The topic of academic bias has been done to death in the blogosphere, nonetheless I was startled by this recent result. When it comes to the 2004 election, polled health sciences professors were 48.1% for Kerry, 51.9% for Bush, at least according to one poll. The social science professors were more than 87% for Kerry, and the physical and biological science professors were more than 77% for Kerry. Even business professors were more than 65% for Kerry.
What is going on in the health sciences? They don’t sound especially conservative to me. On p.28 the authors note that in their sample this is mostly professors of nursing.
Note that the linked article contains some interesting remarks by Larry Summers on the topic of academic bias.
Most of them are probably practicing doctors who teach an occasional class at the at the medical school.
Doctors have an amazing command of details that they can bring to bear on any particular case. But they are terrible at abstract reasoning. Their world is very meritocratic and authoritarian, where abstract considerations outside the details of the case at hand get little weight.
Most of the health sciences professors in the sample are Nursing Professors. I’m not sure that they are representative of the views of the health sciences establishment in general.
What makes the results especially odd is the fact that women vote Democratic in greater percentages than men, yet health sciences professors probably are predominately women.
Given that the general population was 50.7% in favour of Bush and 48.3% in favour of Kerry, I do not think the correct conclusion is that health science professors are more conservative as a result of their profession—it seems that their profession does not inform their politics. Or at the very least, the result of the study is indistinguishable from the results that would occur if a branch of academia had an absence of political bias.
Many of the tenured radical could be a ketman like one comment
at the linked article says
odograph: “I think a disrespect of basic science, as this administration has, is a disrespect for reality.”
Can you elaborate on this administration’s disrespect for basic science? What exactly are you meaning?
John, the disrespect for science is very widespread. At the most basic level, it is ‘whenever science might give us an answer we don’t like, defund that science.’
It’s happened in fisheries science, climate science, health science …
odograph: “the disrespect for science is very widespread”
Can you give a specific example of this alleged dsisrespect?
Defunding science research is not disrepect for science. It is more likely disrespect for public versus private funding of programs. It may also simply reflect priorities. Protecting our lives by securing air travel is more important to Republicans than traveling to Mars, for example.
John Dewey,
Bush himself refuses to come out on the side of evolution and thinks that intelligent design ideas should be taught in science classes as part of the “debate.” That’s about as disrespectful of basic science as one can get.
I think nursing is a subject that often has a relatively bigger faculty size and more prominence at Christian colleges when compared to normal colleges. It might just be that therefore the sample of faculty in this particular subject included much more members of the religious right than the samples of professors of other subjects, which might have driven the results.
Perhaps the reason why more heath science professors prefer George W. could be that polls don’t look at every heath science professor, they look at just a sample of them. Some like Bush. Some like Kerry. I think that all polls are skewed unless they poll the entire population of the group. I think that there is too much over-analysis when it comes to polls like this. It is a poll, just a random sample of the professors. It isn’t a full scale count of all of them. Perhaps the heath science professors prefer Kerry more, but the poll didn’t get enough information to convey this.
Odograph,
Given that science has so clearly and obviously sold out to politics (ie embryonic stem sells as the ultimate panacea for every illness, anthropogenic global warming as catastropic certainty, the Larry Summers debacle, etc.) is it that surprising that politicians feel increasingly free to pick and choose which science to listen to?
After all, Democrats have been ignoring the laws of economics for generations (and sadly the Republicans have joined them over the past decade or so).
BTW Matthew, lets say that anthropogenic global warming is an area of much political and scientific interest. Why would we cut funding for earth-monitoring satellites? Do satellites have a ‘well known liberal bias?’
Interesting the contradiction or assumptions in these who lines:
As for being educated in “Science”, well that’s the problem right there. Science is a methodology, not an orthodoxy. When we turn it into a capital letter “Science”, ie a belief system, then it loses its status as truth approaching and becomes instead a set of dogmas just like the dogmatic religions it supplanted.
Actually the capitalization was my allusion to the Early Days of Science when things were Capitalized Strangely.
But nice to see that you can jump from there to Assumptions about the Politics of the Author.
BTW, if a Scientist is defined merely as One Who Does Science, what does that say about the modern (lay) Republican position that we should mistrust Scientists?
It’s a tidy self-sealer, if you aren’t too bright. Whole fields of study cannot be trusted because no one who does them can be trusted. Indeed, you must always look for Someone Who Does Not Do Science to get your opinion. That is, you have to find people who have Not Dedicated Themselves To The Field.
Thus, washouts with D’s in their last science class become the go-to-guys on climate, etc.
Thus, washouts with D’s in their last science class become the go-to-guys on climate, etc.
Who specifically are you referring to?
On NPR today, on the way home, I got to hear about how global warming is going to cause severe storms and destroy crops. That is a controversial idea among climate researchers, but it has already become the incontrovertible truth among most of the media.
This is exactly what I mean by the institutional corruption of science. You can be sure that the global warming alarmists will not be calling NPR to inform them of the weak scientific basis for those statements.
As someone who studied geology in school before my career as a software developer, I was extremely well informed of real climate change back in the late 1980s. The history of the planet is the history of climate change. Vast world-encompassing ice ages, followed by stifling heat-waves that flooded much of the continents. And all of it happening long before the invention of the internal combustion engine. It’s certainly possible, even likely, that CO2 emissions are contributing to the current warm spell. It’s also possible that changes in solar emissions are primarily responsible. In any event, if anthropogenic warming becomes a problem, there are a multitude of possible, relatively inexpensive technological fixes to reduce the planet’s albedo and hence solar flux. The current furor and frenzy about global warming is a sociological phenomenon, not a scientific one.
Robert Edwards,
And there you cavalierly dismiss an entire 100-year-old field of study in one blog comment. Statistics isn’t a science in the way that the ones Bush disrespects are, but it’s still highly disrespectful to dis something you obviously know nothing about (with a 95% confidence interval and a 5% margin of error).
From these sites:
http://www.payscale.com/research/ca/People_with_Jobs_as_Physicians_%2F_Doctors/Salary
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/People_with_Doctor_of_Medicine_(MD)_Degrees/Salary
It looks like American doctors are making 20%-40% more than Canadian doctors.
Thanks for the link to that report. I ended up writing a long post about it
(http://gregladen.com/wordpress/?p=1445)
Obviously, a person’s politics emerges from the interaction of their cultural environment and other factors. Then, there may be further selection as the particular cultural patterning of a “place” in society sorts you out further (through hiring practices, for example)
On reading this over and thinking about it, I have come to believe (provisionally) that nursing people and business people are part of the same initial cultural/demographic environment (and distinct, presumably from medical doctors and med school professors, etc.). In other words, I don’t think the similarity in patterning shown in this study between these two groups is a coincidence.
chukuang: “Bush … thinks that intelligent design ideas should be taught in science classes as part of the “debate.” That’s about as disrespectful of basic science as one can get.”
I personally believe in evolution. But I’m willing to accept that others have a different belief. If Bush tried to use the power of government to suppress the teadching of evolution, then I would agree that he was being disrespectful.
Chukuang, not everyone’s beliefs are the same. It is a sign of respect to acknowledge that. I will agree with you that intelligent design is not science and should not be taught in science classrooms. But you and I don’t make the rules. Local school boards should be making the rules. Those who would impose their beliefs on others – which I suspect you would do – try to use courts and the federal government tocarry out their bidding.
IMO, the president of the U.S. is a politician first and foremost, and has no business getting in the middle of a debate about evolution and intelligent design. But I do not see how doing so indicates a disrespect for science.
Here are some links regarding Bush administration and science
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=2&articleID=0001E02A-A14A-1084-983483414B7F0000
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/78916.php
http://www.space.com/news/bush_warming_041027.html
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2004/02/62339
he made the unfullfiled promise of put a caP ON DAMAGE AWARDS AGAINST DOCTOR.ThAT S WHY LAWYERS HATE HIM
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