TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF? Sequential entries at Phi Beta Cons offer differing takes on what's going on in (a few corners of) the academy. George Leef recommends a John McWhorter column discovering the most recent manifestations of Barnaby Sneerly.

Anyone who does what I do is used to running up against this type of guy now and then. I mention it not as a personal cri de coeur, but because of a larger tragedy: how ordinary such perceptions are among his demographic, and the failure of our higher education system to correct them. Instead of countering the unthinking polarization increasingly typical in our discourse, a college education too often leaves unchecked a confusion between dogma and enlightenment.

His summation:

“Why can’t Johnny read?” we were once taught to ask. But today, if Johnny learns how to read, in college he is taught that there is only one way to think.

Preceding that post is John J. Miller recommending Arthur C. Brooks in Opinion Journal advising something along the lines of "don't worry, be happy.

"Most studies of the subject have indicated that, indeed, upward of 90% of college professors at many universities hold liberal political views. In some chools and departments, faculties are virtually 100% left-wing. It is one thing to lament this ideological lopsidedness in the academy. But it is quite another to assume that professors actually bend the little minds in their care toward a liberal point of view, or even a radical one. Imagine a student with God-fearing Republican parents exposed to the depredations of an English professor aiming to use his class as a Bolshevik training camp. Will the professor succeed in turning the kid into a Red? The evidence says, probably not: When it comes to politics, people from conservative families follow their parents, not their professors.

The most recent evidence on this subject comes from the mid-1990s, in the University of Michigan's National Election Studies. These survey data uncover two facts. First, people who go to college are more likely to vote Republican than those who don't go to college. Adults 25 and under from Republican homes are, for example, 11 percentage points more likely to vote Republican if they attended college than if they didn't. And young adults from Democratic households are 11 percentage points less likely to vote Democrat if they've gone to college than if not.

Second, nearly everybody grows more likely to vote Republican as they age--but especially college graduates. It is no shock that the vast majority of people of all educational backgrounds from Republican homes vote Republican by age 40. It may come as more of a surprise that 40-year-olds with Democrat parents are far less likely to vote Democrat if they've gone to college than if they haven't. In fact, while three-quarters of the uneducated group still vote Democrat, the odds are only about 50-50 that the college graduates vote this way. And they've not all become skeptical political independents: Fully a third are registered Republicans.

Obviously, some kids turn left in college--but this appears to be the exception, not the rule. Does all this mean that our colleges and universities are actually breeding grounds for conservatism? Hardly. What the statistics really show is that higher education by itself doesn't affect political views very much. Rather, in addition to the strong influence of parents, it is higher incomes--which typically reward a college education in America--that push people to the right politically. In Republican families, the income effect reinforces parents' influence on their kids. In Democratic families, the two effects work against each other.

To fearful Republican parents, then: Sleep tight. When it comes to politics, your kids are in good hands--yours.

How many ways shall I disassemble this? First, consider two possible sample selection biases. These surveys are often based on party preferences people express in order to register to vote in primary elections (themselves a survival of the so-called Progressive Era intended to take candidate selection out of the hands of party insiders by compelling candidates to pander to party insiders) in states where such registration is required in advance of the election. In states that allow crossover voting, such data is meaningless. Furthermore, the faculty surveys often focus on departments at highly visible universities. They tell us more about Stanford or Syracuse than they do about Stanislaus or Stony Brook, let alone about faculty viewpoints among adjunct-heavy community colleges that might have moonlighting executives in the management and engineering faculties. The student survey weights the sample to reflect the lower proportion of Stanford and Syracuse graduates in the population of all graduates.

Next consider a self-interest hypothesis. The propensity of college students to favor Democrats and then vote Republican in middle age is at least as old as the Great Society (what's that line about "to live like a Republican, vote Democratic?") and it might be driven as a desire to keep what one has acquired, as Professor Brooks notes, or it might be a recognition that what appeals to a college sophomore might not appeal well to a messy reality (that raises a question about professors whose thinking has not developed beyond the sophomore level, but I digress.)

Or, perhaps, nobody is paying that much attention to what goes on in Literature anyway.