Sowell and Sociology
Prof. Thomas Sowell is selectively stupid. Outside basic economics he’s a knee jerk social conservative and often has no real understand regarding the issues upon which he pontificates. Outside his field he’s often floundering.
Consider the time he wrote this, “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
He thinks that’s a “gotcha” statement. It isn’t, given that Republicans are likely to be less educated and thus less qualified to be a university professor. In his mind this proves how liberals hate diversity ignoring other facts at work.
Pew found that 27% of white voters without a college degree voted Democrat but 54% were Republican. Of all Blue voters 51% had college degrees but “a majority of Republican voters in 2022 had no college degree (63%)” If Republicans are less likely to enter college then they sure as hell will be less likely to be teaching college.
While conservative-leaning individuals are less likely to attend college their self-selection process doesn’t end there.
The Higher Education Research Institute notes about 20% of college freshmen identify as conservative. These are freshmen, meaning evil liberals haven’t yet had time to “indoctrinate” them. There is also a difference between the courses conservatives take and those liberals take. Conservative students are far more likely to study business or economics and far less likely to study sociology. If you don’t study it you can’t teach it.
Two conservatives authors, Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn Sr., in Passing on the Right, identified 150 conservative university professors to interview and found half were clustered in economics or political science followed by history, literature and philosophy, while the lowest number were sociologists.
At university I was in a program where I was allowed to design my own major and my own courses with the oversight of a professor/mentor, meaning this professor approved the courses I designed and graded the work I produced. He was a sociologist. As far as I know he was a self-proclaimed liberal but during the course of working together he came to identify himself as more libertarian. I saw this is several of my professors. My journalism professor said reading my columns in the campus paper made him realize he was more libertarian than liberal. My philosophy professor was a sponsor of the student libertarian group.
Even professors who disagreed with my views were open to them. I was asked to give one lecture in a humanities course about the libertarian view of free speech. In a sexology class I was asked to run the course for all three sessions in one particular week. The only professor I had who identified as a Marxist stopped me one day on the quad and told me that while he often disagreed with my newspaper columns he always found them interesting and worth reading. My journalism professor once told the class they should all read my columns “even if he doesn’t come to class.” I apologized to him that was true as my grade relied entirely on my writing. He also said he realized he was a libertarian from reading them.
I was never penalized by professors in these fields for being libertarian. But my first college was run by evangelicals and they had a hard core indoctrination program. Anyone who disagreed was expelled. They were the ones banning diversity.
One other matter to consider is the impact knee-jerks comments such as Sowell’s have on students. Attacking certain college majors as “biased” against conservatives discourages conservative students from majoring in those fields. In other words, this reduced diversity in those specific fields.
Sowell’s quote was cherry-picking in that he choose one field as proof of bias. Now Sowell taught economics at university, a field conservatives are attracted to, so why didn’t he use it as his example? The simple answer is it wouldn’t have given him the evidence he needed. He was cheery-picking evidence to prove a position he already held.
I should also point out that there are problems with identifying only liberals, conservatives, and none of the above, as political categories. I met at number of liberal academics who, when I got farther into their views then told me that they were more libertarian—in that they wanted both economic and social freedom. They identified as “liberal” to distinguish themsevers from anti-freedom conservatives.
While what I discussed here is based on past research and studies I suspect those same studies today may show an even bigger difference given how MAGA authoritarianism has utterly corrupted the conservative movement. Trump’s appeal to authority, bigotry, fear, and scapegoating is repulsive to many conservatives in the Goldwater/Reagan sense of the word. Making it worse is Trump using government to attack higher education.
When only given the option of identifying as liberal or conservative many of us who are more comfortable with greater diversity resulting from liberty are forced to label ourselves on the left even though our position is the radical center. MAGA has bankrupted the conservative movement much as it’s bankrupting the country.