Jul 252017
 

Stolen from a friend: “Since conservatives are an underrepresented minority in academia, and having more conservatives in academic disciplines would raise the cognitive diversity among researchers in most fields, I think we should probably use affirmative action-ish policies to make universities cheaper and easier to get into for conservatives.”

This is a surprisingly good point.

Of course, AA is primarily meant to help those who have been traditionally disadvantaged by systemic relics of oppression. It’s not actually intended simply to increase diversity for its own sake. But to the extent that diversity is a goal worth achieving, this idea has some merit. I do think diversity is a good thing, something that we want more of, and this looks to help advance that goal.

There’s also the stealth-attack aspect… Higher education tends to make conservatives more liberal, so this would get more conservatives into the ideological killing fields. So to speak.

A different friend objected that this would only be acceptable if and when conservatives start supporting AA for disadvantaged groups. I don’t think this is legitimate though. Should disadvantaged minorities only get AA benefits if they endorse AA policies? And if the principle at play here is “affirmative action programs should not apply to folks who would not apply them to other folks” does this mean we should disallow affirmative action for minority folks if they don’t support it for conservatives?

Of course then someone had to ruin all the fun by requesting actual data. We turn to the great google, and we find:

Since 1980
% of Far Right students remained even at 20%
% of Far Left students increased, from 20% to 35%
% of Middle/Moderate students decreased from 60% 45%

So conservatives haven’t actually decreased in representation… the far left has swelled greatly instead, at the cost of moderates. The rise in radicalism and polarization isn’t due to lack of conservatives at all, but rather an increase in one fringe.

Suddenly I’m of the opinion that perhaps increasing the amount of people on the opposite side isn’t actually a great idea. That may very well simply lead to more radicalization on the right. Which could feed back into increased radicalization on the left, and so forth. If there’s too much weight on one side of a scale, adding more weight to the other side may break the scale entirely, rather than returning it to balance.

The hell of it is, moderates aren’t sexy. “Boring” is the last thing passionate young people want to be. Can we go about creating and popularizing a form of Radical Moderate movement? People who are vocal and passionate about being reasonable and considering consequences and viewing others as incorrect rather than evil mutants? It seems this was what much of the Rationalist movement was about, but I’m too far removed from university life to know if anything is growing there (god I’m old). Has anyone begun a Rationalist and/or Moderate version of campus activist groups?

  2 Responses to “Anti-Radicalism – Increasing Local Diversity”

  1. I think the general critique isn’t so much that there are no conservative students, it’s that there are barely any conservative professors outside of STEM fields or some specific very conservative universities.
    You even started talking about academia, but then looked up the stats on students. Those two are quite different.

    Sure, conservative students can get their education there, but they’re going to get the hell out of there after they’re finished, while left-wing students feel much more comfortable and want to start academic careers.

    If social science departments think that being conservative speaks against a candidate, they’re not going to diversify. So you might need AA for professors and not for students.

    (I don’t think that’s actually a great policy to solve the underlying problems, but that’s the argument at least.)

    • That’s a good point. It’s gonna be really hard to get conservative professors to stick around in a hostile enviroment when there’s non-hostile job options for them though. I guess sensitivity training for academia folks? /fallsover

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