Partisan Registration and Contributions of Faculty in Flagship Colleges

Sean Stevens and I have been working on a study of 12,372 professors in the two leading private and two leading public colleges in 31 states that make registration public (mostly closed-primary states).  The National Association of Scholars has posted our findings on their blog. We cross-checked each registration against the political donations.  For party registration, we find a D:R ratio of 8.5:1, which varies by rank of institution and region.  For federal donations (from the FEC data base) we find a D:R ratio of 95:1, with only 22 Republican donors(compared to 2,081 Democratic donors) out of 12,372 professors.  Federal donations among all categories of party registration, including Republican, favor the Democrats: D:R donation ratios for Democratic-registered professors are 251:1; for Republican-registered professors 4.6:1; for minor-party-registered professors 10:0; for unaffiliated professors 50:1; for non-registered professors 105:1. We include a school-by-school table that facilitates comparisons. 

  

Lou Dobbs Cites My "Homogeneous" Paper

Last Monday Lou Dobbs cited my "Homogeneous" paper, published in the journal Academic Questions of the National Association of Scholars.  The whole episode is worth watching, but the reference to my paper is at 18:30.

Letter to President Trump in Support of Free Speech Mandate for Colleges

Dear Mr. President

I applaud your announcement that you will sign an executive order mandating adherence to the First Amendment by colleges and universities that receive federal funds.  I support extending First Amendment mandates to all colleges, private and public, that receive federal money. However, I suggest that a limitation be placed on religious colleges when free speech would violate the religious beliefs to which the college adheres.  In other words, freedom of  religion should receive deference equal to freedom of speech. 

I was surprised to see that my good friends at the National Association of Scholars take issue with mandating that private colleges adhere to the First Amendment.  I cannot imagine that a college that wishes to restrict freedom of speech deserves public support--with the exception of religiously affiliated or otherwise religious colleges for whom certain forms of speech will violate their religious beliefs.

Otherwise, I urge you to extend the First Amendment mandate as far as possible. Private colleges, especially elite ones, have led the march toward intolerance and suppression, and they should be included in the mandate.

Sincerely,




Mitchell Langbert

Walter E. Williams Covers "Homogeneous"

In his syndicated column, Walter E. Williams covers my recent Academic Questions article "Homogeneous," which is on the political affilitions of liberal arts college professors . Williams's column is carried in 140 newspapers around the country.



Williams writes:

Just within the past week or so, some shocking professorial behavior has come to light. In the wake of Barbara Bush's death, California State University, Fresno professor Randa Jarrar took to Twitter to call the former first lady an "amazing racist." Jarrar added, "PSA: either you are against these pieces of s—- and their genocidal ways or you're part of the problem. that's actually how simple this is. I'm happy the witch is dead. can't wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million iraqis have. byyyeeeeeeee."

In New Jersey, Brookdale Community College professor Howard Finkelstein, in a heated exchange, was captured on video telling a conservative student, "F—- your life!" At the City University of New York School of Law, students shouted down guest lecturer Josh Blackman for 10 minutes before he could continue his remarks. When Duke University President Vincent Price was trying to address alumni, students commandeered the stage, shouting demands and telling him to leave.

None of this professorial and student behavior is new at the nation's colleges. It's part of the leftist agenda that dominates our colleges. A new study by Brooklyn College professor Mitchell Langbert — "Homogeneous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty" (http://tinyurl.com/ycfomjy6) — demonstrates that domination. (By the way, Academic Questions is a publication of the National Association of Scholars, an organization fighting the leftist propaganda in academia.) Langbert examines the political affiliation of Ph.D.-holding faculty members at 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges according to U.S. News & World Report. He finds that 39 percent of the colleges in his sample are Republican-free — with zero registered Republicans on their faculties. As for Republicans within academic departments, 78 percent of those departments have no Republican members or so few as to make no difference.

New NAS Report on the Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

The National Association of Scholars has published a report on the irreproducibility crisis in modern science.  The report is written by David Randall and Christopher Welser. As well, NAS president Peter Wood has coauthored a Wall Street Journal op-ed with David Randall on the topic.  Irreproducible research is another term for junk science.  Wood and Randall point this out:

In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 “landmark” studies in hematology and oncology. The company could only replicate six. Are doctors basing serious decisions about medical treatment on the rest? Consider the financial costs, too. A 2015 study estimated that American researchers spend $28 billion a year on irreproducible preclinical research.

As the Randall and Welser report emphasizes:

Incompetence and fraud together create a borderland of confusion in the sciences. Articles in prestigious journals appear to speak with authority on matters that only a small number of readers can assess critically. Non-specialists generally are left to trust that what purports to be a contribution to human knowledge has been scrutinized by capable people and found trustworthy.  

The glorification of peer review by wide-eyed, incompetent journalists contributes to the junk science problem.  The problem is probably worse in the social than in the physical sciences, but the report suggests that it has become increasingly worse in the physical sciences too.  

Much research involves fishing for significant correlations that may be statistical artifacts and then playing them up. He who plays up best is most pleasing to the elite journals and is hence best at getting published in those journals.  

Many years ago, with respect to the management field (related to my own field of industrial relations), Lex Donaldson wrote a book American Anti-Management Theories of Organization, in which he describes how the gamesmanship associated with the publication process had led to junk management theories.  The Randall and Welser report is a broader discussion of the same problem.

 Here are the first few of Randall and Welser's recommendations: 

1. Researchers should avoid regarding the p-value as a dispositive measure of evidence for or against a particular research hypothesis. 

2. Researchers should adopt the best existing practice of the most rigorous sciences and define statistical significance as .01 rather than as  .05. 

3. In reporting their results, researchers should consider replacing either-or tests of statistical significance with confidence intervals that provide a range in which a variable’s true value most likely falls.  

4. Researchers should make their data available for public inspection after publication of their results. 

5. Researchers should experiment with born-open data—data archived in an open-access repository at the moment of its creation, and automatically time-stamped.

These recommendations are sensible to anyone who has done research in the social sciences, and I assume the same is true of the natural sciences. 

Astonishingly, tendentious left-wing bloggers (see Cory Doctorow's blog here and Michael Schulson's piece on Wired here) aim to turn these recommendations into a smear campaign against the National Association of Scholars.  

Indeed, the reactions of tendentious "progressives" like Doctorow and Schulson offer evidence as to why university science has deteriorated in quality.  

200th Blog on New National Association of Scholars Site

Ashley Thorne, the coordinator of the National Association of Scholars blog, to which I have been contributing, just sent this message:

>Hi Professor Langbert,

>Hope your semester is off to a good start. I just wanted to let you know that your blog entry on “The Price of Academic Integrity” was the 200th post of the NAS blog. Thanks for all your good blogging!

- Ashley

Ashley adds that:

>Since creating the blog in late September, we have posted over 200 entries and received nearly 10,000 views. We’ve been linked by Joanne Jacobs, the History News Network, Campus Reform, and Minding the Campus.

>We have touched on many different themes, from student learning outcomes to online education to Climategate. Our most frequently used categories are Diversity, Political Correctness, Sustainability, and Academic Standards. There are now 27 of us signed up as authors, with 8 or 9 contributing regularly.

If you haven't seen the NAS blog yet, please take a look. They've got a great list of contributors, including Candace de Russy. NAS is a wonderful organization.

I've reproduced my blog on "The Price of Academic Integrity".

The Price of Academic Integrity

>News Busters, the blog of the Media Research Center, reports that the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) has stated that Michael Mann, a Penn State climatological researcher involved in the recent e-mail scandal, received “$541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.”

NCPPR has issued a press release criticizing the Obama administration “for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.” The release states that Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State Univesity “because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science.”

13th General Meeting of the National Association of Scholars

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) held its 13th general meeting at the Washington Marriott this weekend. I just returned. Steve Balch, who founded NAS in 1987, did an outstanding job in organizing the conference and attracting speakers, who included Ward Connerly, Victor Davis Hanson, Herb London, Greg Lukianoff, Anne Neal, Abigail Thernstrom and Congressman Thomas Petri. The conference had many high points, to include Ward Connerly's and Victor Davis Hanson's two talks each (all of which were phenomenal). For me, the most poignant discussion was that of Greg Lukianoff, director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Greg outline a litany of abuses involving speech codes since 2007. It is depressing that today's colleges and universities continue to suppress speech.

Also excellent was the debate between Peter Wood of NAS and Cary Nelson of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which represents the left-wing viewpoint. Wood got the better of Nelson, but Nelson is to be complimented for his integrity in participating in the debate and the entire conference. I was glad to see that the AAUP was interested enough to send a speaker.

Steve Balch is retiring this year, and he deserves considerable praise for founding and making the NAS a vibrant reality.

The NAS, ISI and Student Therapy

I was able to attend the twelfth conference of the National Association of Scholars only on Friday, November 17 because I teach on Saturday and Sunday. The part of the conference that I was able to attend was among the best academic conferences that I have ever attended. On Friday, the keynote speaker was Senator Hank Brown, who is now the president of the University of Colorado. Senator Brown talked about strategies that he has employed in cleaning up Ward Churchill's mess. Churchill had been promoted to department chair even though he lacked a Ph.D. and had not produced a meaningful body of research. As chair, he claimed that the victims of the 9/11 attacks were "little Eichmanns", implying that their murders were justified. Hearing about some of the steps that Mr. Brown and Colorado are taking to improve things suggested hope.

Other Friday speakers included included Candace de Russy (SUNY), Anne Neal (ACTA), Tom Lucero (Colorado), Mike Ratliff (Intercollegiate Studies Institute) and Todd Zywicki (Dartmouth). Neal is the head of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni; Rafliff is vice president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; and de Russy, Lucero and Zywicki are trustees. On Saturday, de Russy was awarded the Barry R. Gross Memorial award.

The day before the NAS conference I had addressed a group of students who have established an Intercollegiate Studies Institute club at my college. I am the club's faculty advisor, so they suggested that I lead the first meeting's discussion. The students had read Roger Scruton's excellent book The West and the Rest, which I discussed. After a brief lecture, I asked the students to each describe their thoughts on Scruton's ideas and I also asked them what brought them to the meeting.

Attendance at the ISI event was excellent. Many full-time students also work full time, so it is difficult to get good attendance at extra-curricular events. Nevertheless, 30 students attended.

As each student discussed his or her views, one mentioned that an English professor at the college had sent around an e-mail saying that ISI should be prevented from meeting and that the students should not be permitted to set up an ISI group at the college. At the college, the "collegiality" of conservatives has been fetishized while intolerance is reflexive from the campus's left wing. The left's intolerance recrudesces when anyone, student or faculty, has the temerity to question its tired theories.

Several students at the meeting mentioned that all of their professors espouse extreme left wing views and that the assumptions of all class discussions in the social sciences and humanities are steeped in Marxist theory. Given the fixation on Marxism, it would appear that much social science has become, like pharoah worship, a fossilized religion.

I made a point of asking these students whether the constant repitition of left wing ideas has affected them intellectually, and several replied that it has. Even though they know that the left's ideas are erroneous, the constant propagandizing that occurs at universities has had a brainwashing effect, according to the students. In effect, the students imply that university attendance serves not to open the mind intellectually, but to create psychological imbalance.

One issue that the NAS program did not address is whether the political correctness that the NAS has combatted for twenty years has influenced America's ability to defend itself, for example against terrorism. Based on my students' responses, I suspect that it has. Responding to a quote often attributed to the Duke of Wellington, George Orwell wrote in his 1941 essay "England Your England" that "probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."

Since the left supports terrorism and allies itself with America's foes, the left's dominance on college campus seems likely to have crippled our ability to think coherently about defending our nation. That diverse disciplines, journalism, inteligence, and political, have been incapable of thinking coherently about how to eliminate terrorism, suggests some common ground for the intellectual vacuity. The common ground is the poor job that universities have done.

There are two psychological effects of university brainwashing: narcissism and sociopathy. I have previously posted about the Shrinkwrapped blog's discussion of the liberal borg's narcissism. The left is sociopathic, or lacking in conscience, as well as narcissistic.

Let's review some of the characteristics of sociopathy:

I. Grandiose, deceitful
2- Lack of remorse and empathy
3- Lack of goals*
4- Poor behavioral controls; antisocial behavior (anti-social personality disorder is a component of sociopathy).

It seems to me that although Robert Godwin's point about the narcissism of the left is totally right, it needs to be supplemented with a separate sociopathic complex. The left amply demonstrates each of these sociopathic traits. Its practitioners imagine themseleves smarter than others; they are proud of their manipulative skills; and they are often highly emotional and disruptive.

For example, Saul Alinsky, a radical activist, wrote Rules for Radicals in 1971 in which he argues that deception is a characteristic strategy of left-wing radicals. Likewise, left wingers often lack behavioral controls and are highly disruptive, as we have seen in the antics of Ward Churchill and numerous similar cases. The left may be characterized as the sociopathic movement of the twentieth century, and for that reason I would characterize Nazism as a left wing ideology.

The chief trait of sociopaths is lack of remorse or conscience. It is here that the views of the left come into clearest sociopathic focus. The left has been responsible for more murder than any religious or ideological movement in history. More than the Romans, more than the Ku Klux Klan, more than radical Islam, and more than Nazism. Yet, unlike the Germans, who have mostly disowned Nazism, the left continues to advocate its murderous, bloodthirsty ideology without apology. The tens of millions whom Mao and Stalin killed are meaningless statistics to the conscienceless left.

Hence, The Intercollegiate Studies Institute can be viewed as a form of therapy. During the meeting, a student said that he supported alternative approaches to financing public higher education. I mentioned that Milton Friedman had suggested the idea of tuition vouchers in his popular classic Capitalism and Freedom. The students said that they might be interested in a meeting to discuss this book. Friedman, who had been born in Brooklyn in 1912, had died the same day, November 16, 2006, at age 94. But his spirit is very much alive.

Let the therapy begin.

*The left's lack of goals can be seen in its willingness to ally itself with radical Islam without grasping the implications of such an alliance. Similarly, the American labor movement allied itself with slave owners in the 19th century; and the American communist party allied itself with Hitler in 1939. Now that communism has completely failed and only buffoons can advocate centralized economic planning, the left has no goal or model to advocate. Its only role is disruptive and critical. It has nothing to construct. It is at this point in history that the sociopathic nature of the left comes most clearly into focus, and the role it has played in the mass murders of the twentieth century comes into sharp relief.