Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education

Notes

227 Notes Chapter 1 1 Of course, one can be both a drug addict and a professor. But I suggest that a person’s actions as a professor likely add more positive social good than one’s actions as a drug addict. 2 Obviously, individuals with little or no religious faith are going to be less likely to value the importance of maintaining a religious culture. However, they may have other social or political cultural aspects they desire to be maintained in their family. One can easily conceptualize a politically progressive atheist who becomes just as upset at his or her child marrying a devotee of Rush Limbaugh as the person of faith becomes with a child marrying a nonbeliever. 3 For example, work based on the authoritarian personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950) indicated that political conservatives and the highly religious are less tolerant. However, this work has generally used members of progressive social groups as potential targets of such prejudice. Thus measures of right-wing authoritarianism (Altermeyer, 1968) indicate potential hostility against atheists, feminists, and homosexuals, but not against fundamentalists , Republicans, and hunters. In such research potential progressive bias against conservative social groups may not be captured. 4 Some academics freely admit that their conclusions are shaped by their own personal biases. This can be seen in postmodern academic literature (Lyotard, 1984; Rorty, 1994; Seidman & Wagner, 1992) 228 || notes to pp. 14–30 that acknowledges the social and political biases of researchers and removes the “burden” of attempting to be objective. 5 It should also be noted that this anthropologist has a natural incentive not to find evidence of such bias. Evidence of bias would cast doubt on the research of anthropology in general, which could result in a loss of prestige for the anthropologist. Likewise scientists who construct measurements for detecting bias within their field, or even in science in general, possess motivation to find no bias in the field. It is unlikely that such scientists would overtly distort findings, but it is not unreasonable to assert that such individuals may be less able to construct adequate measures for assessing bias due to their own belief in the value of science. 6 A future study ideally would conduct in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of several disciplines as a logical extension of this work. However, the strength of the quantitative findings of the disciplines examined in this work indicates that there is little chance that including more respondents or qualitative assessments of scholars other than sociologists will produce results distinct from these current findings. Nevertheless, such an analysis may be useful in illustrating the process by which social biases develop among academics and the degree of those biases in different types of academic disciplines. 7 The term fundamentalist throughout will refer to a particular type of Protestant Christian that originated in the early twentieth century. 8 I discovered in my dissertation (1994) that individuals from the South and from lower socioeconomic status are underrepresented among sociologists. Chapter 2 1 In fact, sociology has been called a multiparadigmal discipline because of the competing paradigms that reside within it. 2 That is, if objective reality is something that truly exists. Theories of postmodernism contend that objective reality is a myth in and of itself. I tend to resist such reasoning because I find no need for scientific work if there is not a reality out there that needs to be discovered. 3 It has been argued that the Catholic hierarchy was less upset about the claims Galileo made and more concerned with his unwillingness to admit to the weaknesses of his claims (Woods, 2005). Such an argument may put the Catholic church in a little better light, but it does not detract from my general contention that the Catholic church was restrictive to certain forms of scientific inquiry. This historical event notes to pp. 44–57 || 229 still serves as an illustration of early conflict between science and Christianity. 4 This is not to state that groups that do have small numbers of highly educated individuals should be excluded. The Hmong tend to have lower levels of educational attainment, but no one seriously believes that they should be excluded from participation in science. Members of this ethnic group that do obtain the necessary levels of education should be allowed to engage in scientific inquiry. It is only if a group is inherently defined by having lower...