Thread by @sebjenseb

Why does academia lean left now? A long 🧵

The first, obvious thing to check is whether this is due to changes in the number of conservatives and liberals over time. It's not.

The second thing to check is if this is due to right wing views becoming increasingly correlated with low intelligence or "human capital". There are several reasons not to think this is the case...

First, the association between IQ and political views is fairly weak to begin with. The time lag is also off -- White left wingers became more intelligent than White right wingers around the mid 00s. This trend in academia started before that.

Second, if White left wingers are more educated than right wingers (this has been true for longer), then you would expect some of the advantages in left wing IQ scores to be hollow for g, since education gains are hollow for g.
humanvarieties.org/2022/12/22/sch…

Human capital/competence also goes far beyond IQ. Conservatives are more extraverted, hardworking, and emotionally stable than liberals. The only non-cognitive trait where leftists have a decisive advantage in openness.

The openness explanation could explain some of the initial difference (the ratio for D to R professors was 2 to 1 in the 60s), but it doesn't explain the change in the relationship very well, especially when conservatives have become increasingly open-minded people.

Perhaps it has to do with the environment: universities indoctrinate students with left wing propaganda. This also fails as an explanation. While students in the 60s became more left wing in longitudinal samples, the opposite held for students in later cohorts.

The evidence traditionally has supported the idea that it is peers, not professors, that contribute to the political views of students. Which makes sense -- they are the people who they spend the most time around.

Perhaps it's self-selection: the kind of people who want to become professors or academics tend to be left wing. Not a satisfactory explanation either. Being right wing did not predict wanting to participate in academia within a large online sample on prolific academia (n = 843)

They were, however, much more likely to say that their political views would not fit into academia. Which threads nicely into the next section on the explanation with the most evidence for it: that academia is hostile to right wingers.

There are several lines of evidence for this. First, right wingers are more likely to be represented in harder, more rigorous fields that are less political. This is the opposite of what would be expected if the issue was human capital, by the way.

The left wing skew of academia is also less strong if data is sourced from anonymous surveys, indicating that right wing academics are more likely to conceal their political views.

Right wingers rarely want professors to be reported for anything, regardless of what they said. Left wingers tend to want professors to be reported for things they disagree with them on.

It might even get worse. Younger academics are much more pro-discrimination than older ones.

Leftist academics are also much more likely to support discrimination against populist right wingers when their opinions are concealed

Most of this was sourced from wehrkat's article. A few others:


onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…
emilkirkegaard.com/p/conservative…

https://x.com/sebjenseb/status/1838777855955865687