InvaderRam wrote:

but the 2016 defense did not have jenkins and mcleod. and to a lesser extent long. laurinaitis was just about done at that point so i don’t think that made a difference.

i think a healthy quinn. i think a healthy quinn. a dominant quinn would have been the difference but he was not that. so losing jenkins and mcleod hurt even more

I agree with that, but, I think JL was less physically effective and more mentally effective.

BUT I still think they are a playoff caliber D.

What we saw yesterday IMO was mostly the effect of being on the field too much in the 3rd and 4th quarters.

nittany ram wrote:

I don’t think the defense is great but it is playoff caliber. I think the collapses we see at the end of games and against teams like Atlanta have to do with coaching and the defense getting worn down. When you play teams with high powered offenses like Atlanta and NE your defense has to get some help from its offense but Rams’ offense is historically bad.

I agree more with this than with the more alarmist take.

Except unlike you I also think that the right adjustments could make this team playoff caliber overnight.

Not promising it, just not ruling it out.

This is not the end of the 2011 season Rams. This is something different.

.

Things are going well.

The game aside.

Best wishes to everyone.

I honestly dont think there will be tremendous turnover next year. I think it will be more a case of adding players and changing things up than subtracting.

But this game really pizzed me off. It;s the defense, allowing 2 touchdowns at the end of how many games now?

Agamemnon wrote:

I guess Donnal beat out Wichmann and this sort of makes it official? Wasn’t Wichmann the starter for a time?

For most of the season ROG was either Wichmann or Brown, mostly Wichmann.

Donnal started there in both the Atlanta and Seattle games.

But I guess what this means is that with Robinson down, Saffold goes to LOT, and then Brown replaces him at guard, not Wichmann.

That’s just a guess.

bnw wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Jesus Christ.

Some things that get said are just breath-taking.

Or hit too close to home.

Dude, stay away from that kind of cheap retort. Not looking for a response. (In fact I will just delete any response to this.) Just try to come up with arguments, not grade school taunts.

.

Science Vs. Cinema short on PASSENGERS

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/76940

Longtime fans of this column know that I have a basic credo when it comes to science in movies: “You can bend the rules to tell a better story, but it had better be well justified, and don’t get unnecessary things wrong.” In short, don’t be a dumbass. Don’t make the kind of movie that the more you know, the less you like the movie. Sadly, PASSENGERS fails my test spectacularly. The movie is filled with science defying bullshit for no good reason. And beyond that, the writing is bad — developments happen for no other reason than that they needed to happen that way in the script.

The setup is that there are 5000 passengers and 200+ crew going on a 120 year journey to colonize a planet named HOMESTEAD II. They are supposed to be in hibernation until the last few months, but one passenger, played by Chris Pratt, wakes up early due to a malfunction. Eventually a second passenger, played by Jennifer Lawrence, wakes up too. The duo are facing 90 years together, alone the ship.

IF IT AIN”T BAROQUE, DON’T FIX IT

This ship is the opposite of everything we’ve seen in modern Earth spaceships. While the spacecraft we know are small, light, cramped affairs designed by engineers, the vessel in PASSENGERS is the space equivalent of a cruise ship, complete with a swimming pool, bar, luxury suites, shopping and restaurants. Of course the reason spacecraft have to be so light is that it takes a lot of energy to launch someone into space. That means taking a lot of fuel, which is heavy, and requires more fuel.

We’ve built bigger facilities for longer stays — I’ve been in NASA’s mockup of the International Space Station, and it is as long as a football field, complete with different modules and even little closet-sized bedrooms. That’s a special case though — the ISS can afford to be a little bigger because it doesn’t go anywhere. Once you’ve launched the pieces, it doesn’t cost any extra energy to orbit the Earth, aside from a tiny bit for occasionally dodging space debris or lifting it higher after the tenuous upper atmosphere drags it down.

If you want to accelerate a ship, everything changes. Now you have to pay energy, and if you want to accelerate it to 50% of the speed of light, the cruising speed in the film, you have to pay an enormous amount of energy. Assuming this ship has about the mass of a cruise liner on Earth, you have to generate as much energy as the sun puts out in a few seconds, integrated over its whole surface, over all wavelengths of light. That’s a lot!

The energy source in the film seems to be a fusion reactor, the second, the most efficient energy source outside of matter/antimatter reactions. Even so, given the size of the fusion reactor shown in the film, it isn’t nearly enough.

Since being on a luxury liner is essential to the plot, and the filmmakers sort of dodged the implausibility by using an advanced fuel source, I’ll reluctantly give them a pass on this. I still wish they had just made the ship smaller, less extravagant, and used an antimatter reactor.

GRAVITY FAIL

The ship generates artificial gravity by spinning. This trick used by decades of science fiction authors is on solid ground. I reviewed the physics of it in my Science Vs. Cinema article and video on THE MARTIAN, so I won’t repeat it here. The twist is that in PASSENGERS, the part of the ship with gravity isn’t a ring, it is a discontinuous helix. The helix part is fine — this will still generate artificial gravity. But why break it into sections? You could say that it contains your losses in the case of catastrophic failure. That’s fine, but airlocks between sections would do the same thing. The problem with the discontinuous helix is that people need to take zero-g elevators to get between sections, and elevator are very failure prone. Imagine one lasting for 120 years! The design principle for space travel is to minimize moving parts and keep things simple wherever you can. The real reason for the discontinuous helix here is because it “looks cool” and so that there can be some elevator scenes. To me the drawbacks of the idea aren’t worth it for so little gain.

There is a scene where Jennifer Lawrence is swimming in a pool and gravity fails, causing the water to form a ball and rise out of the pool. Then gravity just switches back on suddenly, causing the water all to splash down. It wouldn’t work like this! In space, since there is not air resistance, once you start something rotating, it will keep rotating until you actively stop it. Imagine having a cruise ship worth of mass on a giant arm swinging around. Even if you fired some rockets to stop the rotation, it would take forever to slow it to a stop. During that time gravity would gradually decrease. The same thing goes for starting it back up. So everyone on the ship should have had plenty of time to realize something was going on with the gravity.

Yes, it is true that water in space tends to cling to itself from surface tension, and form a sphere. However, it also clings to other stuff, like walls or astronaut’s faces. If you shut off gravity, this giant mass of water would stay clinging to the inside of the swimming pool, at least for a while, rather than just magically levitating. It takes energy to lift that much water. Remember Newton’s First Law: things at rest tend to stay at rest.

I get wanting to have a cool movie visual like that. Fine, just say they have some future tech to generate gravity. Don’t try to do it on a rotating ship!

A KICK IN THE ASTEROIDS

The thing that breaks the ship is revealed in the first scene — it hit some asteroids. There are so many problems with this. First, you don’t just run across random asteroids in space — they are only around stars. At this point the ship is around 15 lightyears out, and we know about all stars that far away — you can’t accidentally hit one. Haven’t they made this trip before? Second, even in an asteroid belt the density of asteroids is very low — not like we see on screen. If you are standing on an asteroid in the asteroid belt, you can’t even see another asteroid. The chances of hitting an asteroid accidentally are astronomically low — we regularly send probes through the asteroid belt all the time without hitting one, and we’re aiming right at it.

But the real kicker is the energies involved. The ship is running into the asteroid at half the speed of light. Even a tiny asteroid, say one with only the mass of a person (100 kg), would generate an explosion of 1018 Joules. That’s equivalent to twenty times the energy of the most powerful nuclear weapons ever tested by the US. It wouldn’t just knock out a system here or make a little hole — the whole ship would have been vaporized.

Also, I don’t buy the fact that all this goes undetected by the ship’s software for so long. Our heroes just stumble upon a giant hole in the ship when they open a door into the vacuum of space. If big parts of the ship are failing, surely this thing that can automate bartending and breakfast has a diagnostic for that, and a contingency plan that includes waking the crew.

I get it that you need an inciting incident here. Just make it a plausible one. A computer glitch or factory defect would have been fine.

ARC TO ARCTURUS

For no good reason, the ship makes a “slingshot” maneuver around Arcturus, and happens to make an announcement to everyone on board to go to the window and look, even though they are all supposed to be asleep. At this point, they have been on the ship for 30 years or so, so they are about 15 lightyears away from Earth. The problem is that Arcturus is 36 lightyears away, so they wouldn’t have reached it yet. Why name the star the wrong thing? Just pick one at the right distance!

But it is worse than that — slingshotting around stars won’t help you. They got this idea from the fact that probes in our solar system often slingshot around other planets, like Jupiter, to pick up speed. But that speed comes from the angular momentum of Jupiter orbiting the Sun, not from Jupiter’s gravity. Stars are orbiting the center of the galaxy, but there is no appreciable difference between the speed of Arcturus and the Sun, so that doesn’t help you. And if you are going half the speed of light already, whizzing near a star won’t even change your course all that much. Think about photons from background stars passing near the Sun. Their positions are deflected slightly from the mass of the Sun, as was determined in measurements taken during the solar eclipse of 1919, which confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity. Even though photons those photons were very close to the Sun, they were barely deflected.

CHRIS PRATT PHONE HOME

There’s a scene where Chris Pratt sits down to make a call back to Earth. He records his message, but after he sends it, he’s surprised to find out that it will take 19 years to reach Earth. This is such a dumb scene, and it epitomizes everything wrong with the movie. First, every passenger knows they are traveling lightyears away. Nobody would be stupid to take such a trip without knowing the stakes. Later, they even establish the fact that he knew this before he left, *and* that he’s a super-smart engineer. They put in this phone call scene just for a cheap laugh, even though it makes no sense and undermines the character and plausibility of the story.

INTERSTELLAR TITANIC

Ok, so you wake up 90 years too early. This ship is programmed to turn everything on when it detects a person running around, but doesn’t have basic checks to understand that this should not happen. You burn all the lights on this whole ship, keep a massive atmosphere warm, run the air scrubbers, run the fountains, fill the pool, just for one guy? These things weren’t designed to run for 90 years, they were designed to run for only a few months at the end. All his screwing around could doom everyone.

In the case of a catastrophic failure, the crew isn’t designed to be woken up? Even worse, they are placed behind vault-like doors only openable with an electronic key. If that reader fails, is everyone doomed?

A key point here is that the ship doesn’t have the equipment to put people back into hibernation. Why would it have a swimming pool and not that very critical piece of infrastructure? They say there are duplicate parts for everything, except of course the one critical piece of infrastructure they need.

When characters make decisions and plot developments happen that make no sense, but have to happen that way to further the story, we have a phrase for this — bad writing.

PRATT EX MACHINA

Now I’m going to spoil some plot twists, so skip to the conclusion if you don’t want to know.

Chris Pratt’s character does something pretty unconscionable — he wakes up Jennifer Lawrence’s character early because he thinks she is pretty and he is lonely. This effectively dooms her to live out her life with only him, because there’s no way she can go back into hibernation. He doesn’t tell her the truth, and sleeps with her. She eventually finds out, of course, and wants nothing to do with him. That isn’t quite rape and it isn’t quite murder, but it is a whole new level of science fiction violation that we don’t even have on this planet — kind of like being kidnapped and held against your will for life.

This could have been an interesting moral dilemma — he had to chose to rob someone of their future and manipulate them to please himself. And then she had to choose whether or not she could forgive the only other person she would ever see in her life. However, any moral complexity is washed away when the ship starts failing, and Chris Pratt just happens to be an engineer who knows how to fix everything. So see, it was all ok in the end, because he saved the ship. Maybe he screwed over one person, but he saved more than 5000, so all is forgiven. The resolution to this moral quandary is just that the asteroid-induced-failures got lucky and woke up exactly the right guy!

The coincidences don’t stop there. The critical ship failures happen more than year after the initial accident, just because that’s when it script calls for it. And they waited until a crew member played by Laurence Fishburne wakes up for no other reason than to give some critical exposition, then dies when the script calls for it again.

CONCLUSION

PASSENGERS had an intriguing concept, but failed to deliver on the promise of it. Character decisions and plot developments feel artificial and unearned. Nothing about this universe feels authentic. I don’t know how much of this is due to the writer, Jon Spaihts, whose worked I liked on DOCTOR STRANGE, but didn’t care for on PROMETHEUS. I’m sure some blame is due to the director, Morten Tyldum, which is a shame because I liked his work in THE IMITATION GAME. In the end, if either had talked more scientists, I think the movie would have been a hell of a lot better. The failures could have been avoided. And this is a case where I think having a big budget hurt the film. The could have made a very interesting movie if the leads had been a bit less perfect looking, if they didn’t have enough money to overdesign the ship, or they didn’t have studio pressure to have a certain type of ending.

NewMexicoRam wrote:

Yea. It’s all over the internet with stories about how conservatives are limited in their right to express on campuses.

Oh yes the internet.

The story being told is, typically, a partisan conservative bot machine fest. Truth is, especially since the 2010s, american universities are dominated by conservative administrations and boards of trustees. That’s an actual movement. As a rule, the departments you can count on to be predominantly conservative include engineering, applied sciences generally, agriculture, criminal justice, business and economics, but pretty much you tend to find balance throughout the sciences and applied sciences, with a tendency toward liberals in the humanities and social sciences. (A reminder: I don’t identify as a liberal and I count what gets called liberal these days as centrist.)

This of course only accounts for full-time faculty. Right now the trend is to hire tons of adjuncts, who have absolutely no say in policy, and tons of administrators, and the trend in administration is over the top far down the line conservative oriented.

Right now there are about 1.5 million faculty in the USA and 76% or more are part time adjuncts. The percentage of full-time faculty went from 45% in 1975 to only 24%. That’s significant, because it puts completely disempowered adjuncts as the majority of university/college teachers at the exact same time the trend nationally is toward conservative administrations and boards of trustees.

Here;s a good article on all this. It includes this statement: From a personal standpoint, the most surprising part of the results outlined in The Still Divided Academy is that they correspond entirely with my own experience. Like the vast majority of the Republicans in our study, I’ve never been the victim of mistreatment as a result of my political views. On my campus, I’ve never considered discrimination against conservatives to be a problem. Although the work has its unique challenges, I can’t imagine any other job that I would love more. While it may sound odd to be surprised when scientific evidence comports with our personal observations, as a social scientist, I have a natural aversion to drawing generalizations based on my own idiosyncratic life experiences. Because the narrative of the besieged conservative minority appeared consistent with the ideological imbalance in American higher education, I simply assumed that I was the exception. I now realize that my story is not unique.

===

Rethinking the Plight of Conservatives in Higher Education
Findings that run against the grain of assumptions.

Matthew Woessner

https://www.aaup.org/article/rethinking-plight-conservatives-higher-education#.WFy_mNQrLGg

Within academia, I’m a rare breed: a conservative Republican who twice voted for George W. Bush. I supported the invasion of Iraq, and I deeply admire Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas for their originalist approach to interpreting the Constitution. Yet I am first and foremost a scientist whose singular devotion is to Truth. Whatever my ideological instincts, I have an obligation to examine social scientific phenomena impartially, striving at all times to form opinions based on empirical evidence rather than ideological articles of faith.

It is against this backdrop that my research into the politics of academia—conducted with my wife, April Kelly-Woessner—has led me to some surprising and, admittedly, somewhat difficult conclusions. Whereas my conservative colleagues tend to portray academia as rife with partisan conflict, my research into the impact of politics in higher education tells a different story. Although the Right faces special challenges in higher education, our research offers little evidence that conservative students or faculty are the victims of widespread ideological persecution. In waging their high-profile crusade against ideological bias in the academy, activists such as David Horowitz may be overstating the extent to which conservatives are mistreated on campuses. In so doing, the movement to promote intellectual diversity in higher education may be inadvertently discouraging conservatives from pursuing academic careers.

My own interest in the plight of conservatives within academia came somewhat late in my still-young academic career. Whereas some academics become fixated on research questions based on personal connection to the issue (something I once heard psychology professor John Ruscio refer to as “me-search”), it never occurred to me to study the politics within academia. Because everyone already knew conservatives were a persecuted minority, what was the point? So, after writing a doctoral dissertation on public reactions to presidential scandal, I spent my first few years as an assistant professor examining abstract questions in the field of public opinion and voting behavior. It wasn’t until my wife April (herself a political science professor at Elizabethtown College) came to me with an interesting research question that the focus of my work changed. “What impact,” she asked, “do perceptions of a professor’s politics have on student evaluations of the course?” Believing instinctively that all good academic questions have already been taken, I dismissed the idea out of hand: “Not only has that topic probably been done,” I remarked, “I’m guessing it’s been done to death.”

I was wrong. We found virtually nothing on the question and comparatively little on the impact of politics in the classroom more generally. Thus began a line of research that would consume all of our energies over the next six years as we adapted our skills as public-opinion specialists to the study of politics in higher education.

Taking our first tentative steps into the study of politics in the academy, we designed a large-scale survey to test how students reacted to perceptions of political bias in the classroom. In our July 2006 PS: Political Science and Politics article, “My Professor Is a Partisan Hack: How Perceptions of a Professor’s Political Views Affect Student Course Evaluations,” we found that when students perceive a gap between their political views and those of their instructor, students express less interest in the material, are inclined to look less favorably on the course, and tend to offer the instructor a lower course evaluation. The results, while not earth shattering, demonstrated that students do not passively accept disparate political messages but tend to push back against faculty members they perceive as presenting a hostile point of view.

Shortly after completing a follow-up article on perceptions of faculty politics for the Journal of Political Science Education, our research in the politics of academia took a new turn. April and I were asked to participate in a research conference on politics in higher education sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. In an effort to generate original research for the 2009 edited volume The Politically Correct University, conference organizers asked scholars to consider how academia’s liberalism influences American higher education. April and I were asked to investigate why conservatives tend not to pursue PhDs. Drawing from the familiar narrative that conservatives are an oppressed minority group within academia, I assumed that the shortage of conservatives in doctoral programs was the result of their poor treatment within academia. Either conservative students had an overall less positive collegiate experience, making the thought of graduate school less palatable, or they failed to make personal connections with their leftist or liberal professors. Absent a mentoring relationship with the faculty, conservative students would be less likely to consider a career in higher education. Using survey data from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, April and I set about testing these and other possible explanations for the ideological gap in American doctoral programs. The findings defied my expectations.

Quite surprisingly, whatever impact college might have on students’ academic ambitions, left-leaning first-year students begin their education with a far greater interest in eventually pursuing a doctoral degree than their conservative counterparts. Whereas liberal and conservative students have very similar grades and nearly identical levels of satisfaction with their overall college experience, right-leaning students are far more likely to select “practical” majors that are less likely to lead to advanced degrees. Their emphasis on vocational fields such as business and criminal justice permits them to move directly into the workforce.

In contrast, left-leaning students are more apt to pursue majors in the liberal arts, such as sociology and philosophy, which, absent additional graduate training, provide fewer career opportunities immediately on graduation. Even within a major like political science, college seniors of different political leanings have different expectations with regard to their forthcoming careers. Whereas students on both the left and the right place a premium on securing a comfortable salary and having the time to raise a family, conservative students consistently rate these priorities as more important than do liberal students. In addition, while neither liberal nor conservative students are particularly drawn to writing original works or making a contribution to science, liberal students tend to rate these priorities as more important to their future career. In every instance where students’ career expectations might encourage them to enter a doctoral program, liberal students enjoyed an advantage over conservative students.

In other words, from a purely rational perspective, students’ underlying preferences appear to lead more liberals into advanced degrees, thus creating a fairly large ideological gap. Our findings are by no means conclusive, as much of the ideological gap remains unexplained. However, the fact that the data did not support my initial assumptions compelled me to think more carefully about both the cause and the implications of academia’s ideological imbalance.

At roughly the same time that April and I were grappling with why conservatives get fewer PhDs, we began work on our second, more comprehensive study of politics within the classroom. Whereas our 2006 study looked only at student perceptions of the professor’s politics, our newest survey also permitted us to measure shifts in students’ political leanings relative to the professor’s political views. While our follow-up study was motivated in part by a genuine academic curiosity, the project itself was designed to settle a bet. As a conservative who has often encountered left-leaning professors, I assumed that the typical student’s politics would be influenced by his or her academic mentors. While I was not strongly influenced by my professors’ left-wing politics, I assumed most conservative students weren’t so resilient. April, whose politics are well to the left of my own, asserted that students would not be meaningfully influenced by their professors’ views.

April was fond of reminding me that “students aren’t sponges.” By the age of eighteen, she argued, most people are already set in their ways.

Sure enough, our research indicated she was right. In our next major article in the April 2009 edition of PS: Political Science and Politics, “I Think My Professor Is a Democrat: Considering Whether Students Recognize and React to Faculty Politics,” we provided evidence that while student views do shift over the course of a semester, they tend to move somewhat randomly, usually regressing toward the mean. While we observed a slight shift in favor of the Democrats (representing an average 0.06 points on a five-point scale), the change occurred irrespective of the professor’s political orientation. Thus, while students’ partisan orientations did shift over the course of time, the changes are hardly what one might expect if faculty members were systematically indoctrinating their students.

While our more recent findings ran against the grain of my ideological assumptions, I wasn’t yet prepared to rethink fundamentally the plight of conservatives in academia. To that point, our research focused entirely on the experiences of students. While undergraduates might be in a position to steer clear of hostile professors, we surmised, certainly conservative faculty members faced persecution as they sought to secure tenure in a system dominated by the Left.

Conservative—And Content—In Academe
The seismic shift in my view of academic politics came only in the last few years, as April and I embarked on our most ambitious project to date. While attending the aforementioned American Enterprise Institute conference on politics in academia, political science professor Robert Maranto introduced us to Stanley Rothman, a respected scholar and prolific author who had devoted much of his distinguished career to the study of elites. In what was designed as a follow-up study to their landmark research into the opinions of academics, Rothman, Carl Everett Ladd, and Seymour Martin Lipset collaborated to produce the first large-scale survey of students, faculty, and college administrators. The 1999 North American Academic Study Survey captured the values, views, and experiences of more than four thousand respondents drawn randomly from four-year colleges and universities across the United States. However, with the death of Ladd and Lipset, and Rothman’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, most of the data had not been thoroughly examined. Hoping to jumpstart the project, Rothman asked April and me to join him in writing a book-length manuscript that might capture the complex and often conflicting views of those within the academy.

The resulting book, The Still Divided Academy: How Competing Visions of Power, Politics, and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education, goes far beyond a look at politics in the academy. Following the outline sketched by Rothman, Lipset, and Ladd some years before, we examined the views within higher education on such issues as academic freedom, faculty-administration relations, campus diversity, and affirmative action. While working on the politics chapter I began to rethink my views about the plight of conservatives.

Looking at survey data from all of higher education’s primary constituencies, I began to realize that Republicans and conservatives, while vastly outnumbered in academia, were, for the most part, successful, happy, and prosperous. Fewer than 2 percent of faculty (Republican or Democratic) reported being the victims of unfair treatment based on their politics. Only 7 percent of Republican faculty believed that discrimination against those with “right-wing” views was a serious problem on their campus, compared with 8 percent of Democratic faculty who expressed concerns about discrimination against those with “left-wing” views. Asked to consider what they would do if given the opportunity to “begin your career again,” 91 percent of Democratic faculty and 93 percent of Republican faculty answered that they would “definitely” or “probably” want to be a college professor. Similarly, few rightleaning students or administrators claimed to have been the victims of political mistreatment. Like their Democratic counterparts, most were satisfied with their experience in higher education.

Gravitational Pulls
Whereas our results show that Democratic and Republican professors do differ on a number of issues outside of the realm of politics and policy (for example, the purpose of higher education, the importance of tenure, and the prevalence of racial and sex discrimination), the political gap on college campuses is less important than other sources of tension, which arise based on differences between faculty and administrators and differences in academic discipline, age, and gender. While Republicans on campus are members of a distinct minority, their political views are but one of many defining characteristics that permit them to form friendships and alliances with others on campus. These nonideological associations probably act to minimize conservatives’ social and political isolation.

From a personal standpoint, the most surprising part of the results outlined in The Still Divided Academy is that they correspond entirely with my own experience. Like the vast majority of the Republicans in our study, I’ve never been the victim of mistreatment as a result of my political views. On my campus, I’ve never considered discrimination against conservatives to be a problem. Although the work has its unique challenges, I can’t imagine any other job that I would love more. While it may sound odd to be surprised when scientific evidence comports with our personal observations, as a social scientist, I have a natural aversion to drawing generalizations based on my own idiosyncratic life experiences. Because the narrative of the besieged conservative minority appeared consistent with the ideological imbalance in American higher education, I simply assumed that I was the exception. I now realize that my story is not unique.

Yet while the results of our research cast serious doubt on claims that conservatives are besieged, it remains probable that conservatives face unique obstacles within the academic world. For students, these impediments are probably temporary and eminently navigable. For Republican faculty, particularly in the social sciences and the humanities, higher education’s profound ideological imbalance creates impediments that likely hamper their professional success.

Although we don’t have any reliable data on the percentage of faculty members who promote (directly or indirectly) an ideological agenda in the curriculum, since most undergraduates enjoy a remarkable degree of academic flexibility in their course selection, conservative students will tailor their education to avoid needless political conflict. Looking back at my own experience, I remember how, as a young conservative, I tailored my own course selection to the subjects and professors I found most agreeable. I recall that as a naive sophomore I enrolled in an introductory sociology course and was surprised that the professor was an avowed Marxist. Concerned that our ideological perspectives might ultimately affect my course grade, I tried unsuccessfully to lay low. However, noting that I cringed as she denounced Reagan’s economic policies, the professor asked if I had a different take on the issue. Somewhat reluctantly, I offered a defense of Reaganomics. To her credit, she listened attentively and, as far as I could tell, took my novel ideas seriously. In light of the fact that, by her own admission, she had never heard a spirited defense of conservative economic policies, it became clear to me that sociology was an ideological minefield. I never enrolled in another sociology course for the rest of my academic career.

While at UCLA I discovered a number of politically moderate professors, including political scientists like Leo Snowiss and John Petrocik, whose approach to the subject matter seemed largely nonideological. Feeling that political science was a discipline that was relatively tolerant of diverse political views, I elected to pursue a graduate degree and join the professoriate.

While the experience in one or two introductory courses may be a poor proxy for the ideological tenor of a major, it seems probable that conservative students use this type of snap judgment in charting their academic course. Indeed, our findings in The Politically Correct University that conservatives gravitate toward minimally ideological majors are consistent with this explanation. Whereas liberal and conservative students express similar levels of satisfaction with their college education, right-leaning students show greater dissatisfaction with their social science and humanities courses. Predictably, they gravitate away from majors in these fields and toward the more professionally oriented disciplines. While the underlying preferences of conservative students for “practical” fields contribute to their selection of majors, the extent to which the politics of the professoriate also influence these decisions is a question worthy of serious scholarly attention.

Whereas students can avoid conflict and select majors that suit their personal dispositions, right-leaning professors, particularly outside of the hard sciences, are forced to seek the approval of faculty whose ideological worldview may be at odds with their own. By this I’m not referring to overt political discrimination, whereby a left-leaning professor will actively undermine the promotion of a colleague because of a difference of opinion. Indeed, based on our own findings, conservatives have few complaints about unfair treatment based on their political views.

The more pernicious problem occurs when right-leaning scholars submit their work for blind review with prestigious publishers or in peer-reviewed journals. Even if we presume that most journal referees are sincerely trying to judge a work based on its scholarly merits rather than its social or political implications, a jury pool dominated by left-leaning scholars will almost certainly subject right-leaning papers to greater scrutiny, highlighting their methodological shortcomings and challenging their overall conclusions. If the academic universe were evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, the unconscious tendency to challenge dissenting viewpoints would hamper the publication of conservative and liberal work at roughly the same rate. However, with a vast majority of academics falling on the left side of the political spectrum, this is an issue that, in all probability, tends to hamper the publication of conservative-leaning ideas. Thus, professors whose political instincts are right of center must either focus on non-ideological scholarly questions or endure a special degree of scrutiny as they seek to secure publication of their ideas.

Again, while I remain reluctant to consider my own academic career in an effort to understand the plight of conservatives, I must confess that the ease with which my own work moves into print appears inversely proportional to its potential support for conservative policy positions. A journal referee’s propensity to fixate on seemingly trivial methodological flaws seems to increase dramatically if my conclusions undermine a leftist policy position. This observation is not a criticism of liberals in academia. An institution dominated by conservatives would be just as likely to scrutinize unfriendly findings more closely than sympathetic ones. In a field where the number and prestige of academic publications are key factors in tenure and promotion, this potential bias has important real-world consequences. The accusation of bias in the publication process was recently raised in Econ Journal Watch by David Gordon and Per Nilsson. Focusing on the 494 books with an ideological thesis, the researchers found that only 2 percent of Harvard University Press publications had conservative or classically liberal perspectives. While we don’t know the proportion of conservative manuscripts submitted for Harvard University Press’s consideration, it seems improbable that 98 percent of the requests had a left-leaning thesis.

wv wrote:

Except its not ‘the government’ that supports the climate-change-consensus. Its lots and lots and lots of different kinds of governments and organizations all over the world. Japan, Cuba, Norway, France, etc, etc.

If it were just the USA that was pushing this, it would be one thing — but its not.

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As a child of 2 scientists, I have often had this conversation. Someone says, no there’s no global scientific consensus on climate change, that’s a conspiracy. And I say, do you know any scientists? It’s hard to get 2 scientists to agree on where to have lunch. Let alone get thousands upon thousands of them in different countries all over the globe and in different fields to agree to a lie when agreeing to a lie like that goes against the core inner principles that make them scientists in the first place.

It’s not one country. It’s not one field. It’s not one scientific organization. These are people whose very training includes the fact that they get individually rewarded for resisting theories they don’t believe in, and yet there is consensus.

Only people with ties to corporate interests deny this stuff. And even then their own corporations undermined them by accounting for climate change in their own fiscal decision making….which they did do, while also funding the deniers.

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