[lbo-talk] Re: Why do left-liberals dominate the academe?

[Tim Francis-Wright]

jeff fisher wrote: > this is shaping up to be another one of those 
anecdotal discussions
> that serve so well to drive carrol nuts.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> 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.
> 

I was at Yale during the 1984 strike (and the barely-avoided 1987 
strike).  While I found that there was indeed a gamut of opinions on the 
strike and labor issues in general among the humanities, in the science 
departments, the professoriate acted as if the labor issues were an 
entire world away.  (Not that it surprised me: when I saw my Organic 
Chem TA dump a slug of acetone down the drain, I asked him, "You don't 
live in New Haven, do you?"  "No."  "I thought so.")  The math 
department tended not to be politically active, save for Serge land and 
his bizarre causes, but at least it wasn't outright hostile to the workers.

--tim francis-wright