LEFT OR RIGHT: THE AMAZING DECLINE OF HUMANITIES COLLEGE PUBLISH OR PERISH

There are two reasons why liberalism -- as described above -- is directly expedient to a professor's career. First, universities in the United States depend on government funding at least in the form of Pell grants. Democrats tend to expand such programs, and so professors support Democrats.Second, universities run on the publish-or-perish system. This leaves two basic career strategies for professors. The first is to make a discovery, such as "bees' wings are pieces of skin." The other is where groupthink comes in -- to say the exact same thing as someone else did about a slightly different situation, for example, "wasps' wings are made of skin."The vast majority of academic writing falls into the second category and is often not worth the paper it is written on. But much of what falls in the first category -- the breakthrough research in social sciences, even in such disciplines as gender studies -- has been conservative. Even the pretense of liberalism is swiftly being swept away by the increased desperation of tenure candidates for ever-shrinking spots and by the increasing amount of research that is paid for by corporations instead of the government.

L.A. Times
June 13 2008