University Liberals

Todd Zywicki is concerned over intellectual diversity on campus. He is specifically talking about the presence of conservatives at Dartmouth, his alma mater. Long story short, most of the conservative professors he knew about were retired or retiring.

At my Alma Mater, I found that there was a bias against conservatives. But it was significantly less present in the hard sciences than the "soft" sciences and liberal arts. I don't think that is an aspect that has really been covered well my the media or the blogosphere.

I went to the University of Delaware. I am a christian conservative. The interesting thing is that I attended various churches close to campus. Since professors live close to campus, they also attend those same churches. Plus I was the treasurer for the largest christian group on campus so I knew the faculty that was willing to support our organization. So I got to know a few conservative professors through mutual religious interests. I noticed that, by and large, the professors that were conservative tended to be from the hard sciences. A chem prof here, an engineering professor there, but I met very few conservative english professors.

Many of my engineering professors were moderates or liberals. But when you work in a field dominated by hard science, politics doesn't come up very much. Gravity is 9.8 m/s² whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. Plus research in the hard sciences tends to be driven by military spending a fair bit, not by social spending which skews the political spectrum slightly. The arch-liberals wouldn't be able to make the grade without accepting those research dollars.