Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…No, it’s not — there are two universities now, but it’s not which ones matter more and which ones matter less. It’s what is the sacred value. The sacred value of universities from sometime in the 19th century through maybe the 1980s was truth. Now it was not perfect, but we all talked that way. Look at the mottos of Harvard and Yale — Veritas, Lux et Veritas, it’s right there on the motto, veritas, truth. We made a big show — it was largely true — of saying this is what we’re here for, we’re here to find truth. But in the 1970s and ’80s as we had a big influx of baby boomers who were involved in social protest, who were fighting for very good causes, civil rights, women’s rights — they flood into the academy in ’70s and ’80s, they get tenure in the ’80s and ’90s, but also in the 1990s, the Greatest Generation begins to retire. There were a lot of Republicans who became professors after World War II. But the ’90s is the decade where everything flips. At the start of the 1990s, the overall left‑right ratio of the academy, taking all departments, was two to one, just twice as many people on the left as right. That’s fine, that’s not a problem. But by 2005, it had gone to five to one, five people on the left for every one on the right. Those people on the right are mostly engineering, nursing, things like that. If you look at the core — the humanities and the social sciences, other than economics, it’s closer to 10 to 1 or 20 to 1. In other words, right‑wing, or libertarian, or social conservative voices have basically vanished between 1995 and 2005. This has made us unfunctional, but it’s in the social sciences and humanities where the sacred value has become social justice and the protection of victims. That’s the division. One university of the sciences still pursues truth, the other university in the social sciences and humanities pursues social justice. Let’s say I’m a libertarian, and I notice, I suspect you would agree, that libertarians are somewhat overrepresented on the Internet, intellectual discourse, because of their personality traits which you’ve written about yourself. On the other hand, the universities, especially top universities, are more left‑wing. On net, should I be happy with this tradeoff or upset about it? No, you should be very upset that your fellow libertarians are wasting their time in flame wars commenting on people on the Internet, while in the academy, where even though libertarians actually have the highest IQ, they’re the best at systemic thinking, they should be overrepresented. There’s interesting research, I think it’s by Shields and Dunn, somewhere I read this recently, that as people with libertarian leanings go through undergraduate, those who are inclined toward the academy end up concentrating in economics for a variety of reasons. There are a lot of libertarians in economics. I wish we had more in psychology, I there were more in sociology and political science. So no, you should be upset because libertarians would be the easiest, easiest source of political diversity to spread throughout the academy. It’s very hard to find social conservatives in the academy.…

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