Talk:Political views of American academics

Survey

• Include - This metric (and debate about its significance), is referenced in many sources for this topic, and especially in most modern studies. A prior RfC closed to include the view of the HERI director about this data, so it should be necessary to display to readers the data that she and other sources are talking about. Its not uncommon to see secondary sources include charts of this data (Washington Post, Heterodox Academy, Inside Higher Ed). The chart adds informative value to the article, as well as some visual interest to a topic that doesn't easily lend itself to such. -- Netoholic @ 18:43, 16 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Exclude. I strongly urge editors responding to this RfC to read the consensus of
  WP:DUE weight. The page already does report this shift over time and the discussions about it, in the text. It does give considerable space, and a lengthy direct quote, to Abrams. And it does cover the Heterodox Academy. It's not like the page does not cover the information in the graph. So, do we need a graph – the only graph on the page – to drive home what the text already says? Why this graph of data, and no others? All it does is give undue weight to data from a survey that is not even a survey about the political views of American academics. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:27, 16 July 2018 (UTC)[reply
  ]

It is absolutely nonsense all these

WP:ASPERSIONS. The graph is in no way SYNTH, as anyone could recreate it using the HERI data alone (SYNTH means to mix sources to present a a false conclusion). I don't understand the attacks on "think tanks", because as I said, this data comes from HERI itself. The additional references are to demonstrate the weight of this information and in particular that graphs/tables of this data are used by many academics and media about this topic. Trying to make this graph a left-vs-right thing is silly. If we're including a statement by the Director of HERI about these trends, and HERI is certainly not one of these think tanks you're going on about, then displaying the data she and others are referring often to is helpful to the reader. This IS a survey which asks about political beliefs (among many other things), and its a survey with a long history. Academic studies refer to this data, in both their text and using graphs, and so its absolutely appropriate for us to do the same. Its a visual aid, and in no way limits what other data graphs may be included in the future. -- Netoholic @ 21:40, 16 July 2018 (UTC)[reply

]

It might perhaps be better to discuss that in the discussion section below. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:01, 16 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Include. A picture is worth a thousand words. Or in this case, ten thousand. Maproom (talk) 06:35, 19 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Exclude – Unless we're including graphs for every study mentioned in the article (which would be a very bad idea). There's nothing special about the data in the proposed graph such that it deserves the added WP:WEIGHT of inclusion. Mojoworker (talk) 15:30, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  Not everything of course, but there could certainly be a case made for other data to be graphed if they are referenced in media, other scholarly papers and books on this topic. That is the "something special" about this set of HERI data - its probably the most repeated in so many other works. -- Netoholic @ 05:14, 21 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Exclude per Tryptofish. Doug Weller talk 18:24, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Exclude I honestly don't care too much either way, seeing that this graph can be interpreted as proof that reality has a leftist bias, rather than an indictment of academia, but the motive of the RFC proposer is obviously to imply that academia is some sort of echo chamber. The
  WP:REFBOMB that accompanies this screams "you doth protest too much" and also includes opinion articles that are critical of academia, despite the fact that you can't really draw any conclusions from this data as to why academia is overwhelmingly liberal/left leaning. Thus I think this inclusion would be less than neutral, and we should respect the precedent that was established in the RFC that Tryptofish cited. – FenixFeather ^{(talk)(Contribs)} 05:39, 21 July 2018 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• Looking at the picture a little closer, I want to add that I also agree that the chart is low quality resolution-wise and amateurish design-wise. It's extremely pixelated and the legend is needlessly numbered with letters. – FenixFeather ^{(talk)(Contribs)} 17:26, 21 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Exclude because of
  WP:DUE (and no, I don't want to see a ton of graphs appear on the page so that this one doesn't stand out!) and I concur with Tryptofish's observations. StarHOG (talk) 13:02, 23 July 2018 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Exclude per Tryptofish and
  WP:DUE. This doesn't add anything worthwhile that isn't already in the article; it only serves to give undue weight to one specific take on the subject. --Aquillion (talk) 01:35, 4 August 2018 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• include per
  MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE. This image obviously is relevant to the page and is an "important illustrative aid to understanding". It helps readers get a better understanding of the content.desmay (talk) 19:19, 4 August 2018 (UTC)[reply
  ]
• Exclude - Tryptofish is quite convincing. This chart alone is misleading and more charts would turn this into a research paper, not an article. UNDUE. O3000 (talk) 19:28, 4 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Threaded discussion

• One comment only I'll allow myself, for being the previous RfC's closer. Inclusion of graphs increases generally the value and the impact of information. Wikipedia welcomes editor-created graphs. (There's even a bunch of Wikipedia articles about how to create graphs for inclusion here.) However, when it comes to politics, graphs from secondary, independent, outside sources would be preferable to editor-created graphs. There's a practical reason for saying this and the reason is there are many problems inherent to graph creation, which, in a political context, can raise all sorts of objections and create distractions. Some hints: Why a pie instead of bars? Why X gets to be at the top of the stack and Z at the bottom instead of vice versa? Why choose these colors and not those other colors for each segment of the graph? Why present this timeline instead of that other timeline? Why use this scale instead of that other scale? Etc. Such objections have merit, since, as we already (should) know, the way polling data are gathered and presented can potentially, even unwittingly, be biased.

In so many words, no one can seriously dispute that the inclusion of graphs adds value and facilitates transmission of knowledge, but in a political context it's better to seek

sources for them. Of course, this is a non-binding viewpoint. -The Gnome (talk) 07:00, 17 July 2018 (UTC)[reply

]

As above, there are several sources that use graphs of this data, cut in a number of ways. For example, some group the far left/liberal and far right/conservative labels together. Some use lines charts (none use pie), others uses tabular format, etc. We can't directly use any graphs from a secondary source (from a copyright perspective), so in following those WP pages which give advice about editor-generated graphs, I created the chart using the data "as is", selecting a safe/simple color range supported by

election results pages). The data used for this chart itself isn't controversial, indeed the first Exclude vote above points out we mention some data points in text already. The chart is just for visual interest and to present current and past data together. Interpretation is left completely up to the reader. -- Netoholic @ 08:58, 17 July 2018 (UTC)[reply

]

I also want to add that, judged as an image for a Wikipedia page, the graph is of rather poor visual quality. It's not an uploaded file, but rather just made rather crudely in Wiki markup. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:34, 17 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• An editor cited
  MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE. I looked at it, and I do not think it really provides a rationale for including this image here. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:42, 4 August 2018 (UTC)[reply
  ]

After a few more days, I'm going to remove the templates from this page unless someone asks otherwise here in talk. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:07, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

About this: [3], here is what I can see in the source material about Summers and Buckley.

The source for Summers is: [4]. I take issue, in part, with this page saying "Summers disagreed on the interpretation of that data, particularly in terms of Gross and Simmons grouped their results by the degree of liberalism or conservatism." I don't find that in the source. Here is what the source actually says about it:

"In a day-long meeting, the findings were presented by the authors, Neil Gross, an assistant professor of sociology at Harvard, and Solon Simmons, an assistant professor of conflict analysis and sociology at George Mason University. While Gross and Simmons saw their findings on faculty moderation as particularly significant, they were challenged during the day on that conclusion. Lawrence H. Summers, the economist and former Harvard president, did his own cut on their numbers and said that his analysis pointed to a problematic liberal domination at elite research universities. Several other speakers also said that they were troubled by the extent of ideological lopsidedness that they saw in the analysis, and brainstormed about reasons for that imbalance."

A bit later, there is:

"In advance of the symposium, Summers ran some numbers from the study. He focused on elite graduate universities and on what he defined as core disciplines for undergraduate education (excluding health professions, for example). When conducting such an analysis, Summers said, he found "even less ideological diversity" than he thought he would, and that in the humanities and social sciences, Republicans are "the third group," after Democrats and Nader and other left-wing third parties."

That's not about how they interpreted the data or about how they grouped political affiliations. The source does not say that anywhere. "[T]hey were challenged during the day on" their conclusion that there had been some moderation over time, but the source does not say that Summers made that challenge. What the source actually says is that Summers simply ran his own analysis in which he focused on some teaching disciplines at some elite universities, and found a larger difference than what Gross and Simmons found in the data as a whole. And "a problematic liberal domination at elite research universities" is not a direct quote from Summers. Furthermore, I've added a more extensive treatment of Summers' concerns in the "On faculty" section of the page, so his concerns about that are well-covered here. The other speakers were not troubled by how the analysis was done, but by the "ideological lopsidedness" that the study revealed.

As for Buckley, I did Google Books searches for "secular ideology", "collectivist", and "Keynesian economics" within God and Man at Yale, and for "Buckley" in the Nash and Gross books that were cited for the passage about him. I could not find anything that matched the text here, although I recognize that this may be an artifact of the fact that Google Books does not provide the entire works. Therefore, I'm not convinced that there really is secondary commentary that truly justifies that content on this page, but I would be happy to consider anything from the sources that my searches didn't reveal. In any case, per this comment by another editor in one of the recent RfCs: [5], I think that there is a strong argument that the additional material about Buckley is undue weight: NPOV does not mean equal weight to all sides, just due weight, and Buckley certainly wasn't performing a systematic study of professorial political views. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:19, 9 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The previous text in the On Research section stated: "A 2020 study found no evidence that the political beliefs of scientists affected the replicability, quality or impact of their research." The source for this statement does not provide evidence for this claim as stated here:

"In a recent paper in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, we analyzed nearly 200 studies in psychology (which included over 1.3 million participants) to see if politics might have influenced the research. Each study in our analysis had been conducted by one group of scientists and replicated several years later by a different research team to see if they produced the same result—the gold standard of science."

The study only addresses the ability to reproduce the findings of previous studies and does not focus on the quality or impact of previous research. I updated the section with this text to more accurately reflect the findings of the study: A 2020 study found no evidence that the political beliefs of scientists affected the replicability of research in the field of Psychology.

I would also suggest that the actual study would make a better source than the article written about the study.

Also the current framing suggests that the study addressed "the political beliefs of scientists", but this is also not accurate. The studies' (there were 2 included in the published research) methodologies used volunteers to score abstracts of various Psychology studies on a scale to represent their "liberalness" or "conservativeness" (my words). The study did not take into account the political beliefs of the researchers who conducted the study.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.166.140.195 (talk) 22:12, 6 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at the source, the words "the replicability, quality or impact of their research" are a verbatim quote from the source. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:55, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That's fair. However, the research does not take into account the scientists' political attitudes, only the perceived political slant of the findings based on scores assigned by study volunteers. I've updated the language to make this point more clear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.166.140.195 (talk) 21:10, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I like the updated wording, thanks Tryptofish! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.166.140.195 (talk) 23:01, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Good! --Tryptofish (talk) 23:08, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

On New Years Eve, I added

Ellis, John (2021). The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done. Encounter. ISBN 978-1641770880.

to the Further Reading list. It was promptly reverted. The reason given was that it is Not a particularly notable author or work, and the subject matter is particularly POV. First endorsement is from a libertarian think tank as well. The list contains older works by the journalists David Horowitz and Ben Shapiro. Ellis' book makes essentially the same arguments that they do (colleges are increasingly sacrificing academic standards in favor of political indoctrination), but with updated examples, and from the viewpoint of a career academic who rose to be dean of the graduate division at the University of California (Santa Cruz). As an author, he is about as notable and POV as most of the authors in the list. The fact that the book is praised by a libertarian think tank is no reason to ban it from the list. Perhaps the solution is to let the Ellis book replace the Horowitz and Shapiro books in the list.Vgy7ujm (talk) 05:25, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]