Why don't more conservatives go to university?

Why are most university professors liberal? Two academics, Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, have done a study that suggests that most conservatives simply aren't interested in the sorts of things that attract people to academic careers. Matthew Woessner himself is an interesting counter-example: he's a fan of Fox New, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh and usually votes Republican, and unlike most of the conservative students he has studied, has a deep interest in the scientific method. (Although he clearly doesn't apply it to Fox, Giuliani or Limbaugh...)

The Agonist has this to say:

What do you do when there are not enough laissez-fare loving, personal responsibility professing and family values fundies at your university? You make it more socialist:

The research led the Woessners to conclude that if higher education wants to attract more conservatives to the professoriate, it should smooth the way financially, offering subsidized health insurance and housing for graduate students

I've often thought that conservative politics simply meant "handouts for me, not for thee".

Read more here.

Plagiarism redux

Some time ago, I wrote about the ever-increasing extension of the term "plagiarism" to cover more and more behaviour, at least in the academic world. I just came across another example of this. Victoria University advises its English Lit students what to do if they discover that somebody else has already written about an idea they've had:

Your approach will never be precisely the same as the writer who has so irritatingly come up with the same idea, so you can stress the differences and acknowledge the other writer appropriately in your citations. Failure to do so constitutes a form of plagiarism, even if you honestly arrived at your conclusions independently.

No longer is plagiarism the deliberate attempt to pass off another person's work as your own. Now, according to macademia ("May Contain Nuts"), plagiarism can be the failure to cite works which had no influence on you because you didn't learn about them until after you developed your ideas.

In my opinion, the academic rules against plagiarism are less about preventing fraud and more about creating an insular in-group with rules of behaviour that outsiders simply don't understand. To outsiders, fraud has to be fraudulent to be fraud, and failing to say "by the way, this other guy had a similar idea, but it's different from mine" might be impolite and even incautious (in case others discover that work and wrongly imagine you copied it), but it isn't fraud in and of itself. But to macademics, such a failure to mention an irrelevancy is itself fraud.

If your mind boggles, its supposed to. It is no surprise that it is liberal arts departments that are prone to "scope-creep" of plagiarism and the application of other arbitrary rules. Like the rituals and secret handshakes of Freemasons, such practices are there to separate those who have passed the initiation from those who are merely smart and educated.

Plagarism insanity

Professor Steven Dutch of the University of Wisconsin discusses plagarism in the academic world:

From a page by the University of Phoenix, 2002 called Avoiding Plagiarism:
Citation, http://occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/long_longman_uoplezap_1/medialib/ap/apapa/media/d3_bot.htm,
accessed August 1, 2005.

Example of plagiarism:

Carl Sagan (1979) describes science as a means of critically examining the world around us in which both sensory perceptions and even common sense may deceive us. As he states in Broca's Brain, "Our intuition is by no means an infallible guide." The scientist must question his own preconceptions to discover truth through actual and repeated experimentation.

What's wrong? Page number citiation (sic) is missing.

Yes you read that correctly. They said that failing to include a page reference, even if you cite the source, is plagiarism. What we have here is a total collapse of critical reasoning.

Read the rest here, and more here. Professor Dutch has many interesting essays here -- and by interesting I don't mean I necessarily agree with all of them.