In short, self selection. I.e., once a profession (particularly one with such high entrance barriers as the academy, though the authors don't emphasize this point) develops both a reputation for and an internal institutional culture around a particular political orientation, individuals self-select into that profession (and, surely, so some extent the incumbents select candidates, though again the authors minimize this for no apparent reason) so as to reproduce the political orientation. Oh, and by the way, this article gives almost no positive evidence for this hypothesis, but instead do a statistical analysis that shows that other hypothesized explanatory factors are ok but not great predictors.
So, basically, it boils down to this: "There's been a lot of writing on this topic over the years, and all the theories advanced have had poor empirical basis or don't really resolve the question. We demonstrate this once again with great thoroughness and then offer our own speculation on the question." One way this is annoying is in the sense of, "This shit got published in Theory and Society?"
But the deeper annoying part is that not only do they not offer evidence for their "theory," they don't even actually offer an answer to the question but instead merely move it back in time: Why are professors liberal (i.e. left-of-center) in opinion polls? Because left-of-center types were more likely than others to become professors in 20th c America. So, why were left-of-center types more likely than others to become professors in 20th c America? Who knows? They give this question exactly one paragraph in a 40-page article:
How might the American professoriate have acquired its reputation for liberalism, becoming politically typed? This is a complex historical question tied to a variety of macro- and meso-level developments that we do not have space to broach, but we argue that the answer has much to do with “public dramas” (Gusfield 1984) over secularization and academic freedom that accompanied the birth of the American research university and that reflected on the ground processes by which long-term dynamics such as institutional differentiation played themselves out (Parsons and Platt 1973); with the diffusion to the United States of social-critical notions of intellectualism that had their origins in Dreyfus-era France (Eyerman 1994); with the fact that higher education was a crucial micromobilization context for a number of left social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which further enhanced the institution’s liberal reputation; with concerted cultural efforts by American conservatives, especially from the 1950s on, to build a collective identity for their movement around differentiation from various categories of “liberal elites,” not least liberal professors; with restricted opportunities for Americans on the far left to enter other institutional spheres; and with self-reinforcing processes by which self-selection into the academic profession by liberals resulted in a more liberal professoriate whose reputation for liberalism was thereby maintained or enhanced.These are all vaguely plausible, but half of them beg the question of where the initial reputation for left-liberalism came from and the other half seem to suggest a return to the very universalistic explanations (about the critical outlook, secularism, etc, of intellectuals) that the authors rejected to get here in the first place.
In the end, it's plainly obvious the authors completely lack even a rudimentary theory of political formation: what are the origins of competing political viewpoints in society, and what determines the distribution of individuals among them? Instead, their "explanation" of professorial left-liberalism goes back only to the prior facts that there were such things as leftism, left-liberalism, and conservatism, which happened to play out in practice such that the 1st two were much more common in the academy than the 3rd, which instead took to using the academy as a rhetorical punching bag from the 1950s at the latest.
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