Creative Class

The notion that academics are more liberal than the rest of the population may be true, but the idea that this ideologically committed “liberal professoriate” is able to inflict its views on naive and unwitting students is certainly not. That’s just one of the key conclusions of a brand new book by my former George Mason colleagues, Jerry Mayer and Lee Fritschler (pointer via Tyler Cowen). From a very nice feature in the New York Times:

If there has been a conspiracy among liberal faculty members to influence students, “they’ve done a pretty bad job,” said A. Lee Fritschler, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an author of the new book “Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities” (Brookings Institution Press).

The notion that students are induced to move leftward “is a fantasy,” said Jeremy D. Mayer, another of the book’s authors. (Bruce L. R. Smith is the third co-author of the book.) When it comes to shaping a young person’s political views, “it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15,” said Mr. Mayer, who did extensive research on faculty and students.

“Parents and family are the most important influence,” followed by the news media and peers, he said. “Professors are among the least influential.”

A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38 institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions.

Sean Wilentz speculates on the transitional state of American politics in The New Republic:

The age of Reagan, born out of the center’s
collapse in the ’60s and ’70s, has, thanks to George W. Bush, finally
lost its relevance, except as a nostalgic touchstone of bygone
Republican glory. In one sense, it has been the victim of its own
successes, having outlasted the Soviet Union, fundamentally altered the
nation’s political economy, and pushed the center of the nation’s
political gravity to the right. In another sense, it has owed its
remarkable longevity to a confused and divided opposition, and to the
persisting tenuousness of centrist politics. But what a new centrist
politics might look like–whether Republican or Democratic,
conservative or liberal–is as yet difficult to envisage. We are, for
the moment, caught between two political eras, the one dead, the other
struggling mightily to be born.

My own take, with political scientist Jerry Mayer, on the current transition period and possible trajectories, here.