[aperson]

Originally Posted by melonpapes

sorry i don't have a nationwide statistic sheet to get the empirical data on campus political opinions. i'm sure we could smack down a lot of the claims in this thread with a cute lil request for more data.
However, theres information suggesting at least in the way of educators and professors, conservative professors are outnumbered 12:1.

There's no need for your shitty attitude. If we could smack down more claims in this thread with data then we should start doing exactly that. Let's start with self-selection bias that Aquellex mentioned and see how much of the gap it explains.

Gross and Fosse specialize in research in political discrepancies in political science and are heavily cited. They have attempted to quantify the self-selection gap (emphasis mine):

Originally Posted by Gross, N., & Fosse, E. (2012). Why are professors liberal? Theory and Society, 41(2), 127-168. Retrieved from [url

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41349128][/url]
We test these hypotheses using a variant of the Oaxaca-Blinder regression decomposition procedure, an econometric technique typically used to examine wage disparities, on data from the General Social Survey (GSS) pooled over the years 1974-2008. During this period 326 GSS respondents with non-missing values on our outcome variable were employed as professors or instructors in higher education, and we examine how much of the gap between their politics and those of other Americans can be accounted for with variables associated with each of the hypotheses. We find that these variables together account for about 43 percent of the gap, and that the most important factors are advanced education, the disparity between professors’ educational levels and their incomes, the fact that a higher proportion of professors than non-professors have no religious affiliation or are Jews or non-theologically conservative Protestants, and intellectualism operationalized as tolerance for controversial ideas (not of a liberal nature).

So self-selecting reinforcement explains about 40% of the variance in terms of the 12:1 discrepancy you've provided. These self-selecting traits help us determine what in particular makes professors liberal instead of conservative, namely:

- Education (and it would be an open question whether this is due to conservative anti-intellectualism or other causes).
- Wage Level (most professors, especially those in the social sciences, don't make much money)
- Religious affiliation (conservatives aggregate heavily as protestants and this group is mostly separate from professors)
- Tolerance for controversial ideas

The authors find that professors have a higher tolerance for controversial ideas not a lower tolerance. Here is their methodology for testing tolerance to controversial ideas which demonstrates that it also controls for left-leaning controversial ideas:

We also consider the willingness of respondents to tolerate the expression of controversial ideas. To do so, we created a summated, standardized scale of six items: answering “yes” or “no” to the questions of whether racists and militarists should be allowed to speak, teach, or have a book in a library. We chose these items over others from the Stouffer tolerance scale, such as those pertaining to “communists” or “homosexuals,” since the latter may capture aspects of liberal ideology rather than tolerance for controversial ideas per se. Although consisting of only a few items, the scale exhibits a high level of internal consistency with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.8215, above the standard benchmark of 0.700 (Nunnally 1978)

So now to respond to:

Originally Posted by melonpapes

Do you think many students feel safe "ruffling feathers" with those in authority with opposing viewpoints? I think most likely they will stifle their true feelings and opinions during class discussions for the sake of their education and maybe even safety and to save them from the embarrassment of being the "odd one out" in lecture hall.

This would appear to be completely unsubstantiated based on the above research. Since you've mostly been arguing by anecdote, I'll add my own experience that I was repeatedly challenged to defend my positions. While it was often uncomfortable, I grew as a person for it. Probably the most heated disagreement I had was between me and classmates with a fantastically neutral professor where I was taking the minority stance that violence was sometimes acceptable to create cultural change.

And finally, that leaves us with this (emphasis mine):

Originally Posted by melonpapes

So, at least one professor has had to alter the way he exposes students to "difficult" ideas and having them rationalize their feelings on these texts and ideas themselves, for the fear that he might lose tenure or otherwise come upon negative consequence. Something tells me a lot of these ideas that are being described as "difficult" probably come from a right leaning camp.

You now have a hypothesis to test that these "difficult" ideas come from a right leaning camp, time to dig up research. While a Vox article that has a sample size of n=1 may provide an interesting case study, it doesn't really provide much insight because we care about the statistical aggregate rather than the individual. You don't get to determine whether a coin is balanced by flipping it once!

Originally Posted by melonpapes

though its not hard to look at any of the large "campus activism" movements that have sprung up in the past 8-10 years and imagine why it might be hard, scary, or risky to express these viewpoints when there are swaths of people on the other side who show no qualms in doxxing you or causing trouble with your employer or school ethics board over your opinions.

Or, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos outing a transgender student at a speech at a college campus. What you're doing here by assuming a priori which side does X more often and then deriving implications from it without testing them is called "confirmation bias", and it's not really worth engaging over as long as you try to make arguments by peddling anecdotes.

Originally Posted by melonpapes

maybe we should stop treating students like customers that pay 10s of thousands of dollars per year for the right to not be offended. maybe we should fix the system where teachers are afraid to teach effectively because of fear of losing their jobs in a "brutal" job market where they can be replaced with someone who won't cause trouble hurting the feelings of the schools cash cows? but thats another thread i guess.. lol

This actually seems pretty central to rectifying the imbalance in self-selection in professorship. From the outlined explanatory variables above, clearly poor wages are one of the main factors that push professors further left. Does an increased student loan burden also make students feel more entitled to get whatever they want out of a college education? This is also a very interesting question, and it would be a good followup to pursue based on the anecdotal cases provided in your Vox article.

An interesting aside, these self-selection behaviors can create a feedback loop based on ingroup/outgroup dynamics that does result in professorship calcifying into a liberal-biased group. See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.882.1681&rep=rep1&type=pdf. This would make it even more important to address these self-selection factors if you're looking to neutralize political bias.