with the obvious caveat that the person who thinks differently is doing methodologically sound work.) I do wonder if this problem will get worse due to conservative self-selection and the political movement's focus on attacking higher education.

 

When it is, you will not hear about it. My guess is that acceptance of ideological diversity is far more prevalent than a lack thereof/indoctrination.

 

The law enforcement example is interesting. Clearly there is tons of academic work on biases in policing, but perhaps not on identities of law enforcement. There seems to be something more fundamental about academia, in that this institution creates knowledge used by all other industries, so a bias there can infect other arenas.

And I don’t know what to do about getting more conservatives into academia. Certainly we don’t want an ideological quota system, like DeSantis seems to be pining for. Perhaps more research on the biases themselves will help to open up research niches that seem off limits at this time. Even that wouldn’t be much, but it would be something.

And yours is a good point about conservative self selection away from academia. Almost certainly this has to be happening, and it’s frustrating. This threatens a positive feedback loop where for conservatives steer clear of academia because of its liberal bent, only serving to exacerbate the problem.

 

People like Trump are never going to give credit to institutions that don’t say exactly what he wants them to say, but appeasing people like Trump should not be the goal. The goal should be our best attempt to accurately describe the world.

To what extent is academia’s ideological imbalance interfering with that goal is a difficult question. It is likely that this effect is largest researching questions that are most political. Probably irrelevant are the political views of the people who work on fluid dynamics or protein folding, but much more will matter the viewpoints of those researching racial discrimination, heritability of cognitive traits, and likely even climate change. Indeed, research into politics often treats the conservative viewpoint as the one that needs explaining, as if the liberal viewpoint is just assumed. And a few studies have found that academic conservatives are censoring their own views at a relatively high rate. These kinds of trends simply can’t be good for the search for truth.

 

Part of the problem may be conservative popular media coming in hot on certain fields of study, calling climate change a hoax or racial bias studies “woke”.

If the political arena comes in hostile to the idea of studying or actually discussing things, then what exactly is a “conservative academic study” of them!??? How can that even be accommodated in an academic space?

 

Thanks for your response. Agree that evidencing the perceived imbalance is difficult. For the sake of anecdote, I wonder to what extent you have experienced political persuasion during your years in academia? I've been in school every year of my life since age 5 - K12, three degrees, teaching at UF and in MN. Never once experienced a prof, staff, or admin try and persuade students or colleagues. In fact, there's very little discussion of politics probably because people are smart enough not to go there. I had more political discussions with an elementary school colleague than with any in higher ed and those were infrequent. None of the discussions were in the presence of students.

 

Ha yes, clearly we don’t want to make space for someone claiming climate change is a Chinese hoax. Instead of an identity conservative like Trump, I’m picturing someone like Thomas Sowell, an academic that possesses a conservative ideology. Due to their divergent perspectives, Sowell and Paul Krugman will see very different things in the same economic data, and neither interpretation is obviously foolish.

There are various scientific perspectives in the case of climate change as well. A world of people only looking to prove how much climate change there will be would certainly be blind to some aspects of nature. Last year, a scientist published a purposely shoddy analysis of wildfires in Nature to prove that the world’s leading science journal would accept poor work as long as it showed an effect of climate change. Indeed, one of the reviewers noticed that the paper didn’t account for other natural causes (good), but when the author pushed back, Nature ended up publishing it without this revision (less good). This doesn’t prove that all climate science or Nature publications are bunk, but it does highlight the dangers of an intellectual monoculture.

Scientist says he 'left out the full truth' to get climate change wildfire study published in journal

 

The plural of anecdote is not data.

 

Yes I know what you mean. This other issue of political indoctrination is I think overblown. Indeed, I can’t think of any examples of professors specifically trying to make me a liberal. Since a liberal worldview is rather ubiquitous among the academic community, it could seep into one’s worldview via less conscious means, but I don’t think anyone can be made to just believe things against their will. This idea that liberals are taking over universities to politically indoctrinate the next generation demonstrates the flaws of conspiracy minded thinking.

 

Some of it is inherent in the education itself. If want to be a social worker, the classes you take are likely going to spend a fair amount of time pointing out societal inequities. And any class on anthropology or paleontology is likely going to conflict with the Bible. Every year those things are more contentious.
Which gets to an interesting point, that maybe the right moved away from college orthodoxy as much or more than colleges moved towards it.

 

The question cuts to the heart of the matter: what is the truth and what is just bias? While I don’t see any reason for liberals to be free of bias, I also don’t see any reason for them to be particular susceptible to bias either. I think we can dismiss some “debates” as fabricated, eg whether evolution occurs, but others seem to have real scholarship on both sides, eg is minimum harmful to the poor.

 

I took economics courses to satisfy my engineering electives, much to the bewilderment of my ChE professors. One of the courses was international economics. I have no idea if it was from the B school or CLAS. I just assumed it was the latter. All I knew was it was a long walk from the engineering side of campus.

I had engr classmates that shook their heads and said why did I want to go to that side of campus. Those people are different over there. They’re not like us.

I got a similar reaction from the people in the economics classes, wondering what in the world I was doing over there.