Conservative Donnybrook

A recent study suggests that conservatives are not attracted to the courses of study which lead to the professoriate.

Mr. Maranto asked the Woessners to contribute a chapter to his book on why conservatives don’t pursue doctorates. Typically, he says, there are a few answers to the question. Liberals say conservatives want to make more money than professors earn, while conservatives argue that they get less encouragement from professors than liberal students do. What the Woessners found, though, is that those are not the only reasons. They looked at a 2004 survey of 15,569 college seniors completed by the University of California at Los Angeles’s Higher Education Research Institute. That research showed that while liberal students were more likely than conservative students to have contact with professors outside the classroom and to do research with them, the difference was not enough to explain why so many more liberal students wanted to pursue Ph.D’s.

Instead the Woessners looked at differences in interests and personality. They found that in a variety of ways, conservative students were less interested than liberals in subject matter that often leads to doctoral degrees, and less interested in doing the kinds of things that professors spend their time doing. Continue Reading »

I was sort of waiting for Bill to take up this story over on Will Cubbedge’s website, Fish in a Barrel. However, Will was forced to comment off-topic and I thought I would simply promote his comment to a full-fledged post:

This is off topic, but of interest to lawyer types:

The former dean of my Law School, a prominent pro-lifer and Catholic apologist for Romney, has written favorably of Obama, and Deal Hudson has taken him to task:

Catholic Jurist Equivocates for Obama

WAC

This allows me to clean up the off-topic comment and allows you a chance to go check out FIB’s new look.

First, there is the (spurious) claim that New York-style pizza is the best in the world. This is demonstrably false as New Yorkers’ excuse for pizza is barely discernible from a cardboard cut-out of pizza. Luckily, there are those with a much clearer vision when it comes to the paradisaical pie.

Now, New Yorkers propose this. Hot dogs in a vending machine? Are you kidding me? Probably served with little ketchup packets. News flash, New Yorkers: Ketchup does not belong on hot dogs! Get a clue.

I will say this: Nathan’s makes a decent dog, but it is nowhere even close to the king of all dogs, the Vienna Beef Dog.  If they put these little Red Hots in vending machines, they might be on to something, but a flabby little Nathan’s dog is not going to get anyone with a modicum of taste excited.

Good rule of thumb: When a New Yorker starts talking about food, he has no clue what he is talking about. I would check the orifice out of which he is talking.