When Colleges Say "Inclusive," What They Really Mean Is "No Conservatives"

The New York Post quotes my liberal arts study in an editorial today.  The editorial notes that speakers invited to campuses like SUNY Albany are overwhelmingly left wing.  At Indiana the rato is 30:9; at GWU the ratio is 9:2; at Alabama the ratio is 9:2, and at Vermont it is 44:2.  

This kind of phenomenon is consistent with the claims of Jonathan Haidt, the founder of Heterodox Academy and a brilliant psychological ethicist.  I am reading through Haidt's book Righteous Mind now, and his point is that moral reasoning is chiefly used to justify emotional moral reactions.  

Moral reasoning is not the way that we come to our chief political conclusions.  Rather, we tend to reason in a way that justifies conclusions at which we have arrived. We arrive at the conclusions in the first place through emotion; we then seek to confirm the emotional reaction by exposing ourselves to people and to reasoning that agrees with our feelings.  

As a result, social science is by nature susceptible to ideological bias as social scientists skew their findings, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in the direction that fits their preconceptions.  That occurs with respect to hiring as well as campus speaker invitations.