Much is written about the liberal bias in the media. If you are reading this, then you know what I am talking about without my having to say anything more. Nothing exists in a vacuum - including this article - and the medium in which it appears forms its context. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and everyone is entitled to take those opinions with a grain of salt. The devil is in the context.

In that context, liberal bias in academia has become a topic of discussion lately - in the liberal media and elsewhere. As I’ve already reported on in this space, Michael Bloomberg speaking at a Harvard convocation blasted “ivy league liberal bias”. Saying, “you have to wonder whether students are being exposed to the diversity of views that a great university should offer” adding “today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species”. 

And how about this headline from the Washington Times, “Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement”. Adding, “It’s not every day that left-leaning academics admit that they would discriminate against a minority”. The results were from a survey done in the Netherlands. Or consider Professor Stephanie Wolf at West Liberty University here in West Virginia who banned students from using Fox News as a reference because it made her cringe.

This past December, Parisian Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, posted an article entitled “How academia’s liberal bias is killing social science”. In it, he refers to a soon to be published paper in the Cambridge University Press whose lead author is Jonathan Haidt a “social psychologist” and professor at New York University. And yes, Haidt is a self described liberal. Of course.

That said, the paper does grapple with some important issues. For one, it confirms what the Dutch study found. To quote from the paper’s abstract, “The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination.” The paper’s conclusion calls for more diversity. Imagine that.

Here’s more from the paper, “In the last few years, social psychology has faced a series of challenges to the validity of its research, including a few high-profile replication failures, a handful of fraud cases, and several articles on questionable research practices and inflated effect sizes…in response, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) convened a Task Force on Publication and Research Practices which provided a set of statistical, methodological, and practical recommendations intended to both limit integrity failures and broadly increase the robustness and validity of social psychology….In this article we suggest that one largely overlooked cause of failure is a lack of political diversity”.

In other words, liberal bias in academia is destroying the integrity of research. About the paper, says Gobry, “They start by debunking published (and often well-publicized) social psychology findings that seem to suggest moral or intellectual superiority on the part of liberals over conservatives”. What a stupid thing to suggest.

Gobry goes on to add, “Although the paper focuses on the field of social psychology, its introduction as well as its overall logic make many of its points applicable to disciplines beyond social psychology”. Agreed - and perhaps what is considered “settled science” and portrayed as such in the (liberal) media is really academic “groupthink” - a self reinforced biased feedback loop.

Young people today are told that in order to get ahead higher education is a necessity. Young people have been conditioned to accept this on faith - but let’s take a closer look. The inflation rate for college tuition runs at around 8% annually while the overall rate of inflation is currently under 2%. In other words, tuition inflation is running at a much (much) higher rate than overall inflation.

Further, student debt (along with car loans) is the only consumer credit still expanding. It has recently surpassed credit card debt and is now more than $1 Billion. The federal government is virtually the only underwriter of student loan debt having distorted the market by having chased out the private sector. Oh, and by the way, the law was changed so that student loans are no longer disposable in bankruptcy - meaning that a student taking on this debt becomes the equivalent of an indentured servant. If that high priced education doesn’t help you get that dream job, you’re still on the hook for the loan - for the rest of your natural life. Those liberal academics really know how to work it - to game the system.

Now, about that job. Last month, the economy only added 126,000 jobs, the weakest growth in more than a year. But the demographics of that “job growth” are particularly telling. According to Zero Hedge “The labor force has been turned upside down, and the only jobs being created are those for aged workers.” Here are the numbers. The 55 and older crowd saw an increase in jobs of 329,000. However, the 25-54 group actually lost 64,000 jobs. The 20-24 year olds lost an astounding 291,000 jobs. How’s that increase in the minimum wage workin’ for ya?

Those crafty liberal academicians, they discriminate - they keep jacking up the price of higher education, causing their customers to fall ever deeper into debt. And when they graduate, they face a daunting job market. What a racket…

According to a 2014 study by Bentley University there’s a gap between what employers want and what the so-called “millennial generation” does on the job. Companies report a lack of work ethic, lack of hard skills and lack of preparedness as some of the reasons behind the high employment rate for young people. “Among the perceptions from the survey were that recent college graduates are harder to retain, lack a strong work ethic and aren’t as willing to pay their dues as previous generations were.”

But then again, work is such a bourgeois concept.