When veterans of the Clinton administration went into academia, a number of them were shocked to find that despite their impeccable liberal politics, their new university colleagues considered them unacceptably right wing! On many campuses the faculty has more Marxists than Republicans. This has long been known, but some recent studies are documenting the extent to which our nation’s campuses have a hard-left bias and discriminate against conservatives. Read this from Robert Maranto, who is publishing a book on the subject. Excerpts from his findings:

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors’ political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.
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Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

I am provost at Patrick Henry Collegewhere we are countering that anti-intellectual silliness and keeping our civilization’s educational heritage alive. We are giving the best and the brightest of conservative, Christian young people an Ivy-League caliber of education (referring back when the Ivy League was at its height). Our students have some of the highest SAT scores anywhere and we are equipping them with a rigorous classical Christian liberal arts education, full of the great books and the great ideas, coupled with specialties in culture-shaping fields, featuring an apprenticeship methodology with some of the best internships in the nation.

And though we might be accused of bias in the other direction, I would put the quality of our class discussions, including the consideration of alternative viewpoints, to be far above what goes on in the typical leftwing classroom.

We are a young school, having been founded in 2000, and we are small, with just over 300 hand-selected students. We should be at least ten times bigger than we are. But we are pretty much at capacity in our existing facilities. Since we don’t take government funds and refuse to go into debt, we have to raise the money before we can build the classrooms and dormitories that we need.

We have some amazingly generous donors, but we should have 100 times the number of financial supporters than we do now. Many people of means are pouring money into institutions whose faculty members would, if they had their dream, line them up against the wall as bourgeois capitalists and consign them to a revolutionary firing squad. They would do far better to pour money into Patrick Henry College!

If any of you are thinking of making an end-of-the-year charitable contribution or would like to support us in an on-going way, go here and here.

OK, end of fund-raising appeal. I’ll try not to do that very often. But reading about the state of higher education in this country made me convinced all the more of the importance of what we are doing at Patrick Henry College.

The British press is reporting that the head of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said in an interview that the nativity story is just a a legend.

What he really said is that the Wise Men weren’t kings, that they didn’t show up with the shepherds, and that there probably wasn’t snow, since we don’t know that Jesus was really born on December 25. He was casting doubt on the conventional Christmas card scene, which is nothing new or faith-threatening to well-instructed Christians. Unfortunately, today’s Brits are not, on the whole, so well-instructed. (The Archbishop did say that there is “no evidence” the Magi existed, taking the usual Higher Critical approach to Scripture. Normally, if a written document attested to something, that WOULD be considered evidence, but the Bible, for some reason, is not allowed to count.)

But here is my real problem with the Archbishop:

Later on in the show, the Archbishop was challenged by fellow guest Ricky Gervais, the comedian, about the credibility of the Christmas story.

Gervais told Dr Williams he was concerned about “brainwashing” of children who are sent to faith schools at an early age, comparing teaching that God exists to belief in Father Christmas.

Dr Williams said faith schools expose children to the full range of human experience and values and he did not believe they indoctrinated people.

This doctor of theology, this head of the state church addressing his national flock, went along even with a comedian who equated belief in God with a belief in Santa Claus. The Archbishop had an opportunity and a forum to witness to the Christian faith, a chance to explain the doctrine of the Incarnation–which I suspect many Brits have never heard of–but he totally wimped out.

Anglicans of the world: Your problem is not that you have homosexual bishops. It is that you have bishops who deny the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and even sometimes the existence of God. You have bishops who are Druids and syncretists. You have bishops who want to conform to the world rather than teaching God’s Word. (I’m not saying the Archbishop of Canterbury is completely this way, though he is a Druid and is way too concerned about being accepted by Ricky Gervais.) It isn’t so much that Anglicans need heterosexual bishops; first of all, they need Christian bishops.

Confounding the anti-natalists we talked about recently, the fertility rate in the USA has reached 2.1 children per woman, which means that Americans are, at long last, replacing themselves.

This is good news, as other advanced industrial nations are struggling with low fertility rates that will have major bad economic consequences. Most of those countries are giving money to women who have babies and other benefits. The USA is doing nothing like that, but the higher fertility rate is taking place in all age groups and across all demographics. This is the first time the fertility rate has reached replacement level since the 1970s and the advent of birth control and legalized abortion. Read this article from USA Today. Excerpts:

The fertility rate among Americans has climbed to its highest level since 1971, setting the country apart from most industrialized nations that are struggling with low birthrates and aging populations.

The fertility rate hit 2.1 in 2006, according to preliminary estimates released by the National Center for Health Statistics. It’s a milestone: the first time since shortly after the baby boom ended that the nation has reached the rate of births needed for a generation to replace itself, an average 2.1 per woman.

“What matters is that the U.S. is probably one of very few industrialized countries that have a fertility rate close to or at replacement level,” says José Antonio Ortega, head of the fertility section at the United Nations’ Population Division.

A high fertility rate is important to industrialized nations. When birthrates are low, there are fewer people to fill jobs and support the elderly.

Fertility in the USA went up in every age group from 2005 to 2006, the biggest jump coming among those 20 to 24 years old. The U.S. population topped 300 million last year, and the Census Bureau projects growth to 400 million by around 2040.

Developed countries in Europe and Asia have launched several government initiatives to encourage more births, from financial bonuses and extended family leaves to subsidized child care.

The wide availability of birth control options and more career opportunities for women have caused fertility rates to hit low levels in Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany and Russia. France, renowned for its family friendly policies, remains the exception with a fertility rate of 2.

“What is paradoxical is that the U.S. doesn’t have those (family friendly) policies and it has higher fertility,” Ortega says.

Fertility experts say that economic prosperity, immigration and better job security for working mothers contribute to more births.

“We do know that birthrates ticked up quite a bit among the most affluent,” says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. “Kids are luxury goods, and some of this uptick may be stay-at-home moms.”

It also has become easier for women to negotiate leaves from work to stay home with their children. “Women now feel much more entitled and much more confident, especially as they’re getting more education,” Coontz says.

U.S. fertility hit its low of 1.7 in 1976 after the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s. Another factor: the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion.

“It’s not so much that abortion lowered the birthrate but abortion, coming on top of the birth control pill, really made it much more clear to women — and to men — that childbearing was a choice,” Coontz says.

You will notice that some people think of a big population as a liability (how will we feed so many? how will we get them jobs? what will they do to the environment?). Others see a nation’s population as its most important economic resource. Explain.