Why our college faculties are so liberal

It may not be what it seems. Some campus faculty are 100% liberal/progressive; the least liberal might be 80%! For my field, library science, it is so out of wack we fall off the edge and make the ACLU look like the John Birch Society. A new study looks at the various strawmen that both liberals and conservatives build to explain why liberals are more likely go on for the doctorate (the license to drive on the big time campuses), than conservatives. It isn't grade point. Moderates score lower than either liberals or conservatives, who score about the same. It isn't a hostile environment on campus (that would have been my guess as the number one reason). It seems to be based on ideas and ideals based on differing personality traits.

"Instead they hypothesized that the bulk of the ideological imbalance in academia is the result of differing personality traits. And so the scholars picked four traits -- the importance placed on raising a family, making money, contributing original work to a particular field and developing a meaningful philosophy of life -- and matched them up with students' political self-definitions. "Ideology," they wisely write, "represents far more than a collection of abstract political values." Liberalism, they found, "is more closely associated with a desire for excitement, an interest in creative outlets and an aversion to a structured work environment. Conservatives express far greater interest in financial success and stronger desires to raise families."

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. Conservatives keep the economy running, providing the taxes for the sandboxes of the liberals. I wonder if they've looked at the relationship between liberals' desire for risk and other harmful behaviors like gambling, drug use, promiscuity, living with diseased and dying trees in the forest rather than removing the fire hazard, building on fault lines and on coastal hurricane zones, and riding a bicycle to work on busy hi-ways. Story here; the report is for the American Enterprise Institute by Matthew Woessner of Penn State, Harrisburg (the conservative), and his wife, April Kelly-Woessner (the liberal), of Elizabethtown College -- called "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates."