Of course there is a liberal bias at Dartmouth. The vast majority of our campus faculty leans towards the left, as is true of universities around the country. Unfortunately, most of our student body does not believe that this "bias" ought to exist; campus conservatives have assailed administrators for giving preference to liberal faculty. Many students guess that the reason we don't have enough Republicans in our faculty is that Dartmouth as an institution does not want to allow the development of conservative thought in its students. Such is the paranoid reasoning of a minority group, and as an ethnic minority in the greater society of America, I grant that such reasoning is important to outgroup unity and has traceable, transparent origins.
However, I will not grant that the reasoning has fair logic behind it because it overlooks several important points. Firstly, the majority of Ph.Ds in the country themselves are liberal leaning, making the selection pool for teaching positions inherently shifted in one direction. One of the first lessons taught in American government classes is that there is a strong correlation between years of education and liberal political preference. Education forces people to open their mind to new ideas and ways of thought, encourages reasoned thought and fosters social awareness -- tenets central to the philosophy of the Democratic party. This is not to say that all Republicans are unreasonable or socially unconscious, but there tend to be negative correlations in each category. Psychological field studies have found that Republicans are generally believers in the "just-world bias." Stephen Franzoi, author of the Social Psychology textbook for the said course offered in the psychology department, describes conservatives as "tending to make dispositional attributions, blaming poverty on self-indulgence, laziness, or low intelligence." Studies have shown that conservatives are more likely than liberals to blame flood victims for their plight. Education inherently discourages belief in a just world by directly expanding the mind by teaching new perspectives and paradigms of thought, essentially putting students in the shoes of others.
Not all Republicans are unreasonable, either, but the central beliefs of the Republican party often are based on faith and sources other than accepted fact. In a recent New York Times article, columnist Paul Krugman notes that Republicans have called their own party "the party of theocracy." Despite the copious, gargantuan amount of scientific evidence in support of evolution, our president and the leader of the Republican party believe that "the jury is still out" on the topic. In courting the religious right, which depends on holy texts to define its reality, Republicans have alienated academics who by nature depend on logic, reason and evidence to define their own.
So why is there a liberal bias at Dartmouth? There is no liberal bias, there is a self-selecting bias. Dartmouth will not hire a biology professor who will not teach evolution, partly because the basis of hiring at Dartmouth is on how well a professor knows and teaches his subject. If conservatives want to regain the support of academia, the Republican party itself will have to shift.
