Posted by Jay Livingston
Conservatives have been whining about universities for quite a while now, complaining about political correctness and liberal bias. They do seem awfully greedy, those conservatives. They control just about everything, and they're still not happy. As Rick Hertzberg (or was it Todd Gitlin?) said a few years ago, the conservatives get both houses of Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court . . . and we get a handful of campuses.
The public apparently did not share the conservatives’ dismay about academia. Each year the Harris Poll asks people how much confidence they have in the people who run the major institutions in the country. Here are some of the results.
The Presidency and the Court, much beloved of conservatives in the Bush years, suffered a steep decline in that period. Even the military lost a third of its very confident supporters in a 5-year period (Iraq? Gitmo? Abu Gharaib?).
Meanwhile, we politically correct academics have held our own. We are now looked upon more with more confidence than the White House, the Court, organized religion, and big business (along with several obvious also-rans not shown here, like Congress, Wall Street, TV news, etc.)
2 comments:
Perhaps Comte had the right idea after all. Once academia is the only institution garnering any confidence, we will be ready to take over! Wrest control from the government!
Of the institutions listed by Harris, only the Military and Small Business were ahead of Academia this time around, but they were far ahead. Even Medicine had slipped to a mere 28%, down from its once lofty 44%.
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