Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
A Freak in the Sheets
Divergent life choices may explain the dearth of right-wing scholars
Matthew Woessner and wife April Kelly-Woessner did some research about liberal and conservative differences in higher education. The results are not surprising in the least but interesting nonetheless.
“The idea that professors are liberal has been known since the 50s,” says Solon J. Simmons, an assistant professor of conflict analysis and sociology at George Mason University, whose own recent study found that 90 percent of professors called themselves liberal or moderate. “But the Woessners actually have something new here. I think they are some of the first to do this kind of work.”
The Woessners have peered into the psyche of conservative undergraduates to find out why so few of them want to earn Ph.D.’s and become professors. Their paper on the topic, “Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don’t Get Doctorates,” is available online and will be published as part of a book published in August by the American Enterprise Institute.
Their union, however, is somewhat surprising:
In fact, Mr. Woessner gets along so well with Democrats that he married one. Ms. Kelly-Woessner teaches a course on women and politics, among others, at Elizabethtown College. She and Mr. Woessner didn’t like each other at all when they first met at Ohio State. She even once told her future husband that she could never date a conservative. So when the couple announced their engagement, the director of their graduate program at Ohio State was stunned.
“They really were opposites,” says Herbert F. Weisberg, chairman of the political-science department at Ohio State. “They were always debating each other.”
The best thing about their research is the psychological stance they took on the subject matter, accounting for why the differences matter in the long run.
Instead the Woessners looked at differences in interests and personality. They found that in a variety of ways, conservative students were less interested than liberals in subject matter that often leads to doctoral degrees, and less interested in doing the kinds of things that professors spend their time doing.
For example, liberal students reported valuing intellectual freedom, creativity, and the chance to write original work and make a theoretical contribution to science. They outnumbered conservative students two to one in the humanities and social sciences — which are among the fields most likely to produce interest in doctoral study. Conservative students, however, put more value on personal achievement and orderliness, and on practical professions, like accounting and computer science, that could earn them lots of money.
Tags: Matthew Woessner, April Kelly-Woessner, higher education
