By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
One attempt to answer this question is from public internet discussion sites.
Their answers, edited for grammar, are in italics, and my responses in plain font. Not one professor claimed the reasons were the result of discrimination, but rather for what they claimed were valid reasons.
One professor wrote that professors are leftist democrats because they are more intelligent than Republicans. In contrast to Republicans, Democrats can think rationally and value thinking more than money.
College teaching requires a PhD and does not pay well. Most Master’s degree holders working in the commercial sector make much more money. I recently switched from academics to commercial work and tripled my salary.
Another professor claimed, “Conservatives and Republicans put money above all else, and have an insatiable craving to control others and force them to behave as they wish. To control their sex lives, to control their religion, to control what all children learn, and to hate and punish anybody that is not in their group. …Most college professors are liberal Democrats because the selfish money-first conservative Republicans aren’t inclined to get a PhD because their priority is to make big money. If they get a PhD, they leverage it primarily to make even more money.
Ironically, many Republicans believe that this description perfectly fits Democrats! The four colleges I taught at were all unionized and by far, the main concern was money.
At one college where I taught chemistry, I worked to obtain a cabinet to display the Periodic Table elements. I hired a cabinet maker to draw the cabinet and determined the cost of 90 elements. I never got support from the faculty, who were too busy working for better pay.
In teaching chemistry, it helps the students to see the actual elements we were discussing, such as yttrium, praseodymium, terbium, neodymium and molybdenum, an essential nutrient few people have heard of, which helps break down drugs and toxins.
Dr. Greg Forster, Friedman Fellow at the school-choice organization EdChoice concluded that the problem was universities indoctrinate future teachers in left-wing ideology:
“Peruse the course catalog of any major education school, or read the professors Twitter feeds and you will find yourself swimming in an ocean of hard-left ideology: ‘critical theory’ that says there is no truth, only power; ‘intersectionality’ that says you’re not going to be right about anything unless you’re right (that is, left) about everything; cheerleading for every fashionable left-leaning cause.
One of the most irrational explanations is that Republicans are born Republicans. This claim reminds me of eugenics and the justification for racism (i.e., Blacks are born intellectually inferior) given over the last century.
As one professor opined, “The ideological differences between conservatives and liberals result from biology… Being liberal or conservative is just like being gay or straight; you are born that way.
I question the conclusions of someone who is grossly unaware of the scientific literature on this issue. This is like claiming some people are born in the wrong body and need radical surgery to force their body to conform to their gender goal. The born-that-way argument was elaborated here:
The difference is most clearly demonstrated by genetics …Conservatives begin with a much higher sense of general urgency, and a concomitant higher bias for action over analysis, than liberals. We can see the roots of that difference in the relative size of the brain component, the amygdala, between conservatives and liberals.
It’s larger in conservatives, and it drives a vastly greater willingness to make decisions based on inadequate information, a critical survival skill in hostile environments. The liberal demands far deeper analysis, consideration, and far more information before making decisions.
He claims these biological differences are due to evolution:
“Human genetics and human biology have preserved both ways of thinking across our history as a species as we evolved. Academics tend to be liberals because academics are both more congenial to the way liberals think and more forgiving of the lengthy analysis and information gathering [that] liberals need to make decisions.”
The problems for the “born that way” theory include large numbers of people change political parties, as I did. The most accurate explanation for the dominance of Democrats in professoriate is that most existing professors tend to be leftist democrats and reward this trait in their students, often subconsciously.
They are also much more likely to recommend these students for graduate school, for scholarships, and, later, for positions as professors. Professor recommendations are critical in furthering a career.
The recommendations from my professors were critical to my academic progress. The more indoctrinated someone is as students, the more left-leaning they become.
This is true even at the high schools that feed the universities. One survey found among high school English teachers, on average there are 97 Democrats for every three Republicans, and among health teachers, there are 99 Democrats for every Republican.
Among math and science high school teachers, overall, there are 87 Democrats for every 13 Republicans. Regardless of the cause, the political diversity of the professoriate should represent the diversity of the American public.
The case of Dr. Ben Carson covered in a previous column perfectly illustrates this fact. We must strive not only for ethnic diversity but intellectual diversity.
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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.