Universities
Here I will put links to entries on various university subjects (none right now) and notes.
Contents
Budgets
Data
The Death of Universities
Tuition at Colleges
Johns Hopkins Lies about Budget to Cut Faculty Salaries
Miscellaneous
Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, a big, well-funded attempt to set up Centers at elite universities to teach the humanities outside of the official framework. A very good idea. They could be self-funding by alumni donations if it does good work, and will rightly die if used for grifting.
Thank you for alerting me to the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education's Centers. It's a great idea. They will eventually be self-funding from grateful undergrad alumni, if successful; they will die if they are just grifters, as will be the case with some of them.
It reminds me of the idea of medieval universities. Students came to Paris or Oxford and went to lectures and read books in company with each other. The University had exams they could try to pass to get a credential. Students assembled in colleges that were really just dormitories with tutoring and older people to bail you out of jail, etc. Nowadays, the official Yale University provides the credential, in exchange for big bucks. But the education doesn't have to come from official Yale professors; it can come from hanging out with Center people and other students who also want to learn. This is aided by massive grade inflation, which means spending time on your official classes is optional and you have plenty of time for real learning.
Universities don't care about teaching quality. What they care about is keeping students happy. That's why they use student evaluations despite their obvious flaws in measuring learning. What the university wants to find out is
(a) do students think they're learning something?
(b) are students enjoying themselves?
I wonder if hospitals evaluate doctors in the same way. We'd expect that, I think--- bedside manner is what patients care about, and someone who *looks* like he's competent, and who gives them a lot of pills and procedures and tells them they're working if only they keep on paying for more of it. The big difference is that the insurance companies, who are paying, get involved. Universities make sure to keep parents, who are paying, far away from knowing what is going on in classes and dormitories. That's what FERPA is for.
Academic Intolerance
"Relatively conservative professors valued academic rigor and knowledge advancement more than did relatively liberal professors," . The difficulty of publishing a piece on surveys of professors (2021):
"Relatively conservative professors valued academic rigor and knowledge advancement more than did relatively liberal professors."
University Ideology
- "Measuring The Conservative Penalty And Liberal Bonus With Updated 2023 U.S. News Rankings Data" TaxProf (2022) on a study of law school rankings.
- "Only 20% of university faculty say a conservative would fit in well in their department" FIRE 2022 survey.
- "Faculty Presidential Election Survey: 78% Harris, 8% Trump", Inside Higher Education, via Taxprof.
- UCLA study of political leanings of faculty (2022, I think). It has type of college (public, private, religious, etc.),which turns out to make little difference. NOt by field, though.
The sample of 7300 faculty identified their political leanings this way (p. 28 of the pdf): Far Right 0.5% Conservative 12.2% Middle of the road 31.5% Liberal 43.8% Far Left 12.1%
- "The Disappearing Conservative Professor," National Affairs (2025). It has a table with various fields and studies of them. It says 33% of economists are Republicans and 27% are conservatives, which seems high. It's a a bit out of date. THe HERI-UCLA people at heri.ucla.edu are probably the best source.
- "In Compromising Scholarship, a 2011 book by sociologist George Yancey, some 30% of sociologists acknowledged that they would be less likely to hire a job applicant if they knew he was a Republican. Yancey further discovered that 15% of political scientists and 24% of philosophy professors would discriminate against Republican job applicants, and at least 30% of professors in all disciplines surveyed would discriminate against members of the NRA.
- Professors are even less tolerant of evangelicals, whom they associate with social conservatism. Nearly 60% of anthropologists, 50% of literature professors, 39% of political scientists and sociologists, 34% of philosophy professors, and 29% of historians say they would be less inclined to hire evangelicals. Yancey further found that female professors expressed more anti-conservative bias than men, perhaps in part because female professors tend to be more progressive than their male peers. . . .
- Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter found in 2009's The Politically Correct University that socially conservative professors tend to work at lower-ranked institutions than their publication records would suggest. More recently, a 2016 study of elite law schools in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy found that libertarian and conservative professors publish more than their peers, which suggests that right-leaning law professors must outshine liberals to reach the summits of their profession."
- "Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?" (024) Steve Teles, a liberal (as he says in the article). Some good anecdotal evidence, e.g. that at UVA and Harvard there used to be several conservative poli sci profs in 1994 and 1975; in 2024, no.
