(1) There is a much higher percentage of conservatives teaching at (relatively low-paying, low prestige) community colleges than elsewhere. So much for the oft-heard theory that conservatives are so scarce at elite schools because they are selfish, ambitious, money-grubbers who lack the inclination to give up the "good life" to pursue the "life of the mind."
As I thought (and the first commenter also noted), it could also mean that the characteristics that make one a conservative also to tend to make one unfit for success in academia. Liberals would likely suggest stupidity as one of these charactertistics, but ther could be many others.
Another possibility is that conservatives really are selfish money-grubbers, and the intelligent, capable ones go off doing selfish, money-grubbing things (if you define engaging in commerce as selfish and indulging one's intellectual narcissism as unselfish, to flip the rhetoric). Those who can't, teach, though, so the dumb conservatives enter academia, where their incompetence causes them to fail to thrive. I'd tend to favor this latter theory over the former, but of course it could be a mixture of the two effects. Also:
(3) Among social science professors (which I assume includes economics, a relatively, but not absolutely, conservative field), Ralph Nader and "Other" combined received as high a percentage of the votes as George Bush in '04.I would actually not be surprised if the economists were more likely to vote third party, as in the course of earning economics and graduate business degrees I generally found them to be less pragmatic, more idealistic, and more iconoclastic than the typical professor, all characteristics I associate with those willing to "waste" a vote on a third party.
Found via Sullivan.
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