Academia on the Left & Right

The Wages of Anti-Intellectualism:
Jonathan Chait writes that the reason you find so few Republican academics isn't discrimination, it's that the GOP has become so self-consciously anti-intellectual. The argument involves making the important point that even in the hard sciences one finds few Republicans, and, in light of the present administration's endless assault on science, one hardly expects that to change in the future. The flipside is that American liberalism has increasingly ceased to be a strongly ideological movement and has instead adopted an ethic of technocratic managerialism underpinned by a vague consequentialism.

A few weeks ago, a pair of studies found that Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among professors at leading universities. Conservatives gleefully seized upon this to once again flagellate academia for its liberal bias.

Am I the only person who fails to understand why conservatives see this finding as vindication? After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?"