Liberal Profs Admit Bias Against Conservatives in Hiring
This news will come as no surprise to College Insurrection readers. Emily Esfahani Smith of The Washington Times reports on a new survey.
Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement
It’s not every day that left-leaning academics admit that they would discriminate against a minority.
But that was what they did in a peer-reviewed study of political diversity in the field of social psychology, which will be published in the September edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.”
This finding surprised the researchers. The survey questions “were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of agreement,” Mr. Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities.”
One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).”
More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”
Mr. Inbar, who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008, cautions that the finding reflects only what respondents said they would do — not necessarily what they actually would do in real life.
Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement (The Washington Times)
Comments
Of course they do. Wouldn’t want any competition from anyone more principled or skilled. It’s about job security.
I’m not sure this is such a bombshell.
I have a bias against liberals, and consider them inferior candidates for many jobs (I’m not concerned with jobs in academia, but still pretty high-level positions demanding skills, education, experience, and talent). My bias isn’t literally because they’re liberal, but because I interpret their liberalism to be an indicator that they are unimaginative, selfish, insufferably smug & arrogant, poorly read, have low-quality formal educations, have a tendency to jump to conclusions, and are a bit dumb overall.
Now, of course I realize that I could be dead wrong about any of these evaluations in an individual case, and could even be mistaken in my attribution of these traits to liberals in general. But as of now, with the education and decades of experience I’ve amassed to date, that’s my best evaluation, and the one I have to run with if I lack any more accurate data about a particular candidate.
I imagine that even a liberal – an honest one, at least – would do the same; and if a logical process is of utility to me, the same process will be of utility to him as well. So I can’t really object.