Does Academia Discriminate Against Conservatives? Unlikely

Thursday 24 February 2011

by: Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co. | Op-Ed

Ideas are not equivalent to race. Yet now and then you hear stories in the United States that treat ideological divides as being somehow comparable to racial discrimination.

At a Jan. 27 gathering in Texas of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the topic of underrepresentation of conservatives in academics came up during a speech given by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia. According to an article by John Tierney for The New York Times, Dr. Haidt noted that polls conducted in the United States show that 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservative and 20 percent as liberal. An on-the-spot poll showed that about 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the room identified themselves as liberal.