How to Interpret Correlations: Liberals Dominate University Sciences

Reference: "UNIVERSITY OF PC: As a Republican, I'm on the Fringe," by Robert Maranto, The Washington Post Sunday Outlook, December 9, 2007.

"Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors' political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

"In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

"Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans."

Comment: A correlation can be pure coincidence. On the other hand, correlations are often indications of causality. It can be that A causes B, that B causes A, or that both A and B are caused by some hidden factor, C.

Maranto, a conservative, interprets the preponderance of liberals in the physical and social sciences in universities as an indication that the liberals in the universities are busy recruiting new liberals to join them, and rejecting conservatives.

It is not clear why he rejected the hypothesis that liberals are more likely to seek academic careers than conservatives. Nor why he has not assumed people who are smart and educated enough to be college faculty members in the sciences predominantly are converted to liberal positions. Alternatively, he does not seem to consider that there may be a factor that results both in liberal political and university careers in the physical or natural sciences -- such as a modern outlook and a zest for progress. Could liberals in general write better books, more deserving of recognition by promotion of the authors, than do conservatives?

Of course, I am a Democrat. JAD