Also, the survey they mention in that article was conducted by the American Enterprise Institute and had some really stunning (and probably deliberate) methodological flaws, such as including a vastly disproportionate number of women's studies profs... Samuel Waite
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I looked this article up when it was posted. I started to write something about it and figure nobody cared.
I clicked on the story, but the newspaper posting had expired. So I looked for another copy and found it. I forgot where. Then I clicked around the American Council of Trustees and Alumni `study' or some somewhere near it and discovered, guess who? Our old friend David Horowitz.
Also according to another article, ACTA was founded by none other than Lynn Cheney and Joe Lieberman
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1213-05.htm
I suspect that the ACTA `study' was a spin-off from Horowitz or something very close to that. If you follow the Horowitz connection, Horowitz has a site that gives an outline suggestion on how to identify the political identity of individual professors by using the public voter registration rolls when these are available. He cautions that not all states make these rolls accessible to inquiring minds. (Bummer)
Horowitz has a posted questionair that can be downloaded and filled out and returned to be incorporated in an Excel database to keep track of the `liberal' bias in academia. He suggests particular fields for concerned students to track the faculty's political persuasion. For some reason he includes engineering. Engineering sticks in my mind for some reason. I ignored the usual suspects like English, Political Science, Sociology, or Women's Studies.
I think if somebody does a more careful study of this whole AP story (I think Yoshie posted it on Christmas) they will find a kind of magic circle of pure shit.
First, somebody in this righwing web issues a `report'. It is taken up by some other rightwing `news' source and cited. Evidentially a regular stupid media type (like the Seattle paper) puts out a story about it and indeed it therefore becomes fact. Amazing bullshit. Here are some of the usual suspects:
Claremont Institute Heritage Foundation American Enterprise Institute Center for Security Policy American Civil Rights Institute Campus Watch of course American Council of Trustees and Alumni
I am beginning to feel a certain dark fascination with this `news' and `media' tracing process.
There is a horowitzwatch blog. It's a little disappointing since it just links Horowitz over and over. But I guess when you are slumming, you have to make room for all kinds.
CG