that said, i'm thinking about luke's initial question, and remembering a fellow (younger) grad student at yale, who came in with a st. john's (annapolis/santa fe) education -- i.e., from out of the belly of the straussian beast, institutionally if not in terms of the actual faculty. a good guy and a smart guy, but pretty conservative. i was pretty active organizing, in those days, and he was one of the guys i was always working on, between bouts of reading aristotle together, but he saw me as a radical, etc. etc. one day, toward the end of his second year, he said to me, with a very perplexed look, "where are all the smart conservatives? it seems like all the conservatives here are stupid and all the smart people liberals [sic]". not scientific, but interesting as a perspective coming from what we might call the other side.
recalling the faculty, the philosophy dept. there was notoriously in a shambles at the time, but generally speaking, there was a wide political range on the faculty, from conservative nut-job whackos like donald kagan (classics) to david montgomery (history), who was blacklisted as a shop-floor CP organizer in his younger days. paul kennedy, on the one hand, and jim scott, anarchist, on the other. and there's bruce ackerman at the law school. in general, our feeling at the time was that there were some very liberal to more-than-liberal faculty, but that the faculty as a whole was pretty conservative.
again, all anecdotes. this is something i admit i would like to see quantified, if it could be done (nod to carrol and to bill bartlett's post on this thread). i am dubious, however, in part because there is a difference between liberal in theory and liberal in practice. and i don't just mean talking a good game and then being wishy-washy when it comes to what you do. there was a certain well-regarded faculty member who did some very good work on slavery out of the history department. he brought up a grad student TA of his on charges of insubordination coming out of the grade strike. in his letter to the dean's office asking that they reprimand her, he contrasted her with his "loyal" TA. indeed, he had security at the final exam to prevent her even entering the room, since she was apparently going to make off with the exams and hold them hostage or something. it was pathetic.
j
On Thursday, February 19, 2004, at 10:56 PM, Luke Weiger wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "andie nachgeborenen" <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
>
>> And not just not in econ depts. The engineering depts,
>> many of the "hard" sciences, the b-schools (though my
>> friend the former B-school professor, a Kellogg PhD,
>> tells me that marketing depts are pretty liberal),
>> political science (one of my old dep'ts), etc. . . . .
>> and even in philosophy (my other old dep't), we are
>> mostly not talking about "left" liberals but
>> apolitical centrists. In my experience, anyway. You
>> cannot generalize from English and Cult Stud dep'ts.
>> jks
>
> John Hoblo guesstimates that phil departments tend to skew left 4/1.
>
> http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/02/
> andrew_stuttafo.html#more
>
> Judging based on my very limited experience at Michigan, that sounds
> about
> right. Of the phil professors whose politics I'm aware of, there's a
> leftist, a liberal, a conservative, and three left-liberals. One of
> my grad
> student acquaintances (a neo-con) says that Sklar's the only
> conservative he
> knows of.
>
> I don't think I've ever taken a class at Michigan that was taught by a
> conservative. (I've never taken any classes in business, economics,
> engineering, or the hard sciences.)
>
> -- Luke
>
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