Religion & Law

Better Family Leave Policies for A More Balanced Academy?

By Elizabeth Schiltz

Two Penn State professors have been trying to figure out empirially exactly why the academy leans toward the left politically.  They just released a paper, "Left Pipeline:  Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates", in which they conclude that the values and interests of liberal students naturally incline them more towards careers as academics than those of conservative students.  According to a Chronicle of Higher Ed article:

They found that in a variety of ways, conservative students were less interested than liberals in subject matter that often leads to doctoral degrees, and less interested in doing the kinds of things that professors spend their time doing.

For example, liberal students reported valuing intellectual freedom, creativity, and the chance to write original work and make a theoretical contribution to science. They outnumbered conservative students two to one in the humanities and social sciences ? which are among the fields most likely to produce interest in doctoral study. Conservative students, however, put more value on personal achievement and orderliness, and on practical professions, like accounting and computer science, that could earn them lots of money.

The Woessners also found that conservative students put a higher priority than liberal ones on raising a family. That does not always fit well with a career in academe, where people often delay childbearing until after they earn tenure.

The research led the Woessners to conclude that if higher education wants to attract more conservatives to the professoriate, it should smooth the way financially, offering subsidized health insurance and housing for graduate students, and adopting family-friendly policies for professors.

Full post as published by Mirror of Justice on February 20, 2008 (boomark / email).