However, I think that college has rather little influence on the political views of the students/alumni. Most conservatives/libertarians I met were what I would call "petty bourgeois" - small town lawyers, petty entrepreneurs, salesmen, office workers, and other types of "Babbits" if you will. They tend to be dismissive of the professoriat and "college educated elites" in general even though they have college education themselves.
I tend to believe that their political beliefs are more a result of their cognitive style (which is for a large part hard wired in the brain) than intellectual influence of the academia or other social institution. People whose cognitive style makes it difficult to deal with uncertanity, ambiguity and relativism naturally adopt conservative ideologies. There is an article by Jost et al. "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition" (Psychological Bulletin, 2003, 129(3):339-375) which reviews research reports supporting this point of view.
Wojtek
On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Bill Quimby <wquimby at embarqmail.com> wrote:
> The time when a-political middle-class kids went to college and left
> transformed as liberals died 40-50 years ago. I would guess (and no, I have
> no evidence to back this up, thank you) that now it is right-centrist
> kids coming out as libertarians. And damn yes, the college they go to has
> an
> enormous influence on their political position after college - not
> necessarily
> through a designed attempt to influence the young, but through the
> impact of the faculty makeup - primarily centrist bourgeois cowed by
> the culture (a McCarthyism absorbed in uterus).
>
> - Bill
>
>
> John Gulick wrote:
>
>> "66% of Tea Party activists make over $50,000 a year, compared to 42% of
>>> the general electorate."
>>>
>>
>> "Nearly three quarters of Tea Party activists attended college, compared
>>> to
>>> 54 percent of all Americans."
>>>
>>
>> Golly, all the degreed liberal cosmopolitans in my inner circle could have
>> sworn that the Tea Partiers were uneducated trailer trash, to the last
>> man.
>> Something or other about "mouthbreathers..." I guess sending their kids to
>> Cornell won't be the cure-all...
>>
>> PS, thanks for the hard data.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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