It’s not 32% of 484 Stevie - it’s 32% of those who identify their political views as “right” or “fairly right”.
@Geof - thanks. I haven’t done the maths but that will explain it.
As someone with an interest in the subject, are you happy with such a preponderance of left-wing views among academics?
Indeed - I’m not only happy, but see this as natural and inevitable. I commented on another thread here that since its inception - as a description of those that sat on the left of the États généraux at the start of the French Revolution - the term ‘left-wing’, as well as representing those opposed to unreasonable social privilege and exploitation, has also always been associated with the rational, and the search for scientific, objective truth - whereas the right has always relied on authority, tradition, religion or superstition - in short, anything but evidence and sound argument (which of course it has to avoid at all costs).
There are always exceptions - of various degrees - but in general it’s precisely this essential nature of academic discipline that means the more people study, and accept the discipline of rigourously seeking truth rather than relying on uncritically received wisdom or unfounded opinion, the more they will incline to the political left.
(There is, incidentally, another bit of right-wing myth-making around this: that the left inclination among academics is related to identity politics or other recent cultural movements or conspiracies. Unfortunately for this mythology, the association of radical politics with academia can be traced back centuries - it has, indeed, been remarked on pretty much throughout the history of universities - for example in13th century Paris!)
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That’s a fascinating point of view, @Geof. In simple terms, the more people study, the more left-wing they become.
Do you know of any research that shows this?
I wouldn’t over-simplify it. I’m sure you will find lots of relevant research via Google etc - but I think it’s more a question that should be approached via some detailed history reading (as indeed is almost always the case with political issues).
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A typically reassuring and trenchant POV.
Over-simplification tends to be a reliable indicator of right-wing comment on complex issues, such as Trump’s statements about the pandemic of the “It’ll just go away” variety.
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I think there’s a difference between a summary and over-simplification, @Geof.
You made such a surprising assertion that I thought you might have been able to point me to something to support it.
I don’t think I have made any surprising assertions - nor any that are unsupported.
I wonder what you are looking for in a forum of this kind Stevie - detailed analysis with full endnotes of why Karl Marx described his ideas as ‘scientific socialism’ and dedicated Capital to Charles Darwin? (Or Darwin himself delayed publication of the Origin of Species for fear of upsetting the political and religious establishment?) Or how the Nazis were obsessed not with rational enquiry but with astrology and superstition? Or why the Catholic Church supported Franco not the Popular Front? Or why Allende turned to Stafford Beer’s scientific management theory while Pinochet justified his coup by appeal to religion? Or why Trump… well, you know!
These are complex historical questions, and the uncomfortable truth is - as Peter has indicated - that sometimes there is no short-cut to understanding what lies behind these realities - it’s about really getting to grips with the nature and development of intellectual endeavour and political thinking in post medieval Europe, I’m afraid. You just have to do the study (and will probably come out on the left!)
But in your own posts you acknowledge that most academics are indeed left-wing - so here’s your challenge: do you have an alternative explanation for this? (Always bearing in mind of course that it is a centuries-old phenomenon, so not indulging in any of that silly Daily-Mail-type-remainer-elite-conspiracy-theory kind of nonsense.)
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@Geof, why should academia be filled with people with left or left-ish views?
I could suggest several possibilities
i. people on the left choose others with a similar worldview: indeed, they ought to, if diligent study is an indicator of left-wing views
ii. the preponderance of the left encourages people to express similar opinions and discourages those of dissimilar views from expressing theirs
iii. a sort of Stockholm effect, where if you spend enough time with lefties, you start sympathising with them
iv. people on the left have a stronger concept of service to others than those on the right, who are more motivated by self-interest and “the creation of wealth”
v. more able, and right-wing, people don’t choose academia, but business or banking or manufacturing instead; the less able choose to teach.
I would guess it’s a combination of the first 4, if pressed.
A number of your examples referred to religion (sorry, this is another digression!). Am I right in thinking you consider faith to have a (particularly) pernicious effect on thought?
Unconvincing Stevie - you’re still locked in a recent world view, I think, and need to exercise historical imagination - put yourself in what were completely different social formations and circumstances. The ideas that people have simply been ‘choosing’ others like them, or suffering from a Stockholm effect across centuries, for example, is really just another kind of conspiracy theory; or the idea of right-wing people choosing entrepreneurialism, etc - to take another example - would simply not work in pre-capitalist formations. That left-wing people are more likely to want to serve the common good, rather than self-interest, is of course true - but circular (since working for he common good is definitional to being left-wing) and hardly specific to academia!
As to religion - I merely state the facts (and again refuse over-simplification). While it’s true there are laudable examples of left-wing religious activism - the Quakers in the early co-operative movement, for example, or ‘liberation theology’ in South America - the overwhelmingly more common linkage is between religion and the right - as in some of the examples I’ve already mentioned (eg Franco). It’s not a co-incidence that one description of the Church of England is ‘the Tory Party at prayer’, or that evangelicals form a big part of Trump’s electoral base - there are any number of examples - or on a more philosophical level, if you look at religious and non-religious existentialists, for example, it tends to be the religious (eg. Heidegger) that tend to the right and the non-religious (eg. Sartre) to the left. Draw your own conclusions!
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So that’s a no then Geof. 
If I may butt in here 
, isn’t that a rather loaded question, despite the rather spurious innocence of its construction, “Am I right in thinking that…?” 
The weakness of religious thinking i.e faith in a creator God seems to me to be its resolute resistance to the provisionality of belief, which is the lode-stone of science: the principle of fallibility, namely the notion that it is infinitely possible that God does not exist.
That is the direct antithesis of religious faith, which precludes doubt, and is it’s raison d’être for everything that follows from it.
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Personally I get a bit tired of ‘right-wing’ ‘left-wing’ being used as absolutes for individuals, who are far more complex than that.
Using myself as an example, I am right-wing supposedly as I believe in the profit motive, and solid social order - policing etc; However i am very left-wing when it comes to social aid and responsibility towards the less fortunate in any strata of society. I see no problem with this.
Religion to me is a matter of where people find their comfort, although personally I find it a lot of tosh. On the other hand I DO believe there is a spiritual need in us to transcend daily battles in order to make some sense and/or order out of them.
Despite a lifetime of trying to understand people (yes, in order to try and sell them things) I am happy to say I have never been able to plop people in boxes and programme them. That’s the fascination an challenge surely?
I am sure that extreme Fascists are like Hitler, totally capable of loving children and animals whilst progressing the most murderous regimes.
We have only scratched the surface of who we are, and thankfully so. Thus far at least only a very few relatively speaking) have been programmed into robotic state; even Trump’s knuckle-draggers probably still love their children almost as much as their guns? Another paradox)
When I was growing up in Britain (very lower working class) I remember the political credo at the time was ‘Conservatives make the money, Socialists spend it’ Still seems about right and proper to me.
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The current bunch of Conservative government seem to be spending substantially - but in the direction of their friends:
https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1291244082145177600?s=19
Millions of pounds has been spent on PPE with companies with no assets and no history in trading in PPE but just happen to be owned by friends on the government. Absolutely criminal. It also appears that no effective PPE has been supplied and that normal controls on issuing government contracts has not been followed.
Very true Peter.
This is also interesting in relation to historical change - and explains why churches get into all sorts of doctrinal difficulties over cultural change - for example when inequality between the sexes erodes or taboos on homosexuality etc crumble, it is not just religious doctrines on those specific issues that are exposed as of other times and places, but the whole underlying notion of a-historical belief systems.
For both the scientific and the left-political outlook, however, ‘human nature’, ‘moral laws’, etc, are historically specific. Of course! - if you believe in evolution you cannot also believe in an unchanging human nature - and the conception of human cultural beliefs changing with historical circumstances is common (I think) to all left thinking - required, perhaps, by the idea that humanity is capable of organising society more justly - and it is, you might argue, the central pillar of schools of thought like marxism.
This is a version of an old conservative lie that I hoped had been exposed by the pandemic: the myth that ‘wealth’ is created in the private sector and the taxes from that ‘pay for’ public services - whereas in fact the relationship is largely the other way up: teachers, nurses, refuse collectors, etc, etc, create much of what really matter in our lives - and pay a lot of the taxes - and it is precisely these ‘externalities’ that enable businesses to make profits - which in turn allow them and their employees to pay taxes, etc.
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I do agree though that when applied to individuals the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ are nothing more than a very partial description - but it is interesting - and useful, up to a point - that they enable some coherence when trying to orient yourself amid various ways of understanding the world.
@captainendeavour The DM has a remarkably good sports section - see their investigation of Bradley Wiggins’s jiffy bag.
Sadly that appears the only redeeming feature…
The pandemic is the second time socialism has had to bail out capitalism this century!
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@Geof, you say “Unconvincing Stevie - you’re still locked in a recent world view”. I was proposing an explanation of the academic world as it is now, which is what we were talking about, based on how people usually behave. The farther you go back in history, the more difficult any analysis is: the Labour Party didn’t exist before 1900, for example.
I was going to pass over the irony of your “I merely state the facts (and again refuse over-simplification … one description of the Church of England is ‘the Tory Party at prayer’”, but unless we attempt a bit of simplification, we’ll never get anywhere in a discussion on a forum! (And if I can’t express a complex thought in simple terms, maybe I haven’t understood it.)
I think you’re right about many evangelicals in the US, but I’m not sure you can draw valid conclusions from a country where they think it’s acceptable to own guns for killing people and unacceptable to have a system of socialised medical treatment. There are, in fact, many evangelical thinkers in the US who are solidly left-wing or centrist: it’s just that our media never speaks of them.
I also think you’re right that “churches get into all sorts of doctrinal difficulties over cultural change”, because many believe they must change to accommodate the current thinking. Ironic, isn’t it, that the most successful churches are those which hold to the traditional teachings?
@Peter: “the principle of fallibility, namely the notion that it is infinitely possible that God does not exist” is, I think, the same thing as doubt, and something most Christians – and probably most people of all faiths, including atheism – experience frequently. But there are many things in life that aren’t susceptible of scientific proof, aren’t there? A court verdict is one of them (even DNA evidence and CCTV can be open to alternative interpretation). I would imagine most people of faith are satisfied “beyond reasonable doubt” about what they believe and wouldn’t consider it reasonable to expect proof of a scientific type.
@Norman: like you, I would be unable to place myself confidently anywhere on the left/right spectrum. I wonder if that’s increasingly true for a lot of people.