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Conservative Professors

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…in “progressive” academia.

Dunn described to Campus Reform how difficult it was to find conservative professors to include in their study.

“To actually find conservatives in several disciplines we had to use what’s called a snowball sample,” he said. “That method is used with difficult-to-locate populations like the homeless. I think it is both telling and ironic that we had to use it with conservatives. With a snowball sample, you find someone in the population you’re looking for and ask them where you could find more people like them.”

It’s samizdat.

2 thoughts on “Conservative Professors”

  2. “If you want to do something about the underrepresentation of conservatives in higher education, more conservatives need to pursue academic careers,” the professor told Campus Reform. “If conservative students think it’s hopeless, then you’re going to discourage them from going to graduate school and trying to become a professor.”

    I think this is bad advice. The problem is that PhD graduates are way over-produced. For example, when I was going through math grad school, the overproduction of math PhD’s was something like a factor of two more produced than academic positions opened up to take them in. There is considerably more winnowing as one gets to tenure level.

    Now that I think about it, this is probably the real reason that college campuses have become so ideologically biased. Some people can thrive in the private world and thus have a choice. But some people can’t or won’t. Then that 50% chance looks pretty good odds. Just keep doing that for fifty years and see what sort of professor you’re going to get.

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