TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Muzzling the Muppets/Bush Wants PBS to Toe Republican Line

Re: Muzzling the Muppets/Bush Wants PBS to Toe Republican Line

Garrett Wollman (wollman@khavrinen.csail.mit.edu)
Mon, 18 Jul 2005 18:58:52 UTC

In article <telecom24.328.7@telecom-digest.org>, John McHarry
<jmcharry@comcast.net> wrote:

> Of course, one has to wonder why those whose profession is the study
> of history tend to have liberal views. Is there something in the
> detailed study of what has happened in the past that leads to such a
> position?

[This is far off-topic for Telecom, so please keep followups to me
privately.]

It should not be surprising that academia is skewed to the left,
politically, although it was not always so. Conservatives tend to be
people who define their success in terms which are more readily
achievable in politics or in business than in academic research. It's
a rare person who has the ability and desire to succeed in two realms.

Before the 1960s, university faculties were full of sort of academic
conservatives we don't see too much any more: indolent white men from
wealthy families who had no aptitude for business or law; this was
reinforced by the popular social theories of the time. (In one
documented example, most of Columbia's faculty supported Wendell
Wilkie over Franklin D. Roosevelt.)

-- 
Garrett A. Wollman    | As the Constitution endures, persons in every
wollman@csail.mit.edu | generation can invoke its principles in their own
Opinions not those    | search for greater freedom.
of MIT or CSAIL.      | - A. Kennedy, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003)

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