Krugman: The Wrongest in The Wrongest?

I suppose there is a wronger newspaper and a wronger columnist somewhere, but, fortunately I am not familiar with them.

It was only the wrongness trifecta in today’s column that compelled me to keep reading in sheer wonderment.

From a New York Times article, An Academic Question by Paul Krugman:

It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that?

Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new "academic freedom" laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story.

Claims that liberal bias keeps conservatives off college faculties almost always focus on the humanities and social sciences, where judgments about what constitutes good scholarship can seem subjective to an outsider. But studies that find registered Republicans in the minority at elite universities show that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences like physics and in engineering departments as in softer fields. Why?

One answer is self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.

It may be that Krugman has stumbled on to the cause of the decline in the number of young Americans following scientific and engineering careers. The soft headedness of liberals does not exactly recommend them for teaching anything. But perhaps it is the old truism having its effect, “Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach.”

But there's also, crucially, a values issue. In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the "party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the "party of theocracy."

And liberals generally are still lamenting the dearth of new ideas among them. And who really believes that Republicans are promoting theocracy.

Consider the statements of Dennis Baxley, a Florida legislator who has sponsored a bill that - like similar bills introduced in almost a dozen states - would give students who think that their conservative views aren't respected the right to sue their professors. Mr. Baxley says that he is taking on "leftists" struggling against "mainstream society," professors who act as "dictators" and turn the classroom into a "totalitarian niche." His prime example of academic totalitarianism? When professors say that evolution is a fact.

In its April Fools' Day issue, Scientific American published a spoof editorial in which it apologized for endorsing the theory of evolution just because it's "the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time," saying that "as editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence." And it conceded that it had succumbed "to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do."

Actually, as a theory of the origins of life, undesigned “evolution is the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century”. As Behe and others in Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute) point out. It is lamentable that the Scientific American has not done its homework either.

Think of the message this sends: today's Republican Party - increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research - doesn't respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn't be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.

Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they're seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses' content.

And it wouldn't just be a matter of demanding that historians play down the role of slavery in early America,

The demand is that other aspects of colonial America be respected. And that slavery in early America be set in the perspective of contemporary slavery in the Carribean, and the history of slavery in non-Christian cultures.

or that economists give the macroeconomic theories of Friedrich Hayek as much respect as those of John Maynard Keynes. [ … ]

Actually, even PBS with its great liberal bias, recently ran a special showing that recent events such as the failure of Communism, socialism, and the welfare state, have shown Hayek to be much more prescient than Keynes.

If it got that far, universities would probably find ways to cope - by, say, requiring that all entering students sign waivers. But political pressure will nonetheless have a chilling effect on scholarship. And that, of course, is its purpose.

Are we to suppose that the current political correctness fad does not have a chilling effect on scholarship? When the President of Harvard has just been publicly and officially dissed in an unprecedented no-confidence resolution by the Science and Arts Faculty for a minor misdemeanor against the canons of feminism.

I do not know how the odds of such an exhibition of wrongness match the odds for winning a trifecta , but it seems worthy of some sort of award.

(I have not defended the Republican Party in the above. Despite Krugman’s assertions, they are quite obviously capable of defending themselves. Both intellectually and at election time.)