Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education

Messer-Davidow, Ellen

doi:10.2307/466388

Cited by 90 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…1 Second, a major public controversy surrounds professorial politics. Conservative critics charge that many liberal and radical academicians abuse their positions, indoctrinating students politically and silencing conservative voices on campus (e.g., D'Souza 1991; Horowitz 2006Horowitz , 2007Kimball 1990;see Bérubé 2007;Messer-Davidow 1993;Smith et al 2008). Public opinion polls find that about a third of Americans believe "liberal bias" in academia to be a serious problem (Gross and Simmons 2006), and the issue of professors and politics has received extensive coverage in the press.…”

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confidence: 97%

Why are professors liberal?

2012

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The political liberalism of professors-an important occupational group and anomaly according to traditional theories of class politics-has long puzzled sociologists. This article sheds new light on the subject by employing a two-step analytic procedure. In the first step, we assess the explanatory power of the main hypotheses proposed over the last half century to account for professors' liberal views. To do so, we examine hypothesized predictors of the political gap between professors and other Americans using General Social Survey data pooled from . Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas. In the second step of our article, we develop a new theory of professors' politics on the basis of these findings (though not directly testable with our data) that we think holds more explanatory promise than existing approaches and that sets an agenda for future research.

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confidence: 97%

Why are professors liberal?

2012

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“…The culture war also involved a conservative critique of multiculturalism and so-called 'political correctness' (Messer-Davidow, 1993Scatamburlo, 1998;Schultz, 1993).…”

Section: The Culture War As a Leftist Conspiracymentioning

confidence: 98%

Collectivists, Communists, Labor Bosses, and Treason: The Tea Parties as Right-Wing Populist Counter-Subversion Panic

Berlet

2012

Critical Sociology

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The Tea Parties are a right-wing populist movement echoing earlier episodes of white nationalism in the USA. Power elites have encouraged similar counter-subversion panics using populist rhetoric and producerist narratives to enlist a mass base to defend their unfair power, privilege, and wealth. Typically, a large, middle-class white constituency sides with organized wealth as a way to defend their relative and precarious position in society. The blame for economic, political, and social tensions is transferred away from free market capitalism to mythical conspiracies of collectivists, communists, labor bosses, and other scapegoated subversives and traitors. At the same time, defense of unequal racial and gender hierarchies can be mobilized as part of these counter-subversion efforts. Patriots, economic libertarians, Christian dominionists, militia activists, nativists, and ethnic nationalists fit under the Tea Party umbrella in an uneasy coalition ostensibly built around reversing the 'big government' policies of the Obama administration.

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“…25 Perspectivism brings together the personal, cultural, subjective, and objective in the knowledge-gathering process, replacing binary oppositions that inhibit and fix the knower into a particular location with a systematic understanding of how and what we see. Messer-Davidow asks readers to affiliate with their culture and deliberate on how one acquires a self-centered perspective.…”

Section: Presenting and Representing Asian Sexualitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%