{"id":1396,"date":"2010-01-19T12:19:38","date_gmt":"2010-01-19T18:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/crawler\/?p=1396"},"modified":"2010-01-19T12:19:38","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T18:19:38","slug":"typecasting-academics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2010\/01\/19\/typecasting-academics\/","title":{"rendered":"typecasting academics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Professor<\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>\u00a0recently highlighted recent research by sociologists Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse on the tendency for professors to be liberal:<\/p>\n

New research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals \u2014 and so few conservatives \u2014 want to be professors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In their findings, Gross and Fosse chalk this one up to typecasting:<\/p>\n

Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular \u2014 and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people\u2019s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up.<\/p>\n

Jobs can be typecast in different ways, said Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, who undertook the study. For instance, less than 6 percent of nurses today are men. Discrimination against male candidates may be a factor, but the primary reason for the disparity is that most people consider nursing to be a woman\u2019s career, Mr. Gross said. That means not many men aspire to become nurses in the first place \u2014 a point made in the recent Lee Daniels film \u201cPrecious: Based on the Novel \u2018Push\u2019 by Sapphire.\u201d When John (Lenny Kravitz) asks the 16-year-old Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) and her friends whether they\u2019ve ever seen a male nurse before, all answer no amid giddy laughter.<\/p>\n

Nursing is what sociologists call \u201cgender typed.\u201d Mr. Gross said that \u201cprofessors and a number of other fields are politically typed.\u201d Journalism, art, fashion, social work and therapy are dominated by liberals; while law enforcement, farming, dentistry, medicine and the military attract more conservatives.\u00a0 \u201cThese types of occupational reputations affect people\u2019s career aspirations,\u201d\u00a0[Gross]\u00a0added.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gross adds a bit of history to where this typecasting came from:<\/p>\n

From the early 1950s William F. Buckley Jr. and other founders of the modern conservative movement railed against academia\u2019s liberal bias. Buckley even published a regular column, \u201cFrom the Academy,\u201d in the magazine he founded, The National Review.<\/p>\n

\u201cConservatives weren\u2019t just expressing outrage,\u201d Mr. Gross said, \u201cthey were also trying to build a conservative identity.\u201d They defined themselves in opposition to the New Deal liberals who occupied the establishment\u2019s precincts. Hence Buckley\u2019s quip in the early 1960s: \u201cI\u2019d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 1960s college campuses, swelled by the large baby-boom generation, became a staging ground for radical leftist social and political movements, further moving the academy away from conservatism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gross and Fosse also note that stereotyping is not the only reason for the liberal\u00a0leanings of the academy:<\/p>\n

The characteristics that define one\u2019s political orientation are also at the fore of certain jobs, the sociologists reported. Nearly half of the political lopsidedness in academia can be traced to four characteristics that liberals in general, and professors in particular, share: advanced degrees; a nonconservative religious theology (which includes liberal Protestants and Jews, and the nonreligious); an expressed tolerance for controversial ideas; and a disparity between education and income.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times\u00a0recently highlighted recent research by sociologists Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse on the tendency for professors to be liberal: New research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals \u2014 and so few conservatives […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[29,43,34,39114,154,42,37,76],"class_list":["post-1396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-class","tag-college","tag-education","tag-gender","tag-political","tag-religion","tag-social-psychology","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1396"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1402,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1396\/revisions\/1402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}