A study shows that a selected segment of the most highly educated and intelligent people, folks gifted with jobs that allow them to think deeply about the world, tend overwhelmingly to reject the Republican party. Is the rejection of the GOP by professors at California's two leading universities just maybe a sign that Republican ideas don't stand up to sustained scrutiny? No, it seems that this hypothesis isn't even on the table. Instead, it's presumptively a 'Conspiracy of Intellectual Orthodoxy'—if you're a Republican anyway. Seems to me the data is in fact utterly silent as to causes, meaning we should ask ourselves what is more likely.
(Incidentally, given the authors' tendentious manner of introducing the results, the study relied on should be viewed as presumptively suspect. Anyone who introduces a study of faculty living in California by comparing their political party registrations to the national electoral vote is someone who doesn't understand comparing like with like or who is consciously trying to bamboozle with statistics. I understand that the California state party registration patterns are not as skewed as the ones asserted for Berkeley and Standford, but if we're going to do serious work, let's do it seriously, and compare to people similarly situated geographically and by educational and financial status.)
Update: See also Intellectual Diversity at Stanford for more shocking news about narrow-mindedness ruling the halls of academe:
…my preliminary research has discovered some even more shocking facts. I have found that only 1% of Stanford professors believe in telepathy (defined as “communication between minds without using the traditional five senses”), compared with 36% of the general population. And less than half a percent believe “people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil”, compared with 49% of those outside the ivory tower. And while 25% of Americans believe in astrology (“the position of the stars and planets can affect people’s lives”), I could only find one Stanford professor who would agree. (All numbers are from mainstream polls, as reported by Sokal.)
This dreadful lack of intellectual diversity is a serious threat to our nation’s youth, who are quietly being propagandized by anti-astrology radicals instead of educated with different points of view. Were I to discover that there were no blacks on the Stanford faculty, the Politically Correct community would be all up in arms. But they have no problem squeezing out prospective faculty members whose views they disagree with.
