Ask Lemmy

IMO:There are 3 type of "right wingers":

• The sheeps (the majority about 90%) they are less educated, easy to manipulate & very reactionary.
• The shepherds (the minority about 1%) they are highly educated, come from generational wealth & want to defend & multiply their wealth by influenving the sheeps.
• The sheep dogs (about 9%) they are highly educated & very oportunistic. They don't come from wealth and dream of wealth. Their only goal in life is to be shepherds one day. (Most likely they won't achieve it maybe one will make it to be uaed a champion that it's possible) but they will do everything to achieve it and thus work overtime for the shepherds & influence the sheeps as much aa poaaible.

So yeah, about 10% of the right wingers are educated. The majority still is less educazed and easy to manipulatw.

I know a right wing guy who has a PhD, speaks 5 different languages and is an immigrant. He says that you can tell which immigrants are terrorists by just looking at them and everyone who looks like that should be arrested.

I know another right wing guy who has a PhD in Informatics and owns 20 houses in Amsterdam. He doesn't see the problem. People can just move somewhere else.

Both of them don't just have PhDs, they work as academics, one in Berlin the other in Amsterdam.

Go to any school of economics, comp sci faculty, school of business and dare i say biology and you'll find a lot of em. They tend to be less vocal. Historians too.

They exist, but the problem is reality has a liberal bias and academics tend to follow the evidence.

Certainly it's not none, but there's a trend where college educated people tend towards leftist ideals purely because they're exposed to more ideas, more people, more things, and that tends to lead to broader acceptance, which is, unfortunately, a polarizing thing. Many right-wing points are grounded in xenophobia, racism and an 'us vs. them' mentality, and it's harder to hold those ideals when folks are put into situations where they have to actually interact with and get to know the people they're "against", rather than them just being faceless boogie men to be feared and hated.

Current STEM researcher who also happened to have met a few academics on the right side of the political spectrum... I am very qualified to speak about this I hope. I'll try to use as unbiased language as possible

First of all, you are correct. It is generally true that most academics are left-leaning (obligatory not all, but you get the point)

In general, higher education attainment is associated with being left-leaning: academia is known to have extreme levels of education attainment (many jobs require a PhD). On top of it, academic jobs reward intellectual curiosity, do not tend to pay super well, tend to heavily rely on governmental funding... all of these are traditionally more associated with the political left or left-leaning. Still, there very much are right-leaning academics, they just don't tend to scream around a lot about it

There are notable exceptions however. Economics is quite famous for being politically balanced, although what economics treat as left/right-leaning might be a bit different from the general public. If I remember, business schools (yes there are business professors!) tend to be more right-leaning. This is a smaller field and a bit more anecdotal, but quite a few prominent meta-science researchers are right-wing nutjobs: the "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" guy and the NIH director Bhattacharya guy are both COVID deniers

There are also fringe scientists as some others have mentioned, but most people within their fields don't consider fringe scientists as part of the academia so to speak

Being an academic means being open minded because when researching something, the outcome may be different from what you expected. In such cases do you concede that your initial theory was wrong or do you stubbornly continue to believe that you were right and keep trying to prove yourself correct?

You can find stats showing that support for the Conservatives falls in Canada as education rises. So depending on region and definition, it's not just you.

That being said, that doesn't mean there are zero. Jordan Peterson as a famous example.

No, plenty of scientists and a disturbing number of physician scientists are GOP voters. They tend to be the ones who sleep with their trainees and cheat on their spouses. They don't think sexual harassment is a real thing and don't understand why women complain about anything. They occasionally get fired for their behavior but get hired elsewhere because they can find like-minded individuals who couldn't care less about sexual misconduct at work. Recently there was a lot of noise about hiring a physician scientist and he was just about to start when people started pointing out that he was fired from his last job for surreptitiously filming the women's locker room and bathroom.

There are plenty of right wing academics but they are a minority. It probably varies by field too. In the core sciences that minority is probably the smallest and is greater in the humanities. My professor was a right wing scientist and we often clashed on values. I felt sorry for him at times because it would be his point of view Vs the entire research group. He is fundamentally a good person that can hold illogical and contradictory opinions that felt like they were emotionally based.

Perhaps Jordan Peterson can give you some tips about where to find rabid right-wing lunatics in academia.

That's the thing about right-wing populism. It relies on primitive instincts. It's a baseline. It requires no effort.

Rich people are smarter, otherwise they wouln't be rich. No don't tax them, they worked so much harder than anyone else to get there! Taxing them will only punish the imaginative and the resourceful, while incentivising the lazy and the worthless. I blame the immigrants because they work harder and for less money, and it's their fault that I also have to work harder for less! We need one more lane, that would relieve the traffic so much!

These takes always seem super OBVIOUS at first, and if you never bother revising them - you'll just be stuck with them. The longer you live with them, the firmer you'll latch onto them.

That's why it's so crucial for the rightwingers to dismantle the education system. They need you to be ignorant. Take things face-value.

There are fewer right-wingers in academia, and they tend to work at schools with right-wing orientations. Turns out reality has a liberal bias.

There are, but they often kicked out of academia pretty quickly because academic universties dont want to be associated with these people because it discredits the Universities reputation, by providing pseudoscientific beliefs.

J peterson, recently SABINE from youtube, you dint mentioned failed academics too, MDs like she claims she was "ousted from academia in germany, because shes a women" but it was actually are far right views(funded by friends of thiel), and then another one that claims " being a POC played a part why they are not "smart" enough for certian jobs, because they have tendancy towards not being intelligent.

so these people become "influencers" for the far right. when i was in CC, one of my gen bio prof told us that she had a student that was christian, and she was only giving answers on HW/tests as "GOD did it". nevertheless, they had to drop out of COLLEGE.

if there was, they would have to constantly challenge the research, studies out there in academia that contradicts them. theres no way they stay in academia, and thier "own" research is based entirely on assumptions and outdated research.

I'm sure there are some academics who are right wing and some uneducated people who are left wing. But for the most part it is generally true that academics are more likely to be left wing. To put it rudely, stupid people generally believe right wing talking points. Right wing worldview is full of contradictions an uneducated beliefs. People who are curious and bother to educate themselves about the issues are generally more likely to be left wing. Than again, I am left wing so of course I'm going to be biased towards believing left wing views are smart

It depends on the source of academia.

There are a lot of sources beyond universities that do research, including various public policy research institutes or think tanks. They have a spectrum of different ideologies, but a lot of them tend to go more conservative as a lot of them rely on private funding and rich people like having studies which back up their views. If you're a leftist and need a patron to find your research, it is more likely you're going to find a government patron than a private patron. If you're a conservative, you'll probably find more money in private organizations to perform your research.

There are a whole string of rightwing colleges created so they don't have to listen to liberals and their science. (sorry for the formatting mess)

University Founder / Affiliation Founded

Liberty University Jerry Falwell 1971

Regent University Pat Robertson 1977

Bob Jones University Bob Jones Sr. 1927

Cedarville University Baptist (Ohio) 1887

Biola University Christian Churches 1908

Harding University Churches of Christ 1925

Maranatha Baptist University Fundamental Baptist 1943

Samford University Southern Baptist 1901

North Greenville University Baptist 1924

Grove City College Baptist 1930

Brigham Young University LDS Church 1875

Trinity University Baptist 1840

Oral Roberts University Oral Roberts (Pentecostal) 1963

Texas Christian University Methodist 1873

Wheaton College Christian (evangelical) 1860

Reality has a left wing bias. They exist though and they're infuriating.

Depends on what you call "academics". If you mistake phrase shifter courses like "business administration", "politics", or "law" as academic, then yes.

Depending on how you define "academic"

There are certainly people who can get doctorates while still being right wing, those are the ones that get paid a lot of money to tell poor people to stop complaining about being poor.

If you want right-wing academics, look at Economics (eg. Milton Friedman School), Classics, History, and CS. Not that any of those fields are dominated by the right, but there are pockets of them in those fields still.

There are far more conservatives in academia than actual leftists. And there are more liberals in academia than both groups combined. See Catherine Liu for an example of an actual leftist in academia who speaks on this dynamic.

It depends on the country, but there's a self-preservation aspect to academics leaning left. In the USA especially but not exclusively a major right-wing policy point has been defunding academia and publicly-funded research in general. Unless you're in a field that can reliably pull private funding, such as some branches of the oft-mentioned economics, voting and sharing right-wing talking points carries a major risk of getting your funding cut and leaving you without a job.

In academia you are trained to not accept any claim without adequate evidence. Look at left wing claims vs. right wing ones and show me one that has better evidence on the right.

They are fewer than those who lean left but they are there. And typically they tend more toward moderation that extremism. Quintessentially, they're moderate to liberal conservatives. Often times you'll find them more in business and economics related fields.

The main reason being that exposure typically gets a person to come out of their highly conservative nature and education as well to better understand how the world operates. It's not a 100% thing as there are occasional reactionaries in positions of scientific note but they're few.

There are many conservative universities and colleges in the US and all of the ones I know about are heavily tied to some religion.

• Liberty University is right wing as fuck and was founded by Jerry Fallwell. It was originally called Lynchburg Baptist university.
• Baylor is a right wing Baptist University
• Brigham Young University is right wing and part of the Mormon Church
• I suspect that other than the US Coast Guard Academy all Military academies and universities in the US are Right Wing as Fuck.

At Uni i sometimes wished for a rightwing person just to debate things. Everyone agreed on most issues,so there we're rarely spicy debates.