The debate about conservatives in academia (see Daniel Drezner for some links) strikes me as curiously mis-specified.
First, in many of the sciences there's little political content in whatever is taught. There's no earthly reason why faculty in, say, statistics should be influenced in the classroom by what they do in the privacy of their own voting booth.
Conversely, though, if faculty in subjects with little inherent political content vote one way or the other that should be a useful reminder that academics might lean Democratic for two wholly rational reasons
(1) As Mark Schmidt points out if academics perceive Democrats as more likely to increase research funding or state support for universities they are voting for the interests of their business. Nothing wrong with that.
(2) If you're a somewhat smart person, smart enough to get a PhD at least, and choose to go into a profession where the salary scale is relatively flat, and relatively low compared to other graduate/professional degreed occupations; there's an element of self-selection.
By way of comparison, take nursing. Until the recent shortage, somewhat lower salaries for the same level of education. Yet no-one's complaining about how nursing is dominated by Democratic women and that those poor male Republican nurses can't catch a break.
The reason nurses tend to vote Democratic is that people to self-select into a somewhat lower-paying, public service oriented job, tend to be people who vote Democratic. Same with psychiatrists and pediatricians, for what it's worth.
Second, in subjects which are more political -- maybe inherently so -- there's a confusion of partisanship with politics. The two ain't the same.
I don't think it's unfair to say that it has generally been Republicans who want the American history curriculum to focus less on the perceived flaws in that story, and more on the timeless ideals of the founders and the beacon of liberty the nation quickly became etc, etc ... cue national anthem now.
In any case, if we acknowledge that America was not really very democratic for much of its first century, and that slavery was a stain on the nation ... we end up showering more praise on the Republican party if we project our modern values and sympathies back into the past. For it was the Republican party that in the 19th century paid more attention to racial injustice than the Democratic party.
This is well known, but I think it's instructive in making some wider points about history teaching and research. None of these are particularly original, but they bear repeating.
The differences between the present day and even the comparatively recent past are larger than the differences between the parties. This is so obviously true for slavery, but it's true in lots of other ways as well. It was only just over 30 years ago that Richard Nixon could champion a form of universal health insurance. To take a topic from my own research for once, during the Depression members of both parties supported legislation that would have banned married women from holding a paid job in state government if their husbands were working. Neither party proposes such a thing now.
Analogies to the present are sometimes a useful way of helping our understanding, but many of the problems of the past cannot be understood in terms of present day two-party politics.
More fundamentally, and this reveals my own epistemology, a good historian must try to understand the opinions and thoughts that they disagree with, and feel -- temporarily, at least -- empathy for the people they are researching. I don't think you should bring your empathy for the slave owner back into your present day politics, but if you're going to understand them in the past you have to take them seriously and sympathetically.
Posted by robe0419 at December 7, 2004 1:54 PM