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Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University 1st Edition
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expressed culturally conservative views. Despite real challenges, the many successful professors interviewed by Shields and Dunn show that conservatives can survive and sometimes thrive in one of America's most progressive professions. And this means that liberals and conservatives need to rethink the place of conservatives in academia. Liberals should take the high road by becoming more principled advocates of diversity, especially since conservative professors are rarely close-minded or combatants in a right-wing war against the university. Movement conservatives, meanwhile, should de-escalate its polemical war against the university, especially since it inadvertently helps cement progressives' troubled rule over academia.
- ISBN-100199863059
- ISBN-13978-0199863051
- Edition1st
- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication dateMarch 31, 2016
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions9.4 x 1 x 6.3 inches
- Print length256 pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Jon Shields and Josh Dunn have produced our first reliable study of academic conservatives, who have found a more comfortable home at the university than many of us imagined. But they remain a slender minority, especially in the humanities and social sciences, which makes the academy a less educational place for all of us. I hope that this careful and eloquent book reminds my fellow liberals about the vital role that conservative professors can play in academic life, if we can open our minds to them."
--Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of Education and History, New York University
"Technological revolutions, acute financial pressures, and deep cultural shifts undermining the traditional humanistic curriculum are forcing a profound rethinking and restructuring of American higher education today, about which the professoriate at its epicenter sometimes seems the least perceptive and prepared. In the midst of this protracted upheaval, Passing on the Right raises the difficult question of political ideology and its implications for academia's mission. It will only help higher education and the society that sustains it if this book is widely read and debated."
--Christian Smith, Wm. R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology, University of Notre Dame
"Why have most of the humanities and social sciences become political monocultures? Shields and Dunn have written the authoritative treatise, integrating all previous work in an accessible and fair-minded way, and adding in empathy - the rarely heard voices of conservative professors. All academics should read this book, as should anyone who wants to improve the scholarship, prestige, and public funding of the academy."
--Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
"Passing on the Right, although written by two self-described academic conservatives, rejects some common conservative critiques of academia-for example, that it is not hospitable to conservative professors, and that liberal professors are engaging in widespread ideological indoctrination of their students. On the other hand, the book marshals evidence and arguments that increasing the now very small numbers of conservative faculty members in the humanities and social sciences would enrich teaching and scholarship for everyone in the university community, and also benefit society at large. It challenges the champions of diversity to appreciate the important contributions that conservative faculty members-academia's least celebrated minority-can make to a truly liberal education."
--Nadine Strossen, Former President of the American Civil Liberties Union
"Robust and uninhibited intellectual inquiry should be at the center of the American Academy. As a revolutionary Christian I welcome more intense dialogue with my conservative brothers and sisters. This brave book helps us move toward this Socratic condition!"
--Cornel West
"I found this book subtle and thought-provoking throughout." --Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
"Passing on the Right actually manages to be one of the most optimistic books on American higher education by conservative authors in recent memory." --The American Interest
"The interviews and supplementary survey on which the book is based yielded findings that are not only interesting, but vital to understanding the environments in which college students learn - and in which their own political identities are shaped."-- Inside Higher Ed
"[Shields and Dunn] have produced a clear-eyed and rational discussion of modern academia that steers clear of polemics and challenges the dogmas of both the left and the right. . . . [They] make a strong case for the importance of conservative voices in modern academia and for why conservatives should not abandon the field of higher education to the progressive left." --The Weekly Standard
"Passing on the Right does, in fact, venture into great detail to paint this portrait, sharing numerous interviews with anonymous conservative professors and providing research regarding the plight of the right-wing academic...This combination of empirical and anecdotal data provides an inside look on what it's really like to be a conservative professor--does holding such an identity mean facing discrimination and losing friends or does it mean being highly successful?
Shields and Dunn contend that the answer is both."
--Amber Athey, Campus Reform
About the Author
Jon A. Shields is Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Claremont McKenna College.
Joshua M. Dunn Sr. is Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.
Product details
- Publisher : Oxford University Press; 1st edition (March 31, 2016)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0199863059
- ISBN-13 : 978-0199863051
- Item Weight : 1.04 pounds
- Dimensions : 9.4 x 1 x 6.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,414,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #293 in Educational Philosophy
- #346 in Political Ideologies
- #2,054 in Philosophy & Social Aspects of Education
- Customer Reviews:
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Jon A. Shields is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. His most recent book is Trump's Democrats, co-authored with Stephanie Muravchik. His writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
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11-02-2017: I have all the wrong views.
The academic Criminology profession is overwhelmingly Democratic/Marxist, materialist, macro=sociological, and biased against those who recognize free will, religion, conservative or Republican views or affiliations, or biosocial causes. All of the authors below note that the social science departments are overwhelmingly Left or Democratic, and exclude those who are not. There are many books and articles supporting these assertions, and some are given below.
Those biases are against:
Conservatives/Republicans: Conservatives/Republicans today believe in personal responsibility, while liberals, Leftists, Democrats, Marxists, and the like blame poverty, location, race, society, class, white supremacy, Western civilization, and search for “root causes” for crime, rather than the actual people who commit crimes.
Wright, J.P., & DeLisi, M. (2016). Conservative Criminology. New York: Routledge
DeLisi, M., & Wright, JP. (2017). What criminologists don’t say and why. Summer 2017. City
Journal, Manhattan Institute
Shields, J.A., & Dunn, J.M. (2016). Passing on the Right: Conservatives professors in the
progressive university. Oxford University Press.
Religious believers:
Johnson, B. (2011). More God, less crime. West Conshohocken, PA.: Templeton Press. This excellent book warns academics to conceal their religion until they obtain tenure, or to despair of ever getting it.
Bio-sociologists:
DeLisi, M., & Beaver, K. (2014). (Editors). Criminological theory: A Life-course approach. (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. A strongly biosocial approach: Three chapters by DeLisi &/or Beaver (et al): (7) The heritability of common risk and protective factors to crime and delinquency; (15) Gangs and anti-social behavior: A critique and reformulation; (21) Never-desisters: a descriptive study of the life-course persistent offender. It is noted, e.g., that gangs are loosely formed, in part because criminals are defective in those qualities which make for good organizations. The introduction notes the academic bias against theories grounded in biology, in part because fear of racial findings, and that those who pursue this area risk a kiss of death to their academic careers.
Look also at the response to Herrnstein and Wilson’s On Human Nature, and Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve, or to Moynihan on The Negro Family. There is a strong PC and Academic taboo on exploring possible genetic differences even though no serious observer doubts that biology and genetics contributes to human behavior..
Micro-sociologists: Micro-sociologists are aware of the influences of biology/genetics, parents, peers, and society, which contribute to pre-dispositions and risks, but believe that criminals make their own decisions.
Actual criminal justice practitioners: People who are actual lawyers, prosecutors, police offices, corrections officials know criminals, and that they are persons who commit crimes out of selfishness and disregard for others, out of free will. The Anglo-American legal system is based on free will and responsibility, whereas academic and “scientists” believe in materialism and that all actions are “caused” by “root causes” such as class, poverty, location, race, oppression, white supremacy, capitalism, the West, America, and so on.
Other references
Blecker, R. (2013). The death of punishment. Searching for justice among the worst
of the worst. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Liberal rejection not only of the death penalty,
but also of any punishment besides deprivation of liberty.
Herrstein, & Murray, C. (1994). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and class structure in American
Life. There is an entire literature of response to this book, much of it based on straw men and false assertions of what the authors stated. They addressed a taboo, looking at possible genetic differences, which aroused a huge antipathetic response.
"If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate."
MacIntyre, A. (2006). After virtue. A study in moral theory. (3rd Ed.). Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press. Especially Chapter 8: The character of generalizations
in social science and their lack of predictive power.
MacIntyre (1987). Whose justice? Whose rationality? University of Notre Dame Press.
Wilson, J.Q. and Herrnstein, R. (1998). Crime and human nature. The definitive study of the
causes of crime. New York: The Free Press.
Although the book is carried out much like a study, it’s more interesting because of the interviews that are done with various professors throughout. While their identities are obfuscated, i.e., "A professor at a mid-western liberal arts college stated …", we get to hear an unfiltered (though always articulate) view from over one hundred different people. Some tell very personal stories, which are interesting. Some feel compelled to closely guard their political views from their coworkers, fearful of losing research funding, while others take no real issue with the contrasting political views of their peers.
In addition the candid interviews, the book spends a lot of time on aggregate metrics, retrieved from sending out surveys to many different professors. Naturally, this leads the book to spend some time untangling the "Right" as several separate groups ('fiscal hawks', 'social conservatives', 'libertarians', etc), whose opinions are views are sometimes quite antithetical to each other.
The premise of the book is a simple one, but the study that ensures is broad, spanning philosophy, politics and statistics. I think the author does a great job leading an interesting discussion, and that it’s one that everyone should find engaging.






