Neil Gross's work is crucial for anyone who cares about higher education and who also cares about the facts. -- Louis Menand Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? offers a thoughtful, rigorous, and readable study of the causes and effects of liberal attitudes among college professors. Reading this book gave me an entirely new way of thinking about the interactions between political views, social attitudes, and life choices. Gross's book deserves a wide hearing. -- Andrew Gelman, Columbia University
Neil Gross is Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Colby College.
Neil Gross’s Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives
Care? enters the ongoing debate about the position and role of the
academy in American life at a high-stakes moment… Until now, the
characterization of a staunchly liberal professoriate has annoyed
progressives and disturbed conservatives, while remaining a
curiously underexamined trope in American political life. As
Gross’s study shows, it is a product of long-standing misguided
assumptions and overdrawn conclusions about American academics’
politics. Gross offers an impressive range of hard social
scientific data to soften the hyperbole and help set straight the
terms of our debate.
*American Prospect*
The question is not whether college professors are liberal… The
much more interesting question is why college professors are
liberal, and sociologist Neil Gross has studied it for years. His
results are worth considering… Gross is at his best when he’s
explaining his surveys and experiments and using them to evaluate
competing theories of professors’ liberalism—and fortunately, he
spends a lot of time doing that. Readers will gain a nuanced
understanding of the subject, and conservative readers in
particular will find many interesting nuggets here.
*National Review*
[Gross] registers clearly the overwhelming ideological slant of
higher education… [His thesis] leaves conservative critics with a
disarming irony, though: The more critics expose liberal
indoctrination and intolerance, the more they reinforce the image
of academia that makes young conservatives shun it.
*Weekly Standard*
Gross does what really good scholars do—namely, research, research,
research. Through reflection on existing data and that gathered
from studies of his own devising, he concludes that the liberalism
of the academy is not nearly so pronounced as alarmists would like
to believe, nor is it uniform.
*PopMatters*
A sound analysis of the sharply partisan issue of political
imbalance among university faculty.
*Library Journal*
Persuasive… It offers a thoughtful riposte to ad hominem attacks on
contemporary universities as hotbeds of radicalism.
*Publishers Weekly*
Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? offers a
thoughtful, rigorous, and readable study of the causes and effects
of liberal attitudes among college professors. Reading this book
gave me an entirely new way of thinking about the interactions
between political views, social attitudes, and life choices. Gross
deserves a wide hearing.
*Andrew Gelman, Columbia University*
In this engaging book, Neil Gross uses a dizzying range of evidence
to take apart many common beliefs. He shows—among many other
things—that professors are less liberal than pundits claim, that
today’s younger professors are less radical than older ones, and
that it is not so much that academia turns people liberal as that
liberals are attracted to academia. The book cements Gross’s
reputation as one of the most interesting sociologists of his
generation.
*Mario Small, University of Chicago*
A major contribution to debates about the politics of academia.
Neil Gross blends cutting-edge research with old-fashioned reason
to explain the cultural and economic forces that send liberals into
the professoriate. This is a smart, surprising, and important
book.
*Eric Klinenberg, New York University*
Neil Gross’s work is crucial for anyone who cares about higher
education and who also cares about the facts.
*Louis Menand, Harvard University*
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