By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
A columnist for The New York Times, not exactly a bastion of conservative thought, named David Brooks wrote: “there is less intellectual diversity in academia than any other profession.”
He then gave several examples to support his conclusion. An excellent gauge of party commitment is campaign donations, and 99 percent of William & Mary College faculty donations went to Democratic candidates.
Harvard was more pro-Republican: 96 percent of the campaign donations went to Democrats. By comparison, Yale was even more intellectually diverse with only 92 percent of support going toward Democrats. Spoiler alert! I was reared as a Democrat.
When I was a professor at Bowling Green State University, I was told we have only one professor in my department, an ex-college president, that was a Republican. All of the other professors were Democrats
Surveys of colleges throughout the United Stated have found the same appalling level of lack of intellectual diversity.
Mitchell Langbert of the National Association of Scholars surveyed 8,688 American universities, finding that 39 percent of the colleges in his sample did not have a single Republican faculty member.
After examining the political affiliation of professors from the top 50 American liberal arts colleges, he found that the mean ratio of Democrats to Republicans was 10.4 to 1, meaning over 90 percent were Democrats.
Departments such as gender studies or Africana studies have zero Republican professors, raising questions about how objective their research and teaching is.
The Langbert study revealed that over 98 percent of the professors in communications, anthropology, and religion, and 95 percent of those in biology, philosophy, and history were Democrats.
The area with the least number of Democrats was in engineering. Even here, Republicans were the minority, comprising only around 40 percent of the faculty.
In his article, The Disappearing Conservative Professor, Jon Shields concluded that “conservative professors have become increasingly scarce in recent decades even as the share of minority faculty [women, Blacks, and other minorities] has increased.
The obstacles to increasing political or ideological diversity are much greater than those that impede other diversification efforts. In other words, the opposition to intellectual and belief diversity is enormous.
The Chronicle of Higher Education found a mere four percent of secular college faculty were “very conservative.”
Those rare few colleges rejecting the teaching of Darwinism as fact were often at religious colleges, such as Master’s College, Cedarville University, and Liberty University.
Most Christian colleges, unfortunately, accept evolution as the explanation for the origin of life and humankind.
Only 37 percent of professors teaching at Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) reject evolution as the correct explanation for the origin of humans. Of the 13 million college faculty in the world, approximately 99.99 percent teach human evolution as fact.
One claim is that Republicans are rarely academics because they are intellectually and academically less qualified. A quick review of the literature reveals open bias is the actual reason.
A few examples illustrate this fact. Conservative Marc Short, a legislative director in the Trump administration, was offered a position in the University of Virginia center specializing in Presidency research. It was a routine appointment of an acknowledged highly qualified person.
The result was what University of California professor John Ellis called “violent hatred signed by over two thousand members of the campus community who opposed his appointment.”
Professor Ellis added that his professor peers “threw a temper tantrum at the prospect of having a single Republican added to the University of Virginia facility that was so safely tilted to the left.”
Even Republican Black males are not exempt. I wrote a chapter on Dr. Benjamin Carson in my book on this topic which he helped me write. Dr. Carson has the most impressive academic and scientific publication records I have ever seen, Black or White.
A Yale honor graduate and University of Michigan MD, he was honored with several movies about his life and was awarded over 60 honorary doctorates. His scientific publication record puts most professors to shame.
He was the director of the worldwide recognized Department of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center for a quarter of a century.
He also pioneered hemispherectomy, the removal of half of the brain, now the standard lifesaving operation to treat intractable epilepsy.
Then he came out of the closet as, not only a Republican, but also as a creationist. His star rapidly fell. Invited to be the commencement speaker at Methodist Emory University, the bragging about Carson abruptly stopped when faculty members learned that Carson believed that God created life and rejected the view that breaking genes by mutations actually created humans.
A letter condemning Carson for rejecting the unscientific belief that organic molecules evolved into people after millions of years purely by mutations and natural selection by survival of the fittest, plus chance and luck, was signed by 494 students and faculty.
The letter’s 494 signatories included Emory faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and medical school students. His invitation was promptly rescinded.
The university vowed to more carefully vet future commencement speakers to ensure that no Republican ‘Darwin Doubters’ will be invited, no matter how stellar their credentials. A few months later, Carson was even disinvited to address his own university’s commencement!
He was later appointed by the Trump administration as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development by a 58 to 41 vote. He was appointed only because Republicans then held the Senate.
Democrats predictably wanted nothing to do with a person they saw as an ignorant anti-evolutionist. The fact is, in general academies do not teach how to think as they should. Rather, they teach what to think. They do not educate but rather indoctrinate.
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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,800 publications in 12 languages and 60 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries. All 60 of Bergman’s books are on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other bookstores.