Noting that he had served in the Clinton administration, Summers said he identified strongly as a liberal and a Democrat, but that while in Washington he viewed himself as being on “the right half of the left,” in Cambridge, he landed “on the right half of the right.”
the Gross and Simmons' Study (click for a summary) investigates the socio-political orientation of american college professors. the results of course indicate that they are much more liberal than the average american. we all know that. throughout my college years i haven't seen a single conservative professors. those who taught me ranged from mildly discontent with the bush administration to openly mocking him. i also heard about the couple of professors who were activists and really went out of their way to raise awareness in the students. while the students on campus were more evenly split between conservative views and liberal ones, the professors were undoubtedly liberal.
larry summers has a theory on why most of the college campuses are filled with liberals (from the inside higher ed article):
He said that if you are a smart individual, and you like the market, profits, and “striving for profits,” you have “a wide range of choices in life,” of which an academic career is but one. If you are a smart person who doesn’t like the world of markets and profits, “you have a much narrower range of choices,” he said, and academic careers may be quite desirable. In this way of thinking, he said, it’s not surprising to find more liberals than conservatives on college faculties.
which also coincides with what we tend to think: the conservatives do stuff and the liberals only say stuff, from their cozy little corner. the american government tend not to listen to academic gibberish very much anyway.maybe that's why there are still liberals sitting in the colleges. one of my history professors used to lament that while the chinese government worshiped scholars and academics, the US government wouldn't ever listen to them. from that perspective, imperial china was a much better place for scholars. big no no. the chinese scholars are largely brainwashed by the government already, whether 2000 years ago or now. what you get is a handful of silenced liberals and the apathetic rest. looks like as long as there are centralised governments around, liberals will stay in the ivory tower.
anyway, the break down of the stats by field and age is quite interesting. the more practical fields such as health sciences/medicine/engineering tend to be led by the conservatives and the more theoretical fields such as science/humanities more liberal. makes perfect sense. and that the age group between 50 and 64 years old are the most liberal ones across field is not surprising. i think this is because this group of people were the teenages and the 20 somethings in the 60's, when liberalism flooded american and various movements were fluorishing. once your characters are formed then in those ways it'll be hard to change them back i guess. the increasingly stable economy and more conservative political atmosphere in the 80's and the 90's probably fostered the conservatism in the later generations, and resulted in the less liberal younger age groups. the 65+ age group grew up in the 40's and 50's, when the model american family was still a working dad and a stay home mom in a nice suburb house. no surprise on their political inclinations.
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