It’s not really that college professors became more liberal; it’s more that conservatism became more anti-knowledge, anti-facts, anti-reality, anti-evidence, anti-science. Why would people who value rigorous educational and knowledge standards want to be associated with those things?
Originally shared by Russ Abbott
Paul Krugman has some thoughtful comments on the recent poll showing a drastic drop in the extent to which conservative value higher education.
First he notes that college professors are indeed more liberal than conservative. So shouldn’t higher education recruit more conservative professors? Well, the military is significantly more conservative than liberal. Perhaps the military should recruit more liberal members.
But that was just playing. He asks why the anti-conservative lean of academics has become more pronounced over time? The reason, he suggests, has a lot to do with the changing nature of what it means to be a conservative. When denial of climate change, and for that matter the theory of evolution, become tribal markers, you shouldn’t be surprised to find academics, very much including those in the hard sciences, decline to be identified as members of the tribe.
Back to the point: how to explain the decline in Republican views of colleges.
Republicans have changed in the age of Trump: what was already a strong strain of anti-intellectualism has become completely dominant. The notion that there was a golden age of conservative intellectuals is basically a myth. But there used to be at least some pretense of taking facts and hard thinking seriously. Now anyone pointing out awkward facts – immigrants haven’t brought a reign of terror, coal jobs can’t be brought back, Trump lost the popular vote – is the enemy. In fact, I’d argue that anti-intellectualism was, in its own way, as big a factor in the election as racism.
What this means for the future is grim. America basically invented the modern, educated society, leading the way on universal K-12 education, building the world’s finest and most comprehensive higher education system; this in turn was an important factor in how we became leader of the free world. Now a powerful political movement basically wants to make America ignorant again.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/we-dont-need-no-education-2/?_r=0