Readers React: Whose fault is it that few conservatives are in college classrooms?

To the editor: Political scientists Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. shine their ideological light on the political persuasions of university faculty to complain that there aren’t enough conservatives. (“Do universities need affirmative action for conservative professors?” Opinion, March 18)

It’s hard to sympathize with them, considering the existence of Fox News, lavishly funded conservative think tanks and efforts by the Koch brothers and other wealthy donors to fund chairs for right-wing apologists, as reported in a 2014 Center for Public Integrity study.

As a faculty member at a large state university, I don’t want the quality of teaching and research diluted by ideological litmus tests for any stripe of political persuasion. I suggest a cure for the “confirmation bias” that supposedly favors liberals: It’s called critical thinking.

I’ll wager that critical thinking will yield answers of a progressive hue when it comes to our most pressing social problems today, among them the control of politics by money, the dismaying polarization in wealth and power and popular denial of global climate change.

Sam Coleman, Long Beach

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To the editor: Conservatives seem not to grasp that their unpopularity in academia may be due to their ideas not making a lot of sense.

It’s almost a dogma in conservative circles that the Earth is not warming or that if it is, it’s not due to human activity. Yet the best science we have tells us otherwise.

Even in the social sciences conservatives don’t have much to contribute. They left it to liberal professors to denounce the Vietnam War and more recently the Iraq war, and who was right? In economics it’s liberal professors who have denounced austerity politics. They have often been ignored, and we have had one disaster after another.

Conservatives need to take responsibility for their own problems and start questioning their own ideas. If they did, they might finally be able to make their contribution to higher education.

Jean Lecuyer, Los Angeles

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