While liberals outnumber conservatives six-to-one on America’s college and university faculties, the liberal-to-conservative ratio on campuses in New England is a mind-blowing 28 to one.
Politics professor Samuel J. Abrams, a lone voice of conservatism — perhaps even the lone voice — at notably liberal Sarah Lawrence College, crunched the numbers, according to Inside Higher Ed.
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I know it's not news to anyone, but in political seasons it always seems to go this way for me:
Someone more liberal than me annoys me so much with a kind of super-liberal agenda that is much like my own, but just stated with such an out-of-breath urgency that I find it too heard to bear.
And someone to the right of me seems to turn into a gun nut isolationist and can ONLY talk about those matters even though I've just had 3 1/2 years of lively conversations about everything under the sun.
"I just want to vote and get it over with," said our Dean a few days ago. Liberals and conservatives harumphed about the same.
Sounds about right. I've been off facebook for a while, and, although there are some people I'd like to catch up with, I'm not sure this is the moment to wade back in, especially since, thanks to the conventions, I'm increasingly capable of becoming part of the problem -- not surprisingly, I enjoyed the Democratic one (while realizing that there's always a gap between promises and execution, and that there are parts of the candidate's long history that raise some questions about her judgement -- or at least show that, like the rest of us, she is all too human), and experienced emotions that are rather hard to describe in response the Republican one and the ongoing pronouncements of the candidate (okay; the latter can be pretty well summarized with "appalled, aghast, and terrified"). There's a part of me that thinks this might actually be a moment when we could have real conversations about what we care about (especially given the overlap between traditional Republican rhetoric and the rhetoric of this year's Democratic convention), but that could be very, very tricky, especially when each of the candidates seems to invite, or at least experience, demonization in hir own way. While it seems like the oddities of this particular election year have cleared room for discussion in the middle, we do, inexorably it seems, drift toward extremes.
ReplyDeleteI think the harder part may be deciding whether or not to discuss this all with students. Given the courses I'll be teaching, I'm pretty sure that I really shouldn't. It just isn't relevant, and dragging it in would be irresponsible. On the other hand, given the demographics of our campus (and the fact that even the nth-generation European-American kids have chosen to attend a school with a very diverse student body, including a fairly high concentration of Muslim students), it's pretty safe to just say "register to vote; vote; all elections matter, but this one really, really matters" and let them take it from there.