Now that bloggers are reporting news and fact-checking the biased media, liberals in newsrooms no longer control the flow of information or how it’s reported. I predict a similar change will occur in leftist academia. George Will offers an update on liberal domination of colleges and universities:
One study of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That imbalance, more than double what it was three decades ago, is intensifying because younger professors are more uniformly liberal than the older cohort that is retiring.Another study, of voter registrations records, including those of professors in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine Democrats for every Republican at Berkeley and Stanford. Among younger professors, there were 183 Democrats, six Republicans.
So why the disparity? Is there a hiring bias?
But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, denies that academic institutions are biased against conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he explains, occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? “Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice.” That clears that up.
A few months ago I read a study on leftists in media, and a liberal journalist said that Democrats dominated the media because conservatives tend not to pursue low-paying journalism jobs. You buy that? Remind me to tell you about the job interview I had with PBS.
Will quotes someone who offers what I consider an objective explanation of why leftist ideology dominates universities:
A filtering process, from graduate school admissions through tenure decisions, tends to exclude conservatives from what Mark Bauerlein calls academia’s “sheltered habitat.’” In a dazzling essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts, notes that the “first protocol” of academic society is the “common assumption” — that, at professional gatherings, all the strangers in the room are liberals.
It is a reasonable assumption, given that in order to enter the profession, your work must be deemed, by the criteria of the prevailing culture, “relevant.” Bauerlein says various academic fields now have regnant premises that embed political orientations in their very definitions of scholarship…
The “common assumption” extends to most gatherings unless they’re specifically conservative. Almost everywhere I go, almost everyone I meet assumes I’m a Democrat. But things are slowly changing. Enjoy it while it lasts, liberals. I predict that the “red state drift” will eventually enter the halls of higher education.
I also predict “red state drift” will enter the blogosphere’s lexicon. Remember, you read it here first! 
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Links: Funny post on media bias from Scrappleface.
A cool commenter found a link I was looking for: Mark Bauerlein’s article.
Patterico on NYT’s shoddy journalism.
Update: I extend a hearty welcome to readers of a certain high-profile liberal blogger who blogged about me again! 
This is my “house” and I expect you to remember your manners. With that in mind, you may comment on this blog.
Update II (12/1) : David Limbaugh links to a study that concludes liberals dominate academia.
