Why is the Left so dominant in academia?

It seems to me that the Left is represented disproportionately in academic circles and I do not know why this is. There are of course exceptions to this, but so many of them only serve to reinforce this view because of how they have been treated by their peers - think of Roger Scruton's Salisbury Review and the leper status it gave him.

Why do you think this is? Do you even believe it is?

i'm not very good with the whole political compass thing. people here are obsessed with it.

Yes, but TSR is all left wing labour voters, which personally I am not, make a post about how much the left wing is bad and it will be deleted straight away

why/how is an entire set of ideologies bad?

Usually because the left keep promising free education and the like.

We all know they wouldn't hold up to that if they got into power.

Maybe it is because angry people who think they are right wing don't actually know what left and right wing mean?

People keep talking about practical experience... Well maybe academics actually have practical experience of the importance of public funded research and the like since they see it first hand and have a knowledge of the importance it plays. Then stupid people equate this as being left wing and shout about it on their computer full of transistors.

Last week during my brother's anthropology class at a US college, the professor asked who the new Canadian prime minister was, and began to discuss this in class - something which was completely unrelated to the course content which they were studying.

Call me a nutcase, but this very much looks very much like left-wing bias.

Because most young people don't understand consequences, quite frankly.

I think it is probably because academics are expected to deal with facts. It is fairly factual that the average citizen would be better off with a left leaning government.

What has age got to do with anything? An academic is not someone who attends university in my eyes, it is someone who takes up a career in one. A lot of academics are REALLY old!

Would you prefer we had some Stalinist system where academics must only teach state approved topics and bias and stick to a rigid ?

What do you people want? My maths for electronics lecturer would end up showing us nothing but Feynman videos for an entire lectures on youtube

This is what I am talking about. You don;t understand what academia is. Unless we are talking about something like the projectile motion of a cannon ball bias is unavoidable. What is important it that students are taught how to argue. Disusing the Canadian election does not even allude to any particular bias. It's just discussing what people think of the Canadian liberal party. We have a problem if only one set of ideas are aloud to be discussed, which is what you seem to want. You want your beliefs to be the doctrine or some kind of "State Doctrine" in the form of rigid syllabus that lecturers must not deviate from.

Anthology gets brought into politics as it is the study of humans. You can bring it into political questions of gender relations for example. We can compare our ancestors to both Chimpanzees and Bonobos, both of which have radically different gender roles in their societies. Maybe women being housewives is "natural" maybe it isn't. Anthropology can help answer that.

The evidence would point to the opposite.

erm....care to share that evidence?

How successful was the Soviet Union?

Oh my god! Seriously??? What do you hope to achieve by playing that card? Communism is an extreme example, I specifically said left leaning, not as far left as you can go!! I do not think that communism is the way forward for Britain and I think very few academics would also.

Saying that it could also be argued that the main problems facing the Soviet Union were not communism per se, but the exploitation of the regime by those at the top and the impracticalities of enforcing communism on a region the size of the USSR.