Why academics are liberal.

Jonathan Chait: There's a reason academia shuns Republicans

Jonathan Chait has revealed something that should have been obvious: of course academics are liberals, all intelligent people are. The craving that Republicans have for universities to turn Republican just won't happen as long as thoughtful, intelligent people remain in academia. That's the point. "Academics -- who are trained to think through the complexities, not brush them aside-- " are rightly appalled by Republicans in general, and Bush specifically, who follow their "feelings" and ignore the advice of those who specialize in subjects.

Conservatives would blame African-American studies, feminist studies, and other admittedly silly programs for the liberal bias, yet how do they explain the same "bias" in the hard sciences? Chait writes:

"But the rise of fashionable left-wing scholarship can be blamed for only a tiny part of the GOP's problem. The studies showing that academics prefer Democrats to Republicans also show that this preference holds in hard sciences as well as social sciences. Are we to believe that higher education has fallen prey to trendy multiculturalist engineering, or that physics departments everywhere suppress conservative quantum theorists?"

What's rather disturbing is that the products of universities don't seem to be liberal, hence the recent majority vote for the unintellectual.