Talk:Political views of American academics

You may want to increment {{Archive basics}} to |counter= 3 as Talk:Political views of American academics/Archive 2 is larger than the recommended 150Kb.

Pre- and post-WWII years

I added a new section to the article that describes the investigations into academics's political views in the 1930s and 1940s. I think it's important for the article to provide historical context for the current interest in faculty political beliefs.AnaSoc (talk) 02:12, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your work on this, much appreciated. I'll do some gnomish copyediting, but I think the page is significantly improved. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:04, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

As I got into it, I did a considerable amount of shortening, for the purpose of balance and good writing, beyond just the gnomish stuff. Please check whether it is OK with you. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:25, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

Also, it would be good if you could add page numbers for the book-length sources. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:26, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

AWESOME edits, @Tryptofish Excellent job of tightening up the prose.AnaSoc (talk) 22:15, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

Dubious claims

"As part of a survey of faculty views about communism  and free speech, they asked approximately 2,500 professors of social science a large number of questions, and found that about two thirds of these faculty members had been visited by the FBI.:xiv" These are inaccurate claims about the Lazarsfeld and Thielen study. The study asked many questions, and did not focus only on communism as is written. Also, the issue was academic freedom, not free speech per se. And the 2/3 claim--my print copy of Keen does not say that on the page indicated.AnaSoc (talk) 02:59, 23 June 2018 (UTC) 

Yes, a lot of this is the kind of thing that I've been asking for other editors to check over, not so much claims as the artifacts of me writing it by myself. The description of the focus of the study was simply my choice of words at the time, and I'll fix that now. Now as for what the Keen source does and does not say, I still believe what I said in my first comment in #Looking good, above. Here is the link to the online version to which I had access: [1]. (Yikes, there's Keen's name right there on the cover!) Just start at the beginning of the Introduction to the Transaction Edition that is right at the beginning of the book, and go page-by-page for about 13–14 pages, until you come to a paragraph that begins: "In their study, Lazarsfeld and Thielens found that two-thirds of the approximately 2,500 social science faculty..." It says it right there. For whatever reason, this online version does not show any page numbers, so I got the page number by counting pages from the beginning. Obviously, that's a crummy way to do it. I hope that you can find this passage now in your print copy, and if that does have page numbers, then please correct them on the page here. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:25, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

Oh yes, now I recall that conversation about the page numbers... Turns out it's page xvii in the print version. But the visit by the FBI did not necessarily focus on the faculty members, but instead the visits could have been about colleagues or students. We should make that clear as well. I'll give it a try, and you see if you like what I did.AnaSoc (talk) 22:15, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

For further reading section

What do ya'll think about adding a For further reading section?AnaSoc (talk) 23:48, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

Sure, but to follow MOS:FURTHER, it would be good to convert the listings to Template:cite book, and to remove all books that are already cited in the text. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:37, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

RfC on inclusion of HERI data chart

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Shall this chart (seen to the right) of HERI data for self-reported political views of professors be included in the article? -- Netoholic @ 18:43, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Self-reported political views of US academic faculty (% by year), according to the HERI Faculty Survey reports 1990–2014

References

Survey

• Include - This metric (and debate about its significance), is referenced in many sources for this topic, and especially in most modern studies. A prior RfC closed to include the view of the HERI director about this data, so it should be necessary to display to readers the data that she and other sources are talking about. Its not uncommon to see secondary sources include charts of this data (Washington Post, Heterodox Academy, Inside Higher Ed). The chart adds informative value to the article, as well as some visual interest to a topic that doesn't easily lend itself to such. -- Netoholic @ 18:43, 16 July 2018 (UTC)
• Exclude. I strongly urge editors responding to this RfC to read the consensus of #RfC about HERI survey, because this new RfC is less about "balance" than about undoing that consensus through the back door. The community agreed in the previous RfC to include a statement from the director of the HERI data collection that it really isn't suited to drawing conclusions about professors' political views. And the HERI studies were not designed to be about political views. To some extent, the image is WP:SYNTH, put together by the RfC proposer even though there is no such graph covering the same time period published elsewhere. It's true that the data have attracted attention, as per the Washington Post article cited in the comment just above mine. But please look carefully: the WaPo says of the graph of professors' views shown there that "the folks that first put these numbers together, a group of academic faculty calling themselves Heterodox Academy, argue that...". Then look at the cited post from the Heterodox Academy also linked just above. The WaPo graph is directly copied from there, and the creator of the graph is a pol sci professor named Samuel Abrams. Samuel Abrams is also from the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, two conservative think tanks: [2]. He is a legitimate scholar, but also one with a political agenda, and all of the secondary attention to this data originates with him. (He does a lot of science by press conference.) It's a US right-wing talking point that US universities are taken over by liberals and are hostile to conservatives. So ultimately, this RfC is about WP:DUE weight. The page already does report this shift over time and the discussions about it, in the text. It does give considerable space, and a lengthy direct quote, to Abrams. And it does cover the Heterodox Academy. It's not like the page does not cover the information in the graph. So, do we need a graph – the only graph on the page – to drive home what the text already says? Why this graph of data, and no others? All it does is give undue weight to data from a survey that is not even a survey about the political views of American academics. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:27, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

It is absolutely nonsense all these WP:ASPERSIONS. The graph is in no way SYNTH, as anyone could recreate it using the HERI data alone (SYNTH means to mix sources to present a a false conclusion). I don't understand the attacks on "think tanks", because as I said, this data comes from HERI itself. The additional references are to demonstrate the weight of this information and in particular that graphs/tables of this data are used by many academics and media about this topic. Trying to make this graph a left-vs-right thing is silly. If we're including a statement by the Director of HERI about these trends, and HERI is certainly not one of these think tanks you're going on about, then displaying the data she and others are referring often to is helpful to the reader. This IS a survey which asks about political beliefs (among many other things), and its a survey with a long history. Academic studies refer to this data, in both their text and using graphs, and so its absolutely appropriate for us to do the same. Its a visual aid, and in no way limits what other data graphs may be included in the future. -- Netoholic @ 21:40, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

It might perhaps be better to discuss that in the discussion section below. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:01, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

• Include. A picture is worth a thousand words. Or in this case, ten thousand. Maproom (talk) 06:35, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
• Exclude – Unless we're including graphs for every study mentioned in the article (which would be a very bad idea). There's nothing special about the data in the proposed graph such that it deserves the added WP:WEIGHT of inclusion. Mojoworker (talk) 15:30, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

  Not everything of course, but there could certainly be a case made for other data to be graphed if they are referenced in media, other scholarly papers and books on this topic. That is the "something special" about this set of HERI data - its probably the most repeated in so many other works. -- Netoholic @ 05:14, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

• Exclude per Tryptofish. Doug Weller talk 18:24, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
• Exclude I honestly don't care too much either way, seeing that this graph can be interpreted as proof that reality has a leftist bias, rather than an indictment of academia, but the motive of the RFC proposer is obviously to imply that academia is some sort of echo chamber. The WP:REFBOMB that accompanies this screams "you doth protest too much" and also includes opinion articles that are critical of academia, despite the fact that you can't really draw any conclusions from this data as to why academia is overwhelmingly liberal/left leaning. Thus I think this inclusion would be less than neutral, and we should respect the precedent that was established in the RFC that Tryptofish cited. – FenixFeather ^{(talk)(Contribs)} 05:39, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

• Looking at the picture a little closer, I want to add that I also agree that the chart is low quality resolution-wise and amateurish design-wise. It's extremely pixelated and the legend is needlessly numbered with letters. – FenixFeather ^{(talk)(Contribs)} 17:26, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
• Exclude because of WP:DUE (and no, I don't want to see a ton of graphs appear on the page so that this one doesn't stand out!) and I concur with Tryptofish's observations. StarHOG (talk) 13:02, 23 July 2018 (UTC)
• Exclude per Tryptofish and WP:DUE. This doesn't add anything worthwhile that isn't already in the article; it only serves to give undue weight to one specific take on the subject. --Aquillion (talk) 01:35, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
• include per MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE. This image obviously is relevant to the page and is an "important illustrative aid to understanding". It helps readers get a better understanding of the content.desmay (talk) 19:19, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
• Exclude - Tryptofish is quite convincing. This chart alone is misleading and more charts would turn this into a research paper, not an article. UNDUE. O3000 (talk) 19:28, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

Threaded discussion

• One comment only I'll allow myself, for being the previous RfC's closer. Inclusion of graphs increases generally the value and the impact of information. Wikipedia welcomes editor-created graphs. (There's even a bunch of Wikipedia articles about how to create graphs for inclusion here.) However, when it comes to politics, graphs from secondary, independent, outside sources would be preferable to editor-created graphs. There's a practical reason for saying this and the reason is there are many problems inherent to graph creation, which, in a political context, can raise all sorts of objections and create distractions. Some hints: Why a pie instead of bars? Why X gets to be at the top of the stack and Z at the bottom instead of vice versa? Why choose these colors and not those other colors for each segment of the graph? Why present this timeline instead of that other timeline? Why use this scale instead of that other scale? Etc. Such objections have merit, since, as we already (should) know, the way polling data are gathered and presented can potentially, even unwittingly, be biased.

In so many words, no one can seriously dispute that the inclusion of graphs adds value and facilitates transmission of knowledge, but in a political context it's better to seek sources for them. Of course, this is a non-binding viewpoint. -The Gnome (talk) 07:00, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

As above, there are several sources that use graphs of this data, cut in a number of ways. For example, some group the far left/liberal and far right/conservative labels together. Some use lines charts (none use pie), others uses tabular format, etc. We can't directly use any graphs from a secondary source (from a copyright perspective), so in following those WP pages which give advice about editor-generated graphs, I created the chart using the data "as is", selecting a safe/simple color range supported by WP:ACCESSIBILITY. The main purpose of course is because several secondary sources aren't up-to-date as they were released in earlier years, but they definitely demonstrate there is utility and due weight for including such a graph. I'm not sure why say political articles are particularly problematic - we use editor-made charts in lots of article (see any of the election results pages). The data used for this chart itself isn't controversial, indeed the first Exclude vote above points out we mention some data points in text already. The chart is just for visual interest and to present current and past data together. Interpretation is left completely up to the reader. -- Netoholic @ 08:58, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

• A reply was directed at me in the survey section above. Personally, I prefer to keep threaded discussions in the threaded discussion section, so I'm going to make some additional comments here. For me, the bottom line is that I (with a few caveats) support including the information that is provided in the graph on this page. And the page already does include that information, as well as the perspectives of the authors who have commented on the data, including a very lengthy quote from Abrams. So I do not see this RfC as about whether or not to cover the information. Instead, I see the question as to whether or not we should present that information in a graph, in addition to the text that already covers it. Does it help the reader understand it, and is having the only graph on the page due weight? No, and no. After all, some similar studies have found similar results, but other studies (some of which actually focused on political views, unlike HERI) did not find the same results.

I also want to add that, judged as an image for a Wikipedia page, the graph is of rather poor visual quality. It's not an uploaded file, but rather just made rather crudely in Wiki markup. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:34, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

• An editor cited MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE. I looked at it, and I do not think it really provides a rationale for including this image here. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:42, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Tags

After a few more days, I'm going to remove the templates from this page unless someone asks otherwise here in talk. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:07, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Summers and Buckley

About this: [3], here is what I can see in the source material about Summers and Buckley.

The source for Summers is: [4]. I take issue, in part, with this page saying "Summers disagreed on the interpretation of that data, particularly in terms of Gross and Simmons grouped their results by the degree of liberalism or conservatism." I don't find that in the source. Here is what the source actually says about it:

"In a day-long meeting, the findings were presented by the authors, Neil Gross, an assistant professor of sociology at Harvard, and Solon Simmons, an assistant professor of conflict analysis and sociology at George Mason University. While Gross and Simmons saw their findings on faculty moderation as particularly significant, they were challenged during the day on that conclusion. Lawrence H. Summers, the economist and former Harvard president, did his own cut on their numbers and said that his analysis pointed to a problematic liberal domination at elite research universities. Several other speakers also said that they were troubled by the extent of ideological lopsidedness that they saw in the analysis, and brainstormed about reasons for that imbalance."

A bit later, there is:

"In advance of the symposium, Summers ran some numbers from the study. He focused on elite graduate universities and on what he defined as core disciplines for undergraduate education (excluding health professions, for example). When conducting such an analysis, Summers said, he found "even less ideological diversity" than he thought he would, and that in the humanities and social sciences, Republicans are "the third group," after Democrats and Nader and other left-wing third parties."

That's not about how they interpreted the data or about how they grouped political affiliations. The source does not say that anywhere. "[T]hey were challenged during the day on" their conclusion that there had been some moderation over time, but the source does not say that Summers made that challenge. What the source actually says is that Summers simply ran his own analysis in which he focused on some teaching disciplines at some elite universities, and found a larger difference than what Gross and Simmons found in the data as a whole. And "a problematic liberal domination at elite research universities" is not a direct quote from Summers. Furthermore, I've added a more extensive treatment of Summers' concerns in the "On faculty" section of the page, so his concerns about that are well-covered here. The other speakers were not troubled by how the analysis was done, but by the "ideological lopsidedness" that the study revealed.

As for Buckley, I did Google Books searches for "secular ideology", "collectivist", and "Keynesian economics" within God and Man at Yale, and for "Buckley" in the Nash and Gross books that were cited for the passage about him. I could not find anything that matched the text here, although I recognize that this may be an artifact of the fact that Google Books does not provide the entire works. Therefore, I'm not convinced that there really is secondary commentary that truly justifies that content on this page, but I would be happy to consider anything from the sources that my searches didn't reveal. In any case, per this comment by another editor in one of the recent RfCs: [5], I think that there is a strong argument that the additional material about Buckley is undue weight: NPOV does not mean equal weight to all sides, just due weight, and Buckley certainly wasn't performing a systematic study of professorial political views. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:19, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

On Research

The previous text in the On Research section stated: "A 2020 study found no evidence that the political beliefs of scientists affected the replicability, quality or impact of their research." The source for this statement does not provide evidence for this claim as stated here:

"In a recent paper in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, we analyzed nearly 200 studies in psychology (which included over 1.3 million participants) to see if politics might have influenced the research. Each study in our analysis had been conducted by one group of scientists and replicated several years later by a different research team to see if they produced the same result—the gold standard of science."

The study only addresses the ability to reproduce the findings of previous studies and does not focus on the quality or impact of previous research. I updated the section with this text to more accurately reflect the findings of the study: A 2020 study found no evidence that the political beliefs of scientists affected the replicability of research in the field of Psychology.

I would also suggest that the actual study would make a better source than the article written about the study.

Also the current framing suggests that the study addressed "the political beliefs of scientists", but this is also not accurate. The studies' (there were 2 included in the published research) methodologies used volunteers to score abstracts of various Psychology studies on a scale to represent their "liberalness" or "conservativeness" (my words). The study did not take into account the political beliefs of the researchers who conducted the study.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.166.140.195 (talk) 22:12, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

Looking at the source, the words "the replicability, quality or impact of their research" are a verbatim quote from the source. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:55, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

That's fair. However, the research does not take into account the scientists' political attitudes, only the perceived political slant of the findings based on scores assigned by study volunteers. I've updated the language to make this point more clear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.166.140.195 (talk) 21:10, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

I like the updated wording, thanks Tryptofish! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.166.140.195 (talk) 23:01, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Good! --Tryptofish (talk) 23:08, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done by John Ellis

On New Years Eve, I added

Ellis, John (2021). The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done. Encounter. ISBN 978-1641770880.

to the Further Reading list. It was promptly reverted. The reason given was that it is Not a particularly notable author or work, and the subject matter is particularly POV. First endorsement is from a libertarian think tank as well. The list contains older works by the journalists David Horowitz and Ben Shapiro. Ellis' book makes essentially the same arguments that they do (colleges are increasingly sacrificing academic standards in favor of political indoctrination), but with updated examples, and from the viewpoint of a career academic who rose to be dean of the graduate division at the University of California (Santa Cruz). As an author, he is about as notable and POV as most of the authors in the list. The fact that the book is praised by a libertarian think tank is no reason to ban it from the list. Perhaps the solution is to let the Ellis book replace the Horowitz and Shapiro books in the list.Vgy7ujm (talk) 05:25, 27 March 2022 (UTC)