If this is what passes for insightful commentary at the University of South Alabama, I feel sorry for the professors who have to read it all day long.

Do education and this alleged overabundance of brainpower compel one to take on the liberal viewpoint? I don’t think so. Contrary to popular belief, there are many intelligent conservative professors. However, they appear to gravitate toward the business sector, or more specifically the real world. Conservatives are practical.

Traditionally, they emphasize what works. Liberals are theoretical. They dwell on what ought to work. A shining example is the liberal spiel about achieving peace.

‘If only we could just talk out our differences in a peaceful setting.’ Does this sound familiar? Yes, it would be great to reach a utopia through extensive dialogue at a tea party, but conservatives know better. This is practicality vs. theory.

I am not charging that conservatives have no interest in becoming professors. I’m sure we’ve all had one or two. However, they seem to be concentrated in economics and hard sciences.

By contrast, liberals prefer such fields as literary criticism or sociology. Here, their theoretical approaches never have to meet the test of reality. Perhaps there is a second reason that better explains why professors, as a group, tend to lean to the left.

Speaking from first-hand observation, they have an ingrained hostility toward capitalism. On more than one occasion I’ve witnessed the turn to Marxism as a tool for expressing this hatred. So, why do so many professors hate capitalism?

I would be willing to wager that this “ingrained hostility toward capitalism” is not so much ingrained as it is insight from experience. Unchecked capitalism is not a desirable end for America and it is by no means what we have had in place for most of the country’s existence. Government plays a role in ensuring the Enrons and Worldcoms of the world are not allowed to run roughshod over the rest of us.

I do not doubt that as a group college professors are more liberal than the general population, but what the writer seems to dismiss out-of-hand is that, in general, the better educated tend to be more liberal. They are both facts. You can’t just dismiss one and accept the other. I also love that the writer gets a pot-shot off at the end about the “liberal indoctrination” by the mainstream media that has nothing to do with anything she had written up to that point. Very poor writing and an even worse argument.

**UPDATE: Submitted to OTB’s Beltway Traffic Jam

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