Political Science = Political Activism and Social Engineering as do:

American Studies
Art & Art History
Cinema & Media Studies
Cognitive Studies
Cross Cultural Studies
Educational Studies
Environmental Studies
European Studies
French and Francophone Studies
History
International Relations
Literary and Cultural Studies
Music
Philosophy
Political Science
Pre-Med (except for proctology)
Psychology
Sociology
Theater and Dance
Women's and Gender Studies
....................................................................

is that illegal to enforce that also b/c it is public property?

Most professors, both conservative and liberal will say they try to present all viewpoints. So I don't think colleges really try to conciously look for conservative vs liberal when recruiting faculty. They do consider race and background but I don't think the employment application includes and questions about one's political perspective.

It is a mystery why most professors accross the country see themselves as politcal "liberals". And I think most don't think it makes any difference. (Maybe that's cuz they ARE liberals.)

But I would have to think that the applicants for teaching jobs are liberals. Maybe most job applicants apply because they have been recruited (by the liberals) and so fewer conservative people apply.

The reverse is true in the military. Most officers would classify themselves as conservatives.

Anybody know why?

Per my earlier post above, I was not joking, it is broken down by discipline.

A number of studies are done every year and validate that a large percentage of hard disciplines such as engineer, math, and science professors are more conservative leaning and teach/vote accordingly.

Inversly, the soft or "social/people" sciences, literature, and art are more liberal-even socialist leaning and teach/vote accordingly.

The hard disciplines tend to teach facts/formulas and soft tend to teach emotion/feeling.

.......and yes, that is a generalization

I was a double major in college--history and political science. Doubly cursed was I, eh?

I found history professors to be overwhelmingly liberal. Some of them were even more liberal than I was at the time--and that's saying something. I had a reasonably conservative history professor, but only in graduate school.

I found political science professors to be somewhat less liberal. That is my experience, but only at that college at that time--around mid 1960s. I would guess that now, most of them would be considered more liberal than they were then. Times and perceptions change.

I would assume that there is a conservative Environmental Sciences Professor somewhere--just as I would assume that it is possible for an American Studies Professor to be a conservative. But those courses of study do not lend themselves to a conservative point of view. An Environmental Sciences Professor or an American Studies Professor who is conservative would find themselves very lonely.

I would have thought: especially proctology. But then I realized that the social sciences are about pulling thing out of there, not so much poking things in.

Damn, you are quick Cannon.......thought that I could slip that one past...

Another (somewhat younger than Old Dude) History major here- but my professors ran about half and half. The department chair was a fairly conservative gent from Virginia, we had a former U of M professor, a conservative gay prof from Ohio, a municipal judge, and a Canadian Asian studies prof.

Old Dude- did they *have* "history" back then? Or was it a "Current Events" major?

I went to the U of M for Engineering and I did not have to worry about political ideology. They all were foreign TA!

When I got smart and left and went to the UND they were a mix but one thing they had in common is they (spoke English) had fun and went drinking with us a number of times!

Grasshopper, may you live long enough to learn that today's current events are the stuff of tomorrow's history.

The faculty on the hiring committees choose younger clones of themselves. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.


Liberals (in the modern American sense, not Classical Liberals) don't join the military. They don't believe violence can ever be justified.

I'm reminded of the old saying:

Those that can, do: those that can't, teach: those who can't teach, teach teachers: and those who can’t teach teachers administrate.

Too true.



Also too true, much of the time.

I would think that being in the military gives one a sense of reality.

A college professor on the other hand lives in their own little world.

Ivory tower maybe??