Liberal vs Conservative: A Conservative View

When did the battle begin? When did it end? Who won it? Well the winner is obviously the one who occupies the plumb positions in the land is it not? But hang on, some of us don’t even remember that there was a battle on, but there must have been because the land I live in I live now only has a few of my countrymen. I arrive at work and I am surrounded by foreigners, and people who do things differently from me. In the privacy of home, there need not necessarily be harmony but both can be opposed to one another, in fact the house can be divided, yet though divided, it shall not fall.

What is going to fall or not fall, a nation, a house? No not at all, I used the above as a metaphor of conservatives and Liberals, or Republicans and Democrats. Surveys find that it bodes badly for Republicans in America when it comes to certain occupations. According to David Brooks a survey of Popular Culture showed that roughly 90 percent of professors in the arts and sciences that are registered with political parties, were registered as Democrats (Brooks 2003). Why is this? What is it about arts and sciences that causes some or rather most to lean towards the liberal side of politics? This reflected the results at the top universities in the country. Another somewhat disturbing suggestion Brooks makes is that is that these surveys showed that there were virtually no evangelical Christians among these academics.

These results say much about the state of things in Academia in USA and perhaps the world as well, but I believe it says more about the researchers than it does about academics in general. While I believe that liberal Academics abound throughout the world, as can be seen by the number of liberal agendas that are implemented in tertiary institutions, I cannot believe it is as high as 90 percent. Perhaps the reason that the survey found such a high rate is that the universities surveyed Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Caltech, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Colombia, Chicago (Brooks, 2003), are some of the most renowned liberal universities in the country. It seems that the truism that you can make a survey say anything you want is quite true, judging from this obviously Cross-sectional study. I am sure that if the study was longitudinal and took into account some of the conservative institutions in the Southern States, maybe the results would have been more even.