My Mother Made Me a Liberal Professor

It’s hardly news that the academy leans left, or that many conservatives believe liberal professors are biased against those who hold conservative political positions. Now there’s research offering new reasons for the liberal slant of professors: Liberals, and not conservatives, are the ones who want to become professors in the first place. Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, two sociologists who co-authored the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” use data taken from the General Social Survey of opinions and social behaviors to compare professors with the rest of Americans.

They conclude that jobs ranging from farmer and nurse to policeman and professor are typecast in different ways—according to gender, political leanings, etc. Because being a professor is one of those jobs that’s typecast as a job for liberals, young liberals frequently want to become professors while young conservatives only infrequently do. Moreover, the authors say, there are additional causes for why the academy attracts liberals and not conservatives:

“Nearly half of the political lopsidedness in academia can be traced to four characteristics that liberals in general, and professors in particular, share: advanced degrees; a nonconservative religious theology (which includes liberal Protestants and Jews, and the nonreligious); an expressed tolerance for controversial ideas; and a disparity between education and income.”

Although academic sociologists might want to hash out statistically the validity of the authors’ research and conclusions, the argument rings true to me, especially when it comes to the liberal characteristic of accepting a career “disparity between education and income.” You see, I grew up with parents who experienced and accepted just such a disparity. They endured the Depression, yet both managed to graduate from college. For all their college education, they ended up living in the same small home, in a very middle-middle-class neighborhood, for nearly fifty years. They made do with one car (until my mother got herself a little Volkswagen Beetle to drive to her job as an elementary school teacher), always a lower-echelon GM brand that they kept for ten years, an old TV set with Post-Impressionist reception, and furniture that had, as they say, seen better days.

My mother, in particular, inculcated my three sisters and me with mind-more-than-matter values. She was a Mortimer Adler “Great Books” woman—an eager player in that middlebrow culture of intellectual self-improvement that ended up so disparaged by later militantly leftist intellectuals. Although deeply conservative in the sense that she considered high culture as a valuable great thing-in-itself that was her responsibility to pass on to her daughters, she was neither politically progressive nor even particularly political while I was growing up. I’m certain she voted for Eisenhower.

For my mother, the trappings of wealth meant almost nothing. She taught school for 25 years, and she and my father let their daughters know, without harping on the matter, that money that could have been spent on a new Oldsmobile or a bigger house in a more enviable neighborhood was being diligently saved for our four college educations. The family car was always said to be “good enough to go another year.” Even underpants were always good enough to be passed down from my older sisters on to me. (When the elastic in the waistband finally gave out, my mother inserted a safety pin to keep them from falling down around our ankles). She bought the Encyclopedia Britannica on a payment plan, subscribed to a great books club, and occasionally, with great fanfare, splurged by taking her daughters to the opera or a museum in New York. My mother never had real jewels, or a cleaning lady, or an air conditioner. She purchased a clothes dryer late in life—and then only reluctantly—when trips to the clothesline fatigued her.

My mother knew that being educated was—outside of getting lucky with an invention or owning a store—the sine qua non for financial success. But “success” in the larger sense meant to her not material wealth, but rather material self-sufficiency on a modest enough level to leave time enough for one to plumb the culture.

It was no surprise to my mother that I became a professor. And a liberal.